Bioparanoria

 Note that some of this text is adapted from an earlier writing of mine, published elsewhere on the internet. The 70s and 80s were a golden age of cryptozoology, something that is unlikely to be ever replicated again. The notion that these animals of folklore could still be existing in some remote tropical forest or mountain range was actually getting a fair amount of press, not just from the mainstream media but from a few academics as well. The superstars of the art of researching “hidden animals”, Tim Dinsdale, John Green, Bernard Heuvelmans, Grover Krantz, Roy Mackal, and John R. Napier were all active, bitten by that wonderful and childlike belief that monsters do exist not just in our imaginations. “Yes Virginia, there is a Loch Ness Monster and we’ll find him any day now!” Those hopeful days are long gone. The cryptids were all no-shows, so society had no choice other than to stop daydreaming and face the unfantastic reality of it all. But it’s certainly worth it to look bac...

There’s a funny phenomenon we have of adding artificial darkness and mystery to artists, insisting that wild rumors we hear about their sordid private lives are true. Consider the long-running urban legends of Walt Disney freezing himself or of Mr. Rogers being a Korean War sniper. Perhaps when we see a person create genuine innocent art we are intimated and assume that more is at work here, a shadowy side being loosely hidden from public view. In the case of today’s post, we’ll be looking at an unusual hypothesis about Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll. Carroll was a mathematician but wrote fiction as well. Today the only works of his that are widely known are the Alice in Wonderland books, far from a poor literary legacy. In 1996, a man named Richard Wallace published a book promoting an alarming theory about Carroll being none other than Jack the Ripper, quite a scandalous claim to pin against the creator of the White Rabbit! Wallace’s book, ...