Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
I am so excited to announce the debut of my new series, Cryptid Club! Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved the mystery and lore surrounding these creatures and this was my chance to get to know them a bit better.
at least one cryptid definitely does exist in the sense that it was an actual creature who encountered and really freaked out a couple of humans- Mothman!
<art src- Tim Bertelink>
it was a barred owl.
see, owls have a really bright eyeshine at night, and in a really unusual color- blood red.
and barred owls have the brightest eyeshine of them all- so bright you could swear you were looking at the oncoming headlights of the Hellfire Express!
at close range, the eyeshine of a barred owl would be almost blinding- like shining a bright flashlight directly into those bicycle spoke reflector things. like this:
and wouldn’t you know it, barred owls are found in the areas where Mothman was first sighted.
so what presumably happened was that several people had very close encounters with one or several barred owls, and the red hellfire glare of the owl was so bright that it made the owl’s eyes look the size of fucking softballs!
and since it was night and the owl was moving the shape of it was too indistinct to make out, so the humans’ brains extrapolated a body outline for this unknown creature that was MUCH bigger than the owl actually was! it’s also stupid difficult to judge distances in the sky at night so they may have thought the owl was further away when it was almost on top of them. and HEY PRESTO, A LEGEND WAS BORN.
but this doesn’t mean that Mothman was never real, quite the contrary! Mothman is real in the only place that matters,,,, in our hearts
support owl conservation efforts in your local area though, and you may someday see a Mothman of your own!
I first came across the White Monkey of Maine’s Saco River (which flows down from the White Mountains of New Hampshire) on Atlas Obscura’s 2013 Lake Monsters of America map (which is also where I found Kipsy), and I was deeply intrigued. I’d never encountered the ‘webbed hominid’ type of cryptid in my personal research before, so when I was preparing for my second post in this series, I thought it would make an interesting topic to read up on and write about.
And, well, I certainly wasn’t wrong, but…
This one’s got everything - colonialism, Joseph Smith, and terrible research practices! …Still looking for the lake monsters, though. (Read More!)
If you like this post and/or just love me, please reblog! Tumblr hates links and hides them from searches!
there aren’t enough posts going around about the swedish cryptid known as the skvader which is a rabbit with pheasant wings and also a very good boy.
like this one dude just made a fake taxidermy and spread it around as a hoax for a good ass while and it lead to this really cool fantasy creature and i am genuinely dissapointed that it never gets used in anything
THE BOY
Rabbirds, by the amazing @tkingfisher/Ursula Vernon (source).
The lack of skvaders is particularly frustrating when you realize it forms the third point of a wonderful cryptid trifecta.
You got the jackalopes, which are rabbits with antlers.
And you got the wolpertingers, which are rabbits with antlers and wings.
And then… what? Do you escalate? That’s unbalanced, those two rabbit cryptids don’t have the same number of extra things, the wolpertinger is clearly the jackalope But More.
BUT with the skvader on the other side, balance is restored. Antler rabbit, winged rabbit, winged antler rabbit. It’s a classic Venn diagram of imaginary lapine beasts, and it’s only complete if you acknowledge the fucking skvader.
Good thing Ursula’s got our back, at least.
This is a really excellent point and I applaud your advancements in Cryptid Theory.
