EVALUATING THE ELF CHIMP OF FLORIDA - GLOWING GREEN AND VERY MEAN!

 

Is this what the elf chimp looked like? (created by me using MagicStudio)

My previous ShukerNature blog article was devoted to fictional green pigs (click here to read it), so now, continuing this colourful theme, the current one presented here is devoted to a (supposedly) factual green chimpanzee.

As regular readers of my blog, books, and articles will know well by now, I've always been attracted to the more unusual, little-known cryptids, and never more so than when they appear to be confined to a single source, and with no apparent follow-ups either. So it was that when, many years ago, I read about the subject of this blog article of mine in just one solitary book and nowhere else, its details stayed in my memory, to fascinate but also frustrate me in equal measure. For in spite of having searched several times down through the years for additional information in other publications and widely online, I've never been able to uncover any further details. Consequently, I've decided to present here in article form on ShukerNature the scant details that I do have concerning what I have dubbed – for reasons explained later – the elf chimp of Florida, in the hope that my article might induce readers who may know more about this very curious cryptid to post their valuable information here.

My original – and only – source of information (not counting, obviously, the numerous paraphrased versions of it that have subsequently appeared in print and online) is John A. Keel's classic book Strange Creatures From Time and Space (USA 1970/UK 1976). A verbatim version of it later appeared in a revised edition of this book, published in 1994 and retitled The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings.

 

My American 1970 paperback, UK 1976 paperback, and American revised, retitled 1994 paperback of the Keel-authored books noted above (© John A. Keel estate/Fawcett Gold Medal Books/Sphere Books/Doubleday Books – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

In both editions of Keel's book, the relevant excerpt appears as Case #15 within the Florida-themed section of a chapter entitled 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon', and reads as follows:

"There's a terrible smell around here. Can't you smell it?" the girl complained. She was one of four teenagers parked in a Lovers' Lane near Elfers, [western] Florida, in January 1967. As the others took deep breaths "an animal about the size of a large chimpanzee" sprang onto the hood [bonnet] of the car.

"Then we panicked!" the driver later told investigator Joan Whritenour. "The thing looked like a big chimp, but it was greenish [Keel's italics] in color, with glowing green eyes. I started the motor and the thing jumped off and ran back into the woods. We tore like blazes back to the dance we were supposed to be attending."

A police officer from New Port Richey later visited the site and found a sticky green substance which remains unidentified.

The investigator named in Keel's account was ufologist Joan Whritenour (who edited the ufological periodical Saucer Scoop). In 1967 she co-authored with famous mysteries researcher/writer Brad Steiger a book entitled Flying Saucers Are Hostile, followed a year later by a second UFO-themed book, Allende Letters. As I've never been a ufological researcher, however, I've never owned a copy of either of these works, nor any issues of Saucer Scoop, so I have no idea whether they contain any mention of this case (although it's more cryptozoology-based than UFO-themed anyway). Consequently, could any ShukerNature readers who do own any or all of these publications please check through them and let me know? Thanks very much! Sadly, neither Steiger nor Whritenour are still alive, otherwise I'd have contacted them to request further details regarding the 1967 Elfers incident.

Keel himself provided no primary source for his above account's information, nor, as seen, did he attempt to assign any kind of identifying moniker to the green chimp (or chimp-like entity). Consequently, in order to make it more readily identifiable to and referable by future researchers, I have chosen to dub this creature the elf chimp – because it was seen near Elfers, and because the traditional elf-associated colour just so happens to be green.

 

The elf chimp was said to be greenish and to possess glowing green eyes (created by me using MagicStudio)

As a lifelong science-fiction movie buff (click here to visit my film review blog, Shuker In MovieLand), when I read about the creature's green colouration and the police officer's discovery of an unidentifiable sticky green substance at the site where the teenagers' encountered it I readily recalled how such a substance, frequently some kind of deadly radioactive spillage and/or of extraterrestrial origin, is a staple ingredient of sci fi-themed B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s. However, I personally doubt that anything so (melo)dramatic was the identity of the green gloop in this reputedly real-life incident.

Shifting my attention to more prosaic possibilities, I recalled the many reported cases down through the years of so-called luminous owls, spied widely around the world, but especially in Europe, North America, and Australia – all regions that just so happen to harbour the pallid-plumaged barn owl Tyto alba. Said to glow with intense brightness, sightings of mystery luminous owls have been discounted by some scientists as observations of normal barn owls that have inadvertently brushed against bioluminescent fungi such as the honey fungus Armillaria mellea (which are sticky to the touch, enhancing their adhesive capabilities) when perching in trees, with these glowing fungi and their spores becoming attached to their feathers. Comparable fungi, including Armillaria once again, also occur on the ground.

However, as swiftly pointed out by skeptics of this proposed solution, the total luminescence exhibited by a colony of such fungi in situ is still nowhere near as intense as has been reported for a fair few luminous owls. This in turns means that even if barn owls did find themselves with some glowing fungal spores attached to their plumage after having perched upon branches bearing them, the combined glow yielded by these spores would obviously be less still than the total glow emitted by the complete colony of bioluminescent fungi on those branches.

 

Honey fungus Armillaria mellea, depicted in a vintage illustration from English naturalist/illustrator James Sowerby's Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms, 1789-1781 (public domain)

Consequently, I consider it highly unlikely that even if it had climbed trees bearing glowing fungi and rolled on the ground where glowing fungi were growing, the elf chimp encountered by the teenagers could have appeared greenish.

No details concerning the nature of the woods from which it had emerged and back into which it had fled were included in Keel's account, but I am wondering whether it contained any kind of large pool, pond, ravine, lake, stream, or some other body of freshwater. For if so, this might explain not only the elf chimp's colour but also its vile smell. Such bodies of freshwater in Florida and in many other localities around the world all too regularly experience, especially during the summer months, the detrimental phenomenon of algal blooms.

An algal bloom is defined as a rapid growth of microscopic true algae or of cyanobacteria in water, which often results in a coloured scum appearing on the water surface. In marine bodies of water, these blooms are often red in colour, are caused by true algae, and some are known as red tides (but green ones also occur, depending upon the algal species involved), whereas in freshwater they are frequently bright green or bluish-green, and are caused by autotrophic gram-negative bacteria correctly referred to as cyanobacteria but which on account of their superficially alga-like outward appearance are popularly albeit inaccurately dubbed blue-green algae.

 

A bright green example of a severe freshwater algal bloom (public domain)

Algal blooms result when algae or cyanobacteria multiply quickly in waterways with an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus (often caused by fertilizer having been dumped into them), particularly when the water is warm and the weather is calm. Moreover, they can have harmful effects upon the health of humans and other animals if water containing a bloom is touched, swum in, swallowed, or when airborne droplets are inhaled. They also emit a foul, putrid smell that can irritate, and they clog the gills of fishes swimming in water polluted by them.

Florida's freshwater bodies are particularly prone to algal blooms – indeed, in summer 2023 a toxic cyanobacterial bloom was covering roughly half of Lake Okeechobee, Florida's largest inland lake (click here to access a news report concerning this disturbing turn of events). In short, if the elf chimp had entered a body of freshwater containing a cyanobacterial bloom, whether deliberately or accidentally, it could well appear greenish in colour, with the severe irritation to its skin conceivably explaining its belligerent behaviour, and the stench emitted by the cyanobacterial bloom's scum even explaining this creature's awful stink as noted by the teenagers.

On the negative side of any explanation involving algal blooms is that the encounter took place in January, whereas these blooms are most prominent during the warm, sunny summer months. Furthermore, if the body of water where an algal bloom might potentially develop is ensconced within a dark secluded forest with little sunlight penetrating through the trees, this is far from ideal for a bloom's development, as the latter requires plenty of sunlight to stimulate its growth via photosynthesis. And if the sticky green substance found at the site near Elfers by the police officer were indeed from an algal bloom (or from glowing fungi for that matter), why could it not be identified? Algal blooms (and glowing fungi) were already familiar phenomena, scientifically speaking, back then.

 

Artistic representation of the Florida skunk ape (© William M. Rebsamen)

Also needing to be considered is whether, in spite of its eyewitnesses' likening it to, or even directly identifying it as, a chimpanzee, the creature really was a chimp. An absconded exotic pet or an escapee/release from a private collection or menagerie certainly offer plausible explanations for why such a creature might be existing in a woodland near Elfier. However, there is also the intriguing possibility that it may be something truly cryptozoological – possibly a juvenile bigfoot, or, more specifically, a Florida skunk ape.

The reason that I proffer this option for consideration is that in the very same Florida-themed section of his book's 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon' chapter, Keel included as Case #14 another encounter with a hairy green-eyed green-glowing foetid creature of unidentified nature, but much larger than the elf chimp and more suggestive of a typical bigfoot entity. Again, he provided no source for his information, but here is how he described the encounter:

A young woman was changing a tire on a lonely stretch of highway outside Brooksville, [western] Florida, on Wednesday night, November 30, 1966, when she heard a noise in the bushes and became aware of a most unpleasant odor. Then a huge thing with large green eye and an eerie greenish glow on one side of its hairy torso stood up beside the road and studied her. She was terrified. The creature walked off into the woods when another car came along and stopped.

Worth noting here is that Brooksville and Elfers exist in adjacent counties within western Florida, with Brooksville a mere 38.7 miles north of Elfers.

 

Map showing the proximity of Elfers to Brookesville, both situated in western Florida (© Google Maps – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Partial but not full-body contact with an cyanobacterial bloom could explain why only part of the torso of the Brooksville beast was glowing green – as an adult (judging from its huge size), the creature would be more experienced and wary about immersing in bloom-polluted water than a juvenile would be. Of course, as with the elf chimp case, the time of year in which this encounter occurred is outside the peak time for algal blooms, but some can exist all year long. Alternatively, had one side of its thorax simply brushed against some glowing fungi in the undergrowth?

Green glowing eyes have often been reported in bigfoot sightings (so too have red glowing eyes – click here for more insights into red eye-glow). This suggests that whatever the species responsible, a tapetum lucidum, i.e. a light-reflecting cell layer, is present at the back of each eye, behind the retina, as is commonplace in nocturnal mammals, assisting these creatures to see in dim light (by reflecting incoming light back out again through the retina, thus causing the reported glow or eyeshine).

However, as apes and monkeys are almost exclusively diurnal (only the Central and South American douroucoulis aka night or owl monkeys are habitually nocturnal, as well as lower primates such as lemurs and lorises), their eyes do not possess a tapetum – indicating, therefore, that whatever it was, the elf chimp was not a true chimp.

 

A douroucouli depicted in an exquisite vintage illustration from 1894 by John Gerrard Keulemans (public domain)

Having said that: an uncategorised species of ape that has evolved to be nocturnal might be expected, therefore, to have evolved such an adaptation. Again, the douroucoulis provide a precedent here. For although they do not possess a true tapetum, i.e. composed of riboflavin crystals (which nocturnal lemurs have), they do possess an analogous version composed of collagen fibrils, indicating that their nocturnal lifestyle is a secondary adaptation evolved from ancestral species that were diurnal in lifestyle.

In short, glowing green eyeshine at night does not necessarily rule out an ape identity for the bigfoot. Equally, however, those who favour a bear as this famous cryptid's true identity point to the fact that bears' eyes do possess a true tapetum and shine at night, the precise colour varying from red or orange to yellow or green, depending upon a number of different factors (and thereby making conflicting reports of green eyeshine and red eyeshine for the bigfoot less problematic).

As noted at the beginning of this ShukerNature blog article, I am unaware of any sequel to these cases, or the original source material (newspaper reports?) upon which Keel based his accounts. Does any additional coverage exist, for example, that names the teenagers and/or the police officer, which could therefore enable them to be traced and interviewed if still alive? Gathering further first-hand eyewitness testimony from them might yield new, extremely valuable details. Someone with ready access to the archives of local newspapers for Elfers and Brooksville might uncover such source material, which is why I have prepared this article – as a spur for further research by those better-placed geographically to conduct it than I am, living in Britain. It would certainly be fascinating to know whether the elf chimp and its much larger green-furred Brooksville counterpart were ever reported again, rather than being once-witnessed wonders of the kind all-too-frequently found hidden away in the cryptozoological archives.

 

The elf chimp – mean, green, and seen, but only once? (created by me using MagicStudio)

 

 

GREEN PIGS THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS - MUSING ON THE MOME RATHS AND OTHER CARROLLIAN CREATURES.

 

In Lewis Carroll's Looking-Glass Land, mome raths are small green pigs with long snouts (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Down through the years, I've documented here on ShukerNature, and subsequently in various of my books, a number of mysterious creatures featured in certain famous works of literary fiction, investigating their possible origins, in particular the real-life animals that may have inspired their creation.

Such book-dwelling beasts chronicled by me include (but are by no means limited to): the Cheshire cat and the mock turtle from Lewis Carroll's classic children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (click here and here to read my respective accounts of them); the tiny but deadly snakeling Karait from Rudyard Kipling's stand-alone short story 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi' (click here); the rather larger but no less lethal Indian swamp adder (aka the Speckled Band) and the giant rat of Sumatra confronted by the great detective Sherlock Holmes (click here and here); the dream-like hound of the hedges from Charles G. Finney's celebrated fantasy novel The Circus of Dr Lao (click here); the wild were-worms of the Last Desert as referred to by Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (click here); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's huge Brazilian black cat (click here); Ron Weasley's giant spider nemesis in a Harry Potter novel (click here); plus a veritable menagerie of scientifically-unrecognised fauna, from a purple bird of paradise and gigantic luna moths that really are from the moon to some shy living dinosaurs, a giant pink sea snail, and the incredible bicranial pushmi-pullyu, all inhabiting the delightful Doctor Dolittle novels written by Hugh Lofting (click here, here, and here).

 

The 1969 Bancroft Classics #47 hardback edition of Through the Looking-Glass that I owned as a child (© Bancroft Books – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

As it's been a quite while since I last wrote about any such literary cryptids, however, I feel that it's high time I did so again – and what better source to choose from than Lewis Carroll's second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (to give it its full title), which was published in 1871, six years after Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. As a child I enjoyed this sequel novel even more than the original, afore-mentioned Alice book, because its storyline and characters were far less familiar to me.

In particular, I was fascinated by the poem 'Jabberwocky', one of the world's best known nonsense poems. Alice encounters it quite early in Through the Looking-Glass, but as it is written in mirror-image format, she initially finds its verses difficult to read. Moreover, even when she is able to read their reflection in the titular looking-glass, she still cannot understand them because she discovers that they are packed with bizarre made-up words – words that confused but captivated me just as much as they did with Alice, until she encountered the nursery-rhyme character Humpty Dumpty, a self-proclaimed etymological expert, who explained many of them to her.

 

The full version of Lewis Carroll's self-penned nonsense poem 'Jabberwocky', as featured in his second Alice novel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There – please click this poem's picture here to enlarge it for reading purposes (public domain)

Moreover, the latent cryptozoologist stirring within me even as a youngster meant that I was additionally fascinated by this poem's tantalizingly brief, ambiguous references to a number of strange-sounding beasts that seemed endemic to Looking-Glass Land – creatures like the slithy toves, for instance, or the bandersnatch, the borogoves, the mome raths, and, needles to say, the eponymous monster itself, the jabberwock. Some of these were succinctly described by Humpty Dumpty, but others were not, thereby remaining enigmatic and elusive. Consequently, down through the years my childhood memories of this poem have inspired me to seek out further information concerning its fabulous if fictitious fauna in the hope of determining what kinds of creatures they were – and here is what I've found out.

As Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice, many of those weird words in 'Jabberwocky' are portmanteaus, i.e. they have been formed by combining two or more separate, well-known words together to yield a totally new albeit far less familiar one. 'Slithy', for instance, arises from the combination of 'slimy' and 'lithe', 'frumious' from 'fuming' and 'furious', 'mimsy' from 'flimsy' and 'miserable', 'chortled' from 'chuckled' and 'snorted', and so forth (Humpty Dumpty elucidating most of these for Alice). Then there are some that are simply extrapolations from existing words, such as 'beamish', defined by Carroll as beaming radiantly with joy or happiness (though, interestingly, scholars have subsequently discovered that this is one peculiar-sounding word in 'Jabberwocky' that Carroll did not invent, its usage having been traced back as far as 1530).

 

A chortling mome rath beneath a beamish moon!

For the most part, however, such forms of word derivation do not assist in revealing the respective natures of the various anomalous animals mentioned in 'Jabberwocky'. Consequently, it is fortunate that between Humpty Dumpty's in-book revelations, the accompanying illustrations prepared by Sir John Tenniel (who had previously prepared those that had illustrated the first Alice book), and various explanatory notes made by Carroll in a publication that preceded Through the Looking-Glass's first printing by almost 20 years, much of the mystery surrounding them can be dissipated.

The publication preceding Through the Looking-Glass was a periodical entitled Mischmasch, written and illustrated by Carroll himself, which was published in 1855. It was here in which the original, significantly shorter version of 'Jabberwocky' first appeared, consisting of just the first verse of what would subsequently become the full multi-verse version in Through the Looking-Glass, published 16 years later. Needless to say, therefore, as the jabberwock itself is not actually mentioned in the first verse, that original single-verse version was not titled 'Jabberwocky'. Instead, Caroll dubbed it 'Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry'. And as will be seen, it is very intriguing how Carroll's concept of what some of his fictional creatures look like changed quite dramatically from his descriptions of them in this periodical to his descriptions of them (as verbalized via Humpty Dumpty) in the novel.

 

A vintage colorized version from 1927 of Tenniel's illustration depicting some of the cryptic creatures alluded to in Carroll's poem 'Jabberwocky'  - the two badger-faced animals with corkscrew-shaped muzzles and webbed feet are toves; the two long-legged birds (one of them is kneeling with legs bent) are borogoves; and the four small long-snouted pigs are mome raths (green in colour, according to Humpty Dumpty, hence tinted here accordingly), of which three are in the foreground above the toves and borogoves, with the fourth one just visible in the background to the left of the sundial) (public domain)

So let's begin our annotated checklist of the 'Jabberwocky' wildlife. The creatures first mentioned in it are the slithy toves, which as noted earlier are apparently slimy and lithe, and are the subjects of the most detailed description of any creature name-checked in the poem. According to Humpty Dumpty:

Toves are something like badgers, they're something like lizards, and they're something like corkscrews...Also they make their nests under sun-dials, also they live on cheese.

And that is still not all. For as noted in the poem, they "gyre and gimble in the wabe", which as defined by Humpty Dumpty means that they go round and round like a gyroscope, and bore holes like a gimlet. As for the wabe, he states that this is the grass plot around a sundial (where the toves make their nests) and is so named because it "goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it".

 

Only in Looking-Glass Land – a green pig beneath a blue moon!

Conversely, back in 1855 Carroll described the toves quite differently in Mischmasch, stating that they were "a species of Badger [which] had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag [and] lived chiefly on cheese". Moreover, rather than defining the wabe as the grass plot around a sundial, he claimed that it was the side of a hill.

Moving on to the borogoves, they are described merely as mimsy in the poem itself, which as we have seen earlier indicates that they are flimsy and miserable. However, Humpty Dumpty expands upon this briefest of accounts by stating that a "borogove is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round, something like a live mop". Tenniel's picture illustrates them as vaguely stork-like, with very long legs (one of them is kneeling, so its lengthy legs are largely concealed beneath its body). Conversely, again, in his Mischmasch periodical Carroll had described this species as: "An extinct kind of Parrot. They had no wings, beaks turned up, and made their nests under sun-dials: lived on veal". Interestingly, therefore, it would appear that when writing Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll transferred to the toves the distinctive habit of making their nests under sundials that he had originally attributed in Mischmasch to the borogoves.

 

You lookin' at me? Is this mome rath feeling rather wrathful?

Now we come to my favourite members of the 'Jabberwocky' zoo (though you've probably already guessed that, by virtue of their pictorial preponderance in this blog article!). Namely, the mome raths. Humpty Dumpty merely describes them as "a sort of green pig", whereas in perhaps his single most dramatic change of identity for any animal referred to in this poem, Carroll stated in Mischmasch:

'Rath' is "a species of land turtle. Head erect, mouth like a shark, the front forelegs curved out so that the animal walked on its knees, smooth green body, lived on swallows and oysters.

Transforming from a green land turtle to a green pig in just 16 years is quite a metamorphosis, that's for sure! Having said that, I personally consider a small long-snouted green pig to be a much more delightful concept than a shark-mouthed, knee-walking land turtle, green-coloured or otherwise. And speaking of long-snouted: Tenniel appears to have been wholly responsible for giving that particular characteristic to the quartet of mome raths depicted by him, an example of artistic licence, perhaps, as it certainly does not feature in either of the verbal portraits quoted above for this porcine species.

 

A mome rathlet (or green piglet, if you prefer!) – how cute is that??

Perhaps the most unexpected of all portrayals of the mome raths, however, appears in Walt Disney's classic 1951 animated feature film Alice in Wonderland. One rather sad, downbeat scene features a tearful Alice having inadvertently become lost in the dark, forbidding Tulgey Wood, home of the jabberwock (but never seen in this movie version). Suddenly, a voice breaks the somber stillness, warning Alice somewhat peremptorily not to step on the mome raths. Shocked, she looks down, and there all around her are small entities resembling flowers but walking on two tiny legs. These very atypical mome raths duly assemble themselves in various shapes, culminating in a large arrow that points to the route leading out of Tulgey Wood, which a very thankful Alice swiftly follows. Although these floral mome raths are certainly endearing (albeit inexplicable!), I feel that some animated green pigs would have been more appealing to this movie's viewers, as well as being far more in-keeping with its somewhat psychedelic visuals.

But now to the descriptive component of this creature's name – from where is the 'mome' in 'mome rath' derived? Here, for the first time, we find little (if any) satisfactory explanations. Even the etymological egomaniac that is Humpty Dumpty confesses to Alice that he is uncertain regarding the derivation of 'mome' – an admission indeed! – offering only this vaguely hopeful suggestion: "I think it's short for 'from home', meaning that they'd lost their way, you know". Rather like Little Bo Peep's sheep, then? As for 'rath': whenever I read 'Jabberwocky' as a child, 'rath' always reminded me of the word 'rasher' – who knows, perhaps I was onto something!

 

A couple of seriously strange mome raths!

And with regard to this poem's claim that "the mome raths outgrabe", Humpty Dumpty reveals that "'outgribing' is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle" (with 'outgrabe' being the past tense of 'outgribe'). So now we know!

Moving now into the second verse of 'Jabberwocky', it includes three more mystery beasts, the first, and also the foremost, of these being this poem's eponymous beast itself – the jabberwock. Yet in spite of its being the title character, very little descriptive information is provided for this monster. It is said to have "jaws that bite" and "claws that catch", which apart from confirming that it does indeed possess these particular anatomical accoutrements is of very little use, bearing in mind that their respective, exceedingly succinct one-verb descriptions fit the activity of the jaws and claws of most animals thus equipped.

 

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!"

The only other details provided are the statements in the fourth verse that the jabberwock has "eyes of flame", that it "came whiffling through the tulgey wood", and that it "burbled". The first statement is self-explanatory, and so, in a sense, is "whiffling" – for instead of being a Carrollian invention, this is a real word whose usage can be traced back as far as 1568, and is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as emitting or producing a light whistling or puffing sound. As for "burbled", Carroll stated in a letter dating from 1877 (six years after Through the Looking-Glass was published) that he didn't remember creating it, but surmised that it may be a composite of 'bleat', 'murmur', and 'warble'. Interestingly, 'burble' subsequently entered the English language as an accepted word, and today is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a verb that means to make a bubbling sound, and also to babble or prattle, plus a noun that means prattle. So, surprisingly, it looks like when pondering the origin of 'burble', Carroll didn't consider two words that seem much more likely to have been bona fide components of it, namely 'bubble' and 'babble', than either 'bleat' or 'murmur' (though his third proposed component, 'warble', does still seems promising as a contender in this capacity).

Due to the scarcity of morphological details provided in thje poem, Tenniel was evidently given free rein when preparing his detailed full-page illustration of the jabberwock, which is reproduced in vintage colorized form below. As can be seen, Tenniel's terror is a most curious creature – combining a very lengthy elongate neck and tail, a pair of insect-like antennae, and a pair of catfish-like mouth barbels with huge bat-like wings, long bushy side-whiskers, and the incisors of a rabbit, plus, just for good monstrous measure, no doubt, it is wearing a very natty waistcoat!

 

Vintage colorized version of Tenniel's original illustration of the jabberwock, from Through the Looking-Glass (public domain)

The other two mystery beasts name-checked in the second verse are the jubjub bird and the frumious bandersnatch. No details whatsoever are given in it regarding the jubjub bird, but as the father in the poem tells his son to beware both of these entities, we must assume that they were dangerous ones. The only additional clue regarding the bandersnatch is Carroll's use of the portmanteau adjective 'frumious' to describe it. This is a word that Carroll deferred from defining until a few years later, in the preface to his lengthy stand-alone nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, published in 1876, and in which both the jubjub bird and the bandersnatch reappear. Two of this latter poem's main characters hear the jubjub bird's very scary cry (described as a shrill and high scream), whereas a third main character is attacked by the bandersnatch and is driven insane after trying to bribe it. In this composition's preface, Carroll states that 'frumious' is a composite of 'fuming' and 'furious', so clearly the bandersnatch is a beast best avoided!

Meanwhile, here is a very charming but somewhat idiosyncratic illustration from 1902 depicting the jubjub bird and the bandersnatch, prepared by Peter Newell (1862-1924), an American artist and writer of children's books, in which neither of these creatures seems even remotely belligerent, let alone frumious:

 

Illustration of the jubjub bird and the bandersnatch by Peter Newell in a 1902 edition of Through the Looking-Glass (public domain)

No further creatures appear in 'Jabberwocky', but those that are present there have frustrated and fascinated generations of readers eager to learn more about them, and no doubt will continue to so for the foreseeable future.

Except for this ShukerNature blog article's opening photograph of a mome rath, which I created by digitally manipulating a public-domain stock photo of a typical shorter-snouted pink porker, all mome rath illustrations included here (as well as the first jabberwock illustration) were created by MagicStudio.

 

In a mome rath galaxy far, far away, Through the Looking-Glass meets The Lord of the Rings, or could it be Planet of the Pigs?

 

FINDING THE FEATHERED LIONS OF LARRY HAGMAN – AGAIN!

 

Did American actor Larry Hagman see something like this during his 'trip'?

My memory has always been akin to an exceedingly eclectic but generally well-organised, well-maintained filing cabinet whose innumerable drawers contain all of the myriad facts that I've acquired throughout my life, including the 40 years that I've spent researching and writing about cryptids, mythological beasts, and fantastical fauna (flora too) of every imaginable, and unimaginable, kind. Occasionally, however, a fact file somehow becomes misplaced, misfiled, or just plain missing. And so it was with the slim but stimulating file of the feathered lions.

Quite a few years ago now, I distinctly remember reading about some celebrity's autobiography in which he'd referred in passing to some feathered lions – enough in itself to attract my attention and thereupon file away this intriguing snippet for some future use. As the years passed by, however, and it remained unused and unreturned to by me, its details began to fade from my mind. Still, not to worry, I thought, I have it filed safely away in my physical archives as well as in my cerebral ones – until, that is, the subject came to mind again earlier this week, prompting me to seek out the relevant information in my archives and write it up at long last for ShukerNature. But could I find it? Not a chance!

Moreover, by now no longer able even to recall who the celebrity was in whose autobiography these ethereal entities had appeared, there seemed no chance of tracking anything down (online searches drew a blank). So I finally abandoned the subject, and started looking up a totally different one instead – at which point the Library Angel, aka the Seraph of Serendipity, clearly took pity on me, as has happened so many times in the past, to my undying gratitude.

 

If such an exotic creature as a feathered lion existed, what a spectacular sight it would be!

Opening on my laptop a cryptozoology-themed folder of chronologically-arranged files consisting of reports, articles, and other info downloaded by me from the Net during the year 2016, I started looking for the file that I needed for my new investigation, but there were a very sizeable number of files in it, and I had no idea of the specific date on which I'd downloaded the file in question. So I automatically rearranged all of that folder's files into alphabetical order instead, by file title, hoping to spot the file quickly by way of its title's subject. The titles were organised into columns, and while casually casting my eyes across and down a few of these columns before beginning the full painstaking scrutiny of each file title in each column, my eyes alighted upon one particular file title, and opened wide as they did so – 'Larry Hagman sees feathered lions'! Of course – Larry Hagman! Even before opening the long-overlooked file, its title alone was sufficient to usher forth the basic information that it contained, but obviously I still opened it anyway. And here is what I read.

The relevant information had appeared in a posthumously-published newspaper article recalling some of the wild events from Hagman's life that he'd documented back in his 2001 autobiography Hello Darlin': Tall (and Absolutely True) Tales About My Life. Hagman had of course been an American actor best known for his role as astronaut Tony Nelson in the 1960s fantasy comedy TV show I Dream of Jeannie; and, above all else, for his globally-acclaimed tour de force as ultra-villainous oil baron J.R. Ewing in the glossy mega-successful American soap Dallas, originally running from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, then revived in various spin-offs that began a decade later.

 

A multicoloured monarch of all that he surveys!

The newspaper article had been published back in 2012 (thus explaining why I'd not thought to look for it in the 2016 folder, the reason why it was in there and not in the 2012 folder being that I'd only learnt about this article and downloaded it on 7 June 2016, but I'd long since forgotten that small yet crucial fact!), by London's Daily Mail, on, of all days, 9 December (my birthday!), which was just over a fortnight after Hagman had passed away, on 23 November 2012.

Anyway, reading through this article it transpired that some time prior to 2001, feeling very stressed after always having been a total workaholic and perfectionist had eventually taken a sizeable toll upon his emotional well-being (a situation exacerbated after he had perhaps unwisely also decided to give up two longstanding vices – smoking and slimming pills – on the very same day), Hagman had sought aid, advice, and assistance from all quarters. Two years after his issues had begun, however, one of those he'd consulted now suggested that perhaps he should "drop some acid", i.e. try taking some tabs of the potent hallucinogenic drug LSD.

Although Hagman initially dismissed this idea, it became firmly lodged in his mind, until eventually he gave into temptation, and obtained some pure LSD tabs from none other than the late American rock singer/songwriter David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills and Nash fame, after he'd attended one of their concerts and had gone backstage to meet them afterwards. Even so, it still took Hagman a month before he finally summoned up the nerve to take one, and thereby experience his first trip. Here is how he described it:

Just a few moments after I'd swallowed a tab, part of the room I was in became a cave that was guarded by two feathered lions as well as octopus-like creatures with long, writhing tentacles.

So there it is, such that it is, simply a Hagmanian hallucination of the plumed and tentacled trippy kind, but nonetheless notable as the only reference to feathered lions that I've ever encountered (other than certain legendary lions with avian wings, documented by me in my book Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery), albeit from a most unlikely source, and generated in a very unexpected fashion. Yet even though this case may not contribute greatly, therefore, to our shared global lore on fantasy felids, it is nothing if not interesting, and memorable – which is why it has compelled me to track it down almost a decade later, and document here on ShukerNature the exotic creatures mentioned in it.

 

Cave-dwelling ctopus-like creatures also featured in Hagman's drug-induced hallucination

Finally: all of the very eyecatching illustrations of feathered lions and cave-dwelling octopuses included here were created by me specially for this article yesterday, utilizing the MagicStudio image-generation program.