In the world of cryptozoology, which is engaged in the search and study of animals unknown to science, photographs are one of the main evidence. Unfortunately, all these materials are very difficult to verify for authenticity and it is extremely rare for such photographs to reach specialists with negatives.
Below we take a look at the most controversial and discussed photographs of unknown animals.
Giant "tadpole"
In 1964, the Le Serres family was vacationing on their speedboat in Stonehaven Lagoon on Hook Island in Australia. Suddenly, people noticed a huge black mass in shallow water, which was clearly visible in transparent water.
It was at least 25 meters long and most of all looked like a huge tadpole. Although this is not visible in the photograph, people saw the creature had eyes on its head and a very wide mouth.
The creature lay so calm and motionless in the water that at first the Le Serres family thought it was dead. But then it suddenly sharply opened a huge mouth, and then twitched and quickly swam into the open ocean.
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Le Serres managed to take several pictures of the creature, but it is difficult to give him any explanation from them. It is not surprising that the author of the photographs was repeatedly accused of hoax and forgery over the years. Of course, there are, and quite a few, those who believe that the "monster from Hook Island" was real, but science does not take their opinion into account.
Live thylacine or tiger?
In the same 1964, in the same Australia, but now in its very outback, a woman named Rilla Martin was driving her car in an area called Ozenkadnuk. Around there were barren wastelands with sparse bushes, but suddenly the woman noticed a strange striped animal not far from the roadside.
Rylla pulled out her camera and took pictures of the animal before it quickly disappeared into the bushes. Since then, the photograph of the Tiger from Ozenkadnuk has regularly become the center of lively controversy.
Someone is sure that it captures the marsupial wolf, extinct in the 30s of the twentieth century, aka tilacin. However, the stripes on the skin of thylacin are completely different from those of the animal in the photo. In fact, most of the stripes in the photo look like tiger stripes. True, tigers have never been found in Australia, and no one has said about tigers that escaped from zoos.
Water monster
These shots of the strange, ridged-back water monster were captured by River Monsters star Jeremy Wade. He took the pictures long before his career as a TV star in 1994 while fishing in the Amazon in Brazil. Below are two pictures taken on different days, but in the same place, so this is without a doubt one and the same creature.
Interested Wade asked the locals about this creature, and in one case they said that it was a kind of "Holadeira", and in another that it was a "Dolphin with a sawtooth back." Neither Wade nor scientists had ever heard of anything like this.
According to one version, it was an ordinary river dolphin, but with a back injury caused by the boat's propeller. However, Wade insists that the jaggedness on the creature's body never resembles injury, but seems to be a natural thing, like the ridges on a crocodile's tail.
So maybe this is a crocodile? But no, the ridges of the Amazonian caiman are not at all like what is depicted in Wade's photographs.
Skunk monkey
Skunk monkey is a mythical inhabitant of the Florida swamps. A hairy humanoid creature that looks like a large bipedal monkey has been seen there for many years. And she got this name for the unbearable stench, which literally hurts the eyes if this creature is nearby.
In 2000, two women who wished to remain anonymous sent two pictures of the strange large ape to the sheriff of the Sarasota Department. According to them, they filmed this animal right in the yard of their house. One of the photographs was particularly clear and showed definitely some large primate standing on two legs behind the leaves.
But no one was able to determine the species belonging of this creature. This is not a chimpanzee, not a gorilla, or an orangutan. Most of all, it looks like a chimpanzee with long hair, but such in nature do not exist.
Some researchers were particularly attracted by the sparkle of this monkey's eyes. This is the so-called "Tapetum lucidum" effect - the reflection of light in the dark, characteristic of the eyes of nocturnal animals. In all great apes and man himself, he is completely absent.
So if it's not a great ape, what is it?
Montauk Monster
On July 12, 2008, an unusual creature was thrown into Ditch Plains Beach, near Montauk, New York, images of which quickly became viral and widely discussed in the following days and even months.
The creature was four-legged, but its muzzle looked very unusual and rather resembled a beak, and its front limbs created the illusion of having fingers like a human.
Most people are convinced that it was just a highly decomposing pig or dog carcass, filmed from an unusual angle. Others said it was just a dead raccoon. It was not possible to study the remains thoroughly, they quickly disappeared somewhere.
Hippo dolphin
In 2015, 52-year-old Scotsman Harvey Robertson was on vacation with his family on the Greek island of Corfu. There are many sea caves and greenish lagoons in the area that divers love to swim in.
Robertson also dived and photographed underwater beauties, but when he later began to look at the pictures, on one of them, to his complete amazement, he saw a strange hippo-like creature.
During the photographing, Robertson did not notice anything strange in the water, but this animal, which looks like a cross between a hippo and a dolphin, was clearly not a shooting defect.
Dolphin mutant
Another strange dolphin-like animal was captured by fishermen in 2016 in the eastern part of China. The fishermen pulled out the net and it turned out to be this large creature that did not look like a dolphin or a fish.
The creature has a narrow muzzle with arches and large eyes, grayish skin, and a muzzle like a dolphin. It is not clear what the fishermen did with this animal further, let it go, or did they catch it. Apart from photos and videos, no further information about him appeared.