Lost Monster Files is a cryptid bust
It would be awesome if there were no more faked-science TV shows. Back in 2017, I published a book on how amateur paranormal researchers pretend to do science. Around that time, there were so many TV and YouTube shows of people doing this – staging “investigations” using sciencey-looking gadgets and language and playing at being experts – that I couldn’t keep track of them all anymore. And they are still going strong.
Cryptozoology is my favorite fringe subject, but it’s not fringe anymore, it’s mainstream. We can credit Monster Quest and Finding Bigfoot for the current popularity of self-styled cryptozoologists looking for mystery creatures. The latest cryptid show is Lost Monster Files on Discovery based on the files of Ivan T. Sanderson. It’s not low budget but it’s low on originality and almost insultingly dumb.
I realize that people want to be on TV and make a living doing stuff like this, but I will argue that these shows make the audience less knowledgeable about the topic because of the dumbing-down of the presented scenarios, and the exceptionally poor content passed off as “facts”.
Recap
Episode 1 explored the Carolina Chupacabra and the content failed to include anything interesting or new except what they seemingly made up. A condensed show can hardly begin to explore the complex history of the legendary creature and its strange cultural evolution. However, all history and much of the interesting details were entirely ignored for a ridiculous plot and very silly conclusion.
Episode 2 covered Sanderson’s work on ABSMery (the study of abominable snowmen accounts). The cast goes to British Columbia to follow up on an old Sasquatch/Bigfoot account. They confuse us more than enlighten or even entertain. They find nothing.
Episode 3 is on the Thunderbird where the team finds an eagle’s nest but concludes, laughably, that this suggests there is a still living Teratorn or unknown giant eagle.
I took a break from watching the show because it was worthless to me. I was curious, however, and binge-watched the (hopefully) last three episodes.
Bernard is ghosted
Episode 4 was on the Minnesota Iceman, or “wild man” as the show calls it, which was a very popular sideshow promoted by Frank Hansen in 1968 depicting a body of what people thought of as a “cave man” frozen in ice. The team, as usual, ignores much of the important parts of the tale – that the Iceman model that was used still exists, and that Sanderson conducted his inspection of the body with Bernard Heuvelmans. Heuvelmans is entirely absent from this show even though his history is entwined with Sanderson’s. While these extractions were done for time limitations I would guess, it makes the cast appear clueless to those of us who know that actual history. For drama, one half of the cast goes to the old Hansen farm to look for the real body they believe is buried there. And the other half goes to the location where Hansen supposedly shot the creature – they have an “infrasound” experience. (Again. They had a similar thing happen in episode 2, which was also dropped with no consideration). The best find they come up with is a footprint which they do not show on camera in any detail but gush over, claiming it matches Sanderson’s information about the creature having a really big toe. They conclude with misguided blather about evolution connected to Denisovans.
Heuvelmans is entirely absent from this show
even though his history is entwined with Sanderson’s.
Deception island
Episode 5 sent the team to Kodiak Island in Alaska to find out about the Kodiak sea monster. This was probably the worst episode. It was boring and, tracking with all the other episodes, absurd in their suggestion that a plesiosaur twice the size of a blue whale (all wrong) could still be living in the offshore trench. Really reaching for an exciting conclusion, they suggest that the chemicals dumped after WW2 could have caused a genetic mutant 30 years later. Ironically, the episode closed with a voiceover of Sanderson talking about truth and deception.
The cave “dragon” final episode
Episode 6 took the cast into a cave in Arkansas where they actually found something! The subject cryptid was the Gowrow, almost certainly a made up legend of a giant, spiny backed lizard. What caught my attention for this was the appearance of a USGS hydrologist discussing groundwater. I’m certain his words were cut and edited to lose all meaning because the jumbled word salad spewed about aquifers and caves was rubbish. Summing up their misinformed ideas about how water moves underground, they suspected that the creature that might be the Gowrow was travelling between a surface pond and cave systems via underwater passageways (they erroneously called “the aquifer”). This is the well-worn and mistaken idea often proposed for lake monsters using subterranean passageways to the ocean. The average person doesn’t know how groundwater moves, and this episode shows that ignorance in spades.
“Finding all that water in [the cave] was a gamechanger,” says Brittany, who seems to be the one to say the most ridiculous things in the show. Caves are created by water and typically still have water in them because they are under the surface.
The team descends into a cave – it is not shown where it is but the implicit suggestion is that they “found” it and it’s unexplored. This is clearly false, it is too large and accessible for it to be unknown. It is extremely dangerous for inexperienced people to go a mile into a cave system like this. They find evidence of an alligator in the cave. And, they actually find the alligator.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d2LWxeWEGIo
I searched for more information about an alligator discovered in a cave in Arkansas and found nothing. According to the show, they were 80 miles from natural alligator habitat. There is no way this animal was native to this cave because it was too cold to comfortably exist here. It seems likely that it was let loose here. I’m not saying it was planted, it could have been released by an irresponsible person, but I can’t trust anything on this show.
Common threads in the episodes
Over the six episodes, there were common threads:
- Oversimplification. Likely in order to appeal to the non-technical viewer, to fit in an hour time frame, and to help the narrative, every scenario, find, and explanation was oversimplified, often to the extent that it was wrong. It was framed as “Sanderson studied this.” + “There is a uptick in sighting of something like that in this area.” Therefore, “Sanderson was on to something and we are going to just jump in and finish was he started.” This is a dull, banal, and misleading premise. Thus, my opinion that this show makes people less well-informed on the topics covered.
- Lack of expertise. Almost no experts appeared in the show. As I noted in the first review, the cast were hardly what I would consider “experts”. They spoke unintelligently about complex topics like evolution, zoology, geography, and history. The writers and research team for this show did a poor job. Brittany, in particular, was not even coached on how to pronounce words correctly. For example, “Cuvier” as in Georges Cuvier, is pronounced “curvier”. Twice. There is no excuse for such sloppiness.
- Sham inquiry. I was entirely unconvinced that the investigation shown on screen was legitimate. It looked staged, heavily edited, and scripted to serve the pre-set narrative. This is typical of all paranormal nonfiction shows that attempt to portray a “scientific” approach, which instead shows the cast playing pretend scientist. It’s a cheap and lazy ploy.
- Extreme conclusions. The obviously weak and questionable evidence was hyped as convincing and used to bolster their pre-existing narrative that they, indeed, were successful in showing that something mysterious was going on. That’s how an entertainment show is structured. This is not for educational purposes. But that message is not always understood by the audience.
In conclusion, this was a typical scientifical paranormal TV show with excessive hype and no substance. It wasn’t even entertaining. For anyone who knows anything much about cryptids, this show was a total dud.
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