ShukerNature: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

What happens when you ask
AI to generate an image of a tall bipedal tailless monkey confronting a
gigantic octopus emerging from the sea onto the shore (Created by Dr Karl
Shuker using Grok)

Cryptozoology is full of examples of
cryptids that once their existence was finally confirmed officially by science
were shown to have been long since known to the world anyway, but had somehow
been overlooked, veritably rendered invisible – in other words, they had
remained hidden in plain sight. So here are two recently-revealed additional
examples.

MAPPING
A CRYPTO-SPECIMEN

Cryptozoological specimens are notorious for being
almost as elusive as the cryptids themselves, with a worrying tendency to
vanish out of sight, never to be recorded again. So it is always a pleasant
albeit rare surprise if such a specimen reappears somewhere, as was the case
recently with one that has apparently been hidden in plain sight for quite some
time.

On 26 August 2025, I was startled but delighted to
learn from Florida resident and longstanding Facebook friend Adam Naworal that
he had recently encountered a sample of tissue from the famous St Augustine
globster. The sample was preserved and on public yet wholly unpublicised
display in the map room at the St Augustine Historical Society – Oldest House
Museum Complex – in Florida.

 

Aimee’s photograph of the sample of St Augustine globster tissue
(© Aimee & Adam Naworal, but free to use by any researcher)

As revealed in the above photograph snapped of this
remarkable specimen by Adam’s wife Aimee and included here with her and Adam’s
kind permission, it consists of several chunks of whitened flesh preserved in
fluid (formalin?) inside a large vertical glass jar, labelled and firmly
stoppered. The St Augustine globster is – or was – the huge rotting carcase
that washed ashore on a beach near St Augustine during November 1896. Eminent
cephalopod (octopus/squid/cuttlefish) expert Prof. A.E. Verrill from Yale
University deemed it to be the remains of a hitherto-unknown species of truly
gigantic octopus, but since then there has been a long-running dispute among
scientists as to whether this is indeed what it was or whether, alternatively,
it was simply the partial, highly-decomposed carcase of a whale, composed
largely of blubber, and assuming an amorphous mass nowadays referred to as a
globster.

Samples were taken from it at the time, and
analysed, yielding contentious, contradictory results, but most of these
samples were thought to have been lost or discarded. So this confirmed example
at the St Augustine Historical Society is of special interest and scientific
value, and now, thanks to keen-eyed Adam and Aimee, is duly documented here for
cryptozoological posterity. Also, they have asked me to note here that they are
making their photograph of this specimen freely available for all researchers
to use at no charge, only a credit to Aimee is required – thanks guys! Incidentally,
Adam has since informed me that the sample has now been taken off display, so it
was extremely fortuitous that he and Aimee were visiting during the time when it
was accessible for viewing by the public and were therefore able to place its existence
on record.

AN
INFERNAL FIND!

And staying with crypto-discoveries hidden in plain
sight: Just two days before I learnt from Adam and Aimee about the St Augustine
globster sample, another longstanding Facebook friend, Robert Schneck, had
drawn my attention to an illustration that he’d lately discovered and had now
uploaded to his Facebook page ‘Historian of the Strange’. Prepared by German
artist Hermann Wöhler (1897-1961) in c.1930, it was an exceedingly detailed
line drawing entitled ‘Inferno’, depicting all manner of hideous monsters and
other terrifying entities envisaged by him to be inhabiting Hell. But what had
attracted Robert’s particular attention was the creature depicted almost at the
very centre of the illustration, because as he pointed out, it looked more than
a little reminiscent of a certain alleged cryptid depicted in a notorious photograph
during the early 1920s.

The cryptid in question was the so-called Loys’s
ape, reputedly encountered in the jungles on the border of Colombia and
Venezuela by Swiss geologist Dr François de Loys while leading a party of
explorers through this difficult, inhospitable terrain. The official narrative
as provided by Loys was that they’d encountered two such creatures walking
together on their hind legs and lacking tails. Threatened by them, the
explorers shot one, the female, causing the male to flee. Taking the creature’s
lifeless carcase back to camp, they sat it on a crate, propped it upright with
a long stick placed vertically beneath its chin, and photographed it. The
carcase did not survive but the photo did, and for decades led to supposition
that it portrayed one of the mysterious bipedal ape-like entities long reported
from many different regions of South America, and inducing French/Swiss
anthropologist Prof. George Montandon to formally dub their
scientifically-undescribed species Ameranthropoides
loysi.

 

‘Inferno’ by Hermann
Wöhler, with the Loy’s ape lookalike creature appearing almost dead-centre (left) and the hoax photo of Loys’s ape (right)
– please click dual image to enlarge it for viewing purposes (both images are now in the public domain)

Ultimately, however, long after Loys himself had
died, one of his team’s still-living members confessed that it had all been a
hoax – the creature in the photo was nothing more than their pet spider monkey,
which, after eventually dying, had been propped up and photographed (with its long
tail either hidden or cut off) to yield the famous, but now infamous, Loys’s
ape picture. (The entire sordid saga of this hoax has already been documented
by me in full here, here, and here on ShukerNature, so check it out.)

Bearing in mind that Wöhler’s illustration had been
created no more than ten years after Loys’s photograph had first been published
and had duly hit the headlines, it does indeed seem likely that this
eyecatching image had directly inspired Wöhler to include a representation of
it within his line drawing. For there is no doubt that the facial expression of
Loys’s ape as captured in the photo, with mouth agape and eyes staring widely,
is certainly more than a little hellish, positively infernal, in fact! So, many
thanks indeed to Robert for alerting me to a fascinating yet previously unrevealed
and undocumented cryptozoological connection concealed within the art archives.

 

Another
of my AI images, this time generated by Magic Studio, which took my verbal
prompt to depict a giant ape confronting a giant octopus a little too far,
inasmuch as it yielded a fascinating if wholly fictitious monkey-octopus
hybrid! (Created by Dr Karl Shuker using Magic Studio)

This ShukerNature article originally appeared
in the form of one of my regular Alien Zoo columns for the famous long-running British
monthly magazine Fortean Times.