where have all

      the monsters gone?

                                                                         by j. baugher

For thousands of years, Native Americans were dodging the fierce talons of Thunderbirds, sailors were fleeing the sea serpents on the edges of their maps, and East Europeans were beheading corpses to protect against a plague of vampires.

Throw in tales of unexplained aerial phenomena, manlike apes, and spectral apparitions and you’ve got a veritable cornucopia of paranormal fodder for our modern-day scientists to attack with their fierce logic.

But they’ve come up mostly empty-handed. We have to ask: why?

There are four possibilities we have to consider when addressing this question:
-they don’t exist, and never have
-they used to exist and don’t anymore
-they exist but are beyond the scientific method
-they exist and can be proven

Monsters Never Existed to Begin With
They were the focus of cautionary tales, a means of educating a populace too dim to understand why swimming in the river was dangerous or why one shouldn’t venture into the woods alone. This explanation has no doubt occurred many times throughout civilization and will continue to for as long as men exist. But does it account for all sightings of monsters? While it could be the basis for ‘friend of a friend’ accounts, or fake personal accounts given to children, it doesn’t explain specific sightings given by identifiable individuals to authorities, unless…

They were hoaxes. Malicious pranksters attempting to scare or trick a vulnerable public, or even worse, manipulative business owners trying to drum up tourist traffic. Maybe the fame and potential monetary gain of having an encounter with something outside the realm of the norm appealed to these individuals. This is certainly a plausible scenario, one which has played out countless times. So we have to ask ourselves: were all of these sightings lies? Were all these witnesses liars?

That’s a pessimistic viewpoint, to assume that every single witness for the past four thousand years was lying. Unless they believe they’re telling the truth, which leaves just two possibilities: they saw what they think they saw, or they misidentified what they saw.

Which is possible. People make mistakes. But just like assuming every witness is a liar, assuming every witness is mistaken makes a blanket assumption of misidentification kind of a cop-out, an excuse to dismiss monsters instead of studying them.

The final problem with the idea that monsters have never existed is that it’s unprovable. It is impossible to prove something does not exist, as evidenced by the struggles of Athiests who attempt to prove God’s non-existence, and Creationists trying to prove Darwin’s non-existence.

Monsters Used to Exist
Is it so unthinkable? Hundreds of species go extinct every year, and the pace of human development has depleted the number of small mammals a man-ape or thunderbird might’ve eaten, the fish a sea serpent might’ve guzzled down, the habitats they might have lived in.

And the fossil record proves that oversized, monstrous animals have existed during prehistoric times all the way up until the relatively recent past. The mastodon, the mammoth…

While that might be plausible for a man-ape, our progress probably wouldn’t decimate a population of extraterrestrial visitors, and vampires and ghosts are supposedly former humans transformed.

One might note that we certainly have no shortage of humans...

Too Damn Clever to be Caught
That’s one way to think of it. The wily bigfoot dodging the cameras the same way a movie star avoids the paparazzi. The Loch Ness Monster only choosing to surface when low-quality cameras are around to take fuzzy pictures of it. Aliens selectively displaying their superior technology to only the drunkest and hillbilliest of witnesses. Yes, it seems monsters are just too damn smart to be caught by idiot humans.

Unless they’re not. We are discovering new species all the time. We’re diving deeper into the ocean, trekking deeper into the forests and mountains, and mapping the earth with mind-boggling speed and accuracy. Tomorrow might be the day we see a bigfoot on Google Maps, the day one of our thousands of traffic cameras picks up a saucer landing in an intersection and getting stopped for an intergalactic DUI.

However, another take on this would be that we’ve already got that evidence, and it’s not that the monsters in question were too clever to leave it, it’s that it’s collected all the time and withheld from us.

Conspiracy theorists would have you believe in government warehouses full of alien bodies and tightly-locked vampire coffins. The weak point of this theory? Labor. People would have to work in the warehouses. People would have to collect and store this evidence. People would have to be involved, and people are notoriously poor at doing that one thing that would be necessary for this job: keeping secrets.

Of course, it’s also possible that some of these people have tried to come forward and were ignored by the mainstream media or only believed by a handful of loosely-wound crackpots, or that their voices got drowned out by disinformation. Or they were killed by a group of people seemingly better at keeping secrets. Again, all of this is possible because there are documented cases of it happening in cases unrelated to monsters.

But do we really want to be cynical enough to believe that?

They’re Real and We Can Prove It
This is the only possibility that matters, isn’t it? I mean, what would be the point of reading about this stuff or studying it at all if we weren’t trying to find some proof? The guy that hoaxes bigfoot can make a quick buck, but the guy who catches him will be famous and make real money. But even more than that, there’s the human desire to sate curiosity, to know the unknowable. So whether these monsters were never real, whether they used to be real, or weather they’re real and unprovable, we will always seek out our monsters with pathological (read: human) determination.