January 14, 2009

Where The Wild Things Are

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“Where the wild things are”

As our planet edges closer to the apocalypse, the escapist, fantasy world of cryptids is suddenly coming to life
By MIKE MILIARD | January 7, 2009 | The Boston Phoenix

“For every square mile that man has walked on the Earth, three hundred square miles exist that have never been touched by human feet — but MAY INDEED HAVE BEEN TOUCHED by the hooves, paws, tentacles, and horrid tongue-foot-pads of the CRYPTIDS.”

— John Hodgman

Venture out into the waters and woodlands of New England, and there’s a chance you’ll bump into “Champ,” America’s own Loch Ness Monster, who allegedly plies the muddy ripples of Lake Champlain. Or, perhaps, the Gloucester Sea Serpent. Or the Granite State Bigfoot. Or Connecticut’s Winsted Wildman. Dare you wander into the dark-woven forests of Maine or the eerie and unexplored Hockomock Swamp, smack in the middle of the Bay State’s allegedly supernatural “Bridgewater Triangle”?

You well may. After all, could what’s living in there be any scarier than what’s living out here? We find ourselves in a world where presidents swindle their countries into wars, governors shake down children’s hospitals, and con men abscond with $50 billion from their investors, many of them charities. Is it any wonder that some people spend hefty chunks of each day dreaming of a world inhabited by unseen creatures untouched by the mean banality of mankind?

Can it be a coincidence that the field of cryptozoology — literally, the study of “hidden animals” — has evolved from a discipline cloaked in shadows and pooh-poohed by science into a full-fledged pop-cultural explosion? In short: the world of late has gone cryptid crazy.

At the Museum of Science, the “Mythic Creatures” exhibit (on display through March 22) delves into the folkloric and ethnozoological aspects of cryptids, from the Kraken (Norwegian sea beast) to the Chupacabra[s] (Latin American livestock muncher). In Egleston Square, the 826 Boston writing center — a chapter of the San Francisco workshop established by Dave Eggers — disguises itself behind a think-tank named, fancifully, the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute. (Slogan: “We exist because he exists.”) Even Harpoon Brewery’s new line of high-octane beers is called the Leviathan Series — named for that gargantuan but seldom-seen creature of the lower depths.

That’s to say nothing of the new books by the likes of tweedy fabulist John Hodgman, a son of Brookline whose latest almost-true almanac, More Information Than You Require (Dutton), devotes space to discussion of the Pope Lick Monster and Mongolian Death Worm, and delves even deeper into the hollow-earth netherworld of the mole-men. Or the forthcoming Beasts! (Fantagraphics), which features stunning, full-color portraits of more than 90 cryptids, demons, and sprites — from the Ajattar (a grotesque Finnish dragon lady) to the Yuki-Onna (a cruel snow harpy from Japan) — by such comic book artists as Peter Bagge, Kim Deitch, and Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale.

Or the popular TV shows that revel in the unexplained — be they documentary (MonsterQuest, Destination Truth) or fantastical fiction (Lost, with its polar bears pawing through the jungle brush). Or Quatchi, the Sasquatch mascot of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games. Or even, we suppose, the politically disillusioned Minnesota citizen who, in this past fall’s US Senate race, given the choices Norm Coleman and Al Franken, preferred to vote for “Lizard People.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve seen an upsurge in pop-cultural references to cryptozoological creatures, be they in passing, like the “Bigfoot Lodge” featured in the new Jim Carrey flick Yes Man, or in blockbusters like the forthcoming remakes of The Wolfman (starring Benicio Del Toro) or The Creature From the Black Lagoon (with the redoubtable Bill Paxton).

Because, as the economy spirals downward, it’s worth remembering that it was during the tail end of that first depression (1941, to be exact) that Lon Chaney Jr. bristled his whiskers as the first Wolf Man — a “night monster with the blood lust of a savage beast!” — and allowed moviegoers to trade their real-world fears for screams on the screen.

“Cryptids are recession-proof,” says Loren Coleman (no relation to Norm), who lives in Portland, Maine, and is perhaps the world’s foremost promulgator of cryptozoological wisdom.

And it’s not just the big three. (Which, of course, are the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, and Sasquatch/Bigfoot.) Cryptids real and imagined are all around us. Consider the creatures who’ve set the Web abuzz just these past couple years: the body of the so-called Maine Mutant, splayed motionless in the tall grass; the Montauk Monster, washed ashore ingloriously on Long Island; the Georgia Bigfoot, gaped at by millions in his Styrofoam coffin; the Texas Chupacabra, glimpsed fleetingly across a highway patrolman’s dashboard.

Yeah, so what if each of those ended up debunked, either as a hoax or explained away as a more mundane animal? (Respectively: a black chow dog, a raccoon, a gorilla costume, a dog with mange.) Does that mean there are no creatures out there left to find? Certainly not. Why, just last month a whole host of never-seen but quite real beasties was discovered and identified by zoologists in the Mekong Delta, including 88 frogs, 279 fish, and the Laotian rock rat, which was thought to have been extinct for 11 million years.

“Cryptozoology is not the study of things that don’t exist,” says Jeff Belanger, a cryptid true believer and author of Weird Massachusetts (Sterling). “It’s the study of stuff we haven’t yet categorized or understood.”

In search of . . .

Even the most committed cryptozoologist might draw the line at keeping 50-year-old Yeti stool samples in his kitchen. Not so Maine’s Loren Coleman.

It all started for him one Friday night in 1960, when he stayed up late to watch a B-movie called Half Human. The film starred John Carradine as a scientist who (in footage that was spliced into a pre-existing Japanese mock-documentary) goes in search of the Himalayan Yeti. When it re-ran the next morning, Coleman watched it again.

“I went to school on Monday and asked my teachers, ‘What is this about the abominable snowman?’ They all said, ‘Don’t waste your time. Don’t read anything about it.’ ”

So he promptly did the opposite. Coleman pawed through every book and devoured every article he could find about the search for undiscovered or unsubstantiated creatures. He dashed off letter after letter to experts in the then-still-nascent field of cryptozoology. Within two years, by the time he was 14, he had corresponded with 400 people across the world. About that time, he also started doing some field work of his own, accompanying game wardens in his native Illinois “in search of black panthers and little apes and giant snakes.”

Five decades and dozens of books later, “It’s all just kind of happened,” says Coleman. “I’m seen as the leading popularizer of cryptozoology alive.” His Web site, cryptomundo.com, has racked up as many as two million page views in a month, and when he’s not writing or lecturing or appearing on innumerable radio and TV shows, he spends his days responding to sighting reports from amateur cryptozoologists around the globe.

Hair samples from Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1960 Yeti expedition may be the least remarkable artifact in Coleman’s modest but stuffed-to-the-rafters Portland home. Far more eye-catching is the eight-foot-tall Bigfoot, shaggy with taxidermized [musk oxen] fur, standing sentry at the front door. Or the grotesque half-monkey/half-fish “Feejee Mermaid” encased in glass behind his couch. Or the enormous pterodactyl-like “Civil War Thunderbird” suspended from the ceiling in his living room. Or the display case of a dozen or so hominid-skull replicas. Or the hefty blue fiberglass coelacanth fish hanging on the wall.

This coelacanth is the mascot for Coleman’s International Cryptozoology Museum, which currently exists in his home, but will hopefully soon — donations to the cause welcome! — occupy its own space in downtown Portland. It is also emblematic of cryptozoology’s successes. Once upon a time, after all, the coelacanth was a cryptid too — no one had ever seen one. It was thought to have been extinct for 65 million years. Then, in 1938, one was caught off the coast of South Africa. (Its discovery was the inspiration for the Creature from the Black Lagoon.)

Can it be very long, then, before Nessie or Champ finally takes its rightful place in the Kingdom Animalia?

THE BEATMASTER: Since getting hooked on the paranormal by a B-movie as a kid, Maine’s Loren Coleman has become one of the world’s leading authorities on cryptozoology.

Demon days

Coleman has always approached his field work — he’s chased cryptids in every state except Alaska, an omission he insists has nothing to do with Sarah Palin — with the seriousness and inclusive spirit of inquiry of a scientist. He studied anthropology and zoology at Southern Illinois University, but from a young age, he says, the plan was to “grow up and be a naturalist. Not a zoologist, not a mammologist, not a herpetologist — I was already thinking really broadly about being a naturalist.”

Even as he boned up on the hard science, he fed his head with the weird writings of Dutch-American parodist, provocateur, and “anomalous phenomena” researcher Charles Fort; the Belgian “father of cryptozoology” Bernard Heuvelmans; and the cryptid-credulous Scottish naturalist Ivan Sanderson. And, eventually, he took up their mantle.

A major milestone in that journey occurred on the nights of April 21 and 22, 1977, in Dover, Massachusetts, when, on three separate occasions, townsfolk claimed to have spotted a peach-colored homunculus with a huge, ovoid cranium — featureless but for two large orange-glowing eyes — crawling over a low stone wall and gripping trees with slender fingers.

Coleman, who was at Simmons College earning a master’s in social work at the time, used his skills in that area to interview the teenage eyewitnesses, their families, and members of the community, ensuring that he spoke to each before they returned to school from April vacation, before they could compare notes and “contaminate” each other’s evidence. The stories, more or less, were consistent.

“I did all those separate interviews and really was convinced that this was an amazing case,” he recalls. “I really believe they saw something real. What it was, I really don’t know. [But] it was one of the cases where I felt very comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

For a more fully fleshed-out account of the sightings and their aftermath, see the chapter on this topic in his excellent book Mysterious America ([Simon and Schuster] Pocket Books). But it’s safe to say that the Dover Demon was the first New England cryptid to gain prominence worldwide, and it still attracts interest today. (The Massachusetts demon is especially popular in Japan, and Coleman has two tiny action figures to prove it.)

As Coleman writes in the introduction to Beasts 2, the ’70s were “a time of ‘high strangeness.’ Was the world going crazy, or were humans only screening sightings of new cryptids through the lenses of a culture unbalanced by UFO contactees and planetary poltergeists? New animals were being discovered, of course, but weird and unlikely ones were reported, too. The world seemed open to anything.”

In fact, it’s not hard to notice a pattern of sorts. In dreary Depression-era days, people sought diversion in the black-and-white beasts flickering in the dark of matinees. The stultifying Eisenhower era found kids ogling lurid EC Comics titles like Weird Science and Tales From the Crypt. In the ’70s, marked both by wooly weirdness and Carterian malaise, folks went looking once more for things beyond their front doors. Now things are once again bad all over, and once again we detect a strong longing to believe.

The passion of the cryptid

The popular desire to collectively will mythological creatures into existence can sometimes leaves us vulnerable to those who just make up stuff. Frauds and hoaxes perpetrated by overzealous cryptid hunters have always bedeviled the field, says Coleman, undermining whatever claims to legitimacy other sightings might have. Then again, of course, to the doubting Thomases among us they’re the rule, rather than the exception.

But be you skeptic, agnostic, or true believer, it’s those fakers that get all the attention. “And you saw that,” says Coleman, “with Georgia this summer.”

Ah, yes. You may remember the two dudes down South this past July, who posted a YouTube video on which they claimed to have found a Sasquatch body in the woods. The media coverage was all-pervasive in the lead-up to an unveiling and press-conference, where, Coleman says, there were “100 reporters and 38 cameras and CNN live streaming.” Cryptomundo.com’s servers crashed as it was barraged by 23 million hits in 24 hours.

When the cryptid corpse was finally thawed in the glare of a thousand flash bulbs? The fur was synthetic and the feet were made of rubber.

Such hoaxes, alas, come with the territory, says Coleman. “I think ‘frustrating’ is too heavy-duty a word, but I think it’s a distraction. Certainly, for those people who may want to fund [cryptozoological studies], or do serious journal articles, it becomes a sidetrack that we don’t need.”

(Interestingly, Coleman says, many of the hoaxes are “repeat fakers,” who’ve had one actual cryptid encounter and end up staging more and more dubious claims to prove it. “It becomes very sad . . . a psychological need to prove to everyone that they weren’t crazy in the beginning.”)

Christopher Balzano runs the Web site Massachusetts Paranormal Crossroads (masscrossroads.com). On YouTube, there’s an entertaining video of his team’s supposed encounter with a Pukwudgie, a woodland troll of Wampanoag legend. But he nonetheless considers himself “a documentarian of things that people might otherwise ignore — I’m not out there trying to prove to anyone that anything exists.”

Still, he says, sometimes “the insanity, the passion with which [true believers] approach these things” gets a bit much. Many cryptid hunters, he says, are “kind of like addicts who are looking for that one perfect high.” Their quest “has a lot to do with physically owning something — the physicality of going out in the woods, and looking for something that no one else has seen.”

Meanwhile, Balzano makes a point to mention that investigators of the unknown, while they may enjoy escaping civilization and tromping through the untouched mystery of the Hockomock Swamp, aren’t immune from venality and factionalism that marks all mankind. “Make sure you mention that none of us get along,” he says. “Cryptozoologists think that paranormal investigators are crazy, and we all hate ufologists.”

BAFFLE HO– USE: Coleman currently runs the International Cryptozoology Museum out of his home, but hopes to move the collection to its own space in downtown Portland, Maine.

A reason to believe

While there may be infighting among the various “professionals” in the field, fans of the cryptid seem united in their passion for celebrating such extraordinary creatures as the Montauk Monster (whose furless, waterlogged flesh and beaky snout led some to surmise it was the remains of a griffin) and the black, hulking body of the Maine Mutant. The massive attention they receive on sites like Digg and BuzzFeed points to a populace that would rather read about the mysterious than the mundane.

And some cryptids are actually much less mysterious than we previously thought. At the Museum of Science’s “Mythic Creatures” exhibit, a few displays explain how some of history’s cryptids are simply misidentified actual animals that no longer exist. The legend of the Roc could be based on the fossils of the Aepyornis bird. Woolly mammoth bones were once mistaken for the femurs of giants. The Yeti could trace his ancestry back to the massive extinct primate Gigantopithecus blacki.

Whether humans ever encountered that ape is up for debate, but it’s known that one Aepyornis egg could feed an entire family, and it’s suspected that, as with so many other species, humans led directly to its extinction. As Hodgman reminds us in his new book: “What’s the most dangerous animal in the zoo? . . . The answer: man.”

We live in a world that is ever more covered over with “civilization” — strip malls and interstates and foreclosed exurbs. Where pockets of wilderness and intrigue are harder and harder to come by. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the possibility of a phylum of creatures beyond our ken would merit more than passing interest?

“We all love a mystery,” says Belanger. “Everything is catalogued and chronicled so much today that people sit back and say, ‘There must be mysteries left to solve. There must be creatures we still haven’t found.’ ”

Many people who read Cryptomundo religiously do so “because I bring excitement,” says Coleman. “I let them know that there are new animals being found. That people are seeing these creatures around the world. That there are expeditions going out, and films being made. They want to be part of an exciting part of the world, [one] that I certainly know is there.”

In the world of cryptozoology, there are, of course, varying levels of participation. “There are people that are fans, there are people that are researchers, and there are all those people in between,” says Coleman. “A lot of people really think they’re going to be the first one to take their cell phone and photograph Bigfoot. I don’t think it’s gonna happen that way. But I’m not out to discourage people, because there’s a sense of adventure in cryptozoology that’s really part of it. Who am I to tell someone that they’re not going to be the first person to find a new species?”

Into the mystic

It’s probably a safe bet that the hollow earth is not filled, as Hodgman contends, with legions of mole-men, “tending their glowshrooms, their bloodbeetle hutches, and the various under-creatures they [raise] for food, transportation, and companionship.”

But lumbering through the fetid bogs and atop the snow-swirled mountaintops of the surface world, the truth is out there. Somewhere. “I’m a believer,” says Belanger. “I think there’s something to the fact that these stories crop up all over the world, in various languages and cultures. They go back millennia. Really credible witnesses have documented this stuff. I just think there’s something to it.”

And if it’s easy to chide faithful cryptid hunters for being naive, Belanger points out, “debunkers and disbelievers are operating from belief systems as well — they’re assuming we know everything. Which, by God, we don’t.”

Coleman approaches each supposed sighting with healthy skepticism. Fully cognizant that pop culture influences cryptozoology — and vice versa — he always checks to see what’s playing at local movie theaters before attempting to verify each cryptid report.

In fact, he says, “when I go talk to a Bigfoot crowd, the first sentence I say is, ‘I do not believe in Bigfoot.’ I accept or deny evidence. You true believers over here, you’re very interesting, but that’s not me. You skeptics and debunkers, that’s interesting, too. But I really am the open-minded person in the middle.

“I’ve done a lot of screening, and excluded 80 percent of [the evidence] as misidentifications, hoaxes, or mundane. But there’s still that 20 percent of what I feel is unknown. There’s a lot of mysteries out there, and this one may interest you. Here’s the data. You decide.”

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Originally published online as a four-part piece at The Boston Phoenix, here.

For the visual slideshow, go here.

Filed under CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoologists