WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

CRYPTOLINK: Meet Issie, Japan’s very own Loch Ness Monster

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me. 



You may have thought that the Loch Ness Monster had cornered the market on fresh-water cryptids, but Japan has one of its own mythical lake beasts. There may be a monster lurking in the depths of Kyushu’s Lake Ikeda, a monster who goes by the terrifying name of… Issie-kun.



Lake Ikeda, at just 15 km around and with a maximum depth of 233 meters, is still the largest lake in Kyushu, which just goes to show that there are not that many lakes in Kyushu. It’s a caldera lake, meaning it doesn’t connect to the ocean and depends mostly on precipitation to maintain water levels.

The lake is supposedly also the home of a huge saurian creature called Issie, or Issie-kun, to give him the diminutive male suffix the city seems to prefer. Issie was first spotted by a family in 1978. Twenty witnesses reported seeing some black humps several meters in length moving through the water. Later that same year, a man named Toshiaki Matsuhara caught the creature on film.

▼ It’s Issie! …or some glare on the water. Or maybe some lake weeds? Whatever. Proof!



Since then, the tourism authorities have been promoting the Issie story to attract visitors to the region. There is even a mythology to explain Issie’s creation. In the story, a white mare lived on the shores of the lake with her foal. When the foal was captured by samurai, the white mare leapt into the lake in despair, transforming into a huge water creature. She surfaces now and then to look for her child. There is no explanation as to why Issie is a female in the story, but the monster is generally considered male. Another mystery!
Read on...

AND SO (WITH NEARLY ELEVEN MONTHS TO GO) THE COUNTDOWN BEGINS

THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN IS DORMOUSELIKE

The Gonzo Daily - Tuesday
I think I caught a cold while we were away last week. Olivia had one as she went into labour, which rather makes me feeling sniffy, out of sorts, and generally sorry for myself pale into insignificance. I can hear my late father in my inner ear intoning sternly: "Shut up Jonathan, stiff upper lip etc." So I will probably do just that. In fact I will go off with a lemsip and sulk. In more cheerful news we have another student coming to us next week to see if she thinks she can work here for a day a week or whether we are too weird for her. Fingers crossed eh!
Ageing Hipsters, rock and roll historians, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Gong fans and all sorts of other people, had better look out! The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#97) will soon be available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/.
It has me being totally seld indulgent with a picture of my first grand-daughter (born a few days ago) on the cover, but features an interview with the legendary Freddy Bannister, promoter of festivals at Bath and Knebworth amongst others. He talks about Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd amongst others. Doug Harr goes to see Tears for Fears, and Jon is surprisingly reassuring about the future of the music business. There are also new shows from the multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange Fruit and from M Destiny at Friday Night Progressive, and the massively talented Jaki and Tim are back with their submarine and Maisie the cow. There is also a collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and Mollucan palm cockatoos (OK, no weird pink parrots, but I got carried away with things that rhymed with OOOOS) than you can shake a stick at. And the best part is IT's ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!
Read the previous few issues of Gonzo Weekly:


All issues from #70 can be downloaded at www.gonzoweekly.com if you prefer. If you have problems downloading, just email me and I will add you to the Gonzo Weekly dropbox. The first 69 issues are archived there as well. Information is power chaps, we have to share it!

You can download the magazine in pdf form HERE:
http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/
*  The Gonzo Daily is a two way process. If you have any news or want to write for us, please contact me at  jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and want to showcase your work, or even just say hello please write to me at gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow...

*  The Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this link: www.gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2012/11/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit-to-print.html

* We should probably mention here, that some of our posts are links to things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest guv!

*  Jon Downes, the Editor of all these ventures (and several others) is an old hippy of 54 who - together with an orange kitten named after a song by Frank Zappa puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon which he shares with various fish, and sometimes a small Indian frog. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna, his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his elderly mother-in-law, and a motley collection of social malcontents. Plus.. did we mention the orange kitten?

FORTEAN BIRD NEWS FROM THE WATCHER OF THE SKIES

What has Corinna's column of fortean bird news got to do with Cryptozoology?

Well, everything actually!

In an article for the first edition of Cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans wrote that cryptozoology is the study of 'unexpected animals' and following on from that perfectly reasonable assertion, it seems to us that whereas the study of out-of-place birds may not have the glamour of the hunt for bigfoot or lake monsters, it is still a perfectly valid area for the Fortean zoologist to be interested in.



BIGFOOT NEWS IN BRIEF



Bigfoot in My Backyard
I have known for awhile that Bigfoot is reportedly stalking the shadows of my home state of Michigan. Our fair state has even been graced with ...

Game Cam Picture from Pennslyvania Standing Bigfoot?
WATCH: Bigfoot Cloaking Analysis: Boring Proof that the Object is Back by Log. The Sasquatch Hunters: A man in Pennslyvania sent us a game cam ...

Dillon Francis Pulls “Bigfoot” Out of the Woods
Honorary comedian of the EDM community and Taco Bell spokesman Dillon Francis has decided to utilize his secret skill of producing to release a ...

Sep 29
To document Bigfoot reports and encounters and the history of bigfoot in ... I had a face-to-face encounter a with Bigfoot in the summer of 1992 in ...

Does Bigfoot roam Ohio's wilds?
DOUG WALLER and Shawna Parks, co-founders of the Southeastern Ohio Society for Bigfoot Investigations, hold casts made of footprints found in

Bigfoot Watching a Passing Train?
Is this a photograph of Bigfoot or a tree stump? Stories of train passengers catching a glimpse of the wildman of the woods have been told for ages, but ...

'True' story of Barrington Bigfoot
Here's the question: Is there a Berkshire Bigfoot? Aren't we far too sophisticated to believe in an out-sized creature that belongs to an unknown ...

Film analysis of frame 61 of the Patterson Bigfoot video reveals exciting new evidence
Today, Bigfoot researcher M.K. Davis revealed the results of his extensive post-processing cleanup of the video and one frame in particular, is pretty ...

NEWS FROM NOWHERE - Tuesday

ON THIS DAY IN 1791 - The Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflote) premiered in Vienna, Austria. 

  • Blind Cavefish Froze Its Internal Clock to Save En...
  • Climate change appears a mixed bag for common frog...
  • New report identifies actions needed to curb illeg...
  • Lonesome No More: George the Giant Tortoise on Pub...
  • Dolphins are attracted to magnets: Add dolphins to...
  • Hyenas, jackals feast at vulture restaurants
  • Young sea stars suffer more from ocean acidificati...

  • Almost 20,000 tortoises and turtles smuggled in si...

  • AND TO WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK... (Music that may have some relevance to items also on this page, or may just reflect my mood on the day)