There is almost a science - cryptozoology. People, carried away by this wonderful branch of knowledge, are looking for semi-mythical animals. Of course, you've heard about the Chupacabra and the Loch Ness monster, but hardly about the stone toad and others.
Real zoologists look at cryptozoologists condescendingly, since they have enough miracles even without mythological bogeymen. But, unfortunately, only a narrow circle of professionals will be able to admire the discovery of a new kind of rotifer with five pseudopodia instead of one segment, but if you find some killing olgoy-khorhoy with a look, then all the readers of Sunday newspapers will choke on their coffee in ecstasy. Therefore, zoologists consider cryptozoologists to be jesters and charlatans. And those, in turn, believe the official science to be an arrogant fool who would not recognize a miracle, even if she found it in her neckline.
However, cryptozoologists are still ready to trust scientific evidence if a researcher or traveler who left them suddenly takes a bite at the bit and begins to describe something completely out of the ordinary: pesieglavtsy, flying monkeys or a Turkish-speaking centipede. But still, much more cryptozoologists are interested in ancient manuscripts and folklore testimonies of the aborigines. It's not that they were ready to look for koloboks and golden hens of ripples, but if the source is at least one grain more serious, then the monster described in it may well turn into an obsessive cryptozoological idea.
"This world is actually much more mysterious than you think!" - this is the informal motto of cryptozoologists - enthusiasts belonging to a glorious tribe of people who do not want to live on a small, traveled up and down ball in the middle of a remote universe, where for 13 billion years nothing really interesting has been happening. Therefore they are looking. They are looking for, for example, this *.
Underground mammoth
The stories of huge and woolly elephants traveling through underground caves have been amassed by cryptozoologists. They peaked in the first half of the 20th century, when people appeared almost every year in both North America and Siberia, who swore and swore that they had seen hairy giants peeping out of a hole at the bottom of the ravine, or even wandered themselves along the underground passages following the monster: “It seemed to me that I spent a week there. And as he got out, three years have passed! Will you give me a certificate for your wife, comrade district police officer?"
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The story of a fisherman from the Taitamak settlement, cited by the naturalist writer Nikolai Nepomniachtchi, dates back to the 1920s, claiming that he spent several weeks in captivity with underground woolen elephants, feeding on "yellow salty stones that they lick."
And here is an earlier testimony belonging to the Chinese diplomat Tu Li Shan, who, reporting to the emperor about his trip to Siberia in 1714, wrote: “There is a certain beast in this cold country, which, as they say, walks through the underground, and how soon the sun or warm air touches him, then he dies … the name of this beast is Mamunt, and in Chinese - Hishu."
Why would a mammoth live underground? This question is least asked by cryptozoologists, who continue to feverishly search for underground mammoths. And we seem to know why. What else can a not the most educated peasant or an Indian who does not know anything about paleontology think, having discovered a huge skeleton with tusks at the bottom of a pit or during excavations?
Baranets
The story of the ram is extremely indicative of cryptozoological plots in general: cultural differences, linguistic errors and excessive faith in authority are intertwined here in a wonderful drawing. Europe did not know cotton for a very long time. Europeans and North Africans wore woolen and linen clothes, they quickly realized the magnificent properties of precious silk imported from Asia (although its origin remained a mystery to them for a long time), but they did not encounter cotton.
And in Asia itself, cotton was widespread only in very small areas: it was domesticated slowly, and processing required, albeit primitive, but still mechanization, despite the fact that the first devices for the cotton duster were extremely unproductive. So cotton as a raw material for fabric was grown only here and there in Central and Central Asia and India. And the Chinese and the Japanese did not make fabrics from it at all, they only used cotton wool for stuffing blankets and warmed their clothes with it.
So although cotton fabrics sometimes ended up in Alexandria or Athens, buyers, paying huge sums of money for a wonderful fabric, had no idea what it was. The sellers explained as best they could. No, this is not an animal. It is such a small tree, and on it grow … as it would be in Greek … such little sheep. Then they dry out, and you can take wool from them.
It is not surprising that Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, and other venerable scholars, having heard enough about a tree with sheep, in the end explained this in their notes: “There is a plant that looks like a sheep, but only with the navel it grows from the stem and only the grass that grows around it can eat, and when the grass runs out, the sheep dies … Naturalists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, rewriting the truths from ancient books, although by that time they were much better acquainted with cotton, but somehow they did not linked one to the other. And travelers added fuel to the fire. For example, in 1681, a book by the Dutch traveler Jan Streis about his wanderings in Tataria was published.
In the Volga steppes, Streis swears, a ram grows, as the local Muscovite Tatars call it, a plant that “resembles a sheep and has a head, legs and tail. His skin is covered with fluff, very white and soft, like silk. It grows on a low stem, about two and a half feet tall, sometimes taller. His head hangs down, as if he grazes and nibbles the grass; when the grass withers, it perishes. It is only true that wolves do not thirst for anything with such greed as this plant."
And after Streis, other naturalists repeatedly assured that old Pliny was right: there are a dime a dozen rams in Muscovy, and not a single self-respecting muzhik will appear on the street without a high hat made of this beast. They searched for Baranets until the middle of the 19th century. They even officially named a pair of innocent plants with this name. Then, with the general enlightenment of the mentality, they nevertheless put an end to the ram. But not all. Some cryptozoologists are still convinced that somewhere in the remote corners of our country, grassy sheep are growing, covered with white fluff and bleating pitifully when wolves, eager for ram salad, approach them.
Yesing
After we found out that mammoths live underground, we can already calmly take the fact that, from the point of view of the majority of the inhabitants of Myanmar, some elephants live under water. True, the dimensions of these water elephants - yesines - are not too impressive: a rare yeshin grows as long as a human palm. But at the same time they look like real elephants: ears, tusks, trunk - everything is as it should be, only instead of hooves they have legs with four movable fingers. And yes, do not forget the main thing: Yesin's tusks contain poison with which a small Yesin instantly kills a large elephant, not to mention a man.
Since all 50 million inhabitants of Myanmar believe in Yesin, and there have been many descriptions of the animal by travelers over the past three hundred years (although not a single specimen is available either in zoos or museums), official biologists have to say something. “Maybe a daman or a mini-tapir? they say. - Or some nose. But that is poisonous - this definitely cannot be. Maybe some kind of nosed capybara? " Glorified, for example, in the chronicle "Siamese Chronicles" biologists explain the poisonousness of yesina by the fact that the similarity of some local water animal with an elephant caused a superstitious fear of him. Any of the venomous snakes that are found here in great numbers could instantly kill the elephants crossing the ford.
Phantom cats
They are also called "alien big cats". To make a couple of thousand cryptozoologists happy, you can turn into the nearest police station tomorrow and say that in the evening, when you were parking in the yard, a huge lion came out of the darkness (some strange panther, a plucked ocelot), bared its fangs, and then disappeared into the alleys … The main thing is that this site should be located where no huge cats are found, for example, in London. The territories of the CIS countries, alas, are not very suitable for these exercises because of the annoying abundance of all kinds of lynxes and snow leopards in the surrounding forests.
But if it happens, for example, in New Zealand, where no large felines have been observed since the days of Gondwana, then cryptozoologists will be happy. They have long been convinced that our planet is simply teeming with German lions, French jaguars and Australian tigers, they just learned to be almost invisible. Alien big cats, from the point of view of cryptozoologists, hide in parks, basements and construction sites, they have learned to mimic and freeze motionless, becoming virtually invisible, and regular disappearances of people, especially children and the elderly, indicate that phantom kitties eat very well.
I must say that the beliefs of cryptozoologists are fueled by a considerable number of complaints from citizens of various regions, who regularly call the police, yelling: "My God, you won't believe me, but I just saw a cat the size of a horse on the basketball court!"
Kitovras
This apocryphal beast does not have many fans among cryptozoologists either, but the possibility of its existence in the recent past is supported by some cryptozoologists of Slavic origin. For historians and philologists, there is nothing mysterious about Kitovras. They know perfectly well that the medieval Slavic "Legend of Solomon and Kitovras" is a very free retelling of a Greek source, which is based on the ancient Jewish myth about King Solomon and a certain demon.
Among the Greeks, the demon was replaced by a centaur, and a Slavic poorly educated translator, not knowing about any "centaurs", gave birth to the prophetic monster of Kitovras. And since, apparently, a picture was attached to the original, then, looking at the long, long body of the man-horse, the Slavic author gave the following eerie story: “His temper is like this: he does not walk a crooked path, but right, and when he comes to Jerusalem, they tremble the way before him, not walking more crooked. And I came to the widow's temple, and poured into the widow and burst out, saying, praying to Kitovras: “Lord, the widow is seven wretched. Don't insult me! " He will fire near the corner, not straying from the path, and break the blue rib. And the speech: "The tongue breaks the bone pulp" *.
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“If someone is at odds with the Old Church Slavonic, then something like this is written here:“Kitovras could only walk in a straight line. Therefore, when he stomped into Jerusalem at the invitation of the king, houses were broken in front of him so that he could walk without turning. And one widow began to beg not to break her house. Kitovras took pity on her and went around the hovel, after which he broke a rib and said: "A good word breaks bones."
Oddly enough, but until the end of the 19th century, some naturalists (for example, OA Strelnikov in his "Notes") expressed the opinion that the Slavs had a certain animal similar to Kitovras, a distinctive feature of which was a long body and brittle ribs, "for fantasy usually based on actual prototypes."
Olgoy-khokhroy
However, the underground is full of not only mammoths. In Mongolia, for example, it happens underground that it is better not to go to Mongolia at all. Have you watched the movie "Dune"? So, the novelist Frank Herbert borrowed the image of a terrible earthworm from Mongolian folklore, which has long agitated the minds of European connoisseurs of beauty. Only in Mongolian reality is it even worse.
Olgoi-khorhoy (by the way, there is an excellent story about him by the Soviet science fiction writer Ivan Efremov) is a cross between a huge, 10-15 meters long, earthworm and an electric eel. It reacts to the vibration of the earth produced by camel or horse hooves, after which it gives a discharge of current (according to the Mongolian version, it releases a powerful invisible and ethereal poison that instantly kills all life on the surface within a radius of up to one hundred meters), and then rises out and arranges a modest dinner.
Olgoy-khorhoy is found in so many sources, and its description is so realistic that cryptozoologists are absolutely sure of its existence. As you read these lines, a group of Irish and Italian enthusiasts are on the hunt for the olgoy-khorhoi, trying to lure him out of the ground with micro-explosions. What will they do with it if they catch it? Personally, we are more interested in the question: what will he do with them?
Stone toad
Most of all cryptozoologists, of course, like animals that are big, ugly and deadly. Some little mouse with gray ears instead of black - this is not their profile. To really interest cryptozoologists, a mouse must have steel claws a meter long. Well, or at least the ability to sneeze with poison.
For example, the Mexican stone toad interests them very much. A couple of Spanish monks-travelers at one time told the world an Indian story about rocks that are actually toads. Such a toad sits in stone for ten years, then a tired traveler will lie down in its shadow - and the toad will jump! And for the next ten years he will sit quietly on what is left of the traveler and his mule, digesting it with his stone bottom. This is an interesting example of organosilicon life that delights cryptozoologists.
Mermaids
No, no one is trying to extract from the sea a beauty with golden hair and a fish's tail: back in the 18th century, naturalists came to the conclusion that sailors who had gone wild without female companionship took seals, seals and other dugongs for seductive mermaids. Any modern cryptozoologist knows very well what real mermaids look like.
Just as they were described in 1403 by a Dutch doctor who happened to examine a mermaid caught in a net by fishermen in West Friesland. She was a small, stocky woman with dark skin that gave off a strong fishy smell, large saggy breasts and deep-set small dark eyes. The Friesland mermaid somehow managed to get used to wearing clothes and bowing to the cross in church, but she never learned to speak, she tried to get on all fours when she walked, but she had a wild disposition. A few years later, the mermaid died and was, like a Christian, buried in the churchyard. Unfortunately, it is not possible to find her grave now, so it will forever remain unknown who was buried in it by the pious Frieslandians - a crazy dwarf loving to swim or a monkey washed away from a passing ship.
But evidence of aquatic or swamp people (black, scary and insane) continues to flow to cryptozoological centers to this day. However, we must admit that with the proliferation of portable video cameras and filming telephones, for some reason, not a single video document confirming such a meeting has yet been received.
