Having once gotten in to trouble for mentioning offhand that I "believe" in Sea Monsters, a quote I never quite lived down (rather hard to argue the Fortean mindset of "equal opportunity" scepticism) I thought I'd share a comment I made on the Forteana list in reply to an article about the Loch Ness Monster as mythical being...
"I recently finished reading Michael Meurger's excellent Lake Monster Traditions, which should be required reading for any Lake Monster enthusiasts, and certainly is relevant to other areas of Cryptozoology and Forteana in general (especially UFOlogy and psychic phenomena). I think I intended to read this years ago after reading a ten star review from the ever-reliable Bob R in an old edition of FT. While Meurger never out-right denies the possiblity of a large unknown, he does demonstrate that most Lake Monster beliefs are primarily a mix of cultural perception and traditions, in the case of the Americas two traditions (IE original inhabitants and the Jesuit missionaries and other settlers). IE any sighting of natural or unsusual phenomena gets interpreted as being the monster. It's simply Occam's razor. Then again, after the discussions of the Akkorokamui on Cryptomundo and in Matt Bille's excellent blog, I reread last night Michel Reynal's comprehensive article on the Giant Octopus in Fortean Studies Volume 1, and certainly see no reason why the Japanese Akkorokamui can't be an enormously exaggerated Giant cephalopod."
Matt C
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