In 2022, I found myself reaching back to my childhood’s favorite monster for literary inspiration.

That year’s midterm elections had brought with them another round of angry MAGA candidates promoting the Trumpian lie of a stolen 2020 election. Part and parcel of their rhetoric was—yet again—an attack on immigrants and anyone who just didn’t fit in with their image of “real” Americans.

Trump’s wrathful rallying conjured images of the torch-bearing mobs of black-and-white horror films. I thought about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 tale—and the inherently political implications of being a “monster” in a society that created you on the one hand and is repulsed by you on the other.

Like that, Chicano Frankenstein was born. In the tradition of novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, animators, and graphic artists before me, I wanted to use Frankenstein to explore how, under the right circumstances, anyone can become a destructive force in society. And that sometimes it can be difficult to know who the monster really is.

My first exposure to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus came from the 1931 classic Universal Pictures film adaptation. That celluloid creature imprinted itself on my 5-year-old psyche like no other horror movie of my 1960s childhood.

What was it about the monster—gamely played by Boris Karloff—that captured my imagination from the start? Was it the drooping eyes added by makeup artist Jack Pierce at Karloff’s suggestion that made the creature look half-dead? Or perhaps it was the flat skull shaped in such a way to ease the implantation of a cadaver’s brain? Or maybe the monster’s grunts and growls? I wonder if even back then, lurking in my young mind, there was some connection to, and sympathy for, this monster, who didn’t really mean to hurt anyone, right?

When I read Shelley’s novel for the first time in high school, I was surprised, like so many, to discover that the monster remains nameless throughout the book (the name Frankenstein belonged to his obsessed creator, a doctor who dared play God). But the real shock came when I realized that in the book, the monster learns to read and eventually speak rather eloquently. While the creature of the movie evokes fear and sympathy with his grunting monosyllabism, the monster of Shelley’s novel explains in perfect English what drove him to murder: “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?”

In both the original Shelley novel and all the adaptations that followed, it’s telling that one plot point has remained more or less the same: Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is eventually shunned by both his creator and society, and it is this rejection that turns the creature into a monster.

I wanted to reflect on that theme in my modern retelling. As I planned my novel, I envisioned the creature not as a singular entity but as a class of people—reanimated corpses who’ve been brought back from the dead to replenish an aging workforce. After a decade’s worth of reanimation, 12 million of these cruelly mocked “stitchers” now walk among us in the United States—including the hero of Chicano Frankenstein. Other than having been brought back to life after a horrific car accident, our hero is just like any other person holding down a job: He earns a paycheck, attends work-related events, rents an apartment, and runs each evening. But having also lost his left arm and leg in the car accident, the man—described as brown-skinned—has had a replacement arm and leg, both of which are white, “stitched” onto his body. The mismatched limbs flag him as a reanimated subject, marking him for jeers from people who disdain the reanimated population as monsters created by science, who threaten to replace “real” Americans. The story follows his journey, as he attempts to maneuver a world that both needs and resents him.

In my worldbuilding, I determined that the reanimation process should wipe the subjects’ first lives while saving their education and skills. By setting that rule, I could mirror the immigrant’s journey of leaving behind home, family, and friends to become a stranger in a strange land. The “stitcher” epithet also let me explore how those who resent immigrants often rely on dehumanizing language (such as “illegals”) to strip people of their individuality. The irony, of course, is that our country needs immigrants at all levels of employment to replenish our aging population.

For those of us whose “belonging” is constantly questioned, Shelley’s monster is a kindred spirit. As a Chicano, I have experienced too many situations where my presence in this country was questioned, and my self-worth challenged. For example, I remember the time when my football coach in high school called me a “stupid Mexican,” or when police stopped and frisked me when I was just walking in my neighborhood in my teens. My parents and I were born in the U.S.—still, on an Amtrak trip from Los Angeles to San Diego a few years ago, an ICE agent asked what city I was born in.

Writing Chicano Frankenstein, I reckoned with the enduring question Shelley left for us: Who is the real monster? Put another way, what person is truly free from bias? Even the most open-minded person carries assumptions, accumulated at home, work, and the world beyond. It can take great effort to see another person’s full worth.

In Chicano Frankenstein, I present an extreme through a virulently bigoted president concerned with her “legacy,” who wields the specter of the unfamiliar to goose her midterm numbers. But even my character Faustina Godínez, the hero’s love interest, wonders at one point if she could ever have a life with a person who has no history.

This range of behavior makes sense to me. I am a writer, but I’ve also been a practicing lawyer for almost 40 years. I’ve learned in that time that there is seldom a “slam dunk” case. Most disagreements come in shades of gray, and there are two (or more) sides to every conflict. I’ve also observed how an irrational fear of difference is often the driving force behind such behavior. Like the fictional president in Chicano Frankenstein, people throughout history have weaponized “the other”: through slavery, Jim Crow laws, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the so-called “Operation Wetback” immigration enforcement campaign of the summer of 1954, which resulted in the mass deportation of at least 300,000 Mexican nationals.

Most people at least attempt to quell their biases. But fearing those who are different appears to be an intractable human trait that continues to be used to turn others into monsters. Regrettably, I suspect that the monster may very well be within each of us.

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Let’s start with the blade-wielding clowns lurking in American woodlands (And not only there: One even showed up in my adopted hometown in rural Slovenia). Yes, I know that this is a fad, stoked by over-enthusiastic fans anticipating the new film version of Stephen King’s It, but it is outrageously creepy. Citizens are fleeing in terror and calling the police, and evil clowns are being arrested.

Monsters might be scary, but we humans need monsters—because they are far less frightening than the unknown. Our need isn’t new; it has been a consistent characteristic of humans since time immemorial. The recent discovery of a lost 16th century illustrated manuscript filled with illustrations of mythical apocalyptic beasts, now known as “The Book of Miracles,” is a case in point.

73 BC, Golden balls.

 
The near-vanished manuscript came to scholarly and popular attention when it was auctioned in 2007 in Munich to British fine art dealer James Faber. In 2014, Taschen released a facsimile of the book, presented in an artfully designed box. The original, whose author and illustrator are unknown, was published in 1550 in Augsburg, Germany and contains 169 strange, wonderful, and monstrous watercolor and gouache illustrations. They depict purported miracles of the natural world, with strong reverberations from the “Book of Revelation,” with its descriptions of allegorical monsters.

1496, Tiber monster.

 
In “The Book of Miracles,” the First Beast of Revelation, for instance, is an ocean-dweller with seven heads and ten horns, the feet of a bear, the mouth of a lion, and the body of a leopard. The Great Dragon also has seven heads and ten horns—and a tail that can sweep a third of the stars out of the sky.

It is revealing that “The Book of Miracles” focused on the supernatural at a time when Europe was ripe with all too real monstrosities: Plague, war, lawlessness, massacres, bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps there was some combination of comfort and escapism in shifting focus from the imminent dangers at the door to otherworldly signs and wonders.

The sea monster and the beast with the lamb’s horn.

 
Of course, these monsters were plausible concerns for some of the contemporary populace. The manuscript provides what appears to be a “factual” account of reported miraculous events: A sort of 16th century eyewitness bestiary, with dates and locations, and an artist’s strikingly modern interpretation (if you had told me these were painted by Rousseau, I might have believed you).

1533, Dragons over Bohemia.

 
We have, for example, a 1496 appearance of the “Tiber monster” shown with the torso of a woman, a bearded man’s head for a rump, the right leg of a horse, the left leg of a rooster, a dragon-headed tail, and what looks like a kangaroo’s head (though the historian in me is guessing that it’s not). A 1531 earthquake at Lisbon is depicted as a whale (though it more closely resembles an angry seal) emerging from billowing blue-white waves. In 1533, it seems that a swarm of snake-like dragons was spotted over Bohemia, while several undated creatures are also featured, including a “sea monster and beast with the lamb’s horn” and a “beast from the bottomless pit,” both likely drawn from Revelation (though it’s tough to tell: I’m pretty sure the biblical sea monster had seven heads and ten horns).

The beast from the bottomless pit.

 
You may have sensed a theme. Monsters of old are not created wholesale from scratch, but are patchworks of existing, real creatures sewn together like Frankenstein’s creation. This method echoes Hieronymus Bosch’s famous hellscapes, populated by hybrid human-animal or multiple-animal creatures. And it is part and parcel with Freud’s theory of the unheimlich, or the uncanny—beings or beasts or places that straddle the boundary between two opposites, a liminal zone, part of the dream world, part of the real.

Celestial swordsman, castle and army over Strasbourg.

 
We like to think of ourselves as so enlightened that monsters have become our playthings. But the truth is that we need them. Even today. Perhaps not as we once did, but as an integral part of how we process life, and particularly the bad things.

Consider how much easier it is to think of modern human monsters, like Hitler or Stalin, as two-dimensional cartoon super-villains—so evil we don’t even consider humanizing them by thinking of them as people with feelings and origins, cuddled by mothers and teased by schoolmates, maybe, until evil grew from decency. It is easier to pen them up, dismissing them as outliers and inhuman monsters, than to admit that they are just a hair’s breadth away from us.

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Rawhead and Bloody Bones
Steals naughty children from their homes,
Takes them to his dirty den,
And they are never seen again.
—Traditional Nursery Rhyme, Yorkshire, UK

Ours was a safe neighborhood. Postwar cinderblock cottages stood unlocked in the shade of date palms that in summer cluttered our yards with vinegary, fermenting medjools and at trimming time offered their branches to boys for secret forts and clubhouses. Older children ran wild until evening dinner call, extending their explorations far afield to distant canals and vacant lots, disobeying their parents by ditching their toddler siblings who, somehow, always found their way home.

When the sun went down, the world changed: Elongated shadows trembled on concrete sidewalks, inchoate shapes lurked in dark alleys, eldritch rustlings shook the oleanders, bogeys and bugaboos squatted in the drear corners of fenced yards, and nameless terrors crouched like gargoyles in the tops of trees. Malevolent phantasms swooped low, and things went bump in the night.

Such horrors were irresistible to the imaginations of nine-year-old boys. After dinner we would sneak outside, daring to confront the night in rites of passage that put our bluster and moxie to the test. Our most dangerous adversary was the Booger Man who wandered abroad in search of wayward children who stayed out after dark. It was said that he wore a black trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat that hid a face no one had ever seen. Venturing into the neighborhood’s most isolated enclaves, we invoked him in games that ended with imagined sightings and full-scale retreats to the safety of brightly lit front porches.

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim tells us that children find a symbolic resolution of their fears in traditional fairy tales, where the monstrous is clearly delineated and escape is assured in Happily-Ever-After endings. Certainly, we were no strangers to the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen, but our truest monsters in the Phoenix, Arizona of 1959 were those in our imaginations.

The Booger Man was one of these, but in time he proved too much an abstraction, lacking the intimate presence necessary to all ghouls who strive to terrorize the young. He was a faceless shadow lurking in the shrubbery and nurturing a dark agenda of “getting” whoever came within reach of his long, grasping hands. What he did when he got you was uncertain, for he was slow and easy to escape—no one, to our knowledge, had ever been gotten.

Literary great, and master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe personified our propensity for courting the unthinkable. In the Imp of the Perverse, he made us consider a malevolent goblin who whispers in our ear tempting us to stand on the edge of a cliff and consider the consequences of jumping. We may never follow through, but the exhilaration of pushing the envelope of sane thinking can lead us into the sublime. A supreme heightening of the emotions can be achieved though the contemplation of the horrific, said the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.

After a time, our encounters with the Booger Man no longer took us to this place, but we found a successor who himself had pushed the envelope, and paid a dire price for his hubris.

In the late 1950s, the Kiva Theater in Old Town Scottsdale supplemented its usual fare of European art films with Saturday afternoon children’s matinees. On one of these Saturdays, after crawling through the aisles in search of fallen change and throwing melted M&M’S on the heads of unsuspecting viewers in the front rows, we watched First Man into Space, a science fiction/horror flick cheesy in premise and execution but filled with possibility for young adventurers who played games with the night.

It told the tale of a test pilot who flew higher than any man had flown before. Losing control of his craft, he bailed out into a suspicious cloud of extraterrestrial particles. Encrusted in meteor fragments and hideous to behold, he survived his re-entry and roamed the countryside in search of human blood. First, he broke into blood banks but afterwards pursued the citizenry, killing several before being brought down by clever scientists.

That night, the Booger Man went on sabbatical and First Man into Space made his debut. As with the rituals that called forth his predecessor, we sought him out in the neighborhood’s darkest recesses, wary of the moment when one of us would be possessed by the tortured soul of the test pilot who had disobeyed his superiors and ventured into the unknown. In our imaginations, the boy who had chosen to host our newest tormentor morphed into a vile, misshapen thing that lurched and clawed and slavered like a rabid dog. Arms outstretched, he came for us, and with a collective shriek of “First Man into Space!” we scattered once again for the sanctuary of our well-lit homes.

First Man into Space, like the Booger Man, faded into memory as we approached adolescence. But for a while he gave shape to our fears where his faceless counterpart fell short. Being “gotten”—the horrific consequence of succumbing to the temptations of Poe’s imp—was palpable in the bloodlust of an irradiated zombie with a backstory and a physical presence in a possessed victim. He joined a distinguished cadre of childhood terrors, such as La Llorona, the ghoulish Weeping Woman who abducts and drowns children who get too close to water, or the Mogollon Monster, the devourer of Boy Scouts who wander too far from their campsites after dark. Like the venerable English bogey Raw Head and Bloody Bones, they all were hideous, immediate, and supremely threatening—in other words, perfect for the dark play of children.

The allure of shadowy places and the creatures that inhabit them doesn’t end with childhood. Today the Booger Man’s cyber-cousin Slender Man lurks in both his home on the internet and the waking world, challenging millennials to participate in the dialogue between belief and disbelief that characterizes the urban legend.

Legend tripping—the visiting of haunted houses, cemeteries, and other locales connected to extraordinary or supernatural happenings—has long been popular with teens and young adults. If those of us who have left our childhood behind approach such experiences with an uneasy, obligatory cynicism, we would do well to think back to the joy of the screaming retreat to the safety of the front porch, and, when contemplating the question of “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties,” hedge our bets by invoking the last line of a traditional Scottish prayer: “Good Lord deliver us.”

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Two centuries later Frankenstein is the fifth most assigned book in college courses, there’s a fresh round of new film adaptations currently in production, and Franken Berry cereal is back on grocery store shelves for Halloween. Frankenstein’s creation still walks among us as we continue to struggle to absorb the lessons of Shelley’s complex fable about science and society.

Part of what gave Frankenstein’s “monster” its long life was its early and memorable adaptation in theatre and movies, which told a simplified tale about the dangers of hubris, a warning against science and innovation out of control. In this telling, Victor Frankenstein’s creature is an ungodly creation and the results of the experiment are predictably calamitous. Frankenstein was trying to play god, and he went beyond the bounds of acceptable scientific ambition. Of course people died. All of the familiar images around pop culture adaptations of Frankenstein—the thunder and lightning, the white coat, the ornate steampunk machinery, the maniacal cackling—encourage us to think of this as a story about hubris and its rewards.

But the reality of Shelley’s novel is far more complicated. Frankenstein is a nuanced exploration of scientific ethics and the dynamic between scientific creativity and social responsibility. The novel isn’t a straightforward warning to stop innovating; it is a cautionary tale. The dangers aren’t so much about what we do, but how we go about doing it. Frankenstein’s creature isn’t born evil. He only becomes vengeful and violent after Frankenstein abandons him when he’s prelingual and vulnerable. The descent into wrath is accelerated by the rejection the creature encounters time and time again as he tries to forge human connections with people who are horrified by his gruesome appearance. Frankenstein fails not as a scientist, but as a parent.

Frontispiece to the revised edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1831.

Shelley’s narrative urges us to be good caretakers of the new things we bring into the world, whether they’re ideas or works of art or gadgets or synthetic beings. The novel cautions us that human creativity begets things of great power, and dramatizes what happens when a creator significantly shirks his responsibility. Frankenstein’s penchant for the bombastic, and his definition of science as a pursuit of glory, is reminiscent of the spectacles of Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) and his nephew Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834), who thrilled crowds across Europe by using electrical stimulation to make dead animal and human tissue twitch and convulse as if imbued with life. Shelley’s novel distinguishes between practical science, with modest ends and clear applications, and Frankenstein’s Promethean ambitions, which are awe-inspiring endeavors but lack an obvious pathway to improving human life.

I sometimes like to think of Shelley’s novel as a science policy novel rather than a science-out-of-control novel: It admonishes us to build a social context wherein our creations can flourish and improve people’s lives. The story of Frankenstein’s famous creation encourages us to think carefully about the consequences of just dropping something into the world without a carefully thought-out plan for its oversight, growth, and maintenance.

In writing the novel, Shelley made a series of deliberate decisions to encourage us to adopt this more nuanced reading, and not spring for the simpler warning about hubris. When I first read Frankenstein, after a few pages I turned back to the battered cover of my library copy to make sure I was reading the right book. Where were the secret lab and the mad scientist and the hulking, bolt-necked monster I knew from the movies?

The creature that Shelley imagined is nothing like his mute, clumsy, Hollywood and Halloween monster cousins. Her creature is articulate and sensitive, a self-taught Romantic intellectual who agonizes over his violent acts and marshals philosophical writings and John Milton’s Paradise Lost to justify and give meaning to his desperate quest for revenge and wholeness. Reading the creature’s tale, it’s difficult to see the decision to create him as purely a mistake; he is thoughtful and perceptive about his experiences, and clearly traumatized by his abandonment, rejection, and loneliness. Frankenstein fails to create a context in which the creature could thrive, so he becomes wounded, and his grief and isolation warp into rage and violence. This is a survivor of abuse, not an ungodly horror.

It would have been easy to have the entire novel emanate from Frankenstein’s perspective, and it would have given readers an ethically cleaner takeaway about the price of ambition and scientific overreach. Instead, Frankenstein forces us to reach our own conclusions about how much slack to cut the characters, to decide how fault and responsibility should be apportioned for the novel’s many disasters. It’s an ethical puzzle, not a didactic treatise about how to do science correctly without going too far. Shelley built that fuzziness into the structure of the novel.

We’re still grappling with these same issues of creativity and responsibility—even if our scientific knowledge and technological sophistication are far more advanced today than in Shelley’s early 19th century. In an age of obviously Frankensteinian breakthroughs in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and social robotics, we’ve already answered the simpler question—we’re being hubristic, in some sense, playing with the forces of life and death. What remains is the deeper lesson at the heart of Frankenstein: That the thrill of discovery is just the beginning of a creator’s work.

At the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project at Arizona State University, we’re trying to encourage a new round of reflection and creativity about this infamous “monster” and his maddeningly unreliable creator. Through 2018 we’re hosting film screenings, museum exhibits, panel discussions, and other projects as well as publishing a new edition of Frankenstein tailored for emerging scientists, and engineers. The aim is to explore our evolving relationships with science and technology, and contemporary interpretations of monstrosity. Today’s Frankensteinian quandaries about creation and its consequences confront us at every turn, from GMOs in our breakfast cereal and political Twitter bots to the self-driving cars with whom we’re already beginning to share the road. If we want happier endings to these stories, we need to take our responsibilities as creators seriously, and offer all of our creations the care and respect they need to flourish.

The post Why ‘Frankenstein’ Is a Great Science Policy Guide for the Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was August 2014 and I was flying home from the Third International Marine Conservation Congress in Glasgow, Scotland, where I has just chaired a session on the impact of fake documentaries on public understanding of science. When my seatmate—a fifth-grade schoolteacher—found out that I’m a marine biologist, she decided to share this insight with me.

She was referring to “Mermaids: The Body Found” and “Mermaids: The New Evidence,” a series of Animal Planet specials that aired in 2012 and 2013. “Mermaids: The New Evidence” was, at the time of airing, the most successful show in Animal Planet’s history. The conceit: that mermaids were real and that scientists from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration were actively hiding their existence from the world. A few dedicated scientists, hunted and harassed by government agents (at one point, security footage literally shows men in black removing evidence from a lab), were fighting to expose the truth.

The shows were fake, though you could be forgiven if you didn’t realize that. Animal Planet, like many Discovery Communications properties, trades on its reputation for providing educational nature documentaries and lifestyle reality programs. The marketing for Mermaids leaned heavily on that reputation. Meanwhile, the disclaimer shown during the end credits flashed onscreen in tiny font for barely three seconds.

Mermaids was a success, and Discovery launched a series of compelling, yet fabricated, documentaries to capitalize on the ratings boom, including a pair of shows reporting on the continued existence of Megalodon (a giant and definitively extinct shark species), as well as shows about “Old Hitler” (a 60-year-old rogue hammerhead) and “Submarine” (a monster shark that sunk ferries and fishing vessels in South Africa). Discovery opened Shark Week 2013, its single most popular annual event, with “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives.”

Unlike works of pure fiction, the stories were framed around real events and real people and institutions. Submarine blamed a real ferry accident, in which several passengers lost their lives, on a made-up shark; the search and rescue operators who performed admirably in their response to the accident had to issue a release disavowing Discovery Communications. Actual shark scientists were looped into the Shark Week narrative, often filmed without full knowledge of the theme and purpose of the documentary. And NOAA, of course, was directly accused of hiding evidence about the existence of mermaids. NOAA was so inundated with complaints that it had to issue its own press release declaring that mermaids were not real and that there was no evidence of their existence.

Partially or entirely fabricated nature documentaries aren’t a new development. Documentarians have thrived off manufactured moments since the birth of the format. “Nanook of the North,” a 1922 silent film that captures the daily life of an Inuk man in the Canadian Arctic, is often considered to be the first feature-length documentary. Later interviews revealed that significant parts of the film had been staged and bore little similarity to the lives of Inuit hunters at the time. Disney’s Academy Award-winning “White Wilderness,” a 1958 feature that explored wildlife in the high Arctic, famously featured a scene of lemmings so driven with migratory frenzy that they hurled themselves off of a cliff into the freezing sea. Despite later revelations that, far from documenting natural behavior, the scene was staged and filmmakers chased the animals off a cliff, “lemmings” continues to endure as a metaphor for blindly following a crowd to self-destructive ends. Even the classic and fondly remembered nature program “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” has come under scrutiny for staging scenes that resulted in animal cruelty complaints.

Discovery Communications hasn’t been spared these accusations, either. In a four-part investigation, Christie Wilcox, a scientist and writer, documented how “Venom Hunters,” a Discovery Channel show about amateur snake-handling, contained animal abuse, permit violations, and misrepresentation. Other shows have also been exposed over the last few years for egregious animal welfare violations.

These kinds of programs muddy the waters of education-based television. In the case of documentaries like “White Wilderness,” they can actively and seemingly permanently distort our perception of the natural world or, as in “Nanook of the North,” disenfranchise modern communities by painting them as quaintly primitive. In the numerous cases of animal abuse, they cause active harm to the wildlife about which they are ostensibly attempting to educate the public.

And the bold and outright fabrications of shows like “Mermaids” erodes the public’s trust in government and scientific organizations. By framing the villain in these productions as real, often nonpartisan, institutions like NOAA, they don’t just direct resources away from the agency’s actual work by forcing it to respond to a phony controversy; they lend weight to other campaigns aimed at discrediting these organizations. In the United States, the active, well-funded movement to deny the scientific consensus on global climate is adept at capitalizing on manufactured controversy. By calling into question the motives and methods of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, an organization responsible for studying the effects of climate change on the United States’ coasts, Discovery provided validation for this anti-science movement and created an ecosystem ripe for exploitation by the merchants of doubt committed to undermining scientific consensus.

Unfortunately, major cable networks have vastly greater reach than all but the biggest research institutes. This makes it incredibly difficult for scientists to mount a proportional response when their discipline, research area, or even their own lab and research, are used for fodder in these fabricated documentaries. Though media empires like Discovery Communications have a reach that far exceeds the average citizen, social media and other web-based platforms have provided a venue through which knowledgeable parties can respond to this disinformation and boost the voices of subject experts who can respond directly to false of misleading claims. Following the first airing of “Mermaids: The Body Found,” my website, Southern Fried Science, began a concerted effort to respond to that particular flavor of fake documentary. David Shiffman and I published a guide to how scientists can respond and, more importantly, prepare, in the event that they find their research misrepresented through documentary and reality programs that are fabricated, either wholly or in part. There is no easy solution, and the success of many of these shows means that the fake documentary phenomenon is here to stay.

There is hope: After receiving significant criticism for its programming, Discovery’s head of programming announced in 2015 that the company would phase out these kinds of programming, at least for Shark Week. But lasting damage to the public’s trust in science has already been dealt.

The post How Mermaids Became a Real Problem for Scientists appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The giant was a magnificent sight: A stone man naked in repose, seemingly at peace. It could hardly have been hyperbole when a newspaper reporter wrote: “Men left work, women caught up their babies, and children in all numbers hurried to the scene where the interest of that little community centered” (The Lafayette Wonder, 1869). This creature became known variously as the Cardiff Giant, the Onondaga Giant, and the Goliath of Cardiff. It has become an enduring icon of Americans’ enthusiasm for hoaxes that confirm faith over science.

Newell recognized the commercial potential of his fascinating discovery. By the next day he had obtained and erected a circus tent over the remains of the giant, hired a carnival barker to serve as his docent, and began charging people 25 cents for a peek at the remains. Virtually overnight he transformed his farm into a multi-tiered tourist operation. Newell’s wife sold sandwiches and cider, and if you needed a ride from the train station to the farm, he could supply that as well. For a fee. People came in droves, producing a far more substantial income for Newell than farming ever could.

And Newell wasn’t the only one who benefitted from the presence of the giant. Cardiff was a tiny village, incapable of supplying the necessities of a burgeoning tourist trade. Nearby Syracuse had hotels, restaurants, and other amenities for visitors, and its businessmen recognized the economic potential of the giant in Cardiff when their receipts began to rise. When circus impresario P.T. Barnum offered Newell more than $30,000 (approximately $500,000 today) to purchase the giant outright, they were understandably concerned. A consortium of local men stepped up, paying Newell that much for only a three-quarter interest in the giant, ensuring that the specimen would remain local. Along with that gigantic inflow of cash, Newell continued to earn a quarter for every dollar made in ticket sales.

But what accounted for the booming popularity of the Giant? The going story, especially popular among theologians, was that the Cardiff Giant was a fossilized representative of a group of creatures mentioned in the Bible, the Nephilim. (“There were giants in the Earth in those days…” Genesis 6:4). So the Cardiff Giant provided proof of the existence of these biblical giants, and by extension literal proof of other Biblical stories.

Not everyone agreed, however. Scientists noted that the raw material from which the giant was made was gypsum, a soft rock wholly unlike that of any genuine petrification and one that would not last very long in the acidic soil of the Newell farm. Othniel C. Marsh, a well-known paleontologist at the Yale Peabody Museum, wrote a letter to the Syracuse Daily Journal on Nov. 30, 1869: “It is of very recent origin and a most decided humbug …” University of Pennsylvania geologist J.F. Boynton concurred, suggesting, based on erosion rates, that the statue could not have been ensconced in the soil of the Newell farm for much more than a year before its claimed discovery.

Excavation of the “Cardiff Giant” in 1869.

The testimony of well-respected scientists quelled the fervor of some. However, it wasn’t until a shadowy figure emerged to confess to the hoax that belief in the Cardiff Giant evaporated. That figure was George Hull, a relative of Stub Newell.

Hull was a Binghamton, New York cigar manufacturer and an inveterate atheist. While on a visit to his daughter in Iowa, Hull was talking with a minister there about biblical inerrancy when the conversation turned to the story of David and Goliath. The minister maintained that, indeed, there had been a ten-foot-tall champion of the Philistines and that the Bible said so. Hull, while dismissive of a story he considered twaddle, nevertheless wondered if there might be a buck to be made from rubes who would pay to see “evidence” for the past existence of such a giant. In a confession printed in the Ithaca Daily Journal in 1898—nearly three decades after the Cardiff Giant’s discovery—Hull said this conversation was inspiration for the hoax.

He explained that he’d purchased a small tract of land in Iowa, from which he extracted a block of gypsum. He then had the stone shipped to a stonecutter in Chicago to sculpt the giant according to his specifications. Upon its completion, Hull shipped the sculpture to Cardiff and with his cousin Newell planted it in the ground late in 1868, almost exactly one year before its “discovery.” The timeline of Hull’s confession almost exactly matched the geologist Boynton’s calculation. Allowing it to steep in the soil for a year provided time for the stone to weather, bestowing it with a patina of antiquity. At the agreed upon moment, Newell hired laborers to dig the well exactly where he knew they would encounter the giant petrified man from before Noah’s flood.

In truth, the Cardiff Giant wasn’t that convincing a humbug, so why were people so interested in believing in it? 1869 was a contentious time for science and religion. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published just 10 years earlier, creating an ongoing discussion about theories of evolution. The study of fossils and historical geology was further challenging biblical creation stories. There was no room in the emerging scientific consensus for Adam and Eve, Noah, or, for that matter, an ancient race of giants—yet here was a discovery that defied that.

And the Cardiff Giant spoke to a deeper American myth. Consider the man apparently behind its discovery: farmer Stub Newell. Not a scientist, and without a college degree, he had made a discovery that contradicted the viewpoint of scientists. There were giants in the Earth in those days and, if there had been giants, maybe Genesis was as much history book as holy scripture. In this, Stub Newell represents the very American trope of the amateur who, despite the naysaying of the credentialed class, makes a discovery that ostensibly changes what we know about the world.

The Cardiff giant lived on even after its unmasking. After P. T. Barnum failed to purchase Newell’s giant, he had a replica made, which he exhibited as the real thing. Barnum’s version was a fake of a fake! Amused, Mark Twain was inspired to write a short story about all this. Titled “A Ghost Story,” Twain has the spirit of the Cardiff Giant haunting the hotel across the street from where its body is callously being displayed. But there’s a problem; as a result of his own naiveté and confusion, the Giant is actually haunting P.T. Barnum’s fake. The humbug had been humbugged.

Once interest in the Giant waned, a newspaper editor in Iowa purchased the fraudulent fossil. He kept it as a conversation piece in his basement where it was photographed for a 1939 National Geographic spread on the Hawkeye State. Soon thereafter the Giant was returned to, if not the scene of the crime, at least nearby, where he now rests in peace, finally, at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

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I’m so famous for keeping a low profile that some people doubt my existence. So I’m here to tell my fellow Californians that I’m proudly one of you.

I travel widely in California (Bigfoot sightings have been reported in every county of this state), and as I do, my fears have grown about our home state. My anxiety is not because of all the strange California characters who are always claiming to have seen me (I made my peace with my celebrity stalkers decades before TMZ came along) but because I’m seeing far too much of all of you.

Now, you may have noticed that, as a 21st century Sasquatch, I’m a global figure, and have been spotted in almost every U.S. state and in foreign places from Congo to Indonesia to Siberia. And it’s true that there have been a few more sightings of me in Washington state (about 450, according to Bigfoot trackers online and in books) than in California (about 400), but I must confess that my trips to the Pacific Northwest are really just a tax dodge; those Prop 30 rates are monstrous, and Washington state doesn’t have a personal income tax.

But let me be clear: every hair on my body calls California home. The most famous pictures of me (the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967) were taken in the Golden state. And I’ve always been proud of the way I bring its disparate regions together, from the Bigfoot-themed bars in L.A. and San Francisco to the terrific Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I bridge Hollywood (which made me famous through TV and movies) and Silicon Valley (Did you see those ads I did for Google’s photo storage service during the Rio Olympics?).

I spend most of my time in the far north of the state—there’s a reason Siskiyou, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties boast the most sightings of yours truly. I’m particularly loyal to the tiny Humboldt town of Willow Creek, the world’s unofficial Bigfoot capital. This Labor Day weekend, as usual, I’ll ride down Willow Creek’s Main Street in the parade for the annual Bigfoot Days celebration, check in on my personal artifacts at the Bigfoot Collection at the China Flat Museum, and cheer on the competitors in the lawn mower race, the hirsute’s answer to the Grand Prix.

A road sign in Humboldt County, CA, home to the world’s unofficial Bigfoot capital.

Seeing old friends in the Bigfoot community—the folks who study and obsess over me—will be fun. But I also have to confess that at times I miss the solitude and quiet I used to enjoy when I had California’s wilder areas mostly to myself.

These days, I’m encountering so many people in our state’s once-remote precincts that I can hardly get a moment’s peace. The marijuana-industrial complex is relentlessly pushing into the lightly populated regions I favor; the noise of their trucks—bringing in soil, shipping out the finished product—disturbs my sleep. And the epidemic of NIMBYism preventing Californians from building sufficient housing in urban regions is forcing more and more people to build in places near my remote haunts. Some days, the traffic on State Route 299, the main artery for those of us who haunt the lands between Redding and Arcata, can be bumper-to-bumper.

Then there’s the homelessness problem, which everyone except Gov. Jerry Brown thinks is an emergency. The homeless issue isn’t just in the middle of big cities or under freeways. I can’t walk a ridge or wade through a creek in state or federal lands without running into a new homeless encampment. People are pitching tents and trying to survive anywhere camping is legal, and quite a few places where it isn’t.

The presence of more people on hillsides and forests is adding to the risk of giant wildfires at a dangerous time. The drought has dried up waterways and turned brush and trees into kindling. And while I’m more of a coastal guy, I do enjoy roaming the western Sierra, especially in the Oroville area, but the death of millions of trees there—from beetles and drought and climate change—has made some familiar landscapes almost unrecognizable. The erosion is extreme in many wild places, including Bluff Creek, where that video was shot of me nearly 50 years ago. Californians are now running roughshod over the neck of my woods.

I find these intrusions on my wild existence so depressing that lately I’ve been cheering myself up by spending more time intruding on your cities, particularly in settings where I fit in. I caught a number of Bernie Sanders rallies in the East Bay and Central Valley earlier this year. And men are so allergic to shaving in the hipster havens of San Francisco and Los Angeles that I’ve found that, if I wear a beanie hat, skinny jeans, and custom-made sneakers, no one pays me any attention.

My urban forays have led me to wonder if the incursions into my once-quiet wilderness are my fault, at least in part. Californians used to be scared of the woods and wild things like me. I showed up in horror films. “In the ‘70s, Bigfoot was frigging terrifying—he was a monster who killed people,” says my friend Bobby Green, designer of the Bigfoot Lodges in Culver City and Atwater Village in Los Angeles. “When I went skiing as a kid, I was scared to death.”

But then a more accessible, even cuddly, me showed up in cartoons, funny commercials, and comedies like John Lithgow’s Harry and the Hendersons. “Bigfoot has been sugarcoated a lot over the last couple decades,” says Green. “Harry and the Hendersons was cute and funny, and now he’s selling beef jerky.” And he’s right: I’ve become a cousin to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. And that makes me passé, compared to more visceral mythology like Harry Potter or even “Pokemon Go.”

Michael Rugg, who has studied me since before he was a Stanford student and who now runs the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, California, has written that we seek Bigfoot at three levels: at the level of myth; at the level of actual biology, as we look to confirm reports of the living thing out there; and at the level of the paranormal, in our search for forces and things that exist but that we’re not yet capable of seeing.

That third, paranormal level can be the hardest to take seriously, but it may be the most important. One of the things that has always motivated me to keep roaming in my elusive way is the knowledge that I can help people recognize that the most important things in our world may be those things that we don’t understand, that we can’t quite see or prove. And so we must be careful to acknowledge and respect unknown places—and hold to a healthy fear that keeps us from treading too heavily where we do not belong.

I used to create that fear. I used to be scary; but these days, not so much. Now I’m running scared.

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Why Wisconsin? Why not Wisconsin?

An inherent and sensible trait of the successful monster is that it can show up anywhere; unpredictability is key to inflicting a proper scare. Still, after 22 years of looking into reports of unknown beasts from around the United States, I’ve noticed that some places are consistently more monster-rich than others. The Dairy State is one of them.

My first brush with this phenomenon came in 1991 when, as a reporter for Delavan, Wisconsin’s The Week, I broke the story that a Walworth County animal control officer was recording reports of an upright, wolf-like creature I called the “Beast of Bray Road.” I realized that sober, credible people from Rhinelander to Potosi have long claimed encounters with dogmen, Bigfoot, giant storks, super-sized humanoid bats, lizard people, pigmen, goatmen, out-of-place kangaroos, lake monsters, UFOs, and even an aggressive tribe of weird, tiny-baseball-bat-wielding little people that folks around Muskego Lake call the Haunchies. I could go on. Knowing my state as I do, I believe that there are some good reasons for this abundance of beasties, and that those reasons stem from the breathtaking diversity of two things: Wisconsin’s people and its land.

Woods and fields where the Bray Road Beast is said to roam.

Let’s start with the land. Yes, those bucolic, cow-filled pastures that comprise most people’s mental image of Wisconsin do exist, but they are bounded by the deep pine forests of its northern half, the river bluffs and yawning gorges of its western counties, the Kettle Moraine State Forest with its deep, round washbowls slashing through the southeast, and the 30 miles of ancient, red quartzite hills that form the Baraboo Range and anchor the state’s rocky heart. Toss in major rivers like the mighty Mississippi and the serpentine Wisconsin that spread into myriad lakes and marshes, add the windswept shores of lakes Superior and Michigan, and the amazingly varied habitat that is Wisconsin begins to emerge.

For millennia, this wild backdrop inspired indigenous people—the Ho Chunk, Algonquians, Mississippians, Fox, Sac, Ojibwe, and others—to tell stories about living cheek by jowl with every monster imaginable. Stormy nights brought the massive flying raptor known as Thunderbird whose eyes and wings created lightning and thunder. This spirit bird hovered over the rough waves to battle Mishipeshu, the horned water panther, as a lordly river serpent known for carving out the Wisconsin River looked on through dinner-plate-sized red eyes. In the winter, when game grew scarce among the snowy pines, many northern tribes watched carefully for signs of Windigo, a dark spirit that could possess a starving person and turn him or her into a cannibal. As it fed, the Windigo grew into a gaunt, skeletal giant made mostly of ice. If defeated, its melted remains would reveal the shriveled carcass of its original victim.

When fur trappers, traders, and Jesuit priests of European descent landed along the shores of lakes Superior and Michigan in the 17th and 18th centuries, they introduced their own tales of European monsters—werewolves and little goblins chief among them—to lake ports like Green Bay. They and the settlers that followed them added names like Fairy Chasm, Black Earth, and Devil’s Lake to the landscape.

The Bark River, near Whitewater, is the scene of several Bigfoot sightings

In the 1800s, more legends of upright wolves howled their way into the state’s interior along with settlers from German-speaking lands. One alleged werewolf named Gross made its living as an itinerant dance master in the Dane County town of Springfield Corners in the 1840s. When a prosperous farmer from whom Gross rented a room was found dead, the townsfolk blamed the suspected shape shifter, who eventually died and was buried in a nearby cemetery. Although it was never proved, the tale persisted well into the 20th century, when state folktale specialists recorded it.

More immigrants—Yankees, Poles, Italians, Bohemians, Slovaks, Irish, Dutch, African-Americans, Hmong, Latinos, and more—found their way here and brought their own vampires, chupacabras, and phantom hounds with them. On top of that, lumberjacks hired to cut down the northern forests invented mythic beasts like the cougar fish and the snow snake and added them to the spooky mix.

But there is more to it than sheer diversity. Wisconsin is a state that doesn’t mind being known for its love of cheese. Its people are used to being referred to as “the flyover state,” and they don’t give a goatman’s whisker about what people of any other region may think of it. This is the sort of attitude required of anyone willing to avow that Bigfoot lurks in the back 40. It takes true intestinal fortitude buoyed by bratwurst and a lifetime of self-reliance for a man to report that a humanoid bat with a 15-foot wingspan almost took out the windshield of his pickup truck, as did one resident of the La Crosse area in 2006.

Does Wisconsin really harbor more monsters than any other state? I don’t think we know, and I don’t think most residents care where the state stands on a monstrous scale. All I can say is that we boast more than a few citizens who aren’t afraid to call a pigman a pigman when they see one shopping at the second-hand store in downtown Marshfield. I think the monsters know and (grudgingly) appreciate that candid nod to their existence. And this is the true reason they are here.

Vampire and werewolf of Mineral Point, Wisconsin

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As the art director for the “Scare Zones” at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights, I oversee the zombies and ghouls that overtake sections of the park every October. I was just 18 when I started working at Universal. In the fall of 1980, I graduated from high school in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and was trying to find a job. My sister heard the theme park was hiring so I went in for an interview. Later that same day, I was being fitted for a costume for a full-time job playing the Phantom of the Opera.

It was a perfect job for me: I grew up on horror movies and made haunted houses in backyards and basements with my childhood friends. Over time, my character resumé grew to include the Wolfman, a mummy, and my crowning achievement, Beetlejuice. That was a speaking part, which meant no rubber mask and a pay bump. Life was good.

During this same period, I was trying to write the next Great American Novel. By the time I hit my 30s, I realized I wasn’t Steinbeck or Kerouac. I sold a few bad low-budget horror scripts that I knew would never be made into bad low-budget horror movies.

But I was getting promotions at Universal. I took off the mask and put on a tie to become a talent supervisor, which basically meant I got to babysit the Phantom and his friends. The park was growing and so were the creative opportunities. I started building props for the performers and created a few small street shows. At the time, we had a lot of classic Hollywood look-alike performers. So my job could involve finding a giant rubber fish for “Laurel and Hardy” or enlisting park guests to do a screen test with “Humphrey Bogart.”

A seed for my current work was first planted in 1996 when I saw an Ed Kienholz exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown. Kienholz was an installation and assemblage sculptor who took found objects—car parts, broken dolls, damaged furniture—and reassembled them into works of art. He relied on a screw gun, not a paintbrush. That was a concept I could wrap my hands around. So I started to create my own assemblage work. The mixed-media artists Lee Bontecou and George Herms (with whom I took a class at the late, great art school that the Chouinard Foundation ran for a time in South Pasadena) also inspired me.

I took classes in stained glass, welding, and screen-printing. I added printed text and old photographs into some of the pieces. My goal was to tell stories with visual art as I had with the written word and, especially, to connect with an audience the way that only a good story can.

By the early 2000s, I was a part of a small department at Universal called Entertainment Production that creates special displays and events in the park. No event is more special than our annual Halloween Horror Nights, where I have the opportunity to scare up to thousands of people a night.

In addition to the usual rides, weekend nights in October feature mazes based on movies or TV shows, such as The Walking Dead, Alien vs. Predator, and An American Werewolf in London. There are also five Scare Zones that act as “warm ups” to the mazes. These productions go well beyond the bedroom-sheet ghosts, tin-foil robots, and toilet-paper mummies my friends used to set up at our houses to spook our parents. Universal’s Scare Zones are dimly lit, fog-filled streets overrun with actors (or “Scare-actors” as we call them) who have one job and one job only: to scare the crap out of you. And it’s my job to ensure that happens.

That’s where the dead bodies come in.

In mid-May or so, I meet with the event’s creative director and the head art director to hash out ideas. They oversee the creative content for all the mazes as well as the Walking Dead Scare Zone. As with the mazes, our first options are films or television shows related to the studio, which is one reason why New York Street has been overrun for the last two years by crazed mobs inspired by the Purge films. Occasionally our marketing department plays a role in the process: Halloween fans got to vote on a theme for our French Village Street this year. Sometimes I’ll do Internet searches on the history of London, disasters, notorious criminals, or ghost stories to get ideas. This year, the overwhelming favorite zone was an idea I pitched: “Dark Christmas.” Evil elves, Krampus (the half-goat demon who frightens children into being nice), and a scary Santa Claus all run amok down our version of London’s Baker Street.

Over the years, New York Street has been infested by mutant soldiers, radioactive zombies, and killer clowns. French Street has been consumed by the plague, sideshow freaks, witches, and killer clowns with a French twist (harlequins with hatchets). Baker Street has hosted Jack the Ripper, zombies inspired by the cult film Shaun of the Dead, and demonic toys like a man in a bloody rabbit costume wielding a chainsaw. As they say in the Industry, the bunny was a real crowd-pleaser.

In the lead-up to Halloween, dozens of craftspeople build sets, design costumes, and create props in a vast warehouse not far from the studio. If we can’t build something ourselves, we buy it from specialty vendors, many of whom we encounter every year at the TransWorld’s Halloween Convention. The four-day trade show has hundreds of exhibitors selling everything from simple plastic masks to animatronic creatures that cost thousands of dollars.

The author backstage with friends

I typically work on a much smaller scale. My budget is tight so I reuse a lot of stuff year after year. For example, I once repurposed some killer clowns into zombie hookers. Some of our dead bodies are brand new, but we also have “veteran” bodies held together with tape and hot glue. There is nothing you can’t accomplish with a screw gun, a roll of gaff tape, and a bag of zip ties.

I often work high-art or folk-art flourishes into the designs. The concept that received the most audience votes for French Street this year was “Mask-A-Raid”: a horde of cannibals masquerading as French aristocrats. I arranged French aristocrats at a massive table laden with fruits, vegetables, and human body parts in the spirit of 17th century Dutch still-life paintings and the grotesque tableaux of contemporary photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. A string quartet of skeletons is playing violins and cellos behind them.

In 2010, I created a Scare Zone inspired by the Mexican folk legend “La Llorona,” the “Weeping Woman” who is searching for her dead children. I created two large backlit metal silhouettes mounted on wagons based on the Dios de los Muertos illustrations by Jose Posada. A few years later, I converted them into an altar that was featured in a Dios de los Muertos festival at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

Being the Scare Zone art director allows me the luxury of making stuff just because it’s cool.
But viewers move on after they see something to the next fright. I try for the opposite with the mixed-media art I create in my spare time so that viewers will linger and wonder about the story I’m telling with vintage photographs, an old desk, and scrap metal.

This year’s Halloween event is winding down. All I do now is periodically walk through to check for damage and readjust the lights. I can relax until November when it all gets packed up for next year. I plan to use the downtime to start a new piece for a possible gallery show next month.

For some reason, all of my ideas involve dead bodies.

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