An interview with Charles Paxton, a fisheries ecologist and statistician at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who believes that by using the right methods, anecdotes about mysterious monsters can become scientific data to tell us about human perception and the odd reports that science can't fully explain. Some key quotes: "If you look at the distribution of reported distances of sea monster accounts, they're much closer than you would expect by chance alone... I thought people were reporting monsters because they'd seen familiar things at a distances. But the reported distances are much closer than you'd expect." He also warns of misinterpreting a whale penis, which looks quite serpentine, for a sea serpent. Elsewhere, in Mid Atlantic Frogs, our historian of the bizarre wonders what it is some Irish monks from the Middle Ages saw when they described an encounter with some "exceedingly dangerous small creatures covering the sea." He doesn't think it was a species unknown to science, but more likely a confused encounter with some quite conventional animal. The question is: which one?
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