What do you think about this?
In September 2000, a research team set up an experiment in the Skookum Meadows of southwest Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The plan was simple. Set out fruit as bait, surround it with soft mud, see what comes for it.
What they found in the morning was not a fruit-stealing animal. It was a body imprint.
Pressed into the mud was the outline of something that had laid down on its left side. Hip, thigh, ankle, forearm, elbow, heel. The cast pulled from the impression was over eight feet long from heel to crown. The weight required to leave that depression in saturated mud was estimated at 500 to 1,000 pounds.
That alone could have been hoaxed. But the cast also picked up hair samples and skin cells that adhered to the mud during the pressing. Hair came back primate, but not human, not bear, not elk, not anything cataloged in the comparison databases. Three different laboratories examined the samples. All three came back the same way. Unidentified.
The lead anatomist on the project, Dr. Jeff Meldrum at Idaho State University, has spent the last 25 years arguing that whatever made the Skookum Cast was real and was not anything currently in the zoological record.
There are still parts of the Pacific Northwest where a man can disappear for a week without seeing another human being.
Could it be we still have not catalogued every animal that walks these woods?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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