Each morning the dozers get closer, and now the cabin’s walls shudder from the nearby sounds of a landscape screaming. The smell of newly torn roots and earth tell me that I must write quickly, and cannot waste words here.

There is a Monster in the Pond

Behind me now is a pond, visible from the windows, and in that spring-fed pond lives a strange, friendly little monster. Nobody believes it, of course, but that’s because with a bit of Hollywood magic, I have made it unbelievable.

The Kokotapi Monster

A fish-cat might best describe the creature, and while she has gained various names in folklore over the years, the name ‘Kokotapi” seems to have caught on in these parts, and so for the sake of brevity here I will refer to her simply as Koko.

While the head resembles that of a hellbender, the Koko monster’s body is very much shaped like the common house cat. Just imagine an eerie salamander’s head on the body of a little hairless panther, and you will have an idea of what a Kokotapi looks like.

Koko is cleverly camouflaged with patterns across the back which resembles the ripples of sand in a stream, and a mottled watery iridescence can often be seen sending rainbows of color across the wet grey-green skin.

The eyes are large, and fleshy tentacles that resemble dreadlocks fall back away from the jawline. This growth seems to be designed to protect the gills, while giving the animal a sort of ‘bearded’ look, adding even more character to Koko’s mystery and intrigue.

A Perfect Hideout for a Koko Monster

It wasn’t as if I chose one day to become the steward to a rare and mythical creature like Koko, and to be sure, I didn’t even believe in the local legends of elusive water cats with gills and webbed feet.

The few alleged sightings of the animal over the years were always met with skepticism in the community, and most people around these parts had never even heard the legends. I myself had never heard of the Kokotapi Creature before I moved to this cabin by the pond ten years ago, when I saw her with my own eyes.

There’s no time to explain how it was that I took such a liking to this beast, but the means with which I have protected her from being discovered by the public must finally be confessed, as even now the bulldozers approach, and Koko’s pond is suddenly being noticed by some local developers-- this natural spring-fed pond is being seen as a potential “mosquito incubator”.

Here is where I am going to give away a few secrets of Hollywood magic, and since most people are already familiar with Hollywood’s special effects and visual trickery, I will show how I used the mind of the local culture to hide the Koko creature here in this particular pond, and how I simply employed special effects to achieve it. I must be quick about this.

The Orchestration of My Psy-Op

A good old psychological operation, that is the best way to describe what I did to keep the Koko creature safe from the curious public. First, I built a fake Koko monster out of black silk with a coat-hanger wire frame, and then announced to the neighborhood that I was planning to film a Kokotapi movie around the pond by my house, and would need some volunteers to help me.

The Screenplay for ’The Koko Files’

I wrote a story for the movie, a screenplay of deception, wherein a guy who lives next to a pond discovers a Koko monster. In the story, the character decides to protect his Koko by making a movie about her using a fake Koko as a prop for the special effects shots.

In the story, the character then finds a way for the local TV crew to come out to his pond, whereupon he ‘accidentally’ lets them see the fake movie prop monster.

In the story, the news crew makes the story all about the fake movie prop, and adds ridicule to the notion of water dragons or Koko monsters on the evening news, exactly as Caldwell had planned.

Killing Koko By Bringing Her Story to Life, Hollywood Style

As I spread the idea of my home movie production, I was incorporating my own neighbors to unwittingly help me with the cover-up of the reality of the Koko creature.

By planting the idea that it was just a no-budget film idea from a wacky neighbor, I was giving reality a veneer of fantasy in their minds, and by turning the Koko creature into my own fictional story, I could thus hide the creature in the public’s very mind, my Koko puppet forever replacing any notion that the animal might actually exist.

I Made the Real Unreal

By these means, I owned the Koko tale, and when interest in my film died away a few weeks later, all that was left was my fabricated story, a pond that was no longer interesting, and a little Koko creature, happily swimming about through the many interlocking springs that connect my pond with the water table below.

Once Planted...

Nobody likes being fooled. Once something is faked and that deception is revealed, the ones who were initially fooled in the group will invariably celebrate their newfound wisdom, vowing that they won’t be fooled again.

I could very likely walk down the sidewalk now with Koko on a leash and nobody would believe that she was real. Aside from the fact that I would never dream of trying to leash such a highly intelligent wild creature in any way, the group mind around me has been so conditioned that if they saw Koko with their very eyes, even smelling her earthy dampness and patting her on the head, they would still insist that she was somehow a fake.

It is Time

I really should have had this scuba tank tested, but there was no time. I must make the cold plunge before daylight-- before anyone can see me disappear into the dark pond.

Koko has been bringing me trinkets from below; curious artifacts, sometimes made from gold and other metals that seem rustproof, these treasures that she delivers to me have stirred my imagination once again, and by tomorrow, I believe that many of my questions about human origins and the history of our planet will be answered. Wish me luck, and hopefully I will return tomorrow with some exciting information.

In case I don’t return, remember how I used that Hollywood magic on the neighborhood, but do try to see that I used it for good, and that my deception ultimately could have saved a rare and unknown creature from harm.

It is time, I must go.

When she sees me down there, Koko is going to get a good laugh from these flippers and mask, I think.

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