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To the GIANT BIRDS page - Thunderbirds and Bighoot Thunderbirds and the Giant Owls are two species of giant birds that demonstrate how conspicuous animals can remain unrecognized even into modern times. They are classic examples.

They have been reported for centuries. They were known to the American Indians by many different names. The Giant Owls were misperceived at times as "Flying Heads" by some American Indians and as "Mothman" as recently as the 1960s.

Many more unknown animals are similarly seen as "impossible." There is little or no investigation of them by professional men. It is no one's job to do so.

My Strange New Mexico by Mike Smith

To LIVING FOSSILS

SO MANY MYSTERIES

I am familiar with the myopia of the 1950s for I was there. When I was growing up then, the world allowed only three famous monster mysteries: the Great Sea Serpent, the Abominable Snowman, and the Loch Ness Monster.

Then along came men like Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans. They were advocates for all the neglected mystery animals around the world: the Buru of Ralph Izzard in India, the Unicorns and Mermen of Philip Henry Gosse, the Sirrush of Willy Ley, and so on.

In 1958 the Sasquatch giants came back into the headlines as Bigfoot and North America has not looked the same to people ever since.

We are all a half century further down the road. We have lessons that should have been learned by now. We have before us several likely survivals that have been with us all along as part of the natural world. See The Most Credible Cryptids. They were around in the 1950s. We just couldn't focus way back then on what their reported activities meant.

People were chasing "black panthers" in the post WWII years. Reports of them go back one hundred years. But no one noticed those records at that time. So Panthera atrox was overlooked. Now the cats are videotaped and photographed often. It is harder to overlook them today.

Thunderbirds were being seen too. But Robert Lyman had only just begun to collect the Pennsylvania reports that stretched back to colonial days. People who saw the birds around St. Louis and in northern Illinois in 1948 just could not see a context of surviving giant birds in that year. But now we have that context. It explains why the birds appear where they do and when they do.

We had the very bones of a Troll under lock and key then as we do now. They are the remains of Homo gardarensis, excavated from a graveyard at the community of Gardar which was established in AD 1126. They show affinities to the remains of Homo heidelbergensis which date back 500,000 years. The one scientist who made a correct identification of them had died and been forgotten. So the bones had been mislabeled for some thirty years by then.

There are others on the list of the most credible cryptids: Little People, Bighoot the Giant Owls, Neo-Giants, True Giants, Homo erectus, and the Orang Pendek. Each has its own long history of appearances. There are sightings. And they have identities known to people who live near them. Some even leave us good footprints.

During the past half century we have studied these cryptids and come to realize that they were around all the time. Now we know better what they are.

We should be more curious now to learn what else might be found. The presence of cryptids is the rule, not the exception. Nature has an abundant variety inhabiting all the environmental niches of the globe.

We cannot say we have not had the chance to learn more about them. We are hearing about the multitude of strange animals just as the people in the 1950s heard about them. But they couldn't focus on them long enough to learn the truth.

We have so many mysteries still about us. What will the people of the 21st century do?

Where are the bones of the Living Fossils?

To LIVING FOSSILS - the Mystery Primates Behind the Bigfoot Legend

To GIANT BIRDS - Thunderbirds and Bighoot

To The Political Page 2008

To the Hidden History of the World and the WONDERS archive To LIVING FOSSILS

LINKS TO NEWS

Blog at cryptomundo.com News at THE ANOMALIST News at Drudge Report Anthropology in the News

THE MARCH MYSTERY PROFILE

THE PIEDMONT PATH

The existence of the Piedmont Path is one observation to be made based on 20th century reports of unusual animals. The path served as a route for wildlife to pass largely unobserved up the East coast of North America. The route connected the state of Maryland with New York State as shown on the above map.

The wildlife that used this path ranged from familiar mountain lions to the less familiar hairy hominoids loosely labeled "Bigfoot." The animals probably moved mainly at night. They would have kept to the cover of forests when possible as they traveled in the night.

We are aware of the Path because these animals could not avoid being seen altogether. They created many "monster" reports along the Path in the last century. Reports extend back into the 19th century, indicating the activity has always been there in historic times.

The reports were seen as mysterious at the time of their occurrence. They are accountable to a natural presence of animals in nature. Some of those animals are readily recognizable (like the lions) though their genuine presence in places along the Path has been doubted in public discussions. Many of the animals have been the cryptids familiar only to cryptozoologists. So those reports were doubly doubted.

The Piedmont Path is simply the most direct route for land animals to make their way north to south and back again through territory that is a natural choke point along the Eastern Seaboard. The Path keeps to high ground where there were patches of woods sufficient to provide cover during the daytime hours and to give some cover when moving through highly populated country.

In the twenty-first century the existence of the route could be threatened. As changes are made to the modern landscape, the conditions that allowed travel might diminish or disappear.

The presence of the Piedmont Path was first discussed in my book LOCAL COLOR (2006).