Popular Modern Mythology Seems Scarce

[jwyblejr]

Well you've got Destination Truth which starts a new season on SyFy Thursday,you can get your fix with that.

[cjefferys]

It's there. My opinion is that the explosion of cable channels and the internet, etc has just made it appear to be less. In fact, I believe there's actually more than back in the day, you just have to wade through so much extra stuff now to find it.

Rich

Yeah, there is just so much media overload these days. You now have to filter through much more stuff to find what you are looking for, compared to the 70's.

I loved all the Bigfoot, Lock Ness monster, UFO stuff when I was a kid. I would always borrow books about them from the library, and when I went to the movie theatre and saw "Mysterious Monsters" (a "documentary" covering Bigfoot, Yeti and Nessie) I was on cloud nine.

[toyman]

You can go to the site bfro to see where people post their stories of bigfoot,it also does a state by state listing of the posts,it pretty cool.

[Sandman9580]

True, there's a much higher signal-to-noise ratio for everything now.

But I have to agree with the OP--I think we're collectively not as enamored of the "unknown" as we used to be. I think a big reason for this is that the real world is getting so much stranger and more interesting, and the pace is only accelerating. In just the last decade, think of the inroads we've made in fields like information technology, bioengineering, cosmology, social psychology and neuroscience. Think of all the "amazing-truth-hidden-in-everyday-reality" books that have come out (Freakonomics, anything by Malcolm Gladwell), or the popularity of the TED videos. We're in the midst of a knowledge explosion, and even though it's exhilarating, it carries with it its own anxieties. (The one I like to think about is how our friends on Wall Street are using financial instruments that are so insanely complicated even they have trouble understanding how they work. Gee, good thing it affects whole swaths of our economy!)

In the midst of all this "complexity inflation", things like Bigfoot and Nessie seem a little quaint. (Not to mention, what we now about population metrics tends to discourage anyone from taking their existence seriously--but we've known that for awhile.)

Anyone nostalgic for a UFO fix should spend some time on Youtube, though. Between spiral vortices over Norway, planet-sized UFOs around the sun, and--my personal favorite--this guy talking about buildings on the dark side of the moon, there's plenty to keep your attention!


EDIT: Sorry, I meant to say "lower" signal-to-noise ratio.

[TrueDave]

I've read that Sci Fi writing developed as a result or the enligtened modern century killing off superstious things.

We still needed to be scared of the unknown.

Sadly I heard "they" used sonar and copter mounted heat sensors to go looking for Nessie and Bigfoot. Found no trace.

[Joe90]

Is it possible that the availability of the Internet and the info surrounding these stories is so pervasive there that it's deemed to be not newsworthy for other media sources? I think too that the bonafide real stories of terrorists and psychos are more prevalent in the mainstream mind these days.

Or perhaps the "Powers That Be" have finally been able to effectively spike our drinking water...

[HardyGirl]

I think it's the wonderment of the mythology that's scarce, not the mythology itself. Because we have the internet and all this info readily at our fingertips, the strange and bizarre seems much more commonplace. And yes, those ghost hunter, celeb ghost stories are all over TV. Gone are the days of ghost stories around a campfire or at a sleepover when you'd be afraid to go to sleep, and keep a vigil by your window w/ a flashlight. Or the HAMM radio set-up and praying you'd make contact w/ some extra-terrestrial lifeform. Or the Saturday horror movie matinee that made you afraid to walk home alone. Sometimes I think life was more interesting when we didn't feel we had to know everything; when there was still some mystery about life.

[ctc]

>I've read that Sci Fi writing developed as a result or the enligtened modern century killing off superstious things.

....in the 1800's. But yeah; it’s kind of true, but:

>We still needed to be scared of the unknown.

We are; but the definition of “unknown” changes as you get old. By the time you’re an adult you’ve had it driven into your head that monsters don’t exist, so the nature of “unknown” becomes stuff you personally don’t get.... like them kids with their digital whatzits.... and society, I mean REALLY! Look at that! WE wouldn’t wear that when WE were that age! And the MUSIC! Don’t get me started!

>In the midst of all this "complexity inflation", things like Bigfoot and Nessie seem a little quaint.

I don’t agree with that. I think the opposite happens; that when things get tough we “watch the skies!!!!” (Hence this sort of thing being so big the last time the 70's happened.... in the 90's. AND the 70's....) Real problems seem overwhelming so we look to the paranormal for hope: aliens and ghosts means our current life isn’t it. There’s more out there. Maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s worse.... but humans are gamblers and the possibility of an afterlife or higher civilizations amongst the stars means my crappy CURRENT life is just a blip in my existence. I’m not a loser working a part-time minimum wage job who’s slowly starving to death; I’m actually a fragment of the great uni-mind of the Cosmic Brotherhood!

....’course, sometimes folks take it too far and end up drinking the Kool-Aid while waiting for the spaceship.... but on the up-side, it was a major selling point for the original Star Trek.

>Because we have the internet and all this info readily at our fingertips, the strange an bizarre seems much more commonplace.

But isn’t it that inherent sense of wonder that LED to weird being so commonplace? Isn’t our need for the bizarre what fuels these websites? Cryptomundo.com doesn’t get thousands of hits a day ‘cos people are giggling at bigfoot. (Not all them posts can be ironic.)

>You now have to filter through much more stuff to find what you are looking for, compared to the 70's.

Hmmmm.... I think maybe it’s easier to find, but not necessarily more prevalent. When I was a kid in the 70's there were tons of UFO mags, clubs, newsletters, books, films.... Now they’re all online.

I was on a LOT of mailing lists as a kid.

>I do think that a great number of people who are interested in these paranormal ideas are perhaps spending a little bit less time on the classics and devoting more time to trendier phenomena like 2012 predictions and all types of mystical healing.

That’s always been the case. One reason I don’t put much stock in the end of the world is ‘cos of how many dates I’ve seen come and go. And if you look into things, there’s always been trends in the paranormal. You don’t hear so much about psychic surgery or remote sensing; even though they were HUGE in the 70's. Likewise aliens aren’t the “Nordics” or “Space Brothers” of Adamski’s day any more.

Don C.

[johnmiic]

Check the link below, for Bigfoot! The BFRO is refreshingly scientific in collecting reports, responding to hoaxes, and investigating new sightings.

In Search Of..., SIGHTINGS, Unsolved Mysteries & A Haunting used to report on all these things but all these shows have been cancelled. You can find the paranormal reports on youtube.

There's so much noise overload on tv that usually a UFO or Bigfoot sighting is just a filler piece on the news these days and the newscasters will ridicule it as if it was just dumb B.S.. Discovery Channel had a great special on Bigfoot a few years back called Sasquatch:Legend Meets Science.

There is Monsterquest, tho I haven't watched it lately. They have numerous episodes on Bigfoot but they use the different names from different states to title the episodes. They even did a Boggy Creek ep.

Someone turned these pics in-anon. They were taken in sequence. This is damn frightening! I wouldn't want to see this face to face. A Florida Skunk Ape:



The woman on Monsterquest said she thought it was fake but she runs a zoo. These are analyzed in Lauren Coleman's book, BIGFOOT! Experts who reviewed the photos said it is probably a real animal and not fake. They said the clue was in the eyes. They also felt this might be some derivation of Orangutan.

[ctc]

Hmmmm....

Got a chance to watch a few of the new "Mysterious mysteries" type shows; and I noticed they all follow the same formula: team leader is an old guy whos COMPLETELY insane. His crew is comprised of good looking youths from all walks of life who all agree with him.... except for one guy, who's there to get shouted down by the rest. In the beginning the leader will make a specualtion that's later accepted as fact. "So.... if they're NOT alien government agents, WHY do they drive a black sedan?" Followed a half hour later by everyone agreeing that the picture MUST be of an alien government agent since they got out of a black sedan. "UFO Hunters" is kinda funny 'cos it's so off the wall and the team leader comes across like a Dale Gribble parody; but "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" is a little scary since they seem so serious about what they say, and that dude used to be a senator. The others fall somewhere in between.

Don C.

[Brazoo]

Well, to me personally that photo doesn't look very convincing - and at this point I don't think photographic evidence is going to help the American Ape theorists anyway. There have been WAY too many frauds - and WAY too many frauds that have been accepted by "experts" before the frauds were uncovered.

[mego73]

It's to hard to fake them anymore, the video equipment has risen so far the pics and footage can be easily proven to be fake. That's what I think anyway.

On the bonus materials for Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Steven Speilberg talked about how he believed we were visited by aliens a lot in the 1970's and it was just covered up. But now, he doesn't believe that so much because of modern phones we have the means to take pictures, record video and upload it and something solid about alien visits should've been seen by now.

[johnmiic]

I agree that photo-graphic evidence is probably not helpful in proving that Bigfoot exists. Actually I think it was Wendelle Stevens, a UFO enthusiast, who said the same for UFO's. However if you eliminate all photo's and film you must rely on the foot-prints in Bigfoot's case. To be frank, many scientists scoff at that too.

So when you eliminate a category of evidence just because it isn't "good" evidence for some people and fall back to the next type of evidence people are already prepared to say, "That's not good enough either!" The thing to do is investigate and determine, if possible, what holds up under scrutiny. I think those photo's are quite good and they have held up. Compared with the gold standard, the Patterson/Gimlin film, we see that this is not one type of animal but something which has variations depending on what part of the country it lives in.

The late Dr. Grover Krantz in WA did something quite unique. He assembled his collection of Bigfoot Plaster Casts of footprints and presented it to the FBI to see if they could determine which were fakes and which were real. The prints they certified as real were designated so because according to the FBI there is no method for faking finger-prints. Many of the plaster casts have what are called dermal ridges. These are what finger-prints are. Even on your feet there are patterns which are individual and unique like finger prints. So they conducted a study that no qualified Primatologist would undertake. The FBI concluded that many of the casts of Bigfoot prints in Dr. Krantz's collection were not faked but made by a living man or animal. The scientific community should take notice but again, they prefer to ignore the analysis.

[Random Axe]

I firmly believe the Loch Ness Monster, or whatever was in there, was caught.

I distinctly remember watching Good Morning America in the mid 90's when they were broadcasting from Loch Ness that week. They had their set at the edge of the lake and broke into a segment when several speed boats took off in the background and several people around them were saying they found something huge moving very fast.

The hosts, one of which I think was Gibson, were caught off-guard and immediately went to commercial. When they came back they said...ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about what just happened, no mention of what we just witnessed. Zero information or explanation. They went on as if nothing happened.

So, either it was an elaborate stunt pulled by ABC or it was caught and covered up. We'll never know the truth. Maybe I'm just a sucker, but I find that very odd. They didn't even bother to say it was a false alarm.

[johnmiic]

So, either it was an elaborate stunt pulled by ABC or it was caught and covered up. We'll never know the truth. Maybe I'm just a sucker, but I find that very odd. They didn't even bother to say it was a false alarm.

Dude, that pre-supposes that the News-media was in on the cover-up and I can't buy it. If even one reporter had evidence of any of these things they would put it out there for all to see. News is one of the most competitive fields out there. Every reporter wants to break from the pack fast and become a big shot. That's why reporters do dumb things, ( Geraldo opening Al Capone's tomb), or get a report out before they check their facts, ( Dan Rather's 2004 report that GW Bush avoided a medical exam while serving in the reserve).

If they caught the animal it would've been a ratings boon for ABC and they would have exclusive access because they were the only ones covering it. All of those ratings translate to money for the network. I could more easily believe it was a false alarm or they didn't want to look foolish but the news covering it up? Nah. It would be too big for a live newscast to cover it up.