The Montauk Monster and Me

I'm sure that y'all have seen that ol' Montauk Monster a couple weeks ago, an unidentifiable beast with a beak-like snout, sharp teeth, a long tail, and mammalian body with patches of fur jutting out of it's pink skin on it's raw water bloated body. On July 12, Jenna Hewitt found and photographed the strange animal washed up on Rheinstein Estate Park, a popular surfing spot in East Hampton, New York. On July 29, the story went national on Gawker.com with the headline "Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk." Well, as a dedicated follower of cryptids, I was intrigued.


In Cryptozoology, a cryptid is defined as a creature whose existence is suggested but not proven scientifically, as there is usually only anecdotal information or limited photographs. Such presumed entities as Yeti, Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, Mokele-mbembe, and Lake Camplain's Champ are popular cryptids. Certain animals, such as the coelacanth and the okapi, once thought extinct and fictitious, respectively, have since been found and verified due to cryptozoological studies, and similar hopes are held for finding the moa and the thylacine. Cryptids these days usually do not include animals of mythology such as the unicorn, griffin, or dragon, all assumed to be hybrids of existing animals and ancestral imagination. http://www.newanimal.org/ and http://http://www.cryptozoology.com/ are cool sites dedicated to all kinds of cryptids.

















But! Do we have a brand new cryptid to study? Well, not to study. Hewitt allowed her "friend" possession of the monster's carcass, and in a posted you tube video, he admits to pretty much letting it melt in his back yard, a pile of bones, chillin' in oil.

So speculations abound, both about what kind of thing the carcass was and how/why did it get there. Naturalistic explanations are many and all imperfect. On August 1st, Gawker published pictures and x-rays of a Rakali (or Water Rat, Hydromys chrysogaster) showing several convincing similarities with the Montauk Monster: the "beak", tail, feet, size, and general appearance are similar. The Rakali originates from Australia.

Also on August 1st, Jeff Corwin appeared on Fox News and claimed that upon close inspection of the photograph, he feels sure the "monster" is merely a raccoon or dog that has decomposed slightly. This was backed up by Darren Naish, a British paleontologist, who examined the images and agreed that, if real, the creature was a raccoon.

On August 5, Fox Channel's Morning Show news host Megyn Kelly revealed that the most recent theory is that the beast is a decayed corpse of a capybara, an animal indigenous to South America. However, capybaras do not have tails. Classic Fox News!

William Wise, director of Stony Brook University's Living Marine Resources Institute, had a look at it and analysed it. It can't be a raccoon, "The legs appear to be too long in proportion to the body," or a sea turtle, "Sea turtles do not have teeth," nor can their shells be removed without damaging the body. It isn't a rodent, "Rodents have two huge, curved incisor teeth in front of their mouths," nor a dog or other canine such as a coyote, because the "Prominent eye ridge and the feet" don't match, or a sheep, because sheep don't have sharp teeth. Professor wise then deemed it a hoax.

That is a popular theory, claiming it is a prop designed as a viral marketing campaign for either Cloverfield 2, some movie called Splinterheads, or the Cartoon Network's Cryptids Are Real for which Evolutionary Media has similar looking cryptids posted on their site. Remember in Summer 2006 when that Japanese blue-jeans company did that ad campaign where they staged amazingly real-looking angel wings falling around the world? That was a good one!


Now, the real inters ting stuff. The location of the find is key. On the same body of water reside both a government animal testing facility, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, and the famed U.S. Air Force Base Camp Hero. The creature could be a diseased mutant, improperly disposed of by the Disease Center, or something far stranger.

Camp Hero is the military-scientific base that houses the continuation of the ideas and processes started with the Philadelphia Experiment. This of course was the use of a hybrid of Einstein's Unified Field Theory and Tesla's (unpublished) theories in order to render a Navy ship, the USS Eldridge, invisible through "electro-magnetic shielding" or bending light around the object. Testing began in summer 1943 in the Philly shipyards, and was successful to a limited degree. One test, on July 22, resulted in the Eldridge being rendered almost completely invisible, with some witnesses reporting a “greenish fog” in its place. However, crew members complained of severe nausea afterwards. At that point, the experiment was altered at the request of the Navy, with the new objective being invisibility solely to radar.

The equipment was not properly re-calibrated to this end, but in spite of this the experiment was performed again on October 28. This time, Eldridge not only became almost entirely invisible to the naked eye, but actually vanished from the area in a flash of blue light. According to some accounts, the U.S. naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, just over 215 miles (346 km) away, reported sighting the Eldridge offshore, whereupon the Eldridge vanished from their sight and reappeared in Philadelphia at the site it had originally occupied, in an apparent case of accidental teleportation.

The physiological effects of the experiment on the crew were profound: almost all of the crew became violently ill. Some suffered from mental illness as a result of their experience; behavior consistent with schizophrenia is described in other accounts. Still other members, like Jacob L. Murray, were physically unaccounted for—supposedly they “vanished”—and five of the crew became fused to the metal bulkhead or deck of the ship. Still others faded in and out of sight. Sometimes they disappeared, then crewmates would stick their hands into the spot from which they had disappeared and try to grab the crewmate, but, if they did not, that spot would burst into flames. Horrified by these results, Navy officials immediately cancelled the experiment. All of the surviving crew involved was discharged; in some accounts, brainwashing techniques were employed in an attempt to make the remaining crew members lose their memories concerning the details of their experience.

Surviving researchers from the Philadelphia Experiment met in 1952-53. The researchers aimed to continue their earlier work on manipulating the "electromagnetic shielding" that had been used to make the USS Eldridge invisible, and investigating possible military applications magnetic field manipulation as a psychological warfare device. By 1968, this work would all be done at Camp Hero in Montauk.

By the 1980's much progress had been made and the research delved into not only electromagnetic fields and invisibility, but time travel, parallel dimensions, and teleportation. On or about on August 12, 1983 the time travel project at Camp Hero interlocked in hyperspace with the original Project Rainbow (the Philadelphia Experiment) back in 1943. The USS Eldridge was drawn into hyperspace and trapped there. Two men, Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron both claim to have leaped from the deck of the USS Eldridge while it was in hyperspace and ended up after a period of severe disorientation at Camp Hero in the year 1983 at Montauk Point. Here they claim to have met John von Neumann, a famous physicist and mathematician, even though he died in 1957. John Von Neumann had supposedly worked on the original Philadelphia Experiment, but the United States Navy denies this. A "porthole (portal) in time" was created which allowed researchers to travel anywhere in time or space. This was developed into a stable "Time Tunnel." Enrico Chekov, a Spanish-Russian dissident, reported in 1988, after defecting to America, that satellite surveillance captured during the 1970s showed the formation of a large bubble of space-time centered on the site, lending further support to the Time Tunnel idea. Nikola Tesla, whose death was faked in a conspiracy, was the chief director of operations at the base (which if they started in the 80s would make him 120+).

So, is it as obvious to you as it is to me? That either, sure, it's a prop or hoax, an f'ed up, water decayed regular animal, a new cryptid for speculation, or, most likely, it is a transdimesional beast from the future, improperly disposed of, one of a zoo in the inner-most military base at Montauk, the only one still not open to the public, or perhaps in a system of elaborate underground tunnels leading to the past, future, Denver, Mars, and the universe next door.