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PEARSON: Deconstructing a monster

By Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 4, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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This mutant canine was found dead after apparently being hit by a car in Turner, Maine, in 2006. The canines are the subject of next week's installment of MonsterQuest, on the History Channel.

Photo by Michelle O'donnell / Associated Press

This mutant canine was found dead after apparently being hit by a car in Turner, Maine, in 2006. The canines are the subject of next week's installment of MonsterQuest, on the History Channel.

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One of my favorite shows this fall has nothing to do with bionic spies, dancing celebrities or teams of people racing around the globe. It's a show about things that go bump in the night . . . and the woods . . . and the air.

The History Channel has been quietly building an audience for its Wednesday series MonsterQuest, which, as its name implies, is all about monsters.

The show premiered on Halloween and is halfway through its 13- episode run. It's tackled America's Loch Ness monster ("Champ" in Lake Champlain), a reported sasquatch attack in the Alaskan wilderness, giant squids, Birdzilla and Bigfoot.

Wednesday night's subject is mutant canines (rabid beasts stalking the night in Maine), followed by shows on lions in the suburbs (Dec. 12), giant fish (Dec. 19), the real Hobbit (Jan. 16) and an American werewolf (Jan. 23). Other shows are scattered in between, but these are the highlights.

Why would a channel devoted to history programming be interested in monsters? Most of the topics are framed in cultural terms. Many of these creatures are an integral part of a region's mythology, and MonsterQuest tries to apply scientific methods to unraveling those myths.

"These are creatures that people have been seeing for hundreds and hundreds of years," says Mike Stiller, executive producer for the History Channel. "It dovetails into mythology, legend and a little bit of biology. Just recently there was a huge exhibition at the (New York) Museum of Natural History about legendary creatures."

American Indians were reporting sasquatch sightings long before the white man came to this continent, and there have long been historical sightings of giant birds (think Thunderbirds).

The series tries to frame the debate over the existence of various creatures in a larger, geologic context. Lake Champlain, for instance, was once connected to the Atlantic Ocean. Is it possible a dinosaur-like creature could have swum the channel and become trapped in the freshwater lake bordered by Vermont, New York and Canada?

There's also a healthy dose of skepticism, as the producers find not just believers but scientists willing to scoff at the notion. The recent Birdzilla show is a prime example. There's some video footage of what are purported to be giant birds over Illinois, but most of the talking heads dismiss them as larger-than-average turkey vultures.

Naturally, video footage is what we really want to see, and that's been the weak point of the series. We get a fleeting look at Bigfoot thanks to the 1967 film by Roger Patterson, but mostly we get footprints and hair samples of the various creatures sent to labs for analysis. And in the case of Champ, a lot of time spent looking at sonar readings from Lake Champlain.

Each show is littered with eyewitnesses who fervently claim to have seen a given creature. How much stock should we place in human memory, like that of the Illinois man who claims to have been lifted off the ground by a giant bird at age 10?

Sometimes the investigations pay off. The show about the giant squid actually yielded the first footage of live giant squid (attacking bait in the sea of Japan). It wasn't King Kong, but it supports the series' theory that there are many biological things we don't know about our world.

"What we're really trying to do is take a different approach to looking for these creatures," Stiller explains. "We use the latest technology and science to analyze the information in a different way.

"Our attitude is, try to present both sides of the story. Not everyone who appears on these programs believes these creatures exist. . . . We leave it up to viewers to come up with their own opinions."

MonsterQuest

When and where: 8 p.m. Wednesday, the History Channel

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