Just a brief rant, really, and nothing much to do with anything except the human condition.

 

I’m a sporadic trawler of Youtube, and a short while ago I decided to scare up some natural history. I did a little searching on sea critters, and got the usual decent crop: octopus attacks shark, enormously long sea cucumber-like thing claimed unknown to science (1) and the like.

 

As Youtube allows clip to lead to clip, I ended up following the “unknown creature” route into cryptozoological territory. After a few “something moved and I don’t know what so I’ll say it was Bigfoot” sort of videos, kind of like a low-budget Blair Witch Project(2), I got onto the weird animal compilations, usually collections of stills depicting, or supposedly depicting, weird monstrosities of nature. Life began to go downhill.

 

There were some interesting photos, don’t get me wrong. The first few I looked at had, amongst the standard grainy Bigfoot shot and that Loch Ness Monster one they always dredge up, the odd one that showed explorers with some strange animal they’d found (3), but…

 

From strange we step to the related territory claiming “paranormal animals,” and as the claim gets wilder, the actual photographs get sadder. One collector apparently considered albinism “paranormal”. Another, alongside a few stuffed jenny-hanniver mermaids, showed such supernatural prodigies as… a squid! A lizard! Oh no! It’s a cat in a torch-beam, and it’s eyes are glowing! The caption said “Demon?” (5) Mixed in with pictures of angler fish and basking sharks (6) were, incredibly, some shots from Nigel Marven’s Sea Monsters, the spin-off from Walking with Dinosaurs, so Marven in his cage being attacked by a Dinicthys sat side by side with the old far-off Nessie photo and what was, all publicity aside, basically just a lobster. (7)

 

Paranormal animals! The video proclaimed, and after watching the mélange of real, obviously fake, and well-publicised CG, I had the creeping sensation that the perpetrator either just didn’t care (in which case why bother?), or had no real ability to distinguish. “Paranormal” seemed to mean “I don’t know what it is”, and the portion of the animal kingdom, from dugongs to jellyfish, that the compiler had no concept of was horrific. A deep sea squid might as well be in the same class as Bigfoot or a CG plesiosaur, from the compiler’s perspective. Paranormal ignorance and poverty of knowledge, in someone who had access to the internet and the information age?

 

(1)   Maybe it was. It was certainly freaky.

 

(2)   What am I saying “kind of like a”. It was the Blair Witch Project only without using up quite so much of your life.

 

(3)   And shot. And killed. A bizarre and supposedly extinct (4) animal is a lot less impressive when it’s a pile on the ground and some chap in a pith helmet is posing over it.

 

(4)   In fact the generic caption for most of those old shots could be “Supposed to be extinct? It is now!”

 

(5)   Unless that was the name of the cat.

 

(6)   Which, while impressive, are basically just “normal” 

 

(7) Another, boldly promising “strange creatures” had a picture of a heron and some kind of duck. Whilst failing to deliver the paranormal is understandable, failing to deliver the strange is really quite poor.