Mind Monsters?
Posted by: Nick Redfern on June 24th, 2012
There’s a new article from me at Mysterious Universe that starts as follows:
“Just a few days ago, at my World of Whatever blog, I wrote a post that addressed just a few of the uncanny parallels between the Japanese 1961 monster-movie, Mothra, and some of the cases and events featured in John Keel’s classic book, The Mothman Prophecies. But, what I also did was to focus on the possibility that perhaps art – whether movies, novels or whatever – can fire up the imagination to such an extent that the collective unconscious can externalize into quasi-physical form those “things” purely born out of fiction. As noted Fortean author Colin Bennett told me: “When we imagine, we create a form of life.”
“And, I have been doing a bit of further digging into this area of fiction and Forteana, and one of the most notable issues to have caught my attention is that concerning a 1969 movie, The Valley of Gwangi. It stars James Franciscus, Gila Golan and Laurence Naismith who get caught up in a monstrous caper involving still-surviving dinosaurs that inhabit a hidden valley in Mexico. Among those same dinosaurs are an Allosaurus, an Ornithomimus and a Styracosaurus. And there’s another beast, too: a vicious pteranodon that circles the skies menacingly.
“Well, it so happens that from the 1970s onwards there has been an intriguing number of reports of pterosaur-style creatures in and around the Texas/Mexico border and certain other parts of south Texas.”
Is it possible that some of these events were a by-product of the film and along the lines of Colin Bennett’s “When we imagine, we create a form of life”-type theory?
About Nick Redfern
Punk music fan, Tennents Super and Carlsberg Special Brew beer fan, horror film fan, chocolate fan, like to wear black clothes, like to stay up late. Work as a writer.
1. I can’t help but notice that Mothra was *a little* bigger than Mothman. Also, Mothman did not have cute Cosmos twins singing for him.
2. The idea that anything a bunch of people imagine is spontaneously generated flies so much in the face of everything we know about science that cryptozoologists should be really wary of mentioning it. This kind of thing really undermines the attempt to have cryptozoology taken seriously as a scientific effort.
3. It appears that these “monsters from our collective id” never become solid enough to produce more than the fuzzy photographic evidence we have of the Bear-Holding-a-Shark. I suppose that’s a good thing; otherwise we might end up like the Krell.
4. So when can we expect actual sightings of wascally wabbits, or maybe talking, mystery-solving Great Danes?
I do love that picture of pterosaurs as flying marsupials, though. It’s too bad there’s no evidence that anything like that ever evolved; it would have been cool.
Also, I approve of the long-abandoned idea to call pterosaurs griffins. They were obviously warm-blooded and they had hair; they were not mammals, but we would no more call them reptiles if they were still alive than we call mammals and birds reptiles. (That is, only a certain school of biologist would insist on calling pterosaurs, birds, and mammals all reptiles, and also on calling all reptiles fish.)