Moa Mania
1st May 1993
Some Skeptics have been surprised that our organisation has been so restrained in its response to the purported moa sighting near Cragieburn. As we see it, the whole issue is fraught with difficulty.
The notion of a colony of large moas escaping detection till now, despite its location in the Southern Alps accessible to Christchurch, almost defies the imagination. Almost, but not entirely: there is a lot of dense country out there, and the notion of a surviving moa — or two, or twenty — cannot be classed with Bigfoot or UFO abductions.
To this, we have to add the perceived credibility of the witnesses. The Press reporter who broke the story, Dave Wilson, is a previous winner of one of the Skeptics’ “excellence in journalism” awards. He’s an intelligent, persistent, hard-headed bloke who has spent a lot of time interviewing the trio who saw the beast, and he’s strongly inclined to the view that they are at least sincere. Wilson is a world away, for instance, from the cynical, exploitative Australian journalists who a few years ago got their hands on a family that had seen a blinding light on sky over the Nullarbor desert. Wilson has, to the contrary, been careful and measured in his approach.
The New Zealand Skeptics, it seems to me, cannot simply disregard Wilson’s convictions on this issue. If the trio is lying, it’s a particularly skillful and cruel hoax on Wilson personally, not to mention the rest of us. Still, for my part, I found the watery “footprint” of the beast, a photograph of which the three trampers produced at the very beginning of the flap, cause for the most skepticism. It was all wrong for a print left by a running bird, or a standing moa. The fuzzy photograph of the bird itself was plausible; the footprint looked outright fake.
If the sighting is not a hoax, then something like a loose emu still is far more likely than a moa. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal in the hearts of most skeptics that something as wondrous as the recovery of the moa might just turn out to be true. Wouldn’t we all cheer?
When I was musing on this the other day, Vicki Hyde brought me back down to earth with a stern lecture on the real, numerical probabilities of there being large, undetected moas in one of our more accessible parks. She was right, of course. But then I never claimed to have a skeptic’s soul. If anything, I more-and-more consider myself temperamentally gullible, and in need of occasional dressings-down by more tough-minded types like Vicki. Nevertheless, if the Skeptics are to err in this case or any other, better perhaps to be slightly on the side of a splendid possibility, than to dismiss without any consideration some extraordinary claim.
One of the highlights of our upcoming conference will be a symposium on cryptozoology. Dave Wilson will be there, and we may even be able to bring along the moa spotters themselves. Meanwhile, Vicki is organising a “fuzzy-photo” contest for Skeptics who can produce evidence demonstrating the existence of some extinct or extraterrestrial beast. Or perhaps a tossed hubcap, a floating log, or a chicken-wire moa.