Blog Archives

Crypto-Beasts, Cthulhu, and Classic Books

7/11/2012

Last night was the two-hour premiere of SyFy's Destination Truth, and true to form it provided an entertaining mix of travelogue and monster hunt. However, as the years roll by, the travelogue segments appear increasingly staged rather than a genuine encounter with other cultures. I'd prefer it if SyFy would let the travelogue sections of the show expand and reduce the amount of time spent watching people stumble around in night vision screaming at each other, but that's just me. There's now a whole genre of watching people scream at each other in the dark. As it is, it lets me fast forward through the show and hit the highlights in under half an hour.

Last night, Destination Truth went in search of Vietnam's Bigfoot, which was not particularly high on my list of unexplained world mysteries. However, the way cryptozoological creatures weave their way through mythology and folklore is of interest, and its one of the themes running through my upcoming book Cthulhu in World Mythology. In that book, I offer a rather silly hunt for the "historical Cthulhu," but there is plenty of real history and myth on which I drew in creating my parody book.

That's one of the reasons that as we count down to the September publication date for Cthulhu in World Mythology, my print-on-demand line, JasonColavito.com Books, will be releasing classic reprints of important books that investigate the real life beasts and monsters of fact and fantasy that I drew upon in imagining the "historical Cthulhu."

The first two of these classic reprints are now available:

Cory's Ancient Fragments collects the Greco-Roman testimony of Near Eastern mythology and belief, including the story of Oannes, the fish-man hybrid that Robert Temple argued was an ancient astronaut from the Sirius star system. Sea Monsters Unmasked explores the role of the octopus in creating such monsters as the Kraken, one of Cthulhu's direct literary ancestors.

I've done my best to make both volumes both more visually appealing as well as significantly less expensive than the scan-and-print reprints of other on demand publishers. I think that the Sea Monsters Unmasked jacket design is some of my best work.

As we move through the summer, I'll be releasing a few more reprints of classic titles that help to flesh out the real life background for Cthulhu in World Mythology.

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Lovecraftian Horror at the Outer Limits

7/10/2012

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I’ve changed my plans since yesterday. Instead of looking at old ancient astronaut material today, I’d like to talk instead about an episode of the Outer Limits that I just watched, “Cry of Silence,” which aired originally on October 24, 1964. This episode is seriously awesome, and it is one of the most horrific in the series’ run.

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Did the Ancients Worship Noah's Ark?

7/9/2012

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The beginning of summer seems to be a slow period for fringe theorists. With no new episodes of Ancient Aliens and no major fringe claims on the horizon, I’m running out of topics to write about! So this week I think I’ll dip into the archive to look for some of the weirder claims that have been proposed over the past few centuries.

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The Lernean Hydra and the Octopus

7/8/2012

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In Sea Fables Explained, Henry Lee makes an interesting suggestion I had not heard before. He argued (along with Francis Buckland in the 1870s but not reported until the 1890s) that the Lernean Hydra, the multi-headed snake monster slain by Heracles, was a mythologized version of the octopus. Here is how Apollodorus described the monster in his Library (2.5.2):

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Jason and Jonah: Parallel Lives?

7/7/2012

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the theory that the author of the Biblical book of Judges adapted the more ancient Greek myths of Iphigenia and Persephone (Kore) in crafting the story of the sacrifice of Japeth’s daughter. Today, let’s look at another case of the Biblical authors apparently reacting to Greek myth.

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Sea Monsters Unmasked: A Skeptical Classic

7/6/2012

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Some books become classics while others are unjustly forgotten. The skeptical movement tends not to have a very deep canon, and the most iconic skeptical book is probably Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. But there are many older texts that are just as interesting and important that have fallen by the wayside. One of these is Henry Lee’s 1883 Sea Monsters Unmasked, a lavishly illustrated book produced for that year’s International Fisheries Exhibition in London.

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St. Patrick and the Fossil "Snakes" of Ireland

7/5/2012

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As most of my readers know, one of my interests is the origins of mythology, which was one of the reasons I initially began investigating the ancient astronaut theory. I’m especially interested in the claims that fossil remains of extinct animals gave rise to particular myths and legends. That’s why the following claim was so interesting.

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Mermaids and Amphibious Aliens: A Government Conspiracy?

7/4/2012

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The media made a big deal out of a June 27 statement from the National Ocean Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that “No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.” Pundits and commentators found this statement something between bizarre and hilarious (as opposed to the CDC’s “no zombies” press push, which was treated as a response to a real issue), and speculation mounted that the statement was meant to refute Animal Planet’s fictional program on the existence or mermaids. NOAA refused to confirm whether their aquatic humanoid statement was related to the Animal Planet program.

The media failed to report that the mermaid page is actually a history lesson on the myth of the mermaid and was placed in the “Ocean Facts” section of the NOS website, part of NOS’s educational content. It was not a press release or an official government announcement. It sits alongside such other pages as “Can penguins fly?” and “What makes the right whale ‘right’?” The postings are made intermittently, apparently in response to questions NOS receives.

But could it be that this web page is part of an elaborate government cover-up more than three thousand years in the making?

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Great Zimbabwe, Ancient Astronauts, and Supernatural Construction

7/3/2012

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Yesterday I discussed the Devil’s Wall of Germany, a Roman era ruin later attributed to supernatural sources, as a counterargument to the claim of ancient astronaut theorists that ancient legends of supernatural construction indicate alien intervention. Today I’d like to share another example of how supernatural construction legends spring up whenever long-ago builders have been forgotten.

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The Devil's Wall, Cargo Cults, and Ancient Astronauts

7/2/2012

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Ancient astronaut theorists look at the monuments of the ancient past, suggest that they are too large and too well-built to be the work of human beings, and attribute them to semi-supernatural extraterrestrial beings. This process is as old as civilization. I have frequently mentioned how the Greeks attributed Mycenaean ruins to the Cyclopes since they could not conceive of any humans who could build such monumental centers as Mycenae and Tiryns. Sadly, however, ancient astronaut theorists still attribute to Mycenae and other pre-Greek centers an extraterrestrial influence on account of their cyclopean architecture. (See, for example, Erich von Däniken’s Odyssey of the Gods pp. 66-68, where he suggests that the aliens fabricated the site from concrete.)

So, today, I’d like to offer a different case study, one that doesn’t rely on any archaeological site that has been attributed to alien influence.

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