Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Mysteries of the year - and next year

Discover's picks for best solved and unsolved mysteries

Ben Radford offers his selection of mysteries. Among those he considers solved are a widely circulated UFO video from Jerusalem (hoax), and a boy with magnetic powers (same).  Reaching back to the 1700s, he endorses an idea the famed Beast of Gevaudan never existed - that it was just "normal" wolf attacks. Not buying that one. I mean, we HAVE the mount of a hyena shot in the French countryside. Mysteries he considers worth investigating in 2012 include the faster-than-light neutrino claims from Europe and the further study of possible Earthlike planets.  He's right that both are intriguing, but, Ben, use a little imagination... the orang pendek should merit a mention, at least.


2 comments:

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

I am a real enthusiast for anomalies and cryptozoology. However, the recent book, Monsters of the Gevaudan, does really establish very well that the problem was wolf depredation by a number of wolves in a poor and wild plateau in France. It establishes the whole historical context of this instance of periodic peaks in wolf depredation. It covers the the question of whether it was an alien species such as an hyena or some other unknown creature.

Matt Bille said...

Clark, perhaps you have a point and I dismissed this too quickly. I'll give the new book a read. It's a hypothesis I'd always dismissed because a) attacks by wolves on uninjured humans are rare to begin with, and b) if it was not shot in the countryside, where did the blasted hyena come from, and how did it come to be identified as the Beast?