The New York Review of Ideas » Q&A | June 2009
Deciphering Cryptozoology
Loren Coleman defines cryptozoology and says, once and for all, that it is science.
By Peter Koch
On the one hand, Loren Coleman is a skeptic, firmly grounded in scientific principles. On the other hand, his particular branch of science, cryptozoology, gives equal credence to suspected bird species, say, and near-mythical creatures like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Cryptozoology—the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated—is frequently treated as an easily dismissed bastard child of science. If that’s the case, then Coleman is the unrepentant modern father of the field. Besides authoring nine books on the topic, he also owns the International Cryptozoology Museum, which he runs out of his home in Portland, Maine. A former psychiatric social worker and university professor, he now makes his living writing, lecturing, and consulting about cryptozoology, which he’s studied since before the word existed in English. Coleman’s out to show that there’s much more to cryptozoology than chasing down Bigfoot or plumbing the depths of Loch Ness for its most famous resident.
What first piqued your interest in cryptozoology?
In March of 1960, I saw a science fiction film called Half Human, by Ishiro Hondu. This was his first science fiction film after a career in documentary filmmaking, and it was about the Abominable Snowman, filmed among the native Ainu people of Japan. I saw that film on a Friday night, and when I went into school the next week, I asked my teachers what was this about the Abominable Snowman? They all told me, “Don’t waste your time,” “Don’t pay attention to it.” Even though I was only 11 or 12, I heavily questioned authority.
I started investigating crytpozoological cases then. Because I was so small, I would do this with the help of a game warden so people would actually talk to me. I investigated black panther reports in Illinois, mystery cat reports in Indiana, Bigfoot cases, giant snake reports and other strange cases throughout the Midwest…anything that was a little abnormal that newspaper people wrote up as weird animal stories. I understood them as cryptozoology.
Where’d you go to school?
I very specifically chose the university I went to—Southern Illinois University in Carbondale—because there was a folklorist there named John Allen who had been doing research on the Illinois bottomland apes.
Isn’t cryptozoology linked to a history of “fabled” animals being found walking (or swimming) on this Earth?
Yeah, in Cryptozoology A to Z (Fireside Books, 1999), I talk about them in terms of the animals of discovery—the mountain gorilla, the okapi (a member of the giraffe family with zebra-like stripes, found and catalogued by modern science in 1901), the coelacanth (a prehistoric fish thought to be extinct for 65 million years when found very much alive in 1938). Those are creatures that people knew about, that they reported, that scientists went looking for and “discovered.” They dot cryptozoology, but once the animal is found it drifts across this line into zoology, and the zoologists forget that it was ever doubted.
There have been really amazing discoveries in the recent past, like the saola, which is a rather large goat-antelope that was discovered in an area of Vietnam near the Laotian border known as the Lost World. Or the discovery of the fossils of the Hobbit, homo floresiensis, in 2003. It was a whole species of human-like beings that lived at the same time as humans.
The giant squid used to be “The Kraken.” It wasn’t until the 1880s that it became a known species, and it wasn’t even filmed alive until 2006. So some of these animals still remain mysterious.
Aren’t people in the zoological field actively seeking these animals, too?
Well, I think there are generational gaps in zoology. There were a lot of Victorian explorers who were amateur naturalists, amateur zoologists. They explored different parts of Africa and when they came across a new animal, they’d send off the bones or skins to Europe and get them classified as a new animal. It was the first wave of cryptozoology.
After that and through the 1950s, science was very reflective of the Eisenhower, McCarthy, Nixonian era in the United States. By that I mean there was a conceited notion that there weren’t any unexplored areas left in the world, and so there weren’t any undiscovered animals.
But then something very revolutionary happened in the 1960s; there was a conscious revolution around the world. We came into the Kennedy Era in which there was much more openness to talking about everything, whether it was politics, the justification of wars, or stigmas regarding sex. I think it also occurred in the natural world, in natural history. Instead of thinking that all of the animals in the world had been discovered, there was a new environmental consciousness that led to an explosion of animal discoveries from the ‘60s through the ‘90s—the megamouth shark, the Chacoan peccary, the saola. I think we came out of a period of isolation, and cryptozoology happened to benefit from it. Zoologists and naturalists started taking interest in cryptozoology, whether they called it that or not.
The current generation of cryptozoologists and writers are very much a product of the 1960s—conscientious objectors, hippies, politically left-wing, not in any way conservative and held back. We were radicals, ones who questioned authority and questioned whether science really knew all that they were telling us. So part of that questioning authority really slipped into the way we view zoology and anthropology.
Is the public more impressed by creatures like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot than by small fries like sharks and birds?
Yeah, I call them “celebrity cryptids.” I think the word celebrity really captures it. People are interested in what Brad Pitt’s doing, not what his understudy or some other minor actor is doing. In the same way, people know the words Yeti, Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster. So if you’re telling them about reports of a bird—a warbler, say—that’s been seen by the native peoples of the Congo, and how zoologists and cryptozoologists are studying that and think they’re going to find it (which happened last year), you don’t get people in the media or even in the general public interested in that. Because it’s not splashy, it doesn’t get a lot of press. And yet there are snakes, there are birds, there are species of dolphins that are only known from eyewitness reports. Several new species of lemur have recently been discovered. New animals are discovered all the time, and some of them are found employing cryptozoologically-based methods of using eyewitness accounts to guide an investigation in a particular direction.
If cryptozoology is involved in so many animal discoveries, why don’t we hear more about it?
My whole contention is that people mainly forget, and then they think, “Oh, some scientist discovered a new animal last year, what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that it’s found using exactly the same methods that are being used by people searching for the Sasquatch, or the lake monster in whatever lake, or sea serpents. But because we haven’t found what’s supposedly the big one, people forget that cryptozoology is successful. Of course we’ve found the big one; we found the okapi, we found the mountain gorilla. But people forget that, they almost have amnesia once these discoveries are made, and they keep saying, “Cryptozoology doesn’t work because you haven’t found Yeti” [laughs]. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.
Will cryptozoology ever go mainstream?
When I was at the university and I would write a paper about the survival of Neanderthals, which was just a way for me to look at cryptozoology, my professor thought it was an interesting idea and he gave me a grade on it, but he gave me a grade mostly upon the idea and not upon my good research and my several dozen references and all of that. Whereas now what’s happening is those people who are in universities, those people I’m talking to when I go to the Royal Albert Museum or the American Museum of Natural History, are professors in universities, are college students. So we have people in the mainstream who are interested in cryptozoology, who grew up on cryptozoology.