Has a new loch Ness monster been photographed?

[Lady Maven]

I think it is possible it COULD have existed, so we are not so far off.

And only a redneck would grill that piece of meat ;>

[Atla]

Did ya'll know the Bible mentions Dinosaurs? Job even describes several of them in length.

Course, they don't call them Dinosaurs - that term came about late 1800's I think.

[owly]

You'd be surprised what people believe in.......

Majority of Icelandic people believe in elves

HAFNARFJORDUR, Iceland - Do elves exist? Like many Icelanders, Hildur Hakonardottir considers the question to be more complicated than it appears.

"This is a very, very, very delicate question," Ms. Hakonardottir, a retired museum director, said. "If you ask people if they believe in elves, they will say yes and no. If they say yes, maybe they don't, and if they say no, maybe they do."
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Pall Stefansson for The New York Times

Residents of Hafnarfjordur sometimes dress up as elves to amuse themselves and tourists. The Elf Question is a delicate one in Iceland.
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Pall Stefansson for The New York Times

In Kopavogur, a section of road was narrowed to accommodate elves thought to live in the nearby rock.

Hypothetically speaking, what does she think elves look like?

"Well, my next-door neighbor is an elf woman," she declared suddenly. "She lives in a cliff in a rock in my garden."

Despite having seen the elf only once in 15 years - enough time to determine that she was "bigger than life and dressed like my grandmother, in a 1930's national costume" - Ms. Hakonardottir, 67, has no doubt of her existence. "My daughter once asked me, 'How do you know where elves live?' " she said. "I told her you just know. It's just a feeling."

It is a feeling that many people in Iceland apparently share. Polls consistently show that the majority of the population either believes in elves - generally described as humanlike creatures who are fiercely protective of their rocky homes - or is not willing to rule out their existence. But while believing in elves is rooted in Iceland's culture, it remains a touchy subject.

"You have to watch out for the Nordic cliché," the Icelandic singer Bjork told The New Yorker magazine several years ago. "A friend of mine says that when record-company executives come to Iceland, they ask the bands if they believe in elves, and whoever says yes gets signed up."

Yet even Bjork cannot say no for sure. "We think nature is a lot stronger than man," she said in another interview, when the Elf Question came up. "A relationship with things spiritual has not gone away."

A belief not just in elves but also in the predictive power of dreams, in the potency of dead spirits and in other supernatural phenomena, is closely linked to Iceland's Celtic traditions and punishing, powerful landscape - especially the harsh weather and the rocks that appear everywhere.

"If there was a large stone in the garden, and somebody said to an Icelander, 'That's an elf stone,' would they blow it up? They wouldn't," said Terry Gunnell, head of the folkloristic department at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

"It's not like they think there are little people living in there who come and dance outside," he added. "It's more a sense that there are other powers, other forces around them."

This town, a port on the outskirts of Reykjavik, prides itself on its unusually high elf population. Tourists are invited to tour the known elf locations, including a large rock whose reputation as an elf habitat meant that a nearby road was diverted some years ago so as not to disturb its unseen residents.

Elly Erlingsdottir, head of the town council's planning committee, said that made sense to her. Recently, she said, some elves borrowed her kitchen scissors, only to return them a week later to a place she had repeatedly searched. "My philosophy is, you don't have to see everything you believe in," she said, "because many of your greatest experiences happen with closed eyes."

Recently, the planning committee considered a resident's application to build a garage. "One member said, 'I hope it's O.K. with the elves,' " Ms. Erlingsdottir related. Should the council determine that it is, in fact, not O.K. - usually this happens when a local mystic hears from the elf population, directly or through a vision - the town would consider moving the project, or getting the mystic to ask the elves to move away, she said.

Such occurrences are not unusual. In nearby Kopavogur, a section of Elfhill Road was narrowed from two lanes to one in the 1970's, when repeated efforts to destroy a large rock that was believed to house elves were thwarted by equipment breakdowns. The rock is still there, jutting awkwardly into the road, but it is unclear whether the tenants are.

"With the artificial lampposts, there's too much light for them, and there's also too much noise," explained Gurdrun Bjarnadottir, who has lived across the street for some 30 years. "A lot of people believe they still live there, but I think they've moved."

In the same town in 1996, a bulldozer operator, Hjortur Hjartarson, ran into trouble as he tried to raze a suspected elf hill to make way for a graveyard.

After two different bulldozers repeatedly and inexplicably malfunctioned, and local television cameras failed when trained on the hill, though they worked elsewhere, the crew halted the project. "We're going to see whether we can't reach an understanding with the elves," Jon Ingi, the project supervisor, told Morgunbladid, a Reykjavik newspaper, at the time.

Local elf communicators were called in to arbitrate, and after a while, work resumed. "In my opinion, well, whatever it is, hidden people or elves, it has just accepted this and moved away from there," Mr. Hjartarson told Valdimar Hafstein, an academic researcher who in the late 1990's published "The Elves' Point of View," an article about elves and their effect on construction projects. "That's my opinion."

Although he found many similar cases, Mr. Hafstein has grown weary of the subject. For a while, the Icelandic tourist board cited him as a national elf expert. "I kind of feel that I've done my part," he said. He recently completed a doctoral thesis (on Unesco, not elves) for the University of California, Berkeley.

Although it is easy to find Icelanders who roll their eyes at elf conversations, it is not easy to find hardcore skeptics. But 73-year-old Arni Bjornsson is one.

"Today, it is almost a fashion to say that you believe in supernatural beings, but I take this with a pinch of salt," said Mr. Bjornsson, who worked for 25 years as the head of the ethnology department at the national museum.

But even he is not saying no, exactly. "If you were to ask me, 'Are you sure there are no supernatural beings?' I would say I don't believe there are," he said. "But I wouldn't rule it out."

[Lady Maven]

I did know that Atla. Diid YOU know it also describes a fire breathing dragon in Job? Read Job 41:1-34

Owly, I see no reason why they should not exist. I neither believe nor disbelieve in the fae.

[Super_Sturm]

I neither believe nor disbelieve in the fae.

I want a female elf.
Preferabley a brunette, 5'5 about 100-110lbs.

[Atla]

Yep it does.

That link goes over it some.
http://www.clarifyingchristianity.com/dinos.shtml

An example it gives is the Bombardier Beetle for the possibility of fire breathing dragons existing.

[owly]

At first i giggled but then i thought of myself, against all olds i believe in bigfoot and the loch ness and just maybe aliens too. i grew up with them in my heart and i'm sure it's the same way for the icelanders. i hope their beliefs turn out to be fact someday that would be something i mean to have elves amongst us. Sir Arthur Connan Dole believed in fairies and that not Gerien either and he was a much better man than i, more power to um i say.......

[Gerien]

I've never really said what I do and don't believe in. I prefer to keep that private - and to reserve doubt.

[Lady Maven]

I generally do not share my religious beliefs because while I identify as Christian my beliefs are somewheat .. unorthodox at best and heresy at worst. Besides the divine does not need a door to door salesman. And if one were needed a better person than I could certainly be found.

[Super_Sturm]

I generally do not share my religious beliefs because while I identify as Christian my beliefs are somewheat .. unorthodox at best and heresy at worst.

Call it as it is....Heathenism

[owly]

It's good to have a skeptical outlook it keeps us dreamers in check

this thread made it to page two wow, i didn't think anyone would be interested in it.........

[Lady Maven]

More than one has called me a heathen for it Sturm. See, in a nutshell, I believe ALL versions of the Divine are true and we just choose our paths up the mountain, I have chosen Christianity.