Flashback/forward: America Goes Cryptozoology Crazy

My recent talk at the Hibernian Hall in Watertown, Massachusetts, October 18, 2008. It apparently served as a warm-up for a few people, for my talk a week later at the Museum of Science, Boston; some folks came to both. Photo credit to Michael Esordi of Bigfoot Surplus.

I gave my first slide lecture on cryptozoology in 1969. Of course, I have since moved on to PowerPoint treatments. In the last few years, I’ve shown my illustrated talks to many audiences, from business groups to school classrooms. Now, there’s a new place for cryptozoology in the museum auditoriums of North America, I’m happy to observe.

Indeed, some of my recent museum appearances have been at the American Museum of Natural History, the Rubin Museum of (Himalayan) Art, the Royal Alberta Museum (three times), and in the last week, twice at the Museum of Science, Boston. The lines to get in to my presentation on October 29th in Boston were phenomenal, and I thank Lisa, Monica, and Jen for organizing that amazing event.

There were 300 seats available, and by the time my talk began, all of those were filled and there was standing room only. I was overjoyed to greet so many fans and friends of my work and the topic. The crowd was so electric, I joked with the folks there that the rumor that Obama was coming was false, and it was just me talking for the evening. 🙂

The people at these events have been generous with their remarks and excited by cryptozoology. It has been very rewarding for me.

Besides Cryptomundo and my books, the new museum acceptance can be directly traced back to Bates College Museum of Science’s and the Kansas City Art Institute’s 2006 exhibition of Cryptzoology: Out of Time Place Scale, with my keynote at Bates in 2005.

As a flashback and an indicator of the future that was to be revealed, here is Mark Baard’s Wired article that says it all, “America Goes Cryptozoology Crazy” from November 1, 2005:

Lewiston, Maine — As a cryptozoologist, Loren Coleman rarely gets to play the straight man at meetings with his fellow scientists.

“I had to put up with people saying, ‘Oh, you’re the one who believes in little green men,'” said Coleman, a writer and academic who investigates Bigfoot and other folkloric monsters.

But at a weekend symposium called Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale at the Bates College Museum of Art here in Maine, Coleman says he feels quite normal.

Maybe that’s because he’s surrounded by artwork featuring depictions of Bigfoot as a hairy lesbian, subterranean reptilian humanoids and cave people wearing Viking helmets.

Coleman was keynote speaker at an exhibition of artwork inspired by his quest for proof of mythological creatures.

The point of the Bates symposium, said the museum’s director, Mark Bessire, “is not to legitimize or de-legitimize cryptozoology, but to find where it intersects with (art and popular culture).”

It’s a hot topic at the moment. Though the art exhibit is relatively small, popular culture is currently going cryptozoology crazy.

Coleman noted the television networks’ fall prime-time lineup is chockablock with shows such as Lost, Invasion and Surface, all of which have cryptozoological themes running through them. He said in recent weeks he has been busy doing hundreds of TV and radio interviews.

The media’s renewed interest is partly due to the recent discoveries of the “hobbit” remains on Flores Island in Indonesia and the giant squid photographed by Japanese scientists, Coleman said. But mythological creatures are also a diversion from the Iraq War, corrupt politicians and the deteriorating environment.

Not everyone in the media takes Coleman seriously, however. Coleman told the symposium’s audience that he had to turn away a TV reporter because he learned that the reporter worked for a comedy show that planned to ridicule his research.

Cryptozoology has been taking its knocks since the discovery of Neanderthal man in the 19th century.

Many mainstream scientists at the time insisted the remains of Neanderthal were actually those of a sick or deformed human, said Coleman.

But the greatest blow to cryptozoology came when Texas oil millionaire Tom Slick, a major backer of Yeti expeditions in the Himalayas, died in a mysterious plane explosion in 1962. “When that plane exploded,” said Coleman, “all of the funding for serious cryptozoological research disappeared.”

Like artists, cryptozoologists draw upon local legends and sightings of fantastical creatures by fishers and hunters. Mainstream zoologists typically laugh off these stories as superstition, Coleman said. “Often it’s a form of racism that causes scientists to reject these stories,” he said.

But such legends — like those about a prehistoric fish, the coelacanth, or the Indonesian hobbits — sometimes turn out to be true, Coleman said. And when that happens, these creatures leave the realm of cryptozoology and enter zoology.

But zoology’s gain can be art’s loss. Artists sometimes take discoveries of once-mythological creatures as a disappointment.

“I’m happy they’ve found the giant squid,” said artist Sean Foley, who is participating in the cryptozoology exhibition at Bates and another at the Kansas City Art Institute. “But now I have to fantasize about something different.”

Coleman said he is comfortable with the liberties artists have taken with his field of study, and does not see their work as damaging to cryptozoology. He is more concerned with the influence pop-culture movies can have on eyewitness accounts.

“Whenever I go to investigate a sighting,” Coleman said, “one of the first things I ask is, ‘What’s playing at the local drive-in?'”

If you would like me to talk to your group, whether a museum, public or private organization, please contact me at [email protected]

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

Email • Facebook • Twitter •