I hiked along the river in Tafi and kept seeing this very strange current that looked like the humps of a serpentine sea monster!!! I don't know what it was...definitely something unnatural, maybe supernatural?
This was originally posted in "Siesta is Obligatory"
User's name is Natalie/Gordita: I have not been successful in contacting her yet. I contacted Blogger and I was told I needed to contact her directly to get permission to use the photo, but at that time TravelBlog did not seem to have any record of the photo or how to get in touch with her. I will of course always take the photo down if she denies me permission, but my impression is that it qualifies as "Fair Use"
--Anacondas are also usually marked with conspicuous black spots all over the sides and this object?/creature? does not show anything like that. It looks too flexible to be a branch or a tree trunk. And so until somebody comes foreward and says it actually is an unusual anaconda in unusual conditions, I'd be inclined to call it an unknown Giant eel, swimming on its side as Heuvelmans said that they do. Whatever it is, it is a highly valuable photo in that it shows ANYTHING swimming in traditional "Sea-serpent" up-and-down-serpentine-style. That is actually something very unusual to see and not known in anacondas otherwise, so far as the sources state.Best Wishes, Dale D.
This is one of those things where the original poster found out the photo was being used on a different blog and the owner yanked it off the internet pronto.
ReplyDeleteI'll keep this blog entry up a little while in case the photo should turn up again and if it does not, I'll delete the post.
Best Wishes, Dale D.
BTW, the records say ten people viewed this before it was yanked. Any of you happen to take a copy of it when it was up?
ReplyDeleteBest Wishes, Dale D.
Dale, I emailed you what I hope is the photo in
ReplyDeletequestion. Let me know if it's the right one. If not, I'll look some more.
Rick, The Anomalist
Thanks Rick, that was not it. This was a photo of a turbulent stream and in the water was a clearly-shown, all-green, snakelike creature in the classic Sea-serpent described position, undulating vertically. I don't know how you could get a snake's body to do that and I don't know how it could be faked, unless it was some mechanical device with a hose in the water. What was startling about this photo was that you could very clearly make out the body section at the top of the waves. Not the head or tail showing, but a very clear body section and not a snake belly-up either.
ReplyDeleteBest Wishes, Dale D.
For the time being at least, it's back again
ReplyDeleteWhy couldn't this be rocks in the water with the flow over the top?
ReplyDeletePartly because the way the water is going, the object is "going with the flow" and not resisting the waves the way a set of rocks should. A somewhat lesser objection would be that all of the parts seem connected up together, since that observation cannot be verified either.There is a hint that the second hump from the right is actually "Arching up out of the water", although that could be an optical illusion.
ReplyDeleteRick at the Anomalist thought it might be a human figure lying down in the water, right side up and facing the camera-I don't think the proportions are right for that, either.Whatever this is, it seems to be of a substantial size and tubular in cross-section.
The witness also says the object was moving around in the river, if you are not going to discout the assertion out of hand. No doubt the press would call this a "Patagonian Plesiosaur"-but I'm not going so far as to say that. For me it is just a wierd "Something" in the water that is "Not behaving in the expected manner"
Best Wishes, Dale D.
What we are seeing is just waves that are simultaneously flipping over and the color of the water accentuates what looks like the features of a serpent.
ReplyDeleteIt is simply waves that coincidentally look like a serpent.
Also, there are likely a few large rocks or boulders just beneath the "humps", where the water current is being pushed upwards.
ReplyDeletehahaha all of the comments are regarding an animal. It's a twisted tree trunk/branch that is rolling in the rapids. No monster, no snake.
ReplyDeleteWell, now you are assuming facts not in evidence.You not only assume the apparent "body" is made up of separate rocks, you then infer other unseen rocks beneath pushing things up. In the case of a couple of the bumps toward the right, it almost looks like there is a space underneath between the bottom of the object and the body of water. I don't see these as individual spherical bodies at all but as one long tubular object. It is possibly a very large and thick vine, but it seems to me to be not only contiguous but of one colour throughout. And whatever it is is riding on the TOPS of the waves in places, NOT pushing the waves up over the object(s)!
ReplyDeleteI do have several comments submitted to me privately which say it looks like a snake but it does not move like a snake. I think that is the obvious conclusion. I think it is a long, flexible, tubular object from its visual aspect, but I do not say that it is necessarily the body of a living animal. I don't know what it is, really, but it does not look to me like a line of boulders in the stream. If it were an animal, the most likely option would be Heuvelman's suggestion of a giant eel swimming on its side. BUT we don't have enough visual information to determine if that is what it is, either. The nearest available possibly comparable Cryptid would be the Minhocao, I think: but there are legends of "Serpents" in the water in various parts of Argentina otherwise.
Best Wishes, Dale D.
It may be vegetable in nature, but I don't think it is woody. And if it were only a vine it could still be green as it looks: a dead twisted branch would never be green. Besides, that would be one very unusually corkscrewed branch to look like that. My impression still is that it actually is flexible in that it rises and falls with the pattern of waves, and does not stand in resistance to them.
ReplyDeleteBest Wishes, Dale D.
It is very clearly just the water current. If you look at the "hump" that is the second from the left you can see the reflections of light that move with the wave. The original poster also describes it as a "current". Nothing special here.
ReplyDeleteRipples. If you look at the very top of the photo, on the other side of the sand and rocks, you see the same thing.
ReplyDeleteWow that was hard to figure out.
Ordinarily I would have gone with that, but besides that there seems to be an obvious edge with a colour and texture break between the current and the "body," there needs to be some sort of a physical barrier in the water to make it act that way.
ReplyDeleteIn this case also Jon Downes also votes for "Perhaps an unusual form of current"
If it IS only an unusual wave formation, then I could look upon it as vindication of my statement that most "string of buoys" reports are only wave formations and mostly the same world wide, because this one wave illusion was unusually hard to spot!!
Best Wishes, Dale D.
Looking at it again, I can make out that it does look like an unusual set of ripples made obscure by the lighting conditions. Which is something of a relief, I was actually in a quandry as to how a snakeshaped body could go up-and-down like that, even if it was dead and limp. But the giveaway is that it does move exactly the same way the rest of the waves do, and that would be wrong for the boulders or branch explanations. And the fact that there DOES seem to be a colour break in there is what heightens the illusion. But the colour is really only the colour of the water after all.
ReplyDeleteI've seen this pattern many times in water, casued by things like stones or boulders. its posts like this that drag down good sites dealing with paranormal. stupid.
ReplyDeleteIT MAY BE SEVERAL THINGS, BUT THIS DISCUSSION IS NOT STUPID! If we have something which can elicit the number of different interpretations as this photo has, then it is best to air out the reasons why the photo has to show one thing and not the other. This discussion could have stopped at the point of saying the photo shows stones or a tree branch. It did not stop there and the discussion went on because those explanations were WRONG It was in fact very important to establish the fact that we could have a set of waves look so convincing to many people because the larger hypothesis is that the majority if not all sightings of multi-humped "sea-Monsters" are similarly based on illusions caused by wave action. That category has not only been the largest category of "sea-serpent" reports, it is what the traditional image of a "Sea-serpent" REALLY IS
ReplyDeleteIt looks just like a worm.
ReplyDeleteWell yes, that's the point
ReplyDeleteI trust my senses and at first glance, definitely just water turbulence. I have seen enough fast river water to think that. Could be rocks or debris causing the water to swirl. Other "behavior" purported by the witness cannot be verified in a picture.
ReplyDeleteI THINK THAT IT IS A LITTLE COINCIDENTAL THAT THE HUMPS ARE PERFECTLY FOLLOWING THE WAVE PATTERN THAT IS OBVIOUSLY STATIONARY AS IT GOES BY.
ReplyDeleteDale I've seen something very similar to this on Lake Windermere when I was working there back in the Nineties.
ReplyDeleteThis may not be the same thing but what I'd see would sometimes come close enough to the shore for me to see very clearly it was a strange sinuous vorticial tubing of the water itself caused I speculated by there being more than one boat operating on the water creating interfering currents.
Saying that a lad I knew swam nearly all the way to the other side to escape the police then swam all the way back again rather than face "that thing in there" which was one of the ways he'd distractedly mumble about an encounter with something which really seemed to spook the living crap out of him.
It's a ROCK snake
ReplyDeleteThis looks more natural than animalistic. Just water action that has an "serpentine" appearance at that location. For those who think they see a snake like body in the darkish tan colors of the "hump", you will notice that the same color is present in all waves in this photo..big ones and tiny ones on the surfaces facing the viewer. Its the scattering/shadowing affect of light hitting the waves...its same in all waves. Nice pic, but no monster.
ReplyDeleteI've seen this type of wave action before. It's caused by the retreating water pushing up the incoming 'wave'. It's pretty neat to see. On the beach, it will cause the incoming wave to stand straight up. In this case, it would be the river outflow meeting the incoming wave. Glad she got a good photo of it.
ReplyDeletei work at a hydro plant its just waves see this all the time
ReplyDeleteYup it's a kind of standing wave. Google(image) standing wave scotland to see a great example of the phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteDude those are just waves it is not a river monster. Seriously
ReplyDeleteXiccarph is correct, incidentally, and I had already recognised that the colour of the water matched other parts of the photo before Xicc said so. So we can say that the observation was confirmed independantly. It was also the contrast in colours which was giving me problems in seeing the picture before, but I diod eventually recognise the same green colour in the water. At a larger size you can see parallel lines of other sets of ripples inthe background, and although the colours are hard to make out at smaller size, the other ripples do repeat the same colours for the darker background and foam.
ReplyDeleteBest Wishes, Dale D.
BTW, I would like to say once again that I would prefer that you use at least an alias and NOT post messages anonymously. Fo one thing, I would guess we have several distinctly different "Anonymouses" in this conversation. It is difficult to tell who is saying what, and I personally find it annoying and irritating.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing is I get the impression that other people think they are telling me that it is only a standing wave when I was the one saying it was a "Sea Monster". I was not, the photo was POSTED as being a "Sea Monster" and I said early on that For me it is just a wierd "Something" in the water that is "Not behaving in the expected manner"
So it's not me you are arguing with and it's not me that you should be trying to convince.
Best Wishes, Dale D.
Rocks.
ReplyDeletesome people will post any picture and claim its a sea monster or something else supernatural. please post a pic that actually looks suspicious.
ReplyDeleteAll right, I have a "Worse" one also from Argentina, I'll go look it up.
ReplyDeleteLook in the background the same thing is going on. Its just ripples in the river....
ReplyDeleteYes- standing wave. I saw the very same phenom once in northern California, where runoff from a rain was flowing down onto the beach and into a shallow pool, which was flowing into the ocean. It could have resulted from fresh water layering with the ocean's salt water. The waves were about two feet high and seemed motionless from several feet away. It was quite beautiful.
ReplyDeleteWe are getting to the point where "Anonymous" comments are coming in that are just plain rude. It's a waste of time to post them, for I shan't allow your messages through if all you are going to do is be a potty-mouth.
ReplyDeleteBest Wishes (to the rest!), Dale D.
We have pretty much all agreed it's a standing wave now. That part is OK and no big surprise, I had already gone on record as saying that most "seamonster" sightings were due to standing waves as long as I have been doing Cryptozoology on the internet, and I have records of that since late 2006.
ReplyDeleteWhat I am getting now from "Anonymous" contributors is just abuse. I don't know how people can justify it, but now messages are coming through that are obscene and insulting, and claiming I created and planted the photo myself. Enough is enough, you'll get nowhere with that kind of an approach. Since these messages (about a half a dozen of them) came in last night, I'm going to have to assume that somebody (or more than one somebodies) got drunk and was running off at the mouth.
You can't do that here, I won't let you.
Officially, Dale D.
Dale,
ReplyDeleteAndy here, It's easier to post a comment as Anonymous because I have none of the other options. If you take away all the asinine posters, I believe what you have here is the whole reason to have a cryptozoological blog: a reasoned open approach to something strange. Did I want it to be an unknown animal? Of Course. But the fact that you and the posters working together, throwing out ideas were able to come up with a logical explanation is (almost) better. It does show that we, who are interested in this type of phenomena, are not kooks but can be rational. I thank you for that.
I shall definitely have to see what is wrong with the posting here. I would much rather have people use their identities and yet I keep hearing that Blogger is only giving people the Anonymous comment option. I was just talking to somebody else about the filters and stopping all Anonymous comments, but if all that are getting through fall into that category, I would be stopping ALL comments at that point.
ReplyDeleteWhatever is going on, something needs fixing. I'll look into it.
Thanks for the comment, Andy.
Best Wishes, Dale D.
This is a natural (if a little rare) phenomenon caused by three separate actions. The turbulent water suspends particles of dirt and mud in the water. The sunlight reflects off of the bare stones and is scattered by the soil, causing a greenish-brown glow or "shimmer". The texture of the earth beneath the water causes the waves to "scroll" (it's the same dynamic that causes the wave in the first place, just a different direction). It provides the illusion of an undulating sea-serpent type creature if typically only for a few seconds at a time, and I feel that it's worth noting that the "body" seems to have that smooth, shiny, scaled look of snake skin. There is a river by my house and every spring in the same spot, the illusion is observed(by myself and others)consistently. I wish I could explain the fluid dynamics better but I've been watching this same wave since I was 6 pounds 5 ounces and I assure you, it's only mundane. Sorry guys.
ReplyDeleteSo what's to be sorry about? With just this one example and the attendant discussion, we have pretty well demonstrated that the larger part of all water monster reports worldwide are similar standing wave actions. That's probably well above 75% of the recorded cases. Clear all that away and we can begin to talk about unknown seals or whatever.That's a big step foreward.
Delete