https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/is-bigfoot-likelier-than-the-loch-ness-monster

On the categorization of imaginary beings and what it all means.

As defenders of the supernatural will be quick to point out, many arthropods have six limbs; squids, skunks, bombardier beetles, and plenty of other real creatures spew strange things; nature sometimes contrives to recombine old animals in new ways (see the half-striped zedonk—part zebra, part donkey—or the recent emergence of the coywolf: part coyote, part wolf); and, considering the many kinds of metamorphoses exhibited by animals—tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly, baby-faced to bearded—how far-fetched is it, really, for a bat to turn into a man?

And then down the rabbithole of reality it goes:

Most of us understand that our perceptual systems, far from passively reflecting the world around us, actively sort, select, distort, ignore, and alter a huge amount of information in order to construct reality as we experience it. But reality as we experience it also departs from actual reality in deeper ways. In actual reality, space and time are inseparable, and neither one behaves anything like the waywe perceive it; nor does light, and nor does gravity, and, in all likelihood, nor does consciousness. Yet all the while we go on experiencing space like a map we can walk on, time like a conveyor belt we travel on, ourselves as brimming with agency, our lives as mattering urgently.