Big Birds Or Not?

Yesterday, I too hastily said some things about Ken Gerhard’s new book without having the time to fully develop what I meant. I removed that blog, and then later saw that cryptozoologist Chad Arment disagreed with me, a bit, that’s fine, about our different world views of cryptozoology. Chad also took the opportunity to use my vanished blog to have at me. I actually think that is great, as I need to be pulled in sometimes, especially when a book puts me in a bad mood and I go too global. I did not mean to throw Ken’s book into the trashbin of pseudo-cryptozoology books written by certain authors who shall remain nameless. So anyway, I caught myself, and see it got a good blog out of Chad about Ken’s book.

Hey, I was wrong to post what I did without fully stating my thinking at 5 am in the morning. So Chad rightfully has posted a more favorable review of Ken’s book, along with comments addressed to some thoughts I too quickly expressed about “standards.” The Crookston Bigfoot delivery is happening today, so I don’t have time to yet clearly unfold what I wish to expand on regarding the kind of cryptozoology books being published out there. But let me reframe, at least, a longer look at Big Bird! Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters, and do a more considered review of a few things that trouble me about this book. But first, specifically via extracts from Chad’s blog, I want to let Chad Arment have time and space here to say some positive things about Ken’s book:

Ken Gerhard, whom I have met and know as a fine person, has written this new book of his with title “Big Birds!” The name of the title is not about anything originally under Ken’s control, as early media reports from Texas, which Ken studied intensively since 2003, labeled the sighted cryptid with large leathery wings, as a “Big Bird.”

It is well-known my interpretations of these specific reports are that they are bats, not pterosaurs and pterodactyls. But I think Ken and I might agree that what was seen along the Mexico-Texas Rio Grande border in the 1970s were not birds.

In the introduction by Jon Downes (who also was the publisher via The Centre for Fortean Zoology Press) starts by mentioning the Owlman reports from the United Kingdom, and then he immediately tells us the creature is “too fantastic to be a bona fide flesh and blood animal.”

These Owlmen are members of the netherworld “zooforms” of the CFZ, Downes has written often, cryptids that are inhabitants of another dimension that come visit us here on our plane. Of course, I have to point out that Owlmen may be “too fantastic” because they are simply Doc Tony Shiels’ merry hoaxes, which is even what the prankster Doc has alluded to.

Next Downes, going down the same path Bernard Heuvelmans did, restates Ivan T. Sanderson’s sighting of something large flying at Sanderson as he finds himself floundering in the middle of a river, during the 1932-1933 Percy Sladen Expedition to the Cameroons. Was this a giant bird? Definitely not, thought Sanderson, but we don’t learn this detail from Downes, who misses the chance to help the reader along with a reframing and defining of where this book is going. Downes is more interested in telling us about how Gerald Durrell was inspired by this passage, and how Downes’s trip to the USA resulted in his meeting Gerhard, and his agreeing to publish this book.

After the book revisits and explores the Texas cases, Gerhard takes on the worldwide menagerie of the kongamato, ropen, chupacabras, Thunderbirds (leather-winged and feathery ones), teratorns, giant bats, Houston Batman, Owlman, Mothman, and more pterosaurs.

After the global review, Gerhard summarizes what he thinks of the “Big Bird” of 1976 Texas.

Reports of what was seen in Texas, except in some few cases which might have been merely misidentifications of known birds, more often talk of “bat-like” or “human-like” faces and leathery wings. Large bats, not pterosaurs, might be responsible, but to try to squeeze some kind of prehistoric reptilian bird out of these stories incorrectly labeled “Big Birds” seems a stretch.

Gerhard is to be congratulated for retracing the footsteps of previous investigators and breaking new ground. Jerry Clark was one of these people, as Clark did a major article for Oui after his March 1976 on-site fieldwork and interviews.

As Gerhard acknowledges, this material showed up in Creatures of the Other Edge, and begins Gerhard’s “Journey to the Outer Edge” section. (Sadly, while the case material in our 1978 book was new then, the Jungian premise of Creatures of the Other Edge, despite an almost immediate rejection 30 years ago by Clark and myself, lives on in the psychosocial “zooforms” of the CFZ. It only took years of cringing for Clark and me to mature enough to know that our data should outlive the theories, and thus we finally agreed to see the book republished in 2006.)

I am sure Gerhard’s book will and should join the ranks of new books on regionally investigated cases beginning to populate most cryptozoological book libraries, as well as some school book collections in the American Southwest.

It should, don’t get me wrong, and Ken did a good job recording and sharing his material. But the speculations that Arment does not like are what reframes and will define this book as one about pterosaurs – especially from that image that outweighs the title – on the cover. Perhaps Arment and I might run the white flag up and agree that if Ken stuck more to his case material and did better sourcing, instead of so strongly trying to make a case that flying reptiles from millions of years ago still lived in Texas, Ken would have written an excellent, instead of just a very good book?

Considering that Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson have written about some of these same subjects before, and how Jerry Clark’s firsthand investigations of the 1976 Texas events were published and republished in 1977, 1978, 1984, and 2006, I find the CFZ marketing of this book as “Ken’s scholarly work is the first of its kind” giving “evidence of a stunning zoological discovery ignored by mainstream science” is an unfortunate characterization. I don’t even think Ken would have come up with that promotional line.

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.

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