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Why the Legend of the Montauk Monster Will Never Die

The story has it all: cryptozoology, conspiracy theories, a government research facility dabbling in cross-species breeding and bizarrely placed nostalgia.

“It looked like nothing I’d ever seen before,” Ryan O’Shea told Newsday reporter Joye Brown. “It looked like it died angry… I kept thinking, ‘Boy, I hope its mother isn’t around.’” He was referring, of course, to the Montauk Monster, a house cat-sized… something that washed up on the shore of Ditch Plains, a popular Long Island surfing beach, in July of 2008. Most people who encountered the story—i.e., just about everyone—agreed it was an animal, though some floated the idea that it could be a marketing stunt for the Cartoon Network’s Cryptids Are Real. What no one could agree on was what kind of animal. Or even if it hit the beach dead or alive.

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In the same Newsday piece, one Ryan Kelso reported seeing it up and about, roaming the dunes. “It looked about the size of an average fox, gray in color, eyes like a mole, hairless and was breathing quite heavily,” he told Brown.

Cue the conspiracy theorists. Montauk, they say, is a magnet for monsters thanks to both the top-secret Montauk Project, with its psychically-generated Bigfoot, and the village’s proximity to Plum Island, the one-time home of the Plum Island Animal Disease........

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