It’s not often hear of legendary American creature previously unknown to me, but I hadn’t heard of The Dark Watchers before I stumbled across this
“The Dark Watchers are described as tall, sometimes giant-sized featureless dark silhouettes often adorned with brimmed hats or walking sticks. They are most often reported to be seen in the hours around twilight and dawn. They are said to motionlessly watch travelers from the horizon along the Santa Lucia Mountain Range. According to legend, no one has seen one up close and if someone were to approach them, they disappear.”
Have you ever heard of the cryptid known as the Lusca?
The Lusca has been described in varying ways. Some cryptozoologists have suggested it is merely a giant octopus that has been misidentified. Many others have described the Lusca as a half-shark, half-octopus hybrid monster.
It has razor-sharp teeth and multi-suckered tentacles. It sometimes has many of the same characteristics as a colossal octopus, but has also been described at different times as having multiple heads, dragon-like features, or even appearing as a vaguely described evil spirit.
Some eyewitnesses have described the Lusca as appearing like a squid-eel hybrid, rather than the shark-octopus combination.
The Lusca is said to be over 75 feet long, possibly growing as large as 200 feet in some cases. It can change colors, much like some smaller species of octopus. Its habitat is rugged underwater terrain, large underwater caves, the edge of the continental, or other areas where large crustaceans are found, as this is assumed to be its food source.
It’s said to inhabit “blue holes,” deep blue pits in the ocean floor, especially in the Caribbean.
Which brings us to this story, relayed second-hand by a guest of Joe Rogan’s:
Back in the ‘90s, this pilot’s job was to fetch BQM aerial target drones and submarine telemetry torpedoes from the ocean. At the time, the pilot was flying a CH-53—“a big, heavy-lifter the Marine Corps uses for certain things,” Fravor told Rogan. “Off the East Coast they do a lot of shooting, at the time it was off Puerto Rico.”
“The helo drops a swimmer in the water, he hooks the whole thing up and they fly back,” Fravor said. “The first time they were out and they were going to pick up a BQM, he’s sitting in the front—in the CH-53 you can see down by your feet—and as he’s looking down, they’re 50 feet (15 metres) above the water, he sees this kind of dark mass coming up from the depths.”
As the pilot picked up the BQM, he was apparently at a loss for words. “He’s looking at this thing going, ‘What the hell is that?’ And then it just goes back down underwater. Once they pull the kid and the BQM out of the water, this object descends back into the depths.”
One dark mass coming up from the depths is weird enough. Two is officially cause for concern. A few months later, the helicopter pilot saw the exact same thing.
“He’s out picking up a torpedo, they hook the diver up on the winch, and as they’re lowering him down, he sees this big mass. He goes, ‘It’s not a submarine’. He’s seen submarines before. Once you’ve seen a submarine you can’t confuse it with something else. This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and he starts screaming through the intercom system to tell them to pull the diver up, and the diver’s only a few feet from the water.
“They reverse the winch and the diver’s thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And all of a sudden he said the torpedo just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths. They never recovered it.”
Some people are obviously going to think of UFOs, but I thought of the Lusca…
Many of you reading this blog will be attending LoneStarCon 3, the San Antonio Worldcon this year.
Many of you reading this blog have also watched the SyFy Channel’s film Chupacabra Vs. The Alamo.
I know it may come as a shock to some, given the painstaking technical accuracy evident in other SyFy films like Mansquito and Arachaquake, but Chupacabra Vs. The Alamo does, in fact, take certain liberties. As such, to avoid disappointment among those visiting San Antonio for the first time, and given that it’s Cinco de Mayo, which plays an important role in the film, I want to offer up some clarifications on errors made in the film.
The Mexican border is southwest of San Antonio, not southeast. Southeast is the Gulf of Mexico.
There are no green mountains near San Antonio. Unlike, say, Vancouver.
Many people in Texas ride motorcycles, but they do so on roads, not against badly-composited bluescreens.
DEA Agents in Texas do not typically ride motorcycles with unsecured shotguns.
DEA Agents generally drive to crime scenes in cars, not motorcycles.
Especially not riding on the back of another DEA agent’s motorcycle.
People do not typically need to wear jackets in San Antonio in May. Unlike, say, Vancouver. (Though this year may be an exception…)
Animals the size of a Scottish Terrier are not typically capable of dragging away 200 pound police officers in full SWAT gear.
As the seventh largest city in the United States, San Antonio has a large, modern police force. They would not need a random assortment of DEA agents and rogue gang members to take out a few hundred wild dogs.
While many San Antonians are bilingual in both English and Spanish, seldom do they pepper their English with the very most common Spanish words, as though to say “Look, ese, I speak Spanish!”
Police interrogation rooms do not generally look like small business conference rooms.
Most Hispanic gang members in San Antonio don’t look vaguely Asian, and don’t speak with a slight Brooklyn accent.
It is very doubtful that repeating long rifles can be found in display cases at the Alamo, as the Spencer Repeating Rifle was not invented until 1860.
Even if they were in said display cases, it is very unlikely that they would be stored with live ammunition, ready to be used by anyone who broke open the case.
Even if the gunpowder hadn’t gone bad after almost two centuries.
There is no basement in the Alamo. (A point that I think has already been definitively established.)
There is no secret escape tunnel underneath the Alamo. If there was, I’m pretty sure 177 years of urban infrastructure development would have found it.
Especially if it was wide enough for 10 people to walk abreast.
Especially if it lead to a giant metal hatch in a parking lot near the Alamo. (Or, more specifically, a stage in front of a bad bluescreen projection of a parking lot near the Alamo.)
Chupacabras or not, DEA agent or not, if you blow up the Alamo, expect to spend a lot of time in jail.
As the 7th largest city in the U.S., San Antonio also has a large, modern Fire Department, so if you did blow up the Alamo, it would not still be giving off a plume of digital smoke well into the next day.
I hope this has cleared up any confusion anyone might have about San Antonio or the Alamo. Happy con-going!
If you’ve read “Gabe’s Globster” or “Bob’s Yeti Problem,” you know that I have an ongoing interest in Cryptozoology. Oddly enough, I’m not really interested in the same boring cryptids that get all the media attention, i.e. Bigfoot and Nessie. I’m into more obscure fauna, like the Mongolian Death Worm or De Loys’ Ape. I guess that makes me a sort of cryptozoological hipster (“It’s a pretty obscure cryptid; you’ve probably never heard of it”), without the appalling fashion sense.
So I’m happy to report that one of America’s more obscure cryptids, The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, of Lee County, South Carolina, is back in the news.
The first sighting of the Lizard Men was back in 1988, when a 17-year old said he was chased by what he described as a green, scaly, 7-foot figure with glowing red eyes and three-fingered hands. You and I might say “Dude, you are so high.” But the wise people in Lee County immediately thought “Local legend! Ka-ching!” And thus the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp was born.
And now there’s been a new sighting! Well, not a sighting in the sense of “somebody actually saw something.” There’s a been a sighting in the sense of “Dang, somethin’ dun fucked up my car!” Unfortunately, the actual news article is pretty poorly written, burying the lede four paragraphs down and neglecting to provide pictures of “tooth marks [that] went completely through the fender” or metal “just bent it up [like] it was a piece of tissue paper.” Or any reason this might be the work of a lizard man rather than bear or alligator. (There might be a video there, but since I’ve got Brightcove (a really crappy and annoying ad platform) blocked, I guess I’ll never watch it.)
This piece, from 2008, is much better written, and a lot more likely to make you go “hmmmm.” Here’s another piece on that 2008 incident, with much bigger pictures. That’s awful high up on the fender for a gator to go up and gnaw on a car, and those holes look too deep and far apart to have been made by a bear (which gets mentioned as a possibility in the article). Doesn’t rule out the owners faking them, but those holes do look…odd.
Of course, the “Lizard Man’s Car” license plate in this video does nothing to enhance the witness’ credibility:
The video also includes plenty of local Lizard Man Merch. “Moichindising, moichindising! Where the real money from a cryptid is made!”
Another video from CNN:
And the South Carolina Lottery produced a series of painful Lizard Man-themed promo spots:
As for the location, well, it is near some swamp, but it’s not so far out that you would think a lizard man could escape detection for years on end, especially in an era where everyone has camera phones.
And what ever happened to the original victim? The lizard men killed him! That is, assuming the lizard men have guns. “Investigators say Davis was targeted in a drug-related incident.” (See also: The third paragraph of this post.)
Cryptozoology is one of the more interesting disciplines on the fringes of science, mainly because new animal species are being discovered all the time, and every now and then a cryptid turns out to be real. Alas, the idea of lizard men roaming the swamps of South Carolina may be pretty freaking unlikely, though not (quite) physically impossible.
Of course, South Carolina swamp dwellers are pretty far from David Icke’s shape-shifting ruling class. (I gather from the headline that Obama is now counted among the reptoids, but no way am I wading through two hours of Icke to confirm this.) The chances of Icke’s theory being true range from “Dude, listening to Alex Jones is for entertainment purposes only” to “Nurse, more Thorazine.”
