The Mystery Fish – X-CMing
Posted by: Loren Coleman on December 8th, 2005
Is there such a thing as X-CMing? Extreme Cryptomundo.com -ing? You, the Cryptomundo readers, have demonstrated that the Mystery Fish Postcard Photograph is one of the most popular all-time cryptid image enigmas, yet.
Due to popular demand, here is a roundup of all four direct links to the "Mystery Fish Photo" entries in the Cryptomundo.com blog, from earliest to most recent:
"Name the Mystery Fish Continued"
Almost two hundred comments, most of them extremely thoughtful and detailed, can be found at these entries, and yours are welcome here. To date over 100,000 views of these four Cryptomundo.com entries have occurred.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Loren-
I seem to remember a friend having a book on cryptozoology with that picture in it sometime in the early 80’s. Do you know which book that was?
Nope, not at all, or I won’t have asked here. 🙂 But we know what it looks like now, so what is it?
The picture looks very familiar. It might have been a kid’s book, as I was a kid at the time.
Are you sure this isn’t like everyone thinking they have SEEN the magazine picture of the men in front of the barn wall with the ‘thunderbird’ or ‘pteradactyl’ pinned to it?!?
I’m fairly certain I saw it before because there were some heated discussions about it – just like now. It might have been a book from one of those book clubs that kids used to order from through school – Troll was one of the companies, there were others. Could be wrong, through.
Someone said it reminded them of the “silure”.
I don’t know if that is indeed what it is, as I don’t know much about the fish, but some sort of large catfish pulled dead from the water, would seem logical to me. I’ve seen a lot of skinned fish and while skin seems to be missing from this one, it strikes me as more likely slightly decomposed than “skinned”. Besides, wouldn’t you take a photo before skinning a fish if you were going to skin it?
At first glance I honestly thought shark, but the silure/giant catfish theory is intriguing too.
I think we’re looking at a skinned shark of some sort. In the link below which shows a dead shark; skin, gut and de-fin it and you’d have basically the same type of critter at roughly the same scale.
This photo happens to also be a postcard image. It’s of a 20 foot tiger shark caught in 1964.
It’s either a brutally killed mosasaur or a fish that was beaten with an ugly stick.
Well, I guess everyone makes mistakes. Turns out this is very similar to the elephant’s trunk snake, but the apparent coloration is wrong, as is the positioning of the eyes, nostrils, and the fact that most of us agreed that it was found in the SE United States, not Java.