In a world filled with Photoshopped images, it's easy to raise your skeptical flags when an image of a one-eyed albino shark appears - like the Cyclops Shark.  

It is claimed to have been removed from the belly of a pregnant dusky shark caught by a fisherman in the Gulf of California in the summer of 2011.  Apparently, shark researchers have examined the specimen and concluded the eye is made of functional eye tissue.  However, they agreed that the shark would likely not have survived had it been born.

"Cyclopia" is a real developmental anomaly, so this defect is entirely impossible.  It is extremely rare, but has occurred in several animals, including humans (for example, in 1982 a baby girl was born with no nose and only one eye in the center of her face... she died 30 minutes after birth).  

The researchers plan to release their data later in the year - so until then, I will remain at least partially skeptical.

However, it ended in tragedy as the train suddenly derailed, which killed four members, and seriously injuring 6 others. This was consistent to the folklore of the macabre befalling those who angers the Mokele-mbembe. This expedition was documented in the H.L. Shantz papers.

According to the Skeptic's Dictionary...

"Cryptozoologists argue that since a coelacanth was caught off the coast of South Africa, it is reasonable to think that a dinosaur might also have avoided detection for a few million years. However, there is a big difference between finding a fish thought to be extinct and finding a dinosaur. The fish is small and lives in the ocean. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth and have depths of up to 35,000 feet. That is a lot of space to hide specimens and fragments of specimens. Dinosaurs are massive (at least the mokele-mbembe kind), occupied the third of the earth mostly visible to its other inhabitants, and thus would be much more likely to be detected than the coelacanth."  Well said.

For me, the Pacific Northwest quickly transformed in my mind, into the world’s playground, growing more and more enchanting, with each reported Bigfoot sighting. Dating back to the early 1920’s, there were stories that gave me hope. Fred Beck famously detailed a horrific summer night in July 1924, when he and a group of fellow minors were attacked by several “apemen.” Others tried to dismiss the incident, explaining them away as bored pranksters with too much time on their hands. The reports didn’t stop. They ranged from a terrified mother receiving an alarming wake up call in her British Columbia residence, when a Bigfoot allegedly approached her home, to a Californian bulldozer operator uncovering a series of enormous footprints on the outskirts of his worksite. 

In 1967, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin famously captured footage of a Bigfoot which later became known as the Patterson-Gimlin film. To many, this legitimized their belief. Clear proof of the Bigfoot had now been established, or so it seemed. The non-believers claimed foul play, which many dismissed as an inability to grasp the unknown. Several years later, the non-believers scored a major victory, when Bob Heironimus, an acquaintance of Patterson’s, proclaimed that he was in fact the mysterious Bigfoot, shattering the dreams of many. A polygraph test in 2005 confirmed Heironimus’ claims that he believed he was in fact the man behind Bigfoot in the famous video. 

With the start of the new millennium, it became increasingly difficult to justify or defend one’s stance on the positive existence of Bigfoot. A series of well staged hoaxes throughout the years, in addition to Heironiumus’ crippling admission, had all but eradicated any firm foundation for believers to stake their claim. But things changed suddenly on September 16^th, 2007. An image of a potential Bigfoot was captured by Rick Jacobs’ automatically triggered camera attached to a tree. The Pennsylvania Games Commission quickly dismissed the image, saying that it looked like a “bear with a severe case of mange.” It appeared that Rick Jacobs’ photo was just the latest in a long line of dashed hopes for the Bigfoot believers, until a group of scientists examined the photo in-depth in 2008, and discovered the creature’s proportions were not aligned with that of a bear’s. The debate of the Bigfoot was once again on. For the hopeful, there was finally something to point towards and silence their close minded opponents. The doubters could only sigh, and point to a history littered with so called “pieces of evidence” that have been thoroughly dismissed time and again. Why should they concede that this would be any different?