Matt

Nonetheless, I am sure this book will offer many insights into the history of the phenomena and the way in which investigations were carried out. I’ll look for it.

PS Matt, I recently bought Shadows of Existence and am very much in love with it. It’s great to see your posts here!

You like Datsuns too? I have a 1977 Datsun 120Y coupe, not a fancy car but very confy to drive.

(I have also a 1970 Nissan Skyline C10 GTR)

Those of us writing on cryptozoology have had the problem of finding contemporary materials, as opposed to accounts written down later from memory.

A non-crypto parallel: I and my co-author spent five years of spare time on our book The First Space Race, about the first satellites of the late 1950s. We were determined to be thorough and accurate - while NASA asked that the text be kept around 200 pages for a popular audience, we had 499 endnotes. However, we have still found two errors since it came out in 2004 - one where I made an incorrect note in an interview and didn’t cross-check the fact involved, and one where a photograph turned up that we had somehow missed, showing details differently than we had surmised from other photos.

Another lesson from that book: Very smart people, who remained mentally sharp 40+ years after the events, sometimes remembered amazing detail, but also sometimes were certain they had seen details which, from photographs, we knew were wrong. Repetition of an error in the media after an event can lodge in a person’s memory and fuse with or obscure the actual occurrence.

So many thanks to Chad and to everyone who takes the time to preserve history.

I’ve always thought, despite some interesting modern reports, that you can’t have a reptile, amphibian, or mammal in a lake that freezes over, so that only leaves you with fish, logs, etc. That’s why I’ve always paid more attention to Lake Iliamna, where you have reported creatures (although no photographs have been taken) that are huge but are clearly fish. The same is true of some lakes in China, though in the Chinese case, photos are alleged to have been taken, but have never been published (which frankly is no different as evidence than photographs that never existed.)

OK, I’m rambling tonight.

Think about how often we look at the reports (or even published works) from the early part of the 20th century and we wish that we knew more about the report, the conditions, the author of the report, etc. The steps we can take now to ensure these records’ survival may satisfy that same curiosity for future cryptozoologists.
Thanks again for the post (and for everything you do), Loren.

Although he didn’t prove that Mrs. Mansi definitely took a picture of a log (I doubt that’s even possible to prove now), we must be fair and note that he actually tested his theory at the lake and showed that it was very possible for the object in the photograph to been a log. Details on this can be found in the article “The Measure of a Monster” in the July 2003 issues of Skeptical Inquirer.

Loren is quite correct that I have not proven for a fact that what Mansi saw was a log. At this remove, almost nothing about the sighting (pro or con) will be beyond question.

However, labeling the results of the most thorough scientific investigation ever conducted (fact, not opinion!) into Mansi’s Champ sighting as “opinion” and “theory” is a bit disingenuous… Nearly all of the evidence about the Mansi sighting suggests it was a log, including her own photograph and testimony. I ask readers to read both sides and judge for themselves what is more likely.

And as for theories, don’t forget that gravity is “just a theory”!

Declarative statements are fine and good, but the bravo in these here from Radford are way over the top.