Cryptidillated

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made this “Fighting Time Lords” shirt for you! 

Gallifrey University Fighting Time Lords Shirt - Doctor Who parody, geeky tees, funny t-shirts,  nerdy shirts

I am going to be at Calgary Expo this coming weekend with Blind Ferret at booths 925/1025! The whole cast of Star Trek: TNG is going to be there as well, but you are probably more excited about seeing me or whatever. Right? RIGHT?! Well, you know who AIN’T gonna be there? Lieutenant Barkley. Fuck that noise, Space Admiral Dickhole. Broccoli or GTFO. MORE INFO HERE.

HijiNKS ENSUE At Calgary Expo 2012

I caught maybe 45 seconds of an episode of Finding Bigfoot a few weeks ago and the “expert” in “bigfoots” on the “show” kept saying things like “squatches REALLY love this time of night for goin’ out and fiddlin’ ’bout in the woods,” or “these ain’t sqautch droppings. I can tell by the taste,” and “one thing a squatch really hates is when you keep saying SQUATCH all the time.” They also hate that they are make believe and thus don’t get a lot of respect. This dude was just throwing out details and factoids about this fictional beast left and right. He had obviously done his homework (i.e. reading Wikipedia or listening to an elderly dementia patient in a rocking chair on a porch of the nursing home where he was raised as a ward of the state after his parents were mauled to death by a squatch). It’s one level of bullshit to go on TV and pretend noises are ghosts and different noises are bigfoots, but it’s a whole different tub of shit to pretend to be a certified ghost expert or squatchologist.

COMMENTERS: Please share your brushes with the paranormal. Did you ever know anyone that was convinced their leaky pipes and aging duct work were sweet spirits from the beyond? My uncle was convinced that a ghost named Gary lived in his house and kept hiding his things. He was a particle physicist, so maybe Gary was just a big clump of Higgs-Boson particles trying to dark matter all up in my uncle’s cedar chest for loose change. Alternately you may offer up for silly names for silly shows. How about Noise Listeners, Spook Havers, or Enthusiastic Yeti Patrol?

I made some blank comic templates that you can print out for your kids. My daughter has already made a couple of comics about our cats magically transforming into different animals.

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70 Comments

    • Technically, it WAS a UFO;

      It was flying.
      It wasn't identified by you (before it hit you)
      and, it was an object.

      I am satisfied with my finds, here…

  1. You know, everytime I try and come up with a daft name for a paranormal show, I keep finding that SyFy already has it copyrighted, as part of their ever-growing archive of paranormal "reality" shows.

    I did once plan an idea called "Haunting Hunter" which was a cross between Ghost Hunters and Crocodile Hunter, with the main investigator trying to shove his thumb up the butt of any ghost they could find. However, I'm sure the success rate of performing said task would be about zero.
    But, I'm sure one day Ghost Hunters International may just go on a hunt for Steve Irwin's ghost out in Australia.

    • Man, I could see that. Drag out the Paranormal State team.

      RYAN: Wait, hold still … do any of you guys have your thumb up my ass? I swear that there's a thumb up my ass. Sergei, play the tape back!

    • Actually, this brings up a good point. Why are ghosts always humans? What if there was a really pissed off cat ghost? Or maybe that noise you're hearing in the wall isn't a rat – it's a rat ghost! I really think you have a whole new spinoff series here: Undead National Park. What happens when a tough-as-nails cop-turned-park-ranger teams up with a professor of ghostology to make some of America's most dangerous safe for the public once again?

      • I'm pretty sure your question wasn't serious but I'll treat it as such anyway. First, I'm not claiming to believe in the vast majority of the paranormal garbage on TV. However, I've lived in three different haunted houses in my life and been in several more. As a concept, ghosts are certainly real. The particular BS some of these guys try to pass off isn't something else.

        One of the haunted houses I lived in was haunted by the ghost of a beagle dog. Animal ghosts are extremely rare though because animals normally don't get attached to stuff that would prevent them from resting in the way humans sometimes do. The best I can tell, that particular dog was attached to her previous owner.

        The sad part is the owner was also already dead, but the ghost dog didn't seem to know it. The vast majority of ghosts are confuses and weak. That doesn't make good TV. If you want good TV you need a strong, pissed off ghost. As far as I know those are super-crazy-rare (or don't exist).

        If TV were like real life, most exorcisms would be like metaphysical euthanasia…. Who wants to see that?

        • We had several ghost cats in this one house we lived in. I felt a cat hop up onto my bed and when i looked down I saw paw prints appearing one by one on my blanket where I felt the cat stepping. Other times I would be doing dishes and feel a cat rubbing against my feet, look down and no cat, but my pants were being moved.
          I've lived in several haunted places and if it were just noises, I'd count it out as being the pipes or settling, but full-bodied apparitions are harder to blow off. These shows over-dramatize everything and present b.s. "evidence" and it ticks me off.

  2. I believe there is still hope for "Finding Bigfoot." It's only a matter of time before it transitions into a dating show for burly wilderness loving men with foot fetishes. The tag line could be, "love is no hoax" or "they went to search for a legend but found romance instead."

    • It would be easy enough by just getting a Japanese "Research Vessel" to help track ol'Ness down and put some explosive harpoons in her.

  3. Delusion Defenders : Each week a group of people with a fervent belief in some sort of idiotic mumbo jumbo have to try and defend their convictions against a crack team of sceptics who bombard them with controlled tests and rational arguments.

  4. Well, there was that one time that my mom swears she saw alien children dancing in the woods and then try to creep in my breaking the lock with their long pointy fingers, but that may have been a fever dream inspired by E.T. However, the time my friends and I broke into a terrifying haunted hotel from the 1930s was super real and super exciting. I'm not saying there were ghosts, just that having a couple of teenagers breaking into semi-abandoned buildings only to be discovered by a cool security guard who tells ghost stories would make an awesome episode.

  5. I watched an episode of "Fact or Faked" when they tried to examine a car for ghost fingerprints. They go out of their way to conduct scientific experiments that they know will fail.

    On the other hand, that Joshua Gates is kind of dreamy; and maybe the bald ghost hunting dude, too.

    • Also, Josh Gates is a fairly skeptical cryptozoologist-type, so he earns points there. Willing to go looking for crazy shit, but not automatically thinking that everything supports what he's looking for.

  6. All aspects of paranormal investigation were, in fact, pioneered by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. After discovering the whereabouts of the Lindburg baby and the fate of Amelia Earhart (stolen by the Fish Folk of Innsmouth as a sacrifice to the Deep Ones and found an entrance to the Hollow Earth and has been living there since, respectively), these two visionary heroes of psuedo-sciences sought to educate the public and strengthen humanity's ability to combat the menaces of the spooky world. However, such eldritch knowledge would have been dangerous for public consumption at large. Therefore, they couched their lessons into many cartoon programs.

    After many years and many attempts, Hanna and Barbera elected to retire and entrust Ted Turner with their life's work.

    God save us all.

  7. Supernatural-thing Seekers: They never actually picked a monster to hunt, but they still do all that poorly lit looking around, expecting Something, whatever it may be. Blatantly unfounded crap at its finest.

    Alternately: Supernatural Thing-finders: Supernatural beings search for things in the style of all these shows. Sorta like those antiques/pawnshop shows.

  8. On Finding Bigfoot, the hunter leave out copious amounts of food for the animal and its interesting how much of the food happens to be the hunter's favorite foods … mostly bacon.

    • Well, to be fair, the bacon thing IS a good test.

      If Big-Squatch-Feet can't be lured out with bacon, then that's pretty definitive proof that they don't exist. After all, even creatures who only slightly exist, can't resist bacon…

  9. They should have a show where all the ghost "experts" are actually required to have a bachelor's degree in some sort of spook science. They could call it "Boo BS".

  10. I read recently that as much as 75% of women and only about 25% of men believe in ghosts. I've never had any direct bruses with the paranormal, you know, because it's not real, but one time when I was 10 and camping on Catalina island I saw the underbelly of a commercial airplane really low with what, in my half asleep state, my brain thought was an unusual pattern of lights. For about a day I was really certain there was a UFO, then I remembered how close we were to airports and figured it out.

    Also, my Girlfriend's grandma actually watches and believes in the ancient Aliens stufff. I got sad because before that I had respect for her.

    • The History Channel has reached a new all-time low with Ancient Aliens. Can't believe they'd have garbage like that on an educational channel. Profits first, I guess.

      • If they want to get any credibility at all they need to fire that one guy. Forget his name, I just call him "puffy-hair-man". Forget Bigfoot, that hair is the only paranormal occurrence worth investigating.

    • Hey! He is no joke! My grand-grand-mother saw him too. She said that he had been cleaning the wall with a small rag. "There, see? There, right where that old rag is hanging from a nail in the wall."
      Lovable lady, really.

  11. I've come home from work and my locked door has been open and still locked. I've been sitting in my living room and the locked door has popped open, still locked. I could easily blame that on the supernatural if I wanted to, especially since the house I lived in had to be entirely rebuilt following a fire in which people died (they had stupidly disabled the smoke detectors so that they could smoke cigarettes inside).

    The truth however is much more boring. It's a matter of air pressure. That door is at the top of a hallway. The only other door in that hallway is an airtight door leading to the outside. When that doors is opened and there is a difference in air pressure, the air rushes in to balance it, and the force is enough to pop my door open.

  12. EVERYONE I know claim theyve seen ghosts or felt ghosts or heard ghosts or whatever, so either everyone I know lies, or Im the most spiritually dead person on the planet, because Ive never seen or heard or felt anything that could possibly have been a ghost. Also, people who think shows like Ghost Hunters or whatever are actually real are stupid, and should feel bad for liking stupid things.

  13. When I was 9, a friend and I were playing outside the apartment complex we lived in, which was bordered by a tall wooden fence, on the other side of which was a very small farm. One night, something flew over our heads, from the apartment building and over the fence. It was about 3' wide, faintly glowing and vaguely flappy. I had just read Piers Anthony's Battle Circle trilogy and supposed it was a radioactive moth.

  14. Okay, so…I am not saying ghosts exist. I'm not.

    But…as a teenager, I acted at a local theatre that was built around the turn of the last century. During construction, an electrician named George Kelly (also my grandfather's name, but no relation) fell from the electrical grid and died. We always joked that the theatre was haunted by his ghost, and that it protected crew members.

    So one night, it's late, it's raining, and I'm there with my boyfriend, who was doing the lighting for the next show. He was up in the catwalk, hanging lights, and I was sitting below him in the seats, helping him focus them.

    Suddenly, I hear a crash from the lobby. Now, we're supposed to be there alone, so there's no reason there should be any noises from anywhere in the theatre, let alone a huge crash from the lobby. So I make my boyfriend come down and help me investigate, because I am sure as heck not going out there by myself.

    So he comes down from the catwalk, and we go out to the lobby to see what's out there. And we find…a kitten.

    I, naturally, go pick him up and start cuddling him, saying, "Aw, we should adopt him! He can live here and catch the mice, and we'll call him Little George!"

    No sooner are the words out of my mouth, then we hear an ENORMOUS crash from the inside of the theatre. We go inside…and the catwalk has fallen off the ceiling, obliterating the seats below. That would be the catwalk on which my boyfriend was working, and the seats in which I was sitting.

    I swear, that kitten saved my life. And I…don't exactly think that George's ghost sent the kitten to save us, but I KIND OF do.

  15. Im not saying I believe in ghosts but my friends parents house was converted from an old cottage and workshop/barn that was used by some canadian soldiers during WW2 before the DDay operation, I always found the cottage part of the house quite creepy as did a few of my friends who'd stayed in the spare bedroom there. We then found out that an officer had flipped out and killed two of his mates before killing himself in the cottage in the run up to the DDAY landings. It could be that after finding this out me and my mates convinced ourself that the creepy old house had always seemed haunted before, but the noises of an old house at night in the countryside definitely seemed scarier after.

    Near the same house was a run down old cottage boarded up that you could only get to by crossing a shallow part of a river or fighting through brambles, me and my mate went there with his younger cousin when we were both about 18 and got in through a lose board over the back door, we were both trying to scare his cousin a little saying how it was haunted when a couple of bats came flying through the doorway behind my mate, who wet himself whilst his cousin was just laughing (something I still havent let him forget) which goes to show how scary random occurances in an old property can be, and how kids just aren't gullible enough anymore

  16. I used to watch MonsterQuest, where each week they'd explore legendary creatures and interview people that have seen them. The coolest part about that show was the CGI models they made.

    The very last episode before the show was canceled, they were punked so hard by someone that claimed they had seen a real werewolf and had footage of an attack. It was pretty obvious it wasn't real, but they thought it was and started to analyze the data, only realizing later on in the episode it was all faked. Instead of just scrapping the episode to save face, they actually aired it and tried to recover from being punked like they did. It was epic how stupid they had made themselves look.

    As for my run-ins with the supernatural, a big fat none. I don't believe in that stuff, but I'd like to.

  17. Neither the power company nor the electrician could figure out why the lights in my house were flickering. I'm not saying it's a poltergeist, but it could totally be a poltergeist.

    I did have a terrifying experience with a possessed self-checkout register at the supermarket where I used to work. It spoke in full-on demonic double-voice like in the movies. This was before I really believed in demons, but standing next to that thing for eight hours gave me a panic attack.

    And then when it was time to go home, my car wouldn't start. In the deserted parking lot at midnight. Kinda freaky.

  18. I watch The Soup on E! and every week I get to see clips of this "Bigfoot Finder" basically stating that sasquatches really love this thing this guy himself wants to eat.
    My favorite was the bacon. Out in the woods, frying bacon, hanging bacon on trees… eating bacon… because sasquatches really love bacon. (not a real scientific suggestion, who doesn't love bacon?)

    I kinda like the idea of having a reality show where the point is to crash other reality show. Call it "Reality Show Crashers."
    One week they can sneak up on all the different ghost hunters. The next week they can sing along with all the singers and dancers. Another week they can sneak food into the survival games. Food or guns. Whichever passes the censors.

    • "My favorite was the bacon. Out in the woods, frying bacon, hanging bacon on trees… eating bacon… because sasquatches really love bacon."

      That was one of the clip i saw. Holy shit.

  19. Well, I *was* going to share…but the general consensus in the room on paranormal activity seems to be against me…

  20. Have you ever watched the hunting shows where they are hunting actual things that exist? You spend a half hour waiting for something to happen, then a deer or something finally shows up. They start giggling and whispering excitedly to themselves and finally blast it, to much patting on the back and you come to the realization that you have wasted a half hour of your life watching a hobby that is as boring as stamp collecting to observers.

  21. In 1999 I worked for a TV production company in Sherman Oaks called Triage. They had offices on the 7th and 9th floors of the City National Bank building. On the 9th floor, they produced a show with executive producer Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. It was called "Exploring the Unknown", and they named it that so that they could lure onto the show ghost hunters and table tappers and people who'd invented a force stronger than gravity but were holding back the evidence until 60 Minutes called. Once lured, the producers would hilariously and comprehensively expose them all as losers who really needed to grow up. That, I say, was on the 9th floor. Meanwhile, on the 7th floor, they were producing a show called "Beyond Chance", featuring table tappers and ghost hunters. Hosting seances and hunting ghosts. For the Lifetime network. TV is like that.

    TV is also like this: In one episode of "Exploring the Unknown", which was narrated by Mitch "Skinner" Pileggi, we interviewed a lunatic who claimed we'd never gone to the moon for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that no one has EVER gone into space, because it's impossible, because the Van Allen belts would kill you, because they would. Shermer and the segment producer rather elegantly debunked his entire argument point-by-point. Two years later the Fox network gave this lunatic his own half-hour special, "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" It was narrated by…Mitch Pileggi.

    • What can I say, the man's got a heckuva voice.

      I'd hire him to narrate my own actual death one day, if I hadn't already hired James Earl Jones for the job. If you're going to go personal narrator, go big or go home.

  22. As a kid I was convinced my room was haunted. Many nights I'd wake up and see a black ghost move across the wall over my bed. It scared the crap outta me. After months of this I was at a garage sale around the corner that had a lot of tacky costume jewelry pieces, and I bought tons of crosses to keep out vampires (you know, just in case they were real, too) and maybe they'd help with the ghost. I scotch taped them to the windows. Then the ghost stopped showing up, and I was like, huh, I guess that worked.

    Over time I convinced myself it was nothing and I'd imagined it all, until I was in high school and one night I woke up and clear as a fraking bell there is this ghost on the wall, moving towards my door. A friend was spending the night and he saw it, too. We stayed up for half an hour talking about it and then it came by again! WTF? But this time it moved from the door across the wall towards the window. And it stayed there for a while. And then we heard car doors shutting across the street.

    That's when I figured it out. My bedroom had a door to the outside of the house (so that in the 1930s it could be rented out) and when a car was backed into or driven forwards out of our across the street neighbor's driveway, at night, the headlights would shine in through the small opening between the door and the frame, illuminating the wall on the other side of the room. The "ghost" was a shadow from the hinge on the door. It had a rounded top and was tall and skinny and made the shadow look humanish. It moved when the car turned out of the driveway. The height of the car headlights had to be just right to get the right angle to go across the street, over our bushes but under the roof of the porch and hit the door to my room just right. Oh, and there also had to be nothing in front of the door, like the insulation and wood that my dad added when I was little to keep the air from leaking out the crack between the door and the frame. We'd just removed it because we were about to remodel my bedroom and take the door out permanently.

    Talking with my parents the next day, I found out that when I was little the husband across the street worked nights and tended to back into the driveway at two or three in the morning when he came home. Probably the noise from his El Camino woke me up sometimes, and then I'd see the "ghost".

  23. What a coincidence, there's an article in my local paper from yesterday about a group called the Graveyard Seekers. http://www.journal-news.net/page/content.detail/i

    "As the last few minutes of light faded, Faith Moody walked through an unmarked cemetery near the Charles Town water tower and felt a strong tap on her head." The undiagnosed brain tumor was thumping pretty good that evening.

    "In one particular Jefferson County field near a residence, the team has what it believes to be one of the best photos of a demon ever caught in the country, Lavelle said. They sent the photos to some experts, including well-known psychic-medium Susan Sheppard, who said they had captured a "true" demon, which is extremely rare, Lavelle said." As opposed to all the pictures of "false" demons that are circulating.

  24. We have a ghost named George. Randomly, our big red door will just open for no apparent reason. We chalk it up to our "ghost" George. We've never seen nor heard him. I imagine him looking like a young Clooney with a walrus mustache, wearing a flora-patern shirt with matching shorts. And steel-towed boots made of albino snakes.
    OOOOoooOOOOhhhh! "Finding George!"

    • Bigfoot totally already has solid proof of UFO's. Which is why no one can find him, he's in hiding. Because he knows the government is in league with the aliens and they would have him killed if he ever revealed himself.

      The government is also responsible for spreading the rumor that Bigfoot doesn't exist, AND they are secretly funding the search to find proof of him, they're tricking cryptozoologist into hunting Bigfoot down for them, so they can silence him and destroy his evidence of aliens once and for all.

      It's all totally true. A Chupacabra told me, and those guys never lie.

  25. If I was of the inclination to have a band, Enthusiastic Yeti Patrol would be at the top of my list of names.

  26. This reminds me of a guy we have here in the UK; Derek Acorah. He's a lying, cheating, grasping arsehole scumbag of the first water who cons old ladies and the bereaved out of their money (i.e. a psychic medium) and also appears on TV quite a lot.
    Anyway, long story short, he did a show from this castle turned hotel in Ireland and, while in one of the bedrooms claimed to be getting all these psychic vibrations or whatever from a ghost in the bed.
    All well and good but A)The owner of the hotel tells everyone the story of the haunted bed, and B) He was in the wrong room.

  27. I am actually involved with a Paranormal group here in Seattle, and the investigations I have been on I have had experiences that we could not debunk or find any rational explanation to what it could have been.

    However, there was this one time at home. My room is across the hall from one of my roommates (the Fancy Bastard that got me hooked on HE). The lights were off in his room, and I heard some motion in there. I stopped, looked in there briefly, and I heard a male voice "I'm right here." I shrugged it off, and proceeded toward the kitchen. Halfway there, I thought "Wait a minute" and looked outside the kitchen window. My roommate's car was gone – as he had left for work a half an hour ago.

  28. Undercover Squatch: Each week, we take a different CEO and dress him or her up in a big fur suit and set him or her loose in the Pacific Northwest. Will anyone be fooled? Will someone get a reality show out of the deal? How long will audiences put up with this drivel until we can sell out of advertising space in the next upfront? This fall on SyFy Planet!

  29. Gah, I hate that feeling when I suddenly catch up to the current posts of a webcomic. I decided to give your comic a shot a few months back when I saw an ad on Looking For Group, and your humor really hit me where I live. Even more so after I finally got around to watching Firefly and other Whedon-related watchables. You've easily become one of my favorite webcomics. Keep being excellent to us all.

  30. I have had strange experiences, but what bothers me about these shows is that they take a strange experience and then make up a whole bunch of crap about it. It's the making up stories part that bothers me. I am fascinated by strange occurrences, but I can't watch that stuff because they hear a noise that's probably a rat and yell about that guy that was murdered.
    Once when I was a kid, 10 or so, I went camping with my family. I had met a couple of other girls my age, and we were walking around the campsite. We went to the docks and saw a teenage boy standing at the end of the docks. We were all standing next to one another and there was no other way off the dock except by going past us. We were of course excited to see a teenage boy and were being 10-year-old girls about it. One of the girls had someone call her from the shore, we all turned to look. We turned back and saw the teenage boy was gone. Thinking he had fallen in (the water was choppy from a storm the night before) we ran to the end of the dock, but there were no ripples and we'd heard no splash. We kept looking, worried, but we never saw him. He was there, just standing quietly, and then he was gone. It was weird, but it doesn't mean it was a ghost. All three of us saw him.

  31. I haven't personally seen anything, but I saw a forum post about one. Apparently a pair of black hands reached out of an air vent and left singe marks on where they touched. Someone asked for proof and the person who apparently saw it claimed the burn marks had faded off. The most logical explanation besides the entire thing being fake was that there was a crazy hobo in their basement.

  32. I prefer to reserve judgment on other peoples beliefs and let them believe what they wanna believe. I for one believe in ghost I lived in haunted houses and have seen them animal ghost do exist but a fully functioning apparition is rare to see but lots of places have residual apparitions of people and animals which where in places with a strong enough emf actions get replayed over and over again i have seen this too, i am not an expert no one is but i have seen.
    Though I don't personally believe in bigfoot, we only recorded 25% of earths animals there is still more undiscovered(granted many are microscopic)there is still big animals being discovered I think its was last year they found an animal that they couldn't catergorise as dog or cat. so there is the possibility and does not warrant ridicule. what does deserve ridicule is use of term 'expert' for anyone on these subject.

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