So, on tonight’s Supernatural News on Darkness Radio, a listener emailed in the following story about a baby orca being found on a mountain side in Ireland. I found the original post during some research while listening to the story as Tim and Mallie recounted it on air. It was very interesting and I wanted to know more about it and get to the bottom of the story (its the investigator in me).
Here is the link to the original story:
http://paranormalforyou.blogspot.com/2013/07/aliens-and-ufos-ufo-abduction-of-baby.html?m=1
….so, what did I find? Was I able to confirm this story?
The answer is yes, in a way! When studying the paranormal, over time you learn that urban legends grow up out of real events and take on a life of their own in our digital age of social media.
I was not able to confirm any news outlet carried this story, BBC, NBC, CNN, Fox News (yech), or any other media outlet, only internet message boards that mostly copied the original story. I talked to Tim during the broadcast (just a few minutes ago) and he confirmed that I had the right link to the paranormal blog which blamed UFO’s and said police also confirmed UFOs.
The article on that blog was lacking specifics…names…dates…times….organizations….any one who spends time in the paranormal, learns that these are the hallmarks of an urban legend.
How did I confirm anything thing? Well…there WAS a whale on a mountain and it was an orca….but it was in 1931 and it had nothing to do with UFO’s or supernatural events but an entrepreneurial business man and whalers and a whale in a river that ended up on the mountain in tank of formaldehyde. The source of the urban legend that was repeated by so many “investigators” on sites without even trying to investigate it for authenticity is an article from The Free Lance Star, June 5, 1971, about a whale that a was captured in 1931 in Washington state, originally from an Associated Press report:
I set out to find the real truth behind the mysterious whale and found it. By studying the paranormal you find that sometimes not everything is supernatural but is no less interesting in the real history that gave birth to the urban legend.
While this is awesome, it also illustrates the sad current state of a large majority of paranormal bloggers, writers, researchers and investigators who are all too willing to create paranormal events out of ordinary events and then to repeat and spread the distorted tale through social media and before long it becomes an accepted part of UFO lore/ghost lore.
John Keel was right…people place things in the frames of reference they know best and that belief is the enemy because nothing in the paranormal is as it seems.
— A.G.M.