Richard Greenwell (1942–2005) did not have a doctorate in any field relevant to cryptozoology (but received an honorary doctorate late in his life), although he did research on living mammals and published papers on mammalogy in peer-reviewed journals. He held the position of research coordinator for the Office of Arid Land Studies at the University of Arizona. Most of his time, however, was spent writing about cryptids and joining expeditions to find them. As one of the co-founders of the ISC, he was largely responsible for maintaining the ISC Newsletter and the journal Cryptozoology from 1982 until 1996, when they ceased publication. More than any other prominent cryptozoologist, Greenwell tried to rein in the rampant speculation and unscientific aspects of cryptozoology. In several articles, he proposed the establishment of rigorous standards for cryptid research. Despite his efforts, the ISC had financial problems and folded in 1998.
The final major figure among the founders of cryptozoology was the Scottish zoologist Ivan Sanderson (1911–1973), who is often credited with coining the term “cryptozoology.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology and master’s degrees in botany and geology at Cambridge University, and was truly an accomplished field zoologist, with many discoveries to his credit. Despite his credentials, Sanderson resented the academic zoologists with doctoral degrees who did not take his work seriously. Sanderson also apparently served as a spy for the Allies during World War II, using his cover as a field zoologist to gather information for British intelligence. He spent much of his career as a major media figure, doing interviews about wildlife and field zoology, first on the radio and then on the early television talk shows; writing articles for popular magazines; and publishing books about his exploits. But early in his career, he not only argued that cryptids were real, but wrote books and articles on a wide variety of other paranormal phenomena, such as the Yeti, UFOs, Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle, and other “vile vortices.”28 Cryptozoologists are fond of pointing to Sanderson as a true field biologist who believed in cryptids, but he did almost all his fieldwork in the 1920s (as a teenager) and 1930s, when very little was known about many parts of the world and few major biological surveys of remote regions were undertaken.
Historian Brian Regal details the stories of a number of the other prominent figures in cryptozoological research, a few of whom were formally trained in fields of study relevant to their work in cryptozoology.29 They include Grover Krantz (1931–2002), who was an accomplished anthropologist with expertise in human hand and foot mechanics. But he also spent most of his time obsessed with Bigfoot, which (as Regal documents in detail) caused tremendous problems at Washington State University, where he was a professor. Some of his troubles, however, were self-inflicted: he was notorious for his feuds not only with fellow academics, but also with other Bigfoot researchers; his writings were problematic because he failed to cite evidence to support his assertions; and his late work was rejected because his research was outdated, not taking into account the discoveries in genetics and fossil primates that made the existence of Bigfoot less and less probable. As Joshua Blu Buhs showed, Krantz also became more and more a gullible believer and less and less a critical skeptic of the bad evidence as his commitment to Bigfoot increased. He proclaimed that he could unerringly distinguish real from fake Bigfoot tracks—and then a source sent him a “track” that Krantz proclaimed as real, only to have its source show that it was another clever hoax that had taken very little skill to produce.30 As Buhs and Regal describe it, Krantz retired from Washington State in 1998 an embittered man, as both the credibility of Bigfoot in the scientific community and his own standing as a scientist had plummeted.31 He died still proclaiming that he had an infallible way to show that Bigfoot was real—rumored to involve fingerprint-like “dermal ridges” in Sasquatch tracks32—but refused to disclose the secret.
Almost all the “old guard,” who founded and nurtured the “golden age of cryptozoology,” as Regal called it,33 are dead or inactive, and scientists who lent their names to the board of directors of the ISC are dead or very old. Even as early as 1993, cryptozoologists were being called an “endangered species.”34 The ISC is extinct—along with its journal, newsletter, and Web site—because it suffered from perpetual financial problems, the journal issues were often years late, and the field never expanded with more scholarship, as all professional societies must. With the death of the ISC, cryptozoology no longer has a formal professional organization with the pretense of serious scholarship. Loren Coleman still keeps one Web site active,35 and many other sites are maintained by fans of Bigfoot and Nessie. A few cryptozoologists are in major academic positions, like Bigfoot advocate Jeff Meldrum at Idaho State University, but as both Buhs and Regal point out, much of the academic energy and scholarly force of the ISC and its supporters has vanished, and the field is once again the domain of amateurs.36
At the same time, the heart of the cryptozoological enterprise may be changing. The rise of skeptical cryptozoological scholarship by academics—including folklorist Michel Meurger, classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor, and paleozoologist Darren Naish—suggests a path forward for a kind of “post-cryptid cryptozoology”: a folkloristic cryptozoology that investigates animal-themed mysteries without any particular expectation of discovering new species.37 Like other areas of fringe science, the value and energy of amateur cryptozoological scholarship may depend on neglect by professional scholars. In that sense, the call for greater attention from mainstream academics may be self-destructive to cryptozoology, with the arrival of professionals displacing both the popular voices and the working assumptions that so far have unified the cryptozoology community.
Another side of the cryptozoology movement has a motive utterly opposed to that of the academically inclined researchers who wish to bring more science to cryptozoology: the creationists who wish to use cryptozoology to bring science down.38 One cryptozoology Web site lists among the biographies of famous cryptozoologists those of such creationists as William Gibbons and Kent Hovind.39 Creationists are the major players in the search for Mokele Mbembe and other cryptids said to resemble prehistoric reptiles, not because of their curiosity about nature, but because of their mistaken belief that the discovery of such cryptids will overthrow evolutionary biology. As Gibbons puts it,
The very idea of dinosaurs—those “terrible lizards”—still living in some remote corner of the world today threatens to evoke sidesplitting laughter from the modern paleontologist…. Yet, there are a few dissenting voices within the scientific community, although often marginalized, that beg to differ—and for good reason.
According to conventional evolutionary wisdom, the last of the dinosaurs became extinct over 65 million years ago during a period known as “the great dying.” … So teach the colorful books and science publications that have shaped the thinking of the generations since Darwin. However, is this really the case?
Throughout history, over 200 cultures around the world have left us with a rich and detailed record of monstrous creatures that they knew as “dragons.” … From such evidence as the Behemoth of Job 41 to the historical records of 16th century England, and present-day eyewitness accounts, I propose that dinosaurs, or at least creatures that look remarkably like them, are still very much with us today in the dark and remote recesses of our modern, fast-paced world.40
This conviction is absurd and shows no understanding of science. To begin with, it is not difficult to find dinosaurs surviving into the present day. There may be some in your backyard right now. They are called birds. If additional groups of surviving dinosaurs (or of other prehistoric reptiles of interest to cryptozoologists, such as plesiosaurs or pterosaurs) were discovered in Loch Ness or the Congo Basin, they would just be additional, late-surviving descendents of groups known from fossils. There are many such “living fossils,” including the coelacanth, three genera of lungfish, the horseshoe crab, monoplacophoran mollusks, trigoniid bivalves, and lingulid brachiopods,41 not to mention sharks, crocodiles, and turtles. Further such dis
coveries would only cause paleontologists to reassess why those creatures did not leave a more complete fossil record, not overthrow the enormous body of evidence that evolution occurred (and is still occurring). The creationists are openly anti-scientific, trying to overthrow not only evolutionary biology, but paleontology, astronomy, anthropology, and any other field that conflicts with a literal reading of Genesis.42
The credentials of the creationist cryptozoologists are even less credible in field biology than are those of most amateur cryptid hunters. Gibbons has a degree in religious education from a seminary, and Hovind promoted untruths about the fossil record and evolution from his pulpit in Pensacola, Florida. He even had the gall to call himself Dr. Dino, even though he knows nothing about paleontology and his “doctorate” is from a purely religious school that does not even pretend to be able to grant secular academic degrees.43 His dissertation is a short paper that contains no original research, but does include numerous errors in spelling, citation, and reasoning.44 Dr. Dino’s methods finally caught up with him: he was convicted of tax evasion in 2007 and was sentenced to ten years in federal prison.45 The presence of such creationists in the cryptozoology community further damages its chances of being taken seriously as a legitimate field of scholarship.
WHY DO PEOPLE BELIEVE IN MONSTERS?
Roy Mackal, Bernard Heuvelmans, Richard Greenwell, Ivan Sanderson, Grover Krantz, and Karl Shuker are exceptions among cryptozoologists. They were among the few who had formal science education and training, even though most of them did not have training in a science that is specifically relevant to cryptozoology. What about the rest of the people who believe in cryptids? What can be said about them beyond the anecdotal descriptions of the Bigfoot subculture that begins this chapter?
Before looking further at the psychology of cryptozoology, let us briefly consider the wider topic of paranormal belief—“paranormal” being the umbrella under which cryptozoology is typically placed. (This is a widely adopted and, we think, useful convention, but it conflicts with standard definitions of the word “paranormal” as meaning something like “inexplicable by or incompatible with current science”—in effect, supernatural or outside physical law. By that standard, homeopathy should be considered paranormal, for example, while more classic “paranormal” subjects like Bigfoot, Atlantis, and UFOs should not. Sociologists tend to define the paranormal as beliefs and experiences that are “dually rejected—not accepted by science and not typically associated with mainstream religion”—or those ideas unified by the distinction that “traditional science regards their existence or validity as so improbable as to be all but impossible.”46 By these latter definitions—or by the even simpler “stuff you’d see on The X-Files” rule of thumb—cryptozoology is a paranormal topic.)
Rigorous, large-scale studies have been conducted to determine what the population of the United States as a whole, and what kinds of people in particular, think about paranormal subjects. Well-known examples include the series of polls of paranormal beliefs conducted by the Gallup organization since 1990 and the Baylor Religion Survey, which is a huge data set of answers to multiple-choice questions collected since 2005 that looks not only at religious and paranormal beliefs, but also at the demographic data behind them. These very broad surveys are complemented by in-depth studies of specific populations of paranormal believers, such as the psychologist Susan Clancy’s experimental work with people who believe that they have been abducted by space aliens.47 Across the board, the evidence indicates that the clichés about the fringe nature of paranormal belief are wrong: paranormal beliefs are not at all uncommon; they are not restricted to people who are socially marginalized; nor are they a sign of low intelligence or poor mental health.
It is important to understand that essentially everybody believes in things that scientists consider to be either unproven, implausible, or demonstrably false. When polled about even very short lists of ten or so ideas selected from the hundreds of paranormal and pseudoscientific notions critiqued in the skeptical literature, large majorities of the population readily affirm that they hold one or more of those paranormal beliefs. In 2005, Gallup’s survey found that 73 percent of American adults affirm at least one paranormal belief from a list of ten; 57 percent believe in at least two of those ideas; and 43 percent believe in three or more.48 These numbers are not unusual, but are consistent with other findings. In Paranormal America, a book based on the Baylor Religion Survey data, sociologists Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph Baker discuss their similar finding that most Americans agree with one or more items from a short list of paranormal beliefs:
Outside the halls of the academy a broader stereotype is often applied to paranormal believers—people who believe in or have experienced the paranormal are “different.” People who do not believe in the paranormal are perceived to be normal; those who believe in paranormal topics are considered weird, unconventional, strange, or deviant.
There is a big problem with this simplistic assessment—believing in something paranormal has become the norm in our society. When asked if they believe in the reality of nine different paranormal subjects including telekinesis, fortune-telling, astrology, communication with the dead, haunted houses, ghosts, Atlantis, UFOs and monsters, over two-thirds of Americans (68%) believe in at least one. In a strictly numerical sense, people who do not believe in anything paranormal are now the “odd men out” in American society. Less than a third of Americans (32%) are dismissive of all nine subjects. What this means is that distinguishing between people who do and do not believe or experience the paranormal is increasingly less useful. Rather, people may be more readily distinguishing [sic] by how much of the paranormal they find credible.49
The demographics of paranormal belief in general and of any given belief in particular naturally vary with those factors that you would expect, such as age, sex, education, religion, political party affiliation, and income—but not necessarily as you might expect. For a counterintuitive example, respondents in the Baylor survey who identified themselves as adhering to “no religion” were considerably more likely than evangelical Protestants to affirm a belief in haunted houses.50 Other predictors were perhaps more surprising, such as marital status and cohabitation: marriage predicts less involvement with the paranormal, while cohabitation predicts more. Married people claimed fewer paranormal beliefs than unmarried, and when asked whether they have had any of five paranormal experiences (such as consulting a psychic, using a Ouija board to contact spirits, or spotting a UFO), unmarried respondents claimed about two such experiences, while married respondents claimed less than one on average. But cohabitating people held almost twice as many paranormal beliefs as non-cohabitating people.51
Among gender differences, women were more likely than men in general to affirm belief in the paranormal ideas included in the Baylor survey—twice as likely to accept mediumistic communication with the dead, psychic powers, or astrology. Men held greater levels of belief in only one item: the claim that “some UFOs are probably spaceships from other worlds.”52 Why this should be is a matter of considerable discussion and speculation. “Women tend to want to improve themselves, to become better people,” suggested Bader, who is also a director of the Association of Religion Data Archives. “Men tend to want to go out and capture something, to prove it’s real.”53 However, women respondents in the Baylor survey were also more likely than men to accept the existence of cryptids—a finding that flies in the face of stereotypes about cryptozoology—although men followed close behind women on this item (as well as in belief in Atlantis). We recommend caution about jumping to conclusions about the role of gender in paranormal belief. The effects of gender vary with the year of the survey and the age of the respondent; and, as we explore further in the case of cryptozoology, the demographics within each paranormal subtopic are more complicated than they appear.
Pop culture stereotypes might lead us to mistakenly anticipate some correlations that turn out not to exist
in the Baylor data. Rather than paranormal-ism predicting isolation from mainstream activities (or vice versa), the Baylor researchers found “no evidence that involvement in conventional activities deters belief in the paranormal.” Involvement in one or more cultural organizations, fraternities, trade unions, sports, or civic or service groups had no discernable impact on the number of paranormal beliefs a respondent held or the number of paranormal experiences that person reported. Regardless of community involvement, people affirmed their belief in an average of about two of the paranormal items included on the survey.54
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