Estes Park Bigfoot Fest, Day 3

 So, that was Estes Park.

I had some side quests, as always. I spotted a used bookstore behind the theater, called Cliffhanger, and of course had to stop in and buy a book of essays by Barry Lopez. I loved the place and promised to say so, so here it is:

 I’d stopped on the way up at The Crossword in Boulder, a place I’d found on my last visit, picking up books on Alaskan wildlife and Colorado legends.

My writer friend from Colorado Springs, Melissa Marie Rolli, was in town for something else and brought her husband and oldest boy over. She and I talked zoology and writing with Ranae Holland while the men did guy stuff. I reconnected with Lija Fisher, who had a booth for her well-written fiction for younger readers, which I call “Jonny Quest does cryptozoology.” She works with Sasquatch Outpost in Bailey, from whose booth I bought some fuzzy gifts.

Obviously, the highlight for me was talking with Ranae Holland, who accepted gifts of my books and looks forward to future chats. She also did a kindness for someone I love: I’ll leave out the details, but I don’t forget such things. So, I’m definitely a fan. She said a lot of things that surprised me and improved my understanding of the Bigfoot world. We didn’t go into it, but her faith and interest in spiritual phenomena must make her a bit of an outsider among skeptics, too. As a Christian, I think, as she does, that there are some things outside science. I tend to tiptoe around that in my science writing, so she gets an extra point for courage in describing how it’s a key part of her worldview.

To expand on that just a little, me, being Christian means I agree some things are nonphysical in nature.  It doesn't mean any particular things: that is, believing in the Divine does not require me to believe in ghosts or mediums or shapeshifting Sasquatches. It is logical that I accept the possibility, but I need evidence for any particular nonphysical thing, and I've not seen it. Wherever Ranae's answers lie, I hope she finds them: if she tells us what she's found, I'll listen.

And Bigfoot? I didn’t see or hear any new evidence of its existence. I’ve put up my own reward of $5,000 to whoever gets the Bigfoot specimen that results in naming the species in a top journal, and I doubt I will pay out – even though I’d be thrilled to do so. Thankfully, the Estes Park gathering had no hint of the sometimes acrimonious and even dangerous conflicts within the Bigfoot community. It was about trading information, buying stuff, hanging out, and having fun, and by those standards it certainly succeeded.

See you next year.

Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

 

Cryptozoological Fiction Review: Myth Hunter

Myth Hunter: Wendigo Nights

by Shannon Lawrence

Warrior Muse Press, 2024

There's a considerable crossover between straight cryptofiction and urban fantasy. Shannon Lawrence's Myth Hunter: Wendigo Nights adroitly straddles both worlds in a way that offers great characters and plenty of thrills and adventure.

Selina Moonstone is a Myth Hunter, fully human but with some heightened abilities (a little like a Slayer in the Buffyverse, come to think of it). Selina is part-Cherokee, as is the author, who made Selina in her image to avoid trampling on other people’s stories the way many authors do.

Some of Selina's time is spent dealing with “common” cryptids like Bigfoot. Bigfoot here is generally benign, but has to be shooed away from human habitats. She also deals with nasty cryptids like Chupacabras, but they’re hamsters compared to the Wendigo. The Wendigo is a malevolent magical entity that possesses humans. Lawrence’s Wendigo is accurately described as the being of Indigenous legend (here, Cree) not the Bigfoot-y cryptid of pop culture.

Selina’s old mentor and substitute father, Nathan, calls her to Canada for an emergency. He needs her help to deal with a Wendigo – but exactly what help he needs, and why, shakes her to her core. Selina must search desperately for a forgotten ritual no one is even sure exists, dogged by Charles, a cryptozoologist turned cryptid killer. Kudos to Lawrence for dealing with a lot of stuff that gets handwaved by other authors, such as how Selina gets an arsenal of weapons across a national border.

It was a little fuzzy to me how well-known cryptids are - most people don't believe in them, but Selina, needing any help she can get, tells Charles he'll be famous on TV for killing a Wendigo. That’s a quibble, though. The story works, the twists are great, and the big confrontation is a nailbiter. I can visualize the locations easily and immerse myself in the evocative milieu of spirit and myth. Lawrence’s version of an old legend, the Sin Eater, is an original take and adds fun to the story.

I’ve never commented on a sex scene in a book, but this one deserves notice because of its humanity. Short but beautifully written, it's all about touch and emotion, not the frantic gymnastics we're all so sick of.

At the end of the book, Selina’s life has changed in ways I won’t spoil, but we know she has a lot of adventures ahead of her. Readers will be there for it.

Bigfoot Fest in Estes Park: Day 2

Estes Park Bigfoot Days (Part 2 of 3)

Day 2 was the free festival in Bond Park, with presentations in the Park Theater, which we writers are required by law to describe as “historic.” It’s a wonderfully quirky place, a jumble of colorful pieces from different decades, that first opened in 1913.

By the way, I didn’t prep for this event. I didn’t look up previous presentations or interviews with the Bigfooters because I wanted to come in with no preconceptions and report my observations. Concerning Ranae Holland, I should clarify that we never had a sit-down interview. I saw her presentation, and she graciously fit in several short chats over the two days. She readily okayed my using her words in the blog and didn’t ask to review them: I appreciate that kind of trust. Everything here is from my hand-written notes, and any errors are mine alone.

Saturday morning was beautiful, mostly sunny yet decorated with light snow. There was good music on tap: the Celtic band unreeled some infectious foot-stompers. There were kid play areas, an axe-throwing venue (I managed to embed one without hurting myself), and about 30 vendor tents. Maybe half had Bigfoot-related merchandise. The rest offered outdoor-themed goods, food, cannabis products (insert your “Rocky Mountain High” joke here), and gear like knives.

I spent some time with a geologist who explained the post-glacial development of the Rocky Mountain National Park’s current contours. He was selling geology tours and trail maps in partnership with the best-known local Bigfooter, Kenny Collins, who leads Bigfoot tours. I kept looking for Collins, only to learn I’d missed him because he was one of several people walking around in a full Bigfoot suit. Estes Park has plenty of local Bigfoot lore, although police officers I asked couldn’t remember anyone making an official report.

I went to Holland’s presentation, which was an eye-opener if you equate “skeptic” with rejection of all Bigfoot claims. Such claims are unproven, but she reiterated that a skeptic is a questioner, not a “cynic” who won’t look at anything connected to the topic.

Holland is a great presenter, with infectious energy and the timing of a standup comic.

Before she went on Finding Bigfoot, she spent over two decades in limnology and biology, with a special focus on conservation of waterways and their wildlife. She was part of the prestigious Alaska Salmon Program and did research at Lake Iliamna, which is cool since I’m setting a novel there. She was acquainted with Bigfooter Matt Moneymaker, who convinced her to shoot the pilot for Finding Bigfoot. Assuming it would vanish like 90+ percent of pilots do; she was headed back to school for her PhD studying “beavers and rainbow trout” when the show was picked up and found her contract did in fact require her to show up. After that, scientific curiosity, travel, and exploration kept her on board.

Calling herself, “Scully with three Mulders,” Holland recounted her good-natured back and forth with costars who brought her what they thought of as good evidence. Those interactions earned her the nickname of “the Renae-sayer,” but she had a lot of fun despite sometimes-rough conditions. She's not impressed with the evidence for an unknown ape stomping around and doubts we'll ever find one, but she remains fascinated by the phenomenon. “What is Bigfoot?” is the question to her, whether the answer is biological, spiritual, or some mix. Seeing a Bigfoot would not change her worldview: it would just give her a new starting point to investigate that question.

A few other highlights from Holland:

    Modern technology is not a shortcut: drones and remote cameras and eDNA don’t obviate the need for patience in fieldwork or analysis,

    People wondering if a cryptid show or video is real should “follow the money: “ Who is paying for it, and why are they presenting or posting it? Discovery, which funded FB, obviously wanted good TV, and the team accommodated them (“we didn’t really need to ride a hot-air balloon to a location,” she said with a grin), but all video of the actual investigation segments, while edited, is genuine.

    She has a deeply spiritual side, calling herself a “woman of faith,” and thinks there’s a lot to learn about Bigfoot beyond the zoological. She’s very interested in Indigenous perspectives on Bigfoot. Holland has had some odd experiences like seeing “orbs” and thinks some things are “outside science.” The skeptical community today leans so heavily toward atheism that her forthrightness about what she believes and is thinking about takes courage.   [I am reminded of Nobel-winning physiologist Charles Richet's statement on some of his experiments that, "I never said it was possible; I only said it was true."] More of my own thoughts, as a Christian who's also a science writer, will appear in Post #3.

    She is not writing her own book. If she eventually does, it will be with an Indigenous coauthor who can help explore the subject from their worldview. She finds her friend Kathy Strain’s work on this topic very useful. [I’ve met Strain and liked her presentation, although I’ve always felt her book tried too hard to reconcile very different creatures/beliefs with the mainstream image of Bigfoot.]

     While she acknowledges there’s plenty of Hollywood stuff in the show, she got the crew to unite to demand there be no faking on the actual investigations: when one crewmember faked noises, they had him removed from the shoot.

     She is curious about other cryptids, having searched for several of the primate types. She believes the likelihood of finding unclassified large aquatic fauna is much greater than that of terrestrial fauna.

    She cautions against cherry-picking evidence, saying the whole body of evidence needs to be considered. I asked her about this later. I said, “Don’t you have to start by deciding which accounts, footprints, etc. are most likely to be valuable”? She replied that that kind of prejudgment steps off the path of the scientific method. Her preferred approach is quantitative as well as qualitative, taking in all the evidence, developing databases, and looking for patterns.

I skipped the day’s documentary film, about a sacred tree near Bailey, CO, that people claimed they’d actually seen Bigfoot emerging from.   

In Part 3: People, Bookstores, Anecdotes, and Observations

Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Voyager 1: A Long-Distance Miracle

Being a lifelong space buff, I remember when Voyager 1 was launched. When it lifted off in 1977, I was a nervous kid headed for college. I followed the mission on TV and in magazine articles as it made a slew of discoveries at Saturn and Jupiter, Eventually, as the internet appeared and Voyager began showing up in space history publications, I still kept an "eye" out as it left the solar system and counted off the billions of miles. In 1990, it took the famous "pale blue dot" photograph.  Around 2000, when my co-author Erika visited James Van Allen in his office at Iowa State for the writing of our book The First Space Race, he was, guess what, studying Voyager results.  It carried the "Golden Record" message from Earth into interstellar space. 

Over the years, the spacecraft was maintained from Earth, as controllers and then volunteers shut down non-vital functions to match its declining power levels. They also modified the software many times, no mean feat at such distances.  When it started sending garbage in late 2023, everyone assumed it was gone for good.

Almost everybody. A cadre of die-hards kept working. They developed a software fix, itself a challenge working with a computer 46 years old. The tiny capacity of its 68k "brain" and the daunting fact that it took 44 hours for a roundtrip for speed-of-light signals meant every line of code and every bit had to count. 

And they did it. 

Voyager 1 is alive again.  

"Congratulations" just doesn't say it, but it's the best I can do. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers, many now deceased, and the men and women who kept us in contact pulled off a truly amazing feat. God bless and Godspeed.

Maybe we can send these programming geniuses to Microsoft so they can come up with a Word upgrade that doesn't need umpteen gigabytes of space and  is easy to use. Nah. Microsoft would never go for it.

Matt Bille is a researcher, writer, historian, and naturalist in Colorado Springs.   He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail,com and has a website at www.mattbilleauthor.com. He was lead author of The First Space Race, published by NASA through Texas A&M in 2004. He is a member of the AIAA History Committee and the National Association of Science Writers. 

Estes Park Bigfoot Days 2024 (Post 1 of 3)

Well, I have attended the Estes Park Bigfoot Days for the second time. Even for someone like me who thinks it highly unlikely Bigfoot is tramping through around the woods, it was a fun and informative experience. Headquarters was the Holiday Inn, a genuinely nice place with binoculars and walking sticks in every room for guests headed out to see the gorgeous terrain around this Colorado mountain town. You can almost see the famously haunted Stanley Hotel from there.

I study cryptozoology along with zoology, but I'm not a cryptozoologist: I prefer the time-honored term “naturalist.” I like most cryptozoologists, though. Their boundless (even if sometimes unreasonable) optimism and enthusiasm are infectious, and I enjoy spending time with them and learning what they think. I learned more this time than I expected.

The first night was the Bigfoot BBQ dinner. Despite my complaint of false advertising (they never serve actual Bigfoot), it was very good. The special guests this year were three TV Bigfoot hunters: Russell Acord and Ronny LeBlanc of Expedition Bigfoot and Ranae Holland of Finding Bigfoot.

My table included two couples with a squatch-hunting guy and a spouse who was humoring him, along with one dedicated Bigfoot hunter and an Apache family with some interesting stories. I asked several people what I always ask: why do you think we don’t have bodies? The suggestions were not new. They included the chances of finding any given species’ remains in a huge area, Bigfoot being spiritual rather than material, undiscovered extensive cave systems, burying the dead, and “the government” grabbing remains for reasons unknown. (OK, almost unknown: one man suggested the military wants to study how Bigfoot camouflages itself. That might actually be a good question if it’s a real animal.) Someone mentioned it was just like the way the Smithsonian was hiding all the bones of "giants" found in American West, although every such story is a proven hoax or at least without any supporting evidence. When LeBlanc, visiting our table, said the same thing, my reflexive but unfortunate response of “Bullshit” broke my own rules about objectivity, politeness, and public swearing, although he either didn’t hear it or passed it off. (I apologize, Ronny: everyone says you’re a good guy, but I’ve heard that fiction once too often.)  

I of course had my picture taken with the Bigfooters, although I’d watched their shows only a few times and was unimpressed with their results. I didn’t want to talk to the guys so much: no doubt they had a lot of great stories, but I felt I’d read or heard everything they were likely to say about Bigfoot's existence. I did want to talk to biologist Ranae Holland, FB’s skeptic, and that turned out to be smart. She gets most of the ink in these posts because she proved to be an interesting person with remarkably interesting things to say about science, skepticism, and the Big Guy.

L-R: Ronny LeBlanc, Ranae Holland, yours truly, some leftover hippie, and Russell Acord

When I joked that being the skeptic in a Bigfoot show must be like shooting fish in a barrel, she didn’t embrace that: instead, she used it to launch a group discussion of science and skepticism. She explained that a skeptic’s role is asking for proof, being willing to look at evidence offered, and, for her, spending lots of time in the field looking, and hoping to see better evidence that would tell her what’s actually happening, A skeptic is NOT a reflexive debunker who won't look at the topic. To her, the continuum runs from true believers at one end, to scientist/skeptics in the middle, to cynics at the far end. She thinks it extremely unlikely there’s a large unknown primate, but she’s interested in the whole phenomenon and the larger question of “What is Bigfoot?” She even listens to the "woo" types, like the "portal” witnesses, because they are part of the answer to that question. I was surprised at that. I’m interested in the alleged biological animal: I leave the rest to the parapsychologists or folklorists, and I did something no writer should do in assuming Holland had the same approach. There will a lot more on that topic in the next post.

Far from disdaining Bigfoot-hunters (hoaxers excepted), Holland is protective of the Bigfoot community. She explained she had no problem with people doing Bigfoot as entertainment, like on Mountain Monsters, as long as they're not trying to claim they're doing science when they're not. She hates people luring enthusiasts with crap, like CGI videos, just for money. Her participation is "about the people and the conversation.” It’s also a platform for interesting youth in science, especially LGBTQ+ youth who may feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. (She said wryly that, being an “out” lesbian, left-handed, and an academic who studies Bigfoot, she understands being an outsider very well.) She mentioned the importance of citizen scientists and diverse kinds of scientists, noting that Pyle, a lepidopterist, authored the valuable book Where Bigfoot Walks.

Ranae emphasized, "Science is not rejecting Bigfoot. Science is rejecting the evidence people are bringing in." She's currently spending a lot of time going to Indigenous communities to hear their stories for herself. (I asked the Apache gentleman at my table, whose name I can’t bring to mind, whether his people had a word for Bigfoot. He said the medicine men had one, but he didn't know it. A woman of his family said most Apache just use a direct translation of "Bigfoot.")

With over a hundred people present, I was surprised when a request for people to tell their encounter stories drew just four or five responses, only a couple involving direct sightings. Our Apache tablemates described Bigfoot as a well-known denizen of the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, although it wasn’t physical but also spiritual and shapeshifting. I have only a surface understanding of First Nations worldviews, so I'm going to stick with just reporting what they said.

Suffice to say, I finished Day 1 feeling very full and very intrigued.

Coming in Post #2

Saturday in the Park and More Conversations with Ranae Holland

Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

 

Book Review: Big Meg introduces the REAL Megalodon

I just finished reading the first nonfiction book I know of devoted entirely to the prehistoric shark Otodus megalodon, Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived, by Tim and Emma Flannery. (Doubleday, 2023, 200 pp.) 

The text is excellent, clear and highly readable, as one would expect from Tim Flannery. Emma is his scientist daughter, and they don't separate sections by author, so kudos to both of them: however they divided or blended the work, it succeeded in producing a consistent and engaging tone.  The terminology is precise enough for paleontology buffs but not over the head of a smart high schooler. I didn't know from reading Flannery's earlier work (my favorite is his book Throwim Way Leg), that Meg teeth stimulated Flannery's interest in paleontology from an early age. Here he describes finding his first tooth and how his efforts to seek out more contributed to his career. 

Five chapters summarize what we know and don't know about the fish. What we know is not as much as we'd like, so that it takes up less than half the book. The authors could have gone into more scientific detail, but the book is clearly meant, in text and in length, for a wide audience.  They discuss shark evolution (with a very good short introduction to dating methods), the features of Meg and where they came from, and so on. We learn how the fish lived in the chapter "The Miocene: The Meg's Heyday." 

The book finishes this section by examining the Meg's likely time of extinction on and the theories involved. The authors choose as the likeliest explanation of extinction a mix of two factors: the general reduction in the productivity and thus prey available in the oceans in the late Pliocene and the Meg strategy, usual in sharks, of the females being larger than the males. The Flannerys suggest that having the females be the smaller, as seen in cetaceans and particularly sperm whales, means the latter have a cushion in hard times because the most critical sex for reproduction eats less and thus does not need to find as much prey.  (I'm not sure whether they figured in the rise in female consumption when pregnant, or whether that is enough of a factor to matter.) The Meg made it to 2.6 MYA at best and may have gone extinct much earlier than that. 

On everyone's favorite question, how big the largest Megs grew, the book does not offer a definitive answer, noting that we never have remains of the largest or smallest member of any fossil species. The book ventures that the largest Meg tooth ever found, 18 cm high, "almost certainly came from an individual that exceeded 15 meters in length" and mentions estimates up to 20 m. The text says a couple of times the Meg may have been the largest predator ever, if one excludes the baleen whales on a technicality, which most people do. The only contenders offered are the modern sperm whale and its predecessor Livyatan melvilli. The authors apparently consider the ichthyosaurs out of contention, although one species of Shonisaurus has been estimated at 21 m and 81.5 metric tons. The influential 2015 paper "Sizing Ocean Giants" (see URL below) grants the sperm whale 20 m, though I've read of higher claims.

The author with replica Meg jaws at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center

The authors set the Meg material in context with chapters on the unfortunate interactions of sharks vs. humans (in both directions), shark fossil collecting, and the use of shark fossils in arts and crafts. Oddly, they don't discuss the fake Meg teeth swamping the fossil-selling industry: Steve Alten, who knows a good bit about the Meg and popular culture, thinks 85 percent of teeth marketed from the current hot spot of Indonesia are fakes. (There's an interesting real v fake discussion here.) A particular strength is that book offers many stories of fossil discoveries I'd never read elsewhere. A chapter titled "The Imaginary Meg" considers, very fairly, and dismisses claims the fish still exists. It savages the film Meg but doesn't examine Steve Alten's or other Meg books. 

There are good chapter references and an index, something frustratingly absent in too many books these days.

The serious weakness is the lack of illustrations: except for a single page before Chapter 1, there are no photos of fossils or locations, no maps, no timelines, nothing. Regardless, all those interested in sharks in general or Meg in particular will devour this book.

References:

(PDF) Sizing ocean giants: Patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna (researchgate.net)

The ichthyosaur figure is from  https://faculty.umb.edu/liam.revell/pdfs/Sander_etal_2021.Science.pdf 

Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Anniversary of Vanguard 1, Oldest Satellite in Orbit

 

“Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.”   - Charles F. Kettering

  It’s often forgotten that long before Sergei Korolev, Chief Designer, launched Sputnik 1, an American satellite program was underway.  This is a story Erika Maurer and I were honored to chronicle in the NASA-sponsored publication of The First Space Race (Texas A&M, 2004).

The Stewart Committee assembled in 1955 selected Project Vanguard in what might be termed the ultimate Army-Navy game.  Vanguard, to be run by the Naval Research Laboratory, was to orbit a scientific satellite during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year (IGY).  The Navy and the Soviet Union pressed towards the goal of the first satellite (with the Stewart Committee loser, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, left, for the moment, on the bench). 

That competition has been second-guessed, then and now, and some annoyingly persistent and unproven claims have been made about it.  Since we have an opportunity here to mention those, and it’s my blog and these irk me, there are three such claims:

1. The Committee (in some versions, directed or pressured by President Eisenhower) picked Vanguard because it was the “more civilian” satellite, with the National Academy of Sciences being the official sponsor even though the program was hosted and carried out by NRL.  The idea here (logical in itself) is that a civilian satellite would have more of a chance to establish a lasting principle of free overflight through space. But while the Stewart Committee was well aware of this logic, there’s no evidence they acted on it.   There’s also no evidence Ike pressured the Committee in any way. 

1. That dislike of German engineers under the ABMA’s famous Dr. Wernher von Braun carried the day. Again, no evidence. Whether one or more people held an unconscious bias, or a conscious one never spoken of, is unknown and unknowable. 

1. That Ike wanted the U.S. program slowed down so the Russians would establish freedom of space. Again, the Committee, the National Security Council, and the President were aware of this thinking, but Ike more than once criticized Vanguard for being behind schedule. The “slow down” idea was disproved by Ike’s post-Sputnik action of calling his R&D chief, Donald Quarles, on the carpet and demanding to know how the Russians came in first. 

Erika and I are convinced that, in this case, the official version of events is the true one.

On 4 October 1957, Korolev successfully placed a satellite in Earth orbit.  The spacecraft itself was an unimpressive-looking sphere, not much bigger than a basketball.  What it signified, though, was enormous.  The first phase of the first space race was over.  The Soviets quickly followed up with the far larger Sputnik 2.

Project Vanguard hustled to develop a response to the Soviet Union – and a questioning American public.  Everyone knew Ike had approved Project Vanguard but also that he’d watched with growing impatience as its timetable slipped and costs mushroomed.  Vanguard never had an explicit directive to be first, but it was widely assumed the Soviets were behind us in technology and so the first satellite would be American.

On December 6, 1957, what had originally been meant as a non-orbital Vanguard test vehicle but now fitted with a tiny satellite, attempted a launch from Cape Canaveral in full television view of the entire world.  The result was an embarrassment:  a massive explosion two seconds after launch.  Vanguard’s director, John P. Hagen, was remarkably reserved in his response: “Nuts.” The satellite, built quickly in a minor engineering miracle by a team led by Roger Easton, fell forlornly to the sand. Easton carried it back to Washington, where it languished, seemingly unwanted, in his house. (Years later, the Smithsonian put it on permanent display.)

NRL newsletter article

The Army Ballistic Missile Agency’s Explorer 1 became the first American satellite on January 31, 1958.

Vanguard did not give up. On March 17, 1958, on its third try, the program put a satellite into orbit.

“I heard a tremendous roar, as if a fire had started.  Suddenly, books, shoes, and other things flew over the balcony down into the hangar.”

- Propulsion engineer Kurt Stehling on the Vanguard celebration at Cape Canaveral

 In October 1958, the U.S. created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to run civilian space programs.  This organization eventually absorbed the Army and Navy satellite programs.  The NRL reconstituted a Satellites Techniques Branch under Martin Votaw, and the Lab continues working on small satellites today. 

Vanguard has been categorized as a flop. It wasn’t. It went over time, it went way over budget, and it had a launch failure at the worst possible moment, but that shouldn’t obscure its contributions, which echo into 2020 and well into the future. 

First, there was the rocket. The Vanguard launch vehicle, still the smallest ever to successfully orbit a satellite, pushed technology hard.  The margins were miniscule, and the rocket met with success only after great effort (and considerable infighting) by the Glenn L. Martin Company and the NRL team. The second and third stages, the Able and Altair, mated to a Thor missile first stage, became integral components of the longest-running and most successful American booster family, the Delta rockets. Vanguard’s engineering DNA was still traceable in the last Delta II launcher, flown in September 2018.

Vanguard’s satellite design packed a lot into a small space. There were two designs: the full-sized satellite and the miniature one.  Of the full-sized (24-lb) satellite that would become Vanguard 2, Constance Milton Green and Milton Lomask wrote in their book Vanguard: A History, that "Miniaturization, today a commonplace of technology, was a novelty in 1955. The Laboratory's proposal, however, hinged on it. satellite casing weighing eight pounds would carry miniaturized instruments weighing ten pounds for accumulating scientific data…Minitrack equipment weighing two pounds… and two pounds of telemetering equipment."    

There was a recognition even then that some power source besides heavy, short-lived batteries was needed for spacecraft. The first miniature Vanguard "grapefruit" satellite drastically shrunk the original design. Weighing only 3.25 lbs, it carried six solar cells into space and proved the utility of this brand-new technology. The satellite also had a mercury battery, two radio transmitters, and a temperature sensor.  The claim has been made that the NRL originally didn’t want solar cells, but an Army researcher put pressure on them. Roger Easton, discussing the satellite 50 years after launch, reported he had checked into this (and of course, he was also THERE) and it was groundless.  The occasional suggestion that Vanguard 1 was essentially a rickety thing slapped together that somehow worked also irked Easton and other program vets. The ingenious design of the satellite, using every cubic inch of space, and its long active life transmitting from orbit (until 1964) stand as refutation to that idea.

Then there was the tracking system.  Minitrack was another achievement led on the design side by Easton, who deserves his own biography (although his son Richard put a lot of the story into his book GPS Declassified, cited below).  Minitrack was a north-south line of 14 stations, built by the Army Corps of Engineers and stretching all the way down to Argentina. It was a predecessor to the Naval Space Surveillance System (NAVPASUR), created for more accurate tracking of Soviet satellites. That system (somewhat convolutedly) led to an Easton-led satellite project called Timation and then the invention of GPS. Richard Easton says, “I think the most important legacy of the Vanguard 1 satellite is the solar-powered transmitter. The second was Minitrack, leading as it did to Space Surveillance and eventually to Roger Easton’s Timation satellite and then onward to and GPS. But that was a long process.”

NRL Minitrack Station at BlossomPoint, MD

(Side Note: Victory has a thousand fathers (and mothers), and credit for GPS is a complex matter given the long gestation and many contributions leading to the Air Force-deployed operational system that changed the world. If one person and one program were absolutely essential, though, they would be Easton and Timation.)

The Vanguard program would end with the 52.5-pound Vanguard 3, launched on September 18, 1959. 

The full-sized satellite had a second life: it lent its structure, or bus, to NRL’s SolRad (Solar Radiation) satellites, along with its telemetry equipment and other technology. SolRad is best remembered for having a once-classified secondary mission as the first electronic intelligence satellite, called GRAB (Galactic Radiation and Background), which studied Soviet radar emissions, but it also did important science.  SolRad was the first satellite built by the revived Satellite Techniques branch.  The series opened with the launch of SolRad 1 on June 22, 1960 and put 11 satellites in orbit.

Not bad for a “flop.”

Key References

Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, 1969.  Vanguard - A History (Washington, DC:  NASA SP-4202, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969).

Kurt Stehling, Project Vanguard (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1961).

Richard D. Easton and Eric F. Frazier, GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones (Potomac Books, 2013).

Richard Easton, online discussion, March 2020.

Book Review: Sunshine State Monsters

Sunshine State Monsters: Cryptids & Legends of Florida  

Eerie Lights, 2022: 300pp. 

This is a wondrous book for a Floria-raised naturalist and cryptozoological researcher to peruse. I know of three other books on the topic, but this is my new favorite. It's also the best of Weatherly's state-by-state cryptozoology books I've read so far. 

From Pinky the sea monster (wonderfully rendered by Sam Shearon on the cover) to skunk apes to giant octopuses, Weatherly has collected all the stories and uncovered new ones. His work shows a great deal of research. I would have been more skeptical in recounting some of the stories, but this is not a deep scientific analysis: Weatherly is a storyteller, and a very good one.

Weatherly of course covers all the most famous cryptids. He has the most thorough account I’ve read of the Saint Augustine globster, aka Octopus giganteus.  On the Brian McCleary “sea serpent” tragedy, he tries to be very fair to McCleary, but the sole witness was a terrified, nearly drowned 14-year-old in pitch darkness: you can’t prove there was no sea monster, but there’s no evidence there was. I have some nitpicks on his coverage of the “giant penguin” tracks known as Old Three-Toes. He correctly points out discrepancies between the tracks as reported by Ivan Sanderson and his inability to reproduce the tracks vs the iron shoes of confessed hoaxer Tony Signorini. However, he overlooks the fact Sanderson was a serial exaggerator. He also, like seemingly every other writer, misses the fact that Thomas Helm reported the hoax in this 1962 book Monsters of the Deep.   

He mines the state’s folklore for enjoyable tales of giant alligators, sharks, birds, snakes (not much of an exaggeration these days), and – one I’d never heard of – armadillos.  He mentions Scott Marlowe’s report of seeing a dead gator 24 feet long being removed by authorities. This is a bit of an aside, but I’ve never known what to make of this. I knew the late Mr. Marlowe and had no reason to think him a liar, but the gator simply could not have been that large – authorities would immediately have called the news media, the people involved in the removal would have gone on TV as soon as they clocked out, and the thing would have been hauled to a university and be on display. (I have email correspondence claimed n a 30-foot gator was killed and left in a swamp, but I’ll just leave that here.) I hadn’t heard much about Two-toed Tom, a gigantic gator blamed for a host of depredations at the north end of the state. Weatherly includes a claim of a 20-foot rattlesnake: I heard a similar story secondhand when I was a kid.

There are tales of dinosaur-like creatures, sea serpents, a mermaid or two, an alligator man, and much more! For cryptozoologists, Florida is the gift state that keeps on giving.

When it comes to Bigfoot-like critters, most writers lump them under the title Skunk Ape, which seems to be a primate a bit smaller and a lot smellier than its Pacific Northwest counterparts. As Weatherly shows, however, there is a confusing myriad of reports of everything from monkey-size animals to those more on the order of baboons or chimps, to wildmen, to apes of genuine Bigfoot proportions. Florida’s well-earned reputation as a haven for all sorts of escaped or released wildlife, including primates, can explain some of the smaller creatures, but the Skunk Ape endures.

The book includes the search for endangered or presumed extinct wildlife, including the ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina parakeet. Concerning the Florida panther, the story is complicated by claims of black panthers, lions, and other exotics. Just for fun, Weatherly throws in stories of werewolves, El chupacabra, and similar unlikely beasts.

As in all Weatherly’s books, there is a short bibliography and nothing more in the reference section. He does, however, do a very good job of listing the sources for individual accounts in the text, and that largely makes up for it. The lack of an index is irritating when modern software makes it fairly easy to generate.  I certainly would have liked more maps and photos, although I know photos can jack up the cost for a small publisher.

This is a most enjoyable romp through the lore of a state that must have more types of cryptids than any other.

 

Unique Dunkleosteus fossil model

 Here’s a unique Dunk item. Star Ace Toys in Hong Kong offers a simulacrum of a complete, articulated Dunkleosteus fossil. This is part of their Wonders of the Wild series. I'll leave aside my usual quibbles about the tail structure and just enjoy it. It's a great piece of work. 

Star Ace produces a wonderful selection of items (no, I’m not being compensated here), including pop culture figures, creatures from movies (Rhedosuarus, anyone?), and other fossils like mammoths and dire wolves.  

They have a detailed, large (42 cm) Dunkleosteus sculpt, but at $329 I need to wait for someone to buy me a Christmas present. 

Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

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Booz Review: Merbeings as a Real Species?

Merbeings: The True Story of Mermaids, Mermen, and Lizardfolk 

by Mark A. Hall (Author), Loren Coleman (Author), David Goudsward (Author)

Anomalist Books, 2023, 200pp.

I wanted to be intrigued by this book, but in the event I was disappointed. It's an uneven work, a mix of speculation, interesting stories, and puzzling errors. Hall (the primary author) was an exceptional researcher, Coleman is a prodigious cryptozoological writer and a friend, and Goudsward wrote a very good book on creature tales from Florida. I understand the challenge of trying to mesh the work of three people into a cohesive whole, but I expected a better book. 

The book starts with the hypothesis there is a global species of aquatic primate behind the merbeing stories.  Most of the stories of merpeople, as well as some hard-to-classify animal reports and even “Lizardmen,” refer to some variety of this species. It’s fair to mention that the late Mr. Hall liked to throw out provocative hypotheses, and the reader isn’t always sure how strongly he believes in them, but this is what we have to work with. If we suspend disbelief and read with an open mind, the book is entertaining but far from persuasive.

The authors did their research. The book is filled with interesting stories, with sources given in the chapter notes. Another good point is that Indigenous sources are, whenever possible, referred to by tribe or group names, vs the still-too-common “the Indians around Lake Powell say…” approach of lazy writers. They wisely avoid tying their idea too closely to the aquatic ape theory proposed by Hardy and expanded on by Morgan: they mention it just enough to make it a possible source of support without being dragged down by its universal rejection. Finally, they make a worthy effort to collect information from all over the world, avoiding being hemmed in by relatively recent Western motifs.  Missteps include stating the existence of many land primates all over the world as given despite the nonexistence of hard evidence and Hall’s championing of Homo gardarensis, a discarded species based on an acromegalic H. sapiens skull. 

The supporting accounts are spread all over the world, decades or centuries apart, often describing creatures quite differently. The authors suggest there is only one species of marine primate, likely a descendant of the swamp-liking fossil ape Oreopithecus. The differences are due to its using ornaments and coverings (including tails) from other mammals and fish to improve mobility, provide insulation, or express cultural norms. It’s an imaginative solution, and would be fun for fiction, but without evidence, it’s easier to argue the differences indicate unrelated mistakes, folklore, and hoaxes. (At one point it is mentioned there might be two species, one genuinely tailed.) 

Tales from Pacific fishermen, Native Americans, Western explorers, and other sources are used, and the hypothesis requires we accept all of them as true and basically accurate – even the ones about lizardmen jumping on to the running boards of cars. There is not a whit of evidence besides stories. The worst choice of an incident to mention concerns huge yellow humanoids in Vietnam. The source account in Martin Caiden’s book Natural or Supernatural? says American troops blasted the creatures at short range with automatic weapons without harming them, meaning the story is necessarily a hoax. 

The authors never try to condense the accounts into a single description of the species: size, current range and the reason for it, reproduction, etc. Nor is there an illustration of such. The book holds that scientists haven’t discovered the living animal because they are closed-minded about it and have not found fossils in the likely places (land once covered by shallow water), because they haven’t been looking for them. In any fossil dig, though, everything is collected and examined, and there have been many, many digs of such sites. One could posit that the species was always too rare to have turned up yet, but if so, it wouldn’t have a worldwide distribution of viable populations. Hall explains this with a crackpot theory of crustal displacement, which doesn’t help any.   

The speculation here is just too much of a reach, the evidence too thin and scattered to support it. Some of the individual accounts and legends are intriguing, and those plus the references make the book worth having for cryptozoologists, but the boat the authors try hard to build just doesn’t float.

Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

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