Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Over at the Charles Fort Institute website, Mike Dash has an excellent piece about Baron Von Forstner and the U28 sea serpent.

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“F**k the Montauk Monster, this is beyond f**ed-up”, wrote Steve Huff in his Tumblr. The images and information come from Telemetro, Panama, and I translate the story here:

“Strange creature found in Cerro Azul
The finding of a strange creature in Cerro Azul has started a buzz among the locals, as even though some claim it is a being from another planet, others believe it’s merely an animal.
Four teenagers between 14 and 16 years-old found it in the Cerro Azul stream last Saturday while playing around.
According to the story told by one of them, they noticed a creature was coming out of a curve behind the water stream. On seeing its appearance and that it started to climb the rocks towards one of them, they got scared and started to throw rocks and logs at it, to which they managed to kill it, took it out of the water and fled.”

The photos were taken by the teenagers themselves and given to the newspaper. The story made it to Fark, and in a couple of hours Vidani Huff quoted a “believable, real-world explanation for this strangeness”. I didn’t want to spoil it for you, so it’s also after the jump.

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I try not to post too many debunking posts in a row as it starts to get boring, but a bunch of images and claims have been circulating these past few weeks and I didn’t comment on them at the time. So I joined all of them into one quick debunking roundup, if you are still not bored by those.

I promise I will try to make the next post about something truly mysterious and wonderful, contrary to exposing some dubious, lame hoaxes.

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In the GRAPHIC video above presented on Italian television, an alleged aborted alien fetus is shown. You read that right, an aborted hybrid alien fetus shown on mainstream TV, in gory high-definition detail. That’s only part of a long, convoluted story told by a not-at-all anonymous lady abductee, Giovanna Podda.

You can read some translation of the video and story over at the ATS forum. And keep reading for what that “alien fetus” really is. With graphic, gory images.

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Well, it was unknown, because in a few hours it was identified. Those are colonies of tubificid worms, specifically T. tubifex, smaller than a tennis ball. They are not giant blobs about to eat humans, as the small video camera may suggest to the viewer. They are small clusters of hundreds of worms attached to the sewer pipes in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The identification, made by Dr. Timothy Wood on DeepSeaNews and also by Roberto Takata on Massa Crítica, has been confirmed by Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, to the local TV, News 14 Carolina.

According to Buchan, the tubifex worm colonies attach themselves to roots that work themselves into weak points in the pipes. Other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common.

Tubifex (video above) are harmless, commonly used as fish food, and it’s probable those in the sewer came directly from a domestic aquarium.

Their pulsating behavior, as if the whole colony was one bigger organism, is perhaps the most interesting feature. Schools of fishes and swarms of birds also exhibit a similar, beautiful collective behavior, well studied, but sticking to the disgustingly sticky, we may refer to slime mold.

One particular species, P. polycephalum, unicellular but with many nuclei, is even capable of “solving” a maze:

The secret is the food placed in the start and finish points – the slime mold converges to the shortest path between them. The research, published on Nature, earned the authors an IgNobel award last year.

P. polycephalum slime mold may be as intelligent as T. tubifex worms are dangerous, but now you know amoebas can solve mazes and fish food can be terrifying, at least when viewed on Youtube.

It’s worth noting that the horrid sewer creature was made popular by the io9 blog, from the same blog network that made the Montauk Monster popular a year ago. Gawker, your source for terrible unidentified creatures.

UPDATE: A couple more images of Tubifex that may make things even clearer (and nastier):

That’s yummy Tubifex worms sold in Japan. Case closed.

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