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? Over five months from late 1989, more than 13,000 people in Belgium reported a silent black triangle with three corner lights. In March 1990 two F sixteen jets locked radar on it, and it made moves no pilot could survive. Secret aircraft, or a genuine visitor?
What do you think about this? The Abenaki spoke of something in Lake Champlain long before Europeans arrived, and Port Henry still keeps a sign counting sightings. In 1977 Sandra Mansi photographed a long neck and a dark hump, and no hoax was ever found in it. Log, or a real animal?
What do you think about this? In 1579 Francis Drake beached the Golden Hind somewhere on the northern California coast and claimed the land for England. Nobody can say which beach. A brass plate found in 1936 was celebrated for decades, then proved a hoax. Point Reyes, or somewhere else?
What do you think about this? Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, one is engraved on copper instead of parchment, and it is a treasure map. It lists 64 hiding places holding tons of gold and silver. Not one has ever been found. Real temple gold, or an ancient legend set in metal?
What do you think about this? On August 15, 1977, an Ohio telescope caught a 72 second burst from Sagittarius, 30 times stronger than background, right on the hydrogen frequency. The astronomer circled it and wrote Wow. It never came back. Fluke, or one word of a conversation?
What do you think about this? The Shroud of Turin carries a full length image of a man that behaves like a photographic negative, which nobody noticed until it was first photographed in 1898. Carbon dating said medieval. Nobody can explain how the image formed. Artwork, or something else?
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