Lies, Damned Lies, and Cryptozoology

Plesiosaurs, like mermaids, Megalodon, and a representative democracy, don’t really exist anymore, but Baird’s Beaked Whales do, and you’re looking at one.

The internet is a double-edged sword of enlightenment and ignorance. It has the capacity to educate millions in ways never before possible, making science accessible, understandable, and relevant. At the same time it infects the public with idiocy, lies, pseudoscience, and the malevolent intention to mislead (kind of like Discovery Channel). Disinformation is a zombie. It is the resurrected body of mysteries solved, arguments settled, and bad science disproved, marching through half-baked websites and ‘shared’ by newly-infected readers not yet schooled in the truth, spreading fabrications and misinterpretations that eat away at the integrity of science and rot the brains of the masses.

Among the many internet zombies gnawing on science and pseudoscience blogs, the one I’ve battled is the “mystery’ of the “Moore’s Beach Monster” (sometimes called the “Santa Cruz Sea Serpent”), touted as a living plesiosaur in the modern world, a remnant of the age of dinosaurs in the 20th Century, and proof that ancient beasts still live among us. It has become a perennial icon for conspiracy-paranoid cryptozoologists and fundamentalist creationists. In fact, there never was a plesiosaur, and even upon its discovery, the remains of a decomposing beached carcass was shown most definitively not to be a plesiosaur, but dozens of internet sites still push the plesiosaur hoax. I get enough inquiries about the reptilian validity of the Moore’s Beach Monster every year that even the Travel Channel tried to help me debunk it in an episode of Mysteries at the Museum.READ MORE-http://deepseanews.com/2014/11/lies-damned-lies-and-cryptozoology/