Reply to the Skeptics on my book

i am not as well versed on ogopogo as i am nessie. i have almost certainly seen every nessie film and photo ever published anywhere. i have found none especially convincing. now, i have not seen as much for ogopogo, but i have seen a fair share. and again, nothing really good.did you see that scientists recently captured the first images of a giant squid alive in the wild? those were pretty cool. science was skeptical of giant squid for years, even though our circumstantial evidence is much better than anything for lake monsters. we knew that sperm whales were eating something, and we knew it left rather nasty sucker-shaped scars on them too. we knew that if you dissect a dead sperm whale, you'd find a few dozen beaks in its stomach -- they're neither digested nor expelled. but nobody really considered that credible until scientists examined giant squid carcasses that had washed up on the beaches. at this point, it became something of a curiosity that we had never scientifically observed them in the wild (nevermind that sea captains had been reporting them for 200 some years).compare that to nessie. we've got some out-of-focus of things that could be logs and motorboat wakes (and an obvious hoax or two, ie: the surgeon's photo). we've got a blip on the radar. and we've got anecdotes. we have no food chain, no carcass, no good photos, no scientific observation, no live animals... we have a legend, not an animal.don't get me wrong, i love giant lake monsters. i wold be the first person to get in line to see a live on at the zoo. i would be all over legitimate, good photos. but i have to tell you, anecdotes simply aren't reliable.i don't live on okanagan, or loch ness, or even near a lake. but i did have an experience once that was indeed comparable to a lake monster sighting. we have a prominent canal here in south florida called the intracostal waterway. it's brackish, muddy, dark poop-colored water that separates a line of islands from the mainland. once as a child, i was playing on the docks of a local park, and say a rather large hump come through the water. very round, with a very odd looking fin attached. looked sort of like an umbrella. it was a grayish brown mottled color, and had lots of bumps. it acted intelligently, dodging the legs of the dock, and came around to make a second pass against the current. definitally an animal. it rolled over laterally, like a barrel roll.i saw this thing up close, in the presence of a half-dozen other people (most of whom did not seem to notice). it was maybe six feet away from face at the nearest. to this day, i cannot tell you what it was, because i simply did not see enough of it. the bits i saw (the fin) do not match any creature i have ever seen before, and i am a paleo nut. but if i wanted to read "loch ness monster" into, i could pretty easily. and you will notice that by and large most lake monster sightings and photos are just humps in the water -- could be anything, really. i have a better question. where are the recent pictures of ness, ogo, champ, etc? the newest picture on your list is more than 10 years old. and since that time, photography as a consumer recreation has exploded. everyone and their mother has a digital camera, and the average person takes better and better pictures these days. grainy out-of-focus amateur film is out. prosumer high quality digital is in.loch ness is a frequent tourist destination. lakes champlain and okanagan are well populated. where are the nessie, ogopogo, and champ pictures shot within the last 5 years?are lake monsters simply a byproduct of bad photography and poor memories? dinosaurs are alive today. people eat them, keep them as pets, watch them in their yards -- and take some pretty good photos of them with long lenses. but again, you do not answer the point i have made -- i would love to see plesiosaurs and pterosaurs and suaropods alive today. i am skeptical because i am a skeptic, and the evidence presented is simply not very good. cryptozoology is fun and all -- it does get us looking for some interesting things well worth checking out -- but it's also filled with a lot of crackpots and nutballs who go off on the worst evidence possible, without careful examination: such as the ica stones, which are well known forgeries. had you studied paleontology and not cryptozoology, they would not look like dinosaurs to you. they would look like 1960's children's coloring books versions of dinosaurs. these sorts of things are harder and harder to defend as the pop culture becomes more aware of what dinosaurs really were. children today don't think of t. rex like this, they think of t. rex like this. it's harder and harder to convince anyone of the old upright lizard stance when we've all seen jurassic park. if someone had seen these guys in person -- their drawings would look more like the real animals than the popular misconceptions of the times. and their drawings would probably have feathers, too. if you saw an ancient artifact depicting an upright tyrannosaur, when we know they balanced themselves horizontally across their hips, wouldn't you question it a bit more? yet here is one such depiction on an ica stone. did the artist see a real dinosaur? i think not.however, i am very interested in more, real information -- don't just hit and run. i'd like to see those stegosaur carvings, for instance. do you have photos of that? or any of those ogo or champ photos?

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no, the fin was flat against the animal's top, or possibly side (pectoral fins are flattened against the body). my best guess was a really big example of a something like a wreckfish, but it was way rounder than than the side of a fish. and fish don't swim sideways. and they don't inhabit shallow, brackish water, either.if anyone's especially interested, i could draw picture and scan it in tomorrow. maybe some marine biologist here could identify what it was and clear up a minor mystery from my childhood.eitherway, the point is that i don't know what the heck it was, and it could easily be interpretted as a lake monster. when in reality, it's probably just some fish or something i've never heard of. or maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me. or something.

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