The internet has gone nutty lately with pictures of the so-called “Montauk Monster,” a curious-looking corpse which washed ashore in Montauk, New York.

Excerpt:

The validity of the picture has been further established by the numerous eyewitnesses who saw the animal on the beach in front of Montauk’s Surfside Inn. Theories abound as to what the animal is and where it came from. Marci Caplis of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that rare and unknown sea animals did surface after the Asian tsunami, and although the recent East Coast storms are not of comparable magnitude, the animal did wash up on a particularly stormy day in the Hamptons.

The question remains:  Just what the heck is that thing?  A monster? A mutated dog? An escaped experiment gone horribly wrong?

These are all the crazy theories I’ve heard so far over the thing’s origin.  Indeed, many have pointed out that the Plum Island Animal Disease Center is located near the location where the “monster” was found, and have concluded that the creature must have been a mutated experiment (or some such) which escaped its evil scientist captors.  I, on the other hand, have what I believe to be a much more reasonable conclusion:

We have way too much time on our hands.

It never ceases to both surprise and disappoint me at how willing we are to settle for the more outlandish explanations for phenomena.  Reason and rationality, it seems, are too mundane for many to be considered as valid approaches to mysteries.  Occam’s Razor is far from a scientific principle, but it’s a valid rule of thumb when approaching seemingly bizarre mysteries such as this one.  We can hypothesize that the creature is a horrible scientific experiment gone awry, a visiting alien which discovered too late that the Earth’s water would spell certain doom for its biology, or even a new species of mammal that has eluded zoologists for centuries, but the simple fact remains that we’re avoiding the more reasonable conclusions… that:

1. It’s the decaying, warped corpse of an already-identified animal.
2. It’s a hoax.

These certainly aren’t exciting answers to respond to, but they’re nevertheless far more likely than the sci-fi-themed ideas many have conjured up so far.

Oh, and some people have hypothesized that the creature is Satan, too.  Keep that in mind when choosing to avoid the simple answer.