The Oarfish.

They say it’s harmless. But seriously, look at the size of that thing.

Another sea creature: the Bloop.

Scientists have revealed a mysterious recording that they say could be the sound of a giant beast lurking in the depths of the ocean.

Researchers have nicknamed the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones “Bloop.”

While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth, Britain’s New Scientist reported on Thursday.

It is too big for a whale and one theory is that it is a deep sea monster, possibly a many-tentacled giant squid.

You can listen to the sound yourself here. Of course, some people have noticed that the Bloop, heard in the South Pacific, shares a zip code with H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional Lost City of R’lyeh.

This site yielded not only a .wav file of the noise itself, but the fact that the sound is believed to be coming roughly from 50oS; 100oW. After reading that, I wondered how close that was to the coordinates given in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Allow me to quote: “Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47°9′, W. Longitude l23°43′, come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror – the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.”

Which means only one thing. That’s right, kids: Cthulhu.

Somehow it always comes back to Cthulhu.

For those who were kept awake nights, wondering what the hell that thing in a North Carolina sewer was — Anyone but me? No? Well, screw it, I’ve got an update for you anyway.

Thanks to Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing, who found this story on i09, which confirms that the thing is real, and not a special effect.

But aside from confirming its existence, the director of environmental services for the the city of Raleigh can’t say what it is, or even if anything will be done about it.

The video was taken in a private sewer system by a private contractor working for them. It does not belong to the City of Raleigh nor will it reach the Neuse River Wastewater Treatment Plant. This is the response from our director: “The video is of the private sanitary sewer in the Cameron Village and was taken by a private contractor working for them and not taken by our staff. The blob has been identified by others as worms.”

The Raleigh News and Observer investigated as well, and it says bryozoans, which was my guess.

Actually, the sewer monster is made up of thousands of tiny organisms called bryozoans, or moss animacules, said N.C. State University biologist Thomas Kwak. Invertebrates, they bunch together in colonies and feed with tiny tentacles.

“They can get as big as the size of a watermelon,” he said.

But according to yet another Internet posting, the thing is not made of bryozoans. It’s actually a clump of Tubifex worms writhing in the sewage.

No, these are not bryozoans! They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.

OK, gang. Mystery solved. Everyone back in the van, and it’s off to the malt shop for dancing and Scooby snacks.

John Keel, longtime investigator of the paranormal and author of The Mothman Prophecies and many other books, has died.

In his decades-spanning career, Keel chronicled much of the weirdness that didn’t make the headlines. People might know names like “Bigfoot” and “Nessie,” or look to the skies for flying saucers, but Keel searched for the unknown parts of the unknown. He went to spots where our reality gets thin, and probed the cracks.

As far as his theories went, Keel seemed convinced that there weren’t actually wild ape-men in the forest, or aliens visiting the earth like a tourist spot. He studied history and myth, and found that the names have changed, but the phenomena have been with humans as long as we’ve been telling stories and writing stuff down. We’ve called them fairies, demons, angels and monsters, but they have always been there, out at the edge of the light.

Keel himself posited that there were beings on this planet, much older than us, who enjoyed toying with us. Occasionally, they show up, whether as a hairy monster or a silver-suited spaceman, just to play havoc with our lives.

He formed this theory after the events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which ended in the Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people. From his writing after that, he seemed fairly convinced that whatever these things were, they didn’t have our best interests at heart.

People can differ about the reality of the paranormal. I go back and forth on it myself, all the time. But Keel produced volumes of fascinating, challenging work that forever altered the way I look at the world. My writing would be a lot emptier and duller if I hadn’t been exposed to Keel at an early age, and if I didn’t go back to him often, looking for the strangest parts of the strange.

He introduced me to some amazing concepts. Now I get to play with them full-time, and I’m in his debt.

Fine. I warned you.

A truly odd — and more than a little gross — viral video came over the Internet at me today, called “Unknown Life Form In N. Carolina Sewer.”

I can’t resist something with a title like that. So I checked it out. At first, I had the nagging suspicion I’d been duped into viewing a video of a colonoscopy, but it does show something slimy oozing around in what appears to be a sewer.

Just what is it? Well, the candidates are UFO creature, hoax/publicity stunt, or bryozoan — “colonial animals … superficially similar to coral … known to occur worldwide … [and] observed to exist in sewer systems, examples being Denver and North Carolina.” (Emphasis added. And thanks, Wikipedia.)

It’s always tempting to leap to the flying saucer explanation, especially when something looks as weird and horrible as this. But real-life science has plenty of weird and horrible things in it. For some reason, however, saying “colony organism that has the ability to move on its own power and lives in sewers” just doesn’t carry the same thrill as saying “UFO creature! RUN!”

After my exhaustive five-minute research, I’m going to have to vote for bryozoan.

Then again, it could be a C.H.U.D. Yeah, scratch that. Now I’m voting for C.H.U.D.

First, we’ve got these guys (warning: site is overloaded with traffic) who claim they’ve found the corpse of a Bigfoot.

My best guess: hoax. I’ve got no proof. It’s just a gut reaction to the one picture that’s been released, and the tone of the press release. (An Internet search on one of the guys involved doesn’t exactly bolster confidence, however.) I suspect it’s going to turn out like the alien footage shown in Denver a while back.

Then we’ve got what some people think is a chupacabra caught on tape.

Again, this is just my best guess, but I’m going to have to say this is either a feral dog or coyote-hybrid.

The guy who usually sorts through this stuff, Loren Coleman, has so much traffic on his site that I can’t get through.

Still, as much as I’d like to be proven wrong, I’m reluctant to believe that mysteries get wrapped up this quickly or neatly.

Here’s a little thought experiment so you can size up how much of a game-changer it would be if either of these come true. Imagine a world where we have proof of Bigfoot. Where we have to admit there’s some big hairy ape-man in the woods, all over the country, and he’s there all the time. Maybe we’d get used to it, like we’ve come to accept the mountain gorilla, and the grizzly and polar bears. But I doubt it. I’m not sure we can accept the concept, because it means there’s something out there dangerously close to human, only running wild. I don’t think we’ve got room for that in our psyches right now.

For whatever reason, the truly earth-changing events are rare, and so blatant that it’s impossible to deny them. Take the dropping of the A-Bomb, or the collapse of communism, for example.

Other world-changers move as slowly as tectonic plates. The Internet is a good example. Twenty years ago, no Internet. Today, it’s an accepted part of daily life. But there was no one earthquake moment when it became a piece of our everyday reality.

The big changes tend to build up under our feet, while we’re still waiting for the quakes.

Pretty heavy thought for a post that started about ape-men and goatsuckers, huh?

UPDATE: Yeah, BFRO — Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization — says HOAX.