Really Gigantic Squid? 1. Official Records

There is probably no apparition more terrifying than a gigantic, saucer-eyed creature of the depths with writhing, snakelike, grasping tentacles, a huge gelatinous body, and the powerful beak of a humongous seagoing parrot. Even the man-eating shark pales by comparison to such a horror.
(Richard Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid, 1998)

     No doubt this is the reason why, as I commented in another article, people are more likely to encounter a living giant squid in fiction than in real life. Most people don't realize how recent has been our fascination with this monster. It was only scientificly described in 1856, and first observed at sea in 1861. Were it not for its habit of periodically dying en masse and being washed ashore, it may well have remained as legendary as the sea serpent.
     But the aim of the next two articles is to examine the claims that there exist individuals far, far bigger than those known to science.

Really Gigantic Squid? 2. The Big Ones That Got Away.

     In Part 1 we learned that giant squid continue to grow more or less steadily throughout life, with about 6 per cent exceeding 50 feet in length, and that there is good reason to believe that some of them, not yet recorded by science, make it to 66 feet. But what do we make of the claims that rare individuals reach 100 feet in length, if not even longer?

Big Birds Do Fly

     I am gradually coming round to the idea that there is something in the legends of avian giants ("thunderbirds") flying over North America. They were easy to ignore when they just amounted to a bird "the size of a small aeroplane" framed against the sky, because how can you judge the size of anything against the backdrop of the sky? It is a different matter when trees, houses, and roads provide a frame of reference. So, for example, I placed an article on big birds in my Anomalies blog, because two of the three sounded somehow paranormal, but the middle one seems honest-to-goodness flesh and feathers. You can find additional reports of thunderbirds in this article. Another recent report comes from Alaska, and another from Illinois. Scott Maruna provided a summary of 30 newspaper reports of birds attacking, and sometimes carrying off, children.  Jonathan D. Stiffy also wrote an article about thunderbirds in Pennsylvania for the third volume of the Journal of Cryptozoology, which I reviewed here. The reports derive solely from North America, as far as I am aware, and as no nests or eggs have been discovered, it is assumed they represent an uncommon migratory species which breeds in some obscure region of the north. In any case, since one of the functions of this blog is to rescue reports from journals and books which others may not have seen, I shall add a few more.

Another Trove of Sea Monsters

     When I originally decided to use the Australian National Library's Trove of digitalised newspapers to locate the original citation of old "sea serpent" reports, I didn't realise it was going to be almost open ended. Dr Heuvelmans quoted a number of cases from secondary sources. Some of these were mere summaries, but others appear to be more or less verbatim copies of the originals. However, these, as far as I can determine, were the original reports. So here goes.

The Search for the Wild Man of the Pyrenees

     It came as a bit of a surprise to me to see the amount of feedback I received from last month's translation of Sr. Javier Resines' article on the alleged "wild man of the Pyrenees". It included a secondhand report of a sighting in France, and a firsthand report of a sighting in southern New York.
    In 2011 Sr. Resines also published two articles on a search for the fabulous creature, the first expedition being described here and the second here. It is high time, therefore, that I translate both of them in the same post. The italics were in the original.

A Photo of the Wild Man of the Pyrenees?

     Let me state up front that I find it extremely hard to believe that a bipedal primate, unknown to science, could exist up to the present time in a narrow stretch of mountains between two heavily populated countries, such as France and Spain. Then again, I held the same view about the Australian yowie, until the sheer bulk of evidence became too large to ignore, for evidence which would be unimpressive individually can become very strong in the aggregate. We must therefore follow the trail wherever it leads us, and at least record every item of evidence as it turns up.
     Some months ago, when I published an article on the legendary "wild man of the Pyrenees",  Javier Resines kindly informed me about various articles on the same matter on his own Spanish language blog. So, for those whose Spanish is limited, I shall provide a translation of his article of 30 March 2012. As explained, the closest town to the event was Irún (43° 21'N, 47° 20' W), an ancient Basque city close to the sea and to the French border.