Nebulous Agents

Panopticonfidence or panopticonsciousness are character traits upheld by the perceptually aloof. A royal menagerie including: the Blobsquatch, the globster, Holbein’s Skull and indeed the “gas station ghost.” It’s ghostliness derived via contextual analysis, like the ways in which the woodlands are used in identifying a Blobsquatch. The globster is just a perpetual anomaly, an out-of-place artifact of unknown cosmic origins, end of story. While Holbein’s skull: an act of anamorphosis. Generally speaking, each cryptid provokes acts of associational anamorphosis. Shaping again, puzzling the world, the spectator tries to harness the noise and turn it into a signal. Grasping even for supernatural or paranormal place-holders. Known unknowns seem desperate measures to delimit the wild oscillations of amorphous anomalies

On Earth day, Cryptomundo posted an obituary of Kay Linaker, screenwriter of The Blob. Following this lead-in, I’ve stumbled onto a previously peripheral acreage of amorphous creatures that warrant attention. Globsters not withstanding, myriad visions of viscosity are loitering inconspicuously in the cryptozoo. Star Jelly is an age-old phenomena summed up as cosmic detritus. I’m not referring to man-made space junk here, but star dust– material memories of celestial shape-forms. Fort describes gelatinous falls in his Book of the Damned, Coleman and Clark cite an incident in Montana “huge glob of jellylike substance,” also Edinburgh, Scotland wherein a “vague black shape…moved like a huge caterpillar,” in their late 1970s catalog Creatures of the Outer Edge

Atmospheric Beasts are more curious still. Described as “low density animals native to clouds” by famed cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, these cryptids oscillate opaquely, and “it is said that when atmospheric beasts die, they fall to earth as a gelatinous mass that may resemble a green, purple, gray or iridescent jelly that evaporates into nothing within minutes, hours, or, at the longest, a few days.” (The Cryptid Zoo)

The stealthier amongst these nebulous agents will maintain a presence through obfuscation. Visible, yet unverifiable.

Exercise in Adaptive Re-Use

Sasquatch Realism*

As a full-fledged movement, Sasquatch Realism was kick-started with the Patterson-Gimlin filmstrip in the late 1960s in the United States. Sasquatch Realism is predominately made up of cryptozoologists who are not content with metaphorical monsters. Sasquatch Realism was founded in celluloid in October 1967. The Sasquatch Realist acts as follows:

1. The Sasquatch Realist uses the camera and photograph to gather information.
2. The Sasquatch Realist uses oral, print (and now) digital networks as means of discussion and distribution
3. The Sasquatch Realist must strive for image clarity. Avoiding equal parts imagination and interpretation.

Sasquatch Realism cannot exist without the photograph. In Sasquatch Realism, reality must be accurately represented by the camera. Sasquatch Realists gather their imagery and information with the camera and photograph. The Sasquatch Realist style is tight and precise, often with an emphasis on imagery that bears a high level of similarity to Frame 352 of the Patterson-Gimlin film. This rigorous repetition of likenesses takes the place of (missing) physical evidence of sasquatches. These reference marks become “the very signifer of [Sasquatch] realism” (Barthes)

*(big)footnotes

Fortean Sasquatchery

There is a transference involved with metaphor –understanding one thing in terms of another, and there is an interference characteristic in the Fortean —understanding that all explanation ultimately provokes new questions.

The Metaphortean involves transferring interference from the Fortean context to another (usually technocultural), or vice-versa, and interfering with such transport in a manner akin to the gremlin. The Metaphortean is regularly, if not deliberately, confused with Meta-Fortean phenomena. Fortean phenomena are ruptures, faultlines and anomalous natural occurrences that offset the explanations of mainstream Science. The Fortean researcher finds noise/interference in allegedly objective findings. The Meta-Fortean considers the domain of Fortean Forteana, recursive research into anomalous anomalies.

The “Fortean” namesake is Charles Fort, that iconoclastic collector of curious goings on. As an adjective the meaning is roughly synonymous with “strange and/or unexplainable naturally occurring phenomena.” Damned data, fortean phenomena meddle with the certainty of established facts. A catch-all continuum, “Fortean” operates on the words it accompanies, endorsing an accretion of anomalous acreage . For example, Fortean Zoology involves the “study of animals,” and indeed includes cryptids* –but not exclusively. Fortean Zoology incorporates a diverse menagerie — aberrant animal behaviors, creatures falling from the sky, supernatural beasts, mystery animals and other peripheries of officially demarcated zoologies.

With the advent of digital tech, cryptozoology has (un)certainly hastened proliferation of particular representational regimes for imaging the Sasquatch. Initial outgrowth of Bigfoot lore, memorates, rumors, photographs, sketches, plaster casts, eye-witness reports have accumulated into a layer of anecdotal sediment. Digital prosumerism has imposed on the rogue science of sasquatchery, amplifying the yearnings of scientific “objectivity” over vernacular belief structures and paranormal mechanisms. Sasquatch Realism? The missing but signified bi-pedal hominid (connotation) takes the helm as proof (denotation) of its existence. Traveling here with Barthes’ notion of the reality effect…”notation [becomes] the pure encounter of an object and its expression.” (Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p.148)

*Cryptids are mysterious animals that have been reported but not yet found and classified. Once classified they relinquish their cryptid status becoming literal things not speculative possibilities. Liminoid place-holders, cryptids hold down the Fort, amassing attention in a manner not too far from the “spime.”

Adaptive re-use of the original ambiguity surrounding unknown occurrences (‘blobbiness’) is critical for the sustainability of the Fortean in the post-digital imagination. What is the Blobsquatch if not an example of Fortean Sasquatchery?