Linkage disequilibrium can form a positive feedback cycle leading to explosive evolution.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Case of S T Nikos

The Reptile House at the Crypto-Zoo

It was reasoning like this that led S Tino Nikos into an interest in Forteana. Forteana are odd occurrences, inexplicable in our present state of knowledge. The word comes from Charles Hoy Fort, the strange American who made a hobby of collecting reports of events which were beyond the bounds of known science, and has now become a cult figure. He avidly sought out information on unusual occurrences, UFO sightings, reports of close enounters, the crypto-zoo, and so on, classified them and published them in wonderfully eccentric books.

Nikos was similar. Though he was as logical and rational as anyone could be, and as disciplined and well trained as any orthodox scientist, Nikos seemed to take pleasure in those inexplicable events that had his scientific colleagues spluttering or turning away with a nose in the air muttering: "I don�t believe it".

He eventually convinced me that they were often manifestations of the Other Ones, his term for intelligent beings that had once ruled the world. Not all such sightings were�he readily discounted most UFOs as perfectly normal celestial appearances misread by the hoi polloi. Similarly many of the reports of elemental creatures he discounted as bats, owls, moggies, etc, or even genuine sightings of rare but otherwise normal mammals. Many of the oddest sightings were, he believed, hoaxes often perpetrated by journalists short of copy in the silly season.

"It is not," he explained, "a sign of otherworldliness that investigators cannot substantiate a well publicised UFO report afterwards. It is a sign that the story was made up by an editor who loses interest when he gets some real news. The really interesting ones are those where, on investigation, witnesses can be found, and one wonders why they were not found when the report was fresh. Sometimes the witnesses themselves are astonished that nobody seemed interested in their testimony. Why are genuinely interesting sightings ignored when obvious fakes fill the columns of newspapers?"

The ones which could be well documented but unexplained were the ones which interested Nikos. He was sure many of the sightings of strange animals had the stamp of reptilian on them despite aspects of the report apparently contradicting such an interpretation. In one letter he seemed quite impressed by accounts he had read of a series of apparently related events in Florida a few years ago.

On a clear January night, teenagers petting in a car in a wooded area after a high school dance became aware of a foul smell drifting in through the window. Then they were astonished to see a greenish, chimpanzee-like creature with glowing green eyes bound on to the car bonnet. The driver started the engine as quickly as he could and drove off leaving the green chimp darting back into the woods. Later the local sheriff, to whom they reported the incident, found a green residue on the car where the chimp had landed.

There followed a spate of reports of smelly green hairy creatures, or creatures which gave the impression of being hairy, with long arms and legs like large gorillas. The odour was described as putrid and rancid, like stale urine. Footprints found were described as humanoid except that they had a splayed out toe at each side, rather like thumbs. Others described the tracks as three toed. Bear tracks were discounted. A UFO landing had been reported shortly before the outbreak in the previous December.

"These accounts seem odd enough, Miss Griffiths, but perhaps they were a local phenomenon, some unknown but natural entity of the swamps. Well, if so they were mobile animals or have cousins, if not brothers, elsewhere, because only a few years later a similar spate of sightings of a similar, smelly, hairy biped startled people in the state of Missouri. These too were associated with sightings of UFOs or fireballs. This is important to know, to distinguish the sightings from what are possibly genuine rare creatures of a hairy and bipedal nature. These shy animals might be seen in remote woods or by woodland roads but usually retreat from humans and, of course, do not require nearby flying saucers.

"The note about the tracks is possibly important. Apes have five toed feet and at least four toes should be distinguishable, unless the tracks are hopelessly poor quality. The description of humanoid with prominently splayed toes is likely to be a rationalisation from their ape-like description. It seems clear to me that these creatures have three toes like a bird."

Nikos concluded his letter with his usual question: "What do you make of all this, Miss Griffiths? Chimpanzees and gorillas are not green. Indeed it is unnatural for any mammal to be green. When green mammals are seen it is because they have something green on their fur, or occasionally in it�they have gotten coated with an alga or have been eating a diet excessively rich in some element like copper. Creatures which are green are reptiles, serpents or birds. Three toed prints are made by reptiles."

Of course, I was not willing to accept this suggestion too easily and in my reply, suggested to him that if green mammals are rare then hairy reptiles and birds are non-existent. Even if these creatures are real they cannot be reptiles as Nikos thought.

Nikos responded to my question about hairy reptiles. "You say hairy mammals and birds are non-existent. The ancestors of the hunter gatherers of South West Africa were, like their modern day descendants, familiar with the large rock python which they sometimes killed and ate. For 4000 years they illustrated a reptilian creature in their rock shelters. Perhaps naturally the experts considered them to be rock pythons. However the drawings always had horns and hair!

"Could a layman, surprised and possibly shocked, often at night, tell the difference between down or the plumage of a bird like a kiwi and hair. We tend to think of feathers as flight feathers, but most of a bird�s feathers are for insulation and are of quite a different nature. If a bird has given up flight for quite a different lifestyle from ordinary birds of the air, it might have an insulating covering which is much more akin to fur than to feathers. Both fur and feathers are, in any case, simply modified reptilian scales.

"Now if a scaly creature never took up flight but nevertheless became warm blooded, what would it develop in order to keep warm when the external temperature fell? The answer is fur! Whether it is fur like a mammal�s or fur like the down of a bird, it will look hairy. So there you are, Miss Griffiths! If our elemental creatures of the night are really hairy, it merely proves that they , unlike me, are warm blooded! They could be of a superficially reptilian nature like a dinosaur, but yet be capable of intelligence."

That puts me in my place!

And, Nikos continued: "You will appreciate, Miss Griffiths, that many of the animals at loose from the crypto-zoo are plainly reptilian. We find reports of sea serpents, lake serpents, sky serpents, reptile men, living dinosaurs, living pterosaurs, tatzelwurms, lindorms, and so on. This propensity, if it can be so called, to see serpents reflects the curious respect primitive people pay to serpents, as we have noted in earlier correspondence."

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
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