Episodes
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Better pack your elephant gun for this one.
NOTE: the guest appliance on Pirates Don't Eat The Tourists mentioned probably won't be out when you hear this. But it will be before too long ...
I didn't intend to get into the history of Mokele-Mbembe, the infamous African living sauropod (I really, really didn't) but this short story 'The Great Beast of Kafue' by Anglo-Irish writer Clotilde Graves (from Cork no less!) sucked me into the murky stories of inter-war Germans sending strange tales back to Europe from the Congo, Cameroon, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and other parts.
Cryptozoologists have, over the years, muddied the waters by combining tales from different parts of the continent, mixing and matching Mokele-Mbembes, Chipekwes, and other lesser-known mystery African animals to create a more homogenous idea of an African Jurassic Park creature.
In this episode, we look at the influence of Carl Hagenbeck's 'real-life' dinosaur stories on Graves' short story, and attempt to bring this story back to its origins.
Links:
Sharon Hill's Evolution of the Kasai Rex
Markus Hemmler's Kassaisaurus from Congo
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A project that was almost certainly greenlit following the immense success of the novel and movie Jurassic Park, John Darnton’s 1996 novel ‘Neanderthal’ is a relatively rare 1990s example of a literal ‘lost world’ tale. Two paleontologists travel to the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan to follow up on a rumour that a surviving band of Neanderthals is hiding out there. Frontloaded by lots of ‘real’ cryptozoological nuggets from the work of investigators Myra Shackley and Boris Porshnev, Neanderthal gets off to a good start. But will things stay positive as our heroes go native in this particular lost world and follow their ancestral trail?
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Missing episodes?
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Described recently by one of its stars as 'one of the great bad movies of our time,' the widely-panned 1995 cinema outing for Michael Crichton's Congo is given a hearing at the Explorer's Club. A somewhat out-of-time 'jungle movie,' Congo is sometimes a competent if silly B-grade Indiana Jones adventure, with odd nuggets of social commentary on the genre itself. And some of it is, in fairness, a mess.
But it's got lost cities and mystery animals, so it's squarely within our territory.
We might not win over any hearts or minds on this one, but we'll damn well try! Bring coffee and sesame cake for this trip to the Club.
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Michael Crichton takes an unlikely band of explorers into central Africa to recreate the classic 'lost city' narrative, almost one hundred years after H. Rider Haggard invented this literary form. But is Crichton too interested in ape language research and red-hot 1970s tech to focus on the lost city story?
Fortunately, there's an unknown species of cryptozoological gorillas menacing our team to keep things interesting.
Join Cian (who is more fond of this book than 99% of the earth's population are) for a drink at the Explorers' Club to chat about Michael Crichton's Congo. And there's some bonus material from friend-of-the-show Eddie Guimont!
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With the Bigfoot world consumed by debate over a documentary supposedly proving the Patterson-Gimlin film to be a hoax, we at the Explorer's Club retire to a gentler place: a look back at one of my favourite Bigfoot books, and the one that makes your host keep the door of belief open just a crack: it's the natural history book that just happens to feature the big guy: Where Bigfoot Walks.
Get ready to bro out with Peter Byrne and sigh at Ray Wallace in this back-to-the-90s classic.
*Oh, and there is a film version of this book from 2020, but as far as I can tell, Bigfoot is completely excised from it!
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In this episode, we cover several of H.G. Wells' stories which contain mysterious animals, or other links to the world of cryptozoology.
These stories include underwater civilisations of fish-people, murderous octopus species of octopus, extinct elephant birds, and highly-evolved ants!
Wells' fertile brain and immense talents often used science fiction ideas to comment on social issues, but he was equally capable of creating convincing fictional wonders purely as an exercise in imagination - grounded by his training in zoology.
The stories covered are:
-In The Abyss (1896)
-The Sea Raiders (1896)
-Aepyornis Island (1894)
-The Empire Of The Ants (1905)
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Dennis Wheatley is better known for his occult novels. But he wrote several 'lost race' novels as well. 'The Man Who Missed The War' from 1946 is by far the daftest of them all, though of course it has that Wheatley charm. Take a seat at the Explorer's Club for a tale of Atlanteans and leprechauns (with extra giant crabs).
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'There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them ...'
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a few stories, other than The Lost World , which might be considered important to the history of Cryptozoology. In this episode, we examine 'The Terror of Blue John Gap' and 'The Horror Of The Heights.'
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The lost 'Spider-Pit Sequence' from the original 1933 King Kong has long been the subject of much lore and myth-making. Was it truly a scene so disturbing it had to be cut? Were audiences terrified by the sight of stop-motion spiders, crabs and octopus-armed critters devouring the crew of the Venture?
Was this scene even filmed around all?
You're invited to the Explorer's Club as Cian seeks out varying versions of the tale from his many books on King Kong.
ERRATA: I mistakenly state that the Arsinotherium was an Ice Age mammal - it is, of course, much much older - 30 to 60 million years, in fact. Apologies to my better-informed listeners.
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For your first trip to the Explorer's Club, crack open a copy of James Hilton's 1933 classic 'Lost Horizon.' Journey to Shangri-La, where sensitive types from many countries wait out the turbulent 1930s, recovering from the last War and hiding out from the inevitable Next War. And just what does 'Glory' Conway and his visitors think of the place? And just what do they think of the colonial powers? Surprises abound in this somewhat ambiguous example of Lost World / Lost Race fiction.
