The Mysterious Monster: Nessie, Yeti, and That Time a Psychic Scanned Bigfoot

Few of the audience in my theater even blinked when Peter Graves turned up on screen in MIB 2. The venerable mission-assigner delivered some exposition in a hokey 70’s alien documentary ("Mysteries in History") with 70’s Doctor Who production values. Most of the theater shrugged. "Old stars need work," they probably thought. I knew better. I'd seen Mysterious Monsters.

I'd seen it lots of times.

So many times, in fact, that I'd memorized every commercial on a disintegrating videotape that I treated like a holy relic. So many times that I can still sing that jingle for the local Ford dealer jingle thirty years later.

After all, what was more thrilling to a young monster kid than a Bigfoot/Loch Ness Monster/Yeti documentary? Especially narrated in the dramatic tones of Peter Graves.

“Hi, I’m Peter Graves. I’d like to enroll at the University of Minnesota.”

“The facts we are going to present are true," Peter Graves declares that the beginning. "This may be the most startling film you'll ever see." I was hooked. Like many children, I haunted the 000.00 section of the library, where one of its subjects was labeled wonderfully at my local branch “controversial knowledge.” You find two types of subjects there: information technology or the Jersey Devil.

Speak of the Devil…

Man, I believed everything as a kid. That list of things Jeanine Melnitz rattles off in Ghostbusters? All of it. Hell, I did my 7th grade science project on pyramid power experiments from the Osborne World of the Unknown UFOs.

It was an interconnected world of weird we believer kids lived in, as intricate as any comic universe, which is why Peter Graves resonated with me. He had a Mission.

When the world was young, and the long POV shot of a guy grunting in an ape suit could still make us hold our breath, the Mysterious Monsters came to tell us that it was all true. With copious reenactment shots and some crazy methods, Peter Graves wanted all of us to believe. The show mostly focuses on Bigfoot, with the Yeti and the Loch Nessie Monster being the Marvel cameos of the film for us true believers.

It’s probably a familiar format to most of my readers. A breathy Graves introduces the mysteries of Bigfoot, Nessie, and Yeti before a slew of eyewitnesses and talking head scientists while camera-mugging reenactments do their level best to make us clap and say, “I do believe in cryptids!”

I’ll give them this; the used their travel budget. Graves rides helicopters over the Pacific Northwest, tromping through beautiful scenery to harangue expert after expert. There’s stunning Loch Ness footage, including gorgeous details of Urquat Castle, a place I still resolve to visit before I die. The interviews aren’t a slouch either, with such important names as Grover Krantz, Peter Byrne, and Tim Dinsdale, it’s a history lesson on early cryptozoology.

How are the monsters, you’re asking? The Bigfoot suit looks pretty good for low-budget 70’s; believe me, I’ve seen much worse cinematic fare from that time period. What stunned me was the variety of suits. You got the main Bigfoot, pictured above. You have the Yeti, with its interesting face suggesting a Fu Manchu mustache.

Then for family scenes, there’s more sasquatch suits, each slightly different.

Trust me, from one schooled in the genre, I was not expecting this level of effort.

How’s their Loch Ness Monster? Nonexistent.

For paranormal films of this time period and well into the future, Nessie was a budget saver, a Lochtease. We cryptid kids hoped to see something cool, but every segment on the Scottish water was pretty similar. An ape suit was easy, but no move company that wallowed in budget mysticism would pop for the special effects needed to bring a plesiosaur to even subpar screen life.

You’d be lucky to get the Crater Lake Monster. Most of the time, you’d end up with the homicidal puppet from The Loch Ness Horror.

Trust me, the poster was the best part.

No, we would only be treated to the same old photographs and painting on the screen each time, and we'd like it.

Tim swears the back can change shape. I’ve heard of X-Men with worse powers.

It’d be hard to match the spell-binding effect Nessie photos had with special effects anyway, especially with one only three years old at the time of filming.

Nessie was the cryptozoological rock star who never comes out on stage. Bigfoot was the reliable opening band. I guess that makes Mothman that weird prog rock band whose concert you got high at once.

Also of note are the really fun graphics...

...and newspaper clippings the film throws up on screen.

These kind of documentaries thrive on eye candy, and Mysterious Monsters has it in droves.

But this is early in the genre of paranormal documentaries, and therein lies the fun, because Peter Graves throws spaghetti at the wall and hits gold.

The first bit of weird science Peter Graves rolls out is voice analysis computers. Using supposed Bigfoot recordings, Peter is lectured by a nervous-seeming lab tech on the differences between human sounds and Bigfoot sounds.

Peter is just as enthralled as you will be.

But then we get to the psychic.

...or the 70's version of Antique Roadshow.

Peter Hurkos claimed to have psychic powers caused by a head injury after falling off a ladder, giving him a cooler origin story then 87% of all comics character created in the 1990s. He seems to be the second-rate Uri Gellar, never quite convincing quite as many people but adept at scoring international television specials. To sum up, if Uri Gellar is the Stephen King of psychics, Hurkos is Dean Koontz. But he claims to have psychometry, the ability to pick up your college t-shirt and know just how many disgusting things it’s touched.

With this in mind, Peter Graves takes a Bigfoot footprint in a wooden case and presents it to Hurkos without comment. Keeping the case close, Hurkos pontificates on the mysterious unknown object in the box. “It’s half-man, half-animal,” he says with the bored look of someone negotiating Turbo Tax. “Weighs about, I would say, 500 pounds. It’s about eight to nine feet.”

I have seen middle school kids in my literature class read aloud with more excitement. Hurkos finally gets rolling as he describe a cave-dwelling, long-armed gorilla-like carnivore. Finally, he draws a picture of the savage man-beast.

I think I've seen that Bigfoot before.

..as the best part of the Buffy movie, searching for the basement of the Alamo.

Peter claims that Hurkos has no idea what's in the box. Still, I do find it a little unlikely that Hurkos didn’t know the name or subject of the special he was being filmed for. I will admit that’s more common with paranormal documentaries, getting a specialist to pontificate with a fake title and recutting things to fit the narrative. Still, my skepticism is rising.

Afterwards, Mysterious Monsters never quite reaches the heights of weirdness. We get some senior citizens stomping through a recreation, finding Bigfoot footprints. Then, after an extended sequence of old man shouting happily about stride lengths, we come to the money shot, the part that lived in my dreams for years. When I thought of The Mysterious Monsters, I pictured The Attack.

Horror-movie-victim-to-be Rita Graham is chilling in her forest adjacent house, watching TV, enthralled by footage of men silently eating.

Seriously.

She hears noises outside, and as the men on TV loudly discuss margaritas, a large shadow moves quickly across the window behind her.

[image error]They learned too late that Bigfoot is a feeling creature, and because of it the greatest in the universe..