Montauk Monster of Plum Island: The Mystery Deepens
We all love a nice X-Files type mystery to get our blood fizzing and the Montauk Monster is a Cryptozoologist’s wet nightmare.
The Montauk Monster tales come from a facility, lovingly named Plum Island Animal Disease Center, just off the coast of Long Island in New York State. The facility has been shrouded in controversy since it was spewed onto the island in 1954.
The centre was built to investigate foot and mouth disease, initially, but was also used during the Cold War to develop biological weapons that targeted livestock. See, this is already shaping up to be pretty mysterious, right?
The facility holds a frig load of nasty stuff in it, like polio and hog cholera. Due to the severe contagious ability of some of it’s potions, every wild mammal seen on the island is killed on sight.
The Plum Island Animal Disease Center has experienced a number of disease outbreaks; also, they were fined $111,000 in 1995 for keeping some evil concoctions that they really shouldn’t have been mucking about with. Then, one day, this thing rolls up, all dead and bloated on a beach in Montauk, NY in July 2008:
What a good looking chap. Of course, two and two were added together to make four and the Montauk Monster myth was born. Officials have never inspected or dissected the critter in question, and it seems to have somehow been lost, possibly thrown in to the woods by someone. The details are misty.
So, we’ll never know what it was for sure. But by studying the photos alone, there have been a few explanations, many of which have consequently been poo-pooed by people who want there to be monsters around (like me).
Explanations include a raccoon, but the legs are too long; a sea turtle, but you can’t rip off their shell without disemboweling them (and they don’t have teeth); a sheep, but the feet are all wrong; a canine, but the feet and brown ridge don’t match. None of the explanations quite line up.
It’s possible that it is so decomposed from rocking around in the waves that we’ll never know exactly what it was.
The story slowly died away, until May 2009 when this fella joins the party:
All the Montauk Monster shenanigans chilled out after a while, but then in January 2010, a human body washed up on the shore of Plum Island itself.
Officially there seems to have been no evidence of foul play, but eye witness’ tales were a lot more interesting. The body was reported to be particularly tall, with startlingly long fingers and five holes drilled in to his head! Alien? Yeah, probably.
Despite the body being carted off by guys in full bio-hazard suits, this story actually didn’t get that much coverage, so the Plum Island plums were probably pleased to have dodged that one… until….. July 2012, when this chap is washed up:
The official line this time went as follows:
“It was a pig left over from a cookout. We disposed of it.”
They buried it in the sand to rot in peace; the question is, why would you roast a pig and then dump it without even sampling the crackling? And do these look like pig trotters to you?:
Unfortunately, despite the secrecy of the disease-dabbling Cold War facility, the creepy hairless freaks and the human body with holes in it’s skull, it probably just boils down to something boring and explainable. That’s normally the case, but, personally, I reckon they are all aliens and monsters; and I’m sticking to it, because it’s more fun than a rotten putrefying raccoon corpse. So there.
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