Making Monsters: Montauk

at about 30′ away i could see what i think was the back shoulders of a very large version of the montauk creature alive and well and hunting swans… pinkish skin and large shoulders was all i could make out ….. when we got close enough for my son to hear it clearly …he said “pop theres a monster” and he started backing up fast… shit we both
did…. the area has many places i think something like this could hide easily…. i went to check for prints the next day but it rained pretty hard that night and there was nothing……. my son is 7 and while he does have a vivid imagination  im 39 and i dont

July 2008. For a while the only public photograph of the Montauk Monster was this one:

But then a new one emerged. (Photographs may not lie but they do tell different kinds of truth.) From another angle, in a different light, taken sometime earlier judging by the lower level of decomposition, the same 'monster' on the same beach:

Speculation in published reports included theories that the Montauk Monster might have been a turtle without its shell, although turtles do not have any teeth, or a science experiment from the nearby government animal testing facility, the Plum Island Animal Disease Centre. Mad scientists manufacturing crazy hybrid animals which then escape from the lab into the wild is the stock-in-trade of shlock horror, after all. The monster is now stated, categorically, to be a raccoon, its appearance much altered by prolonged submersion in seawater. But the human mind struggles to impose that kind of scientific order on a chaotic and distorted creature thrown up by the ocean, and, moreover, finds pleasure in thoughts of monsters. Especially dead ones.

Living chimera, on the other hand, disturb the category of 'human' profoundly. This sculpture by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini (made with, among other things, leather and human hair) frequently provokes howling or weeping on internet sites where it appears, since it is taken to be a living creature. Posed in an ostensible hospital environment, it passes for a medical freak or a medical experiment. Once taken for an actual creature, no one seems to find it very amusing, only horrific or deserving of compassion.