May 22, 2009
I get emails. People write me often.
But anonymous emails with no contact information do not help.
Beside the fact they could be hoaxes or wild goose chase missives, informants with identities are important. To get into a community, especially one that is closed and/or extremely close-knit, I need contacts, even if carefully de-identified ones in the public record, not just hints of what’s happening. Reports are only as credible as the people sharing them, remember.
As an extreme example, let me share an anonymous email received yesterday:
“I live on the White Mountain Apache Reservation, where there has been many sightings of Bigfoot. However, there are sightings of other things. Since I was a child there has been sightings of small men that live in the mountains, goat man, giant snakes that make noise like cows, and many other things. I wish to stay anonymous, due to secrecy. But maybe you can research it. Fort Apache reserve. Look up the reservation, the huge snake has been seen and heard by many people! It sticks to the ponds and rivers! You’d be surprised by all the stories and evidence you can collect here.”
No return email, no name, no phone number, nothing attached to inform me whom the sender is.
I can Google “Apache” and “giant snake,” of course, and find tales, as well as the next person, like this one:
Arizona. Early in this century a 14-footer lived in the Huachuca Mountains along the Mexican border. It had the unpleasant habit of slithering after prospectors, running them into their cabins and laying siege to them. The size and behavior of this snake suggest it may have been a descendant of the Apache snakes that once infested this area. Apache shamans would talk giant snakes into ambushing whites.
Sports Illustrated, October 21, 1974.
Or I can research such things in books such as Boss Snakes: Stories and Sightings of Giant Snakes in North America by Chad Arment.
But my gosh, if someone wants me to come to their area and investigate, hopefully, they would leave contact info.
Also, I am part Indian, and I respect that First Peoples’ reservations are not exactly open to strangers coming in and poking around. Contacts are important as far as keys to deeper information, not just moments that will be remembered only as “let’s-tell-the-cryptozoologists-good-stories.”
🙂 Thank You.
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.
Filed under Bigfoot, Conspiracies, Cryptotourism, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoologists, Cryptozoology, Eyewitness Accounts, Folklore, Giant Cryptid Reptiles, Sasquatch