Is It Real? - Lake Monsters

[Red Siegfried]

National Geographic channel has deviated as of late from their usual environmental hysteria programming long enough to present a skeptical look at lake monsters!

The show is a series called "Is It Real?" and the episode is "Lake Monsters."

I was particulary impressed with the almost completely skeptical viewpoint this program has. They analyze problems with known photos, film and video of alleged lake monsters and discuss the problems with eyewitness accounts. In one sequence, they take a boat out to a sight where the monster was sighted - can't remember where. After a little computer assisted trigonomitry, they conclusively prove that even if the film showed a real monster, it was less than half the size, distance away and speed that people claimed. Point is to show that eyewitness accounts are not always reliable.

I'm still watching the program right now. It looks like it will repeat from 5-6pm central time on Sunday the 7th.

Oh cool, now they are discussing unknown sea "blobs" like the infamous Chilean and Tasmanian blobs. Hmmm, looks like whale blubber. Oh, wait, it is!

 

[case sensitive]

Oh cool, now they are discussing unknown sea "blobs" like the infamous Chilean and Tasmanian blobs. Hmmm, looks like whale blubber. Oh, wait, it is!

You know what they say: if it looks like whale blubber and it smells like whale blubber it's probably the Tasmanian blob.

 

[Ashles]

They're doing a whole series called "Paranormal" which involves comments from believers and sceptics on a wide variety of topics (ghosts, lake monsters, psychic animals, bigfoot, crop circles, psychic detectives etc.).

Randi is on a few of them.

And.... amazingly... they actually come down in favour of the sceptics in each episode.
I.e. for once they actually let sceptics have more than 8 seconds of the programme to provide explanations of the phenomena and, obviously, the paranormal claims end up looking a bit silly.

They're pretty good.
If anyone has the National Geographic Channel they are worth checking out (I know they are on quite frequently in the UK at the moment).

 

[Psi Baba]

Damn, I apparently missed the Lake Monsters episode. I saw the "Is It Real?" on Spontaneous Human Combustion--that was good. This is turning out to be good series. As Ashles said, they take a critical-thinking approach but without simply belittling believers or ridiculing the topic right on the bat, which is probably the best approach, so that a fence-sitter or even a casual believer watching the show, not knowing what to expect, won't be put off by a condescending, nay-sayer attitude.