#blake smith

For Halloween I decided I wanted to try and write about something spooky that nevertheless still fit in with the overall theme of this blog. To this end I’ve decided to write about the fascinating field of cryptozoology and my own interest in the subject from the time I was in middle school till now and about how my views on the subject have changed and evolved.  Enjoy! CRYPTOZOOLOGY AND ME: A MEMOIR

When I was in middle school I went through a big cryptozoology phase. I chalk this up to a number of cultural influences. At the time my three favorite shows on TV were The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Invader Zim – all heavily steeped in the paranormal. For those who don’t know, cryptozoology refers to “the study of hidden animals” and its coinage is typically attributed to either Bernard Heuvelmans or Ivan T. Sanderson – who I’ll talk about more later on. For all practical purposes however, today the term generally denotes the vocation of “monster hunter” with the prize quarries being such legendary creatures as Bigfoot and the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster and other lake monsters including Champ the Lake Champlain monster and  Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan, sea serpents, living dinosaurs such as the Mokèlé-mbèmbé – an alleged sauropod living in the African Congo – or the Ropen – a bioluminescent pterosaur inhabiting Papua New Guinea – , as well as such decidedly weirder and less biologically plausible creatures as the Jersey Devil, Mothman and the Chupacabra.

As a kid I read all the major cryptozoological authors: Bernard Heuvelmans (On the Track of Unknown Animals, 1955), Ivan T. Sanderson (Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, 1961), Loren Coleman (Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti, & Other Mystery Primates Worldwide, 1999), Jerome Clark (Unexplained! 2nd Ed., 1998), Coleman and Clark (Cryptozoology A To Z, 1999), Karl P.N. Shuker (From Flying Toads to Snakes with Wings, 1997), John A. Keel (The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, 1994), Janet and Colin Bord (Alien Animals, 1981) and Brad Stiger (Out Of The Dark: The Complete Guide to Beings from Beyond, 2001). I also had a well-read copy of W. Haden Blackman’s The Field Guide to North American Monsters (1998) and readily consumed every cryptozoological related documentary or program that came on TV from Animal Planet’s Animal-X to Discovery’s X-Creatures – you can see the influence the X-Files had on pop-culture here! – to The History Channel’s History’s Mysteries.

Looking back on all this I’m not sure how much I really believed that cryptids – the nickname cryptozoologists use for the monsters they track – actually existed. But like many proponents of the paranormal I think it’s fair to say that, at the time, I had a very open mind about all of this.

It may also come as a surprise to many readers to learn that among the various cryptids my favorite wasn’t any of the alleged living dinosaurs or other supposed prehistoric survivors but rather Mothman. I don’t know what it was about the story of the Mothman that so fully captivated me. I think it must have been how utterly alien the creature seemed. By the time I was in middle school dinosaurs, pterosaurs, prehistoric marine reptiles, dragons and even giant bipedal apes were a pretty common part of my imaginary menagerie thanks to lifetime of consuming books and movies about dinosaurs. However until I read Keel’s 1994 book I had never heard of anything even remotely resembling a Mothman.

Today Mothman seems fairly well integrated into contemporary pop-culture – there was even a 2002 film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, though it did admittedly bomb upon its release – but for those who are unfamiliar here’s the basic gist as it has come down in the paranormal literature and is still being recounted to this day: Beginning roughly in November of 1966, citizens of the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia – located along the Ohio River – began reporting sightings of a creature which was described as a humanoid being with black/grey skin, red glowing eyes and a pair of giant bat-like wings which came out of its back. This gargoyle-like creature – which the local media would eventually dub “The Mothman” – was seen by dozens of eyewitnesses, usually in passing, though in one dramatic early encounter was said to have chased four young adults who were driving in excess of 100 mph down a deserted road. The sightings eventually came to an end nearly one year later in December of 1967 coinciding with the collapse of the area Silver Gate Bridge which killed 46 people. Many paranormalists, and even some cryptozoologists, have attempted to link the creature with the bridge collapse claiming that Mothman acts as a kind of harbinger of impending catastrophes.

By the summer of 2002 I was so obsessed with the story of the Mothman that I convinced my parents to stop by the town of Point Pleasant during our summer vacation to Niagara Falls. I wanted to see the town where Mothman had appeared. This would turn out to be a poignant trip for me because while on it I acquired the book Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend (2002) by Donnie Sergent Jr. and Jeff Wamsley. Sergent Jr. and Wamsley were Point Pleasant locals who had undertaken the arduous task of combing through local and state newspaper archives and locating the original Mothman newspaper reports which they then reprinted – alongside original eyewitness statements, police reports, and letters exchanged between Keel and locals – in their book. Sergent Jr. and Wamsley don’t attempt to make any argument about what the Mothman was or wasn’t, their book is simply a collection of primary source documents about the phenomena which unfolded in Point Pleasant between ’66 and ’67. Being able to go back to the original reports and read them for myself had a profound impact on me because it demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Mothman… was a bird. In the original newspaper reports and statements delivered by eyewitnesses the creature which came to be known as Mothman is repeatedly described as a bird. It does not have the body of a man but rather is described as being as tall as one. It does not have red glowing eyes but is rather described as having red markings around its eyes. It does not have leathery bat-like wings but rather feathers and wings like a bird. In some accounts it is even described as having long skinny legs and a beak! In a few cases eyewitnesses describe seeing multiple creatures together in a flock standing in a field or a clutch of trees before flying away. Many witnesses - including those aforementioned scared twenty-somethings who claimed Mothman chased them down a road - reported that the creature produced a high-pitch squeaking sound. What these people are describing is likely a flock of sandhill cranes which stand six-feet-tall, have grey feathers, bright red patches around their eyes and as for the sound they make: just listen. Sandhill cranes are not native to West Virginia but do migrate down the Mississippi River making it conceivable that a flock could have gotten blown off course and ended up in Point Pleasant where they proceeded to scare the daylights out of locals unfamiliar with such large, odd-looking birds. Another possibility is that some sightings of Mothman were of a snowy owl, which is also uncommon in West Virginia. However as documented in Sergent Jr. and Wamsley’s book in December of ’66 several news outlets reported that a local farmer had killed just such an owl. It is worth noting that after this, sightings of the Mothman largely fell off and were replaced by reports of UFOs (which in all likelihood were, pardon the cliché but I’m being dead serious here, weather balloons). A few sightings that occurred in the area during the summer of ’67 appear to have been the result of common turkey vultures. What this means is that contrary to what the paranormalists like to claim the Mothman ‘flap’ did not occur over a 12-month period but only for about three months at the end of ’66/start of ’67 and was certainly the result of people seeing unusually large birds in the area.

However what Sergent Jr. and Wamsley’s book also demonstrated via their reprinting of sci-fi TV screenwriter turned paranormal investigator John Keel’s private letters with local residents was that Keel was actively manipulating information and witnesses in order to have their accounts match the scenario he had envisioned in which the small town of Point Pleasant played host to a virtual invasion of flying saucers and alien monsters portending the disaster which was the Silver Bridge collapse. Keel initially presented these ideas in a streamlined manner in a chapter for his 1970 book Strange Creatures From Time and Space which he would revise in 1994 as his cryptozoological/UFOlogical “encyclopedia” The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. Between that time Keel wrote a more extensive version of the Mothman incident as he saw it in the form of a sundry mish-mash of paranormal potpourri that was his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies. Today more people know Keel’s version of the events then they do the actual eyewitnesses’ and while Keel’s books captivated me as a middle schooler nowadays I find them more than a little cringe worthy. Keel was vehemently anti-science, anti-academia, never cited his sources and often embellished and exaggerated events to make them read better.

The same year I became convinced that Mothman was just a misidentified bird I also encountered the magazine Skeptical Inquirer at a local Barnes & Noble. The cover story was “Evaluating 50 Years of Bigfoot Evidence” by researcher Benjamin Radford. I got the magazine and in six short pages Radford had disabused me of any notion that Bigfoot might exist. A final encounter with marine biologist Richard Ellis’ book Monsters of the Sea (1994) on a trip to the library convinced me that sea serpents and lake monsters were also likewise nothing more than figments of mankind’s imagination. My fascination with cryptozoology now thoroughly deflated I redirected by interests back towards world mythology and folklore; a path which eventually led to me obtaining two degrees in Religious Studies and teaching in the field.

I didn’t think much more about cryptozoology during my time in college with a few exceptions. In grad school I took a class on the paranormal in American culture and had to read the book Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture (2011) by Christopher Bader, Frederick Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. Baker. I ended up having a lot of issues with the trio of scholar’s methodology – for example the fact that they seemed willing to accept certain claims made by cryptozoologists at face value such as the idea that Native American lore is full of descriptions of Bigfoot-like creatures: it isn’t – but one point they do make and make well is that the kind of spin-doctor treatment employed by Keel when writing about the Mothman is rampant within the field of cryptozoology and goes all the way back to its very founders.

As mentioned at the top, the coining of the term cryptozoology is generally ascribed to either Bernard Heuvelmans or Ivan T. Sanderson. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1911, Sanderson attended Cambridge University where he obtained a BA in zoology and later an MA in both botany and ethnology. For a while Sanderson worked as a science popularizer penning articles and appearing on TV with live animals. However, beginning in the 1940s Sanderson developed an interest in the paranormal in general and cryptids in particular – especially Bigfoot and the Yeti – and began writing about such topics fulltime; mostly for pulp-style men’s adventure magazines. As detailed by Joshua Blu Buhs in his book Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (2009), while Sanderson certainly seemed to believe that Bigfoot and the Yeti existed he nevertheless didn’t hold most Bigfoot eyewitnesses in high regard, which is to say nothing of his low opinion of his fellow Bigfoot researches. Despite such misgivings however Sanderson knew what his reader’s did and didn’t want to hear and as a result spun stories in which less than reputable eyewitnesses became upstanding citizens, crazy sounding sightings were reworked into more feasible narratives, and credulous cryptid hunters became competent men of action.

In 1948 one of Sanderson’s articles on the possibility of living dinosaurs caught the attention of Heuvelmans; a Belgian-French zoologist who had earned his PhD from the Free University of Brussels studying mammal dentition. Like Sanderson, Heuvelmans became enraptured by the idea of cryptids and spent the rest of his life writing articles and books on the subject. Two of these books, On the Track of Unknown Animals (1955) and In the Wake of Sea Serpents (1965), were especially influential and worked to establish what would become the overarching methodology of all cryptozoologists. The first of these, employed in On the Track, is what paleontologist Darren Naish has dubbed the “prehistoric survivor paradigm.” Simply put this approach advocates that when attempting to identify an alleged mystery animal the first route one should take is finding a prehistoric animal which superficially matches the description of said mystery animal and proclaiming it the creature you’re looking for. Application of the “prehistoric survivor paradigm” is widespread in cryptozoology with Bigfoot and the Yeti being identified as Gigantopithecus – an extinct species of giant ape similar to an orangutan from Southeast Asia –, sea serpents and lake monsters being dubbed extant plesiosaurs, pliosaurs, mosasaurs, Pleistocene era whales like basilosaurus and in the case of cryptozoologist Dennis Hall a long necked Triassic era reptile known as tanystropheus, supposed giant Thunderbirds being claimed as either pterosaurs or surviving members of a clade of large North American vultures known as Teratorns, and legendary African dragons being seen as evidence of living dinosaurs. In one remarkable case Heuvelmans even proposed that the Australian cryptid feline known as the Queensland Tiger might be an extinct species of marsupial known as the thylacoleo. Thylacoleo means “pouch lion” but the lion part of the name is metaphorical not literal since in life the thylacoleo would have looked more like a giant wombat then a tiger.

The problem with the “prehistoric survivor paradigm” should be self-evident. Namely that the animals in question are extinct, in most cases by many millions of years. Proposing that a supposed mystery animal is a relic from some bygone era is a bit like a detective assuming that a mugger who a witness describes as being a tall Caucasian male with dark eyes and a beard must be Abraham Lincoln simply because he matches certain aspects of the witness’s description. Cryptozoologists of course love to point to the case of the coelacanth; a Cretaceous era fish believed extinct until living ones were discovered in 1938 in the West Indian Ocean. However this prehistoric fish is something of a red herring. It is one thing to lose track of a fish in the fossil record. It is another entirely to claim that large marine and terrestrial animals such as dinosaurs could somehow survive for millions of years without leaving any evidence.      

In the advent that the “prehistoric survivor paradigm” should fail, Heuvelmans’ second approach was to simply makeup an animal. This is what he does with wild abandon in his In the Wake of Sea Serpents. Have an eyewitness who claims to have seen an animal swimming in the water with brown fur, a long neck and tail, webbed feet and a horse-like head? No problem! This is clearly a description of an unknown species of giant long-necked, long-faced otter! Heuvelmans does this throughout Sea Serpents going as far as to invent nine whole new species of undiscovered sea monster. As Buhs notes in his Bigfoot book, Heuvelmans appears to have operated under the peculiar belief that as long as one could describe an animal so that it sounded scientifically plausible then that was enough to assume that it likely existed! Modern cryptozoologists still operate under this rubric. Loren Coleman, the most prominent cryptozoologist alive today and curator of the International Cryptozoology Museum located in Portland, Maine, follows Heuvelmans’ example perfectly in his 1999 Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti, & Other Mystery Primates Worldwide co-authored by Patrick Huyghe and illustrated by Harry Trumbore. In this book, Coleman proposes the existence of a dozen different species of unknown hominid ranging from extant Gigantopithecus and Neanderthals, huge “devil-monkeys,” swamp dwelling Skunk Apes, fairy-tale style “True Giants” and even a type of semi-aquatic species of primate with webbed claws and spines which he believes may be responsible for reports of the chupacabra – who we will come back to shortly.

Despite the fact that Heuvelmans and Sanderson’s methods were scientifically unsound, scores of self-professed cryptozoologists continue to use them to this day. And as Benjamin Radford notes in his book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore (2011) whenever the claim that cryptids are merely cultural constructions is raised cryptozoologists immediately point back to the alleged eyewitness testimony: the bread and butter of cryptozoology. People don’t have eyewitnesses encounters with cultural constructs they say. Except for the fact that they do. Human perception and recollection is extremely unreliable. People get confused, forget, misremember, make mistakes and unknowingly fabricate details even about some of the most commonplace and important events in their lives. With regards to seeing something that isn’t really there, a classic example is the case of the escaped red panda of the Netherlands’ Rotterdam Zoo in 1978. After news got out that one of the zoo’s red pandas had escaped its enclosure hundreds of eyewitness sightings from across the country poured in. Suddenly people were seeing red pandas everywhere and anywhere. Eventually zookeepers found the animal and determined that it had not traveled outside the zoo’s immediate vicinity. How then does one account for the multiple eyewitness sightings of the animal? Merely that people upon hearing about the escaped red panda became primed and expected to see it and so did. This same phenomena happens when people travel to places like the woods of the Pacific Northwest or Loch Ness. Because they’ve heard the legend of Bigfoot and Nessie they now expect – even if only subconsciously – to encounter the monster and as a result any unusual sight or sound becomes the beast. This is what celebrated folklorist Bill Ellis refers to as “Legend Tripping.”

Of course in some instances people actually do see some animal they can’t identify, but then we’re back to the sandhill crane in Point Pleasant. A former colleague of mine, Alan Rauch who specializes in the area of animals and their representations in literature and popular-culture, often speaks about the issue of “animal illiteracy” among the general public. The simple fact of the matter is that most people are not particularly familiar with the numerous creatures that inhabit this planet alongside us outside of those few domesticated animals we keep as pets or on farms and those celebrity animals found in zoos and aquariums like lions, elephants, gorillas, giraffes, dolphins, whales, etc... And many are also unfamiliar with the full capabilities of many animals. For example, few people seem to know that bears can move about on their hind legs, that moose and deer are excellent swimmers or that alligators are adept at climbing. The issue of animal illiteracy is undoubtedly responsible for a great many alleged cryptid sightings as was demonstrated in 2010 when a video posted online of a great frigatebird was mistaken by many Americans as footage of a pterosaur!

Once instances of legend tripping and animal illiteracy have been removed the small numbers of supposed cryptid sightings that remain often tend to be so outlandish as to raise serious doubts about their legitimacy. A good example of this is the case of the original chupacabra eyewitness Madelyne Tolentino; a Puerto Rican woman with an interest in UFOs and conspiracy theories who claimed that she encountered a creature identical to the monster from the movie SPIECIES (1995, Dir. Roger Donaldson) which she had just recently watched. Not only does Tolentino claim that she encountered this creature but that she was able to observe minute details about its anatomy – such as a lack of genitals – even though she was a considerable distance from it and that it levitated and communicated with her telepathically. She also claims that this was only the first of two chupacabra encounters that she had with the second occurring while she was taking a taxi across town! Despite the fact that Tolentino claims to have had two other eyewitnesses with her at the time of her first encounter no one has been able to corroborate her story, though her husband did at one point claim he was in possession of “chupacabra slime” similar in appearance to the ectoplasm seen in the movie GHOSTBUSTERS (1984, Dir. Ivan Reitman) though he could never produce the actual substance for anyone to see. Radford, in his aforementioned book Tracking the Chupacabra, concludes that if Tolentino is not perpetuating a hoax then she is likely a victim of confabulation; a psychiatric disorder in which a person loses the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction as evidenced by Tolentino’s conviction that the monster and events from the movie SPIECIES are real. Of course, even the most dyed in the wool cryptozoologists realize how ridiculous a story like Tolentino’s sounds, and so in the tradition of Sanderson and Keel will judiciously edit the tale when relating it in books and articles on the chupacabra removing inconvenient details and instead making it sound as if Tolentino merely had an eyewitness encounter with a strange animal.  

In wrapping up, I want to talk about what renewed my interest in cryptozoology. As stated before, after the boom and bust cycle of my middle school years I didn’t think much about cryptids. I don’t regret the time I spent looking into the subject however because I love monsters and because I believe that learning about cryptozoology and then learning to recognize the flaws inherent in cryptozoological methodology as outlined above helped me to develop critical thinking and research skills that served me well as I began to peruse a degree in Religious Studies – an academic field where researchers are often confronted with many issues similar to those found in cryptozoology (i.e. the importance of primary source documents, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, the deliberate and accidental blurring of fact and fiction, etc…)

Then in 2010/2011 I discovered the podcast Monster Talk (tagline: “The Science Show About Monsters”) hosted by Blake Smith with co-hosts Karen Stollznow and, for the first few years, Benjamin Radford. As Blake has explained many times over the years the idea behind Monster Talk was to do a show on cryptozoology and the paranormal that amounted to more than just wide-eyed mystery mongering. To this end Monster Talk is firmly rooted in science and academic scholarship. Each episode focuses on a particular topic with special guests called in to speak on specific matters. These guests are not only fascinating to listen to but have also provided me with a wealth of new reading material including such books and papers as Robert E. Bartholomew’s The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America's Loch Ness Monster (2012), Robert Lebling’s Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar (2011), Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda’s Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide (2012), Christopher Josiffe’s article on Gef the Talking Mongoose, Joe Laycock and Natalia Mikels’ work on the connection between Nessie and Buddhism, and Brian Regal’s fascinating research on the history of the Jersey Devil. And now is a great time to be interested in critical approaches to cryptozoology too with multiple excellent books available. Two that come highly recommended are Darren Naish’s Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths (2017) and Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids (2012) by Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero.

To be clear, the aim of Monster Talk is not to ridicule cryptozoologists or those who believe or even just have an interest in such creatures but rather to try and separate history from legend and to do so with nary an ounce of cynicism about the subject matter. The hosts of Monster Talk are not doing this show because they think monsters are dumb. They clearly love monsters. It’s just that they believe (as I do) that it’s important to remain aware of where fact ends and fiction begins, and that often time truth is indeed far stranger than fiction.     

Blake Smith, “The Lie of Silence”