Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  Cryptozoology has the reputation of being part of a general pseudoscientific fringe—just one more facet of paranormal belief. Given Bigfooters’ humdrum appearance and attempt to portray themselves as serious scientific researchers trying to track down just another species of primate, it should not be surprising that they typically try to avoid any association with other paranormal beliefs, which they scorn as unscientific. Despite this sentiment, the dividing line between cryptozoology and the paranormal is unclear—and to some extent artificial.

  While cryptozoology need not be considered “paranormal” by all definitions (cryptids are usually conceived as flesh-and-blood creatures, not as phenomena outside known physical laws), it is difficult to avoid the association when such visible figures in cryptozoology as Ivan Sanderson and Jon-Erik Beckjord have also advocated for a range of other paranormal phenomena. More important, it is fairly common for cryptozoological testimony to include paranormal or supernatural elements—much more common than most cryptozoologists prefer to admit. “Paranormal folkloric entities, whether ghosts, vampires, or lycanthropes, are not cryptozoological,” insists cryptozoology micro-publisher Chad Arment,79 but Loren Coleman discusses modern American sightings of creatures with a “classic werewolf look,” which he includes in his book about Mothman—a UFO- and Men in Black–associated, flying, humanoid cryptid with glowing red eyes!80 Like Mothman, Bigfoot often has been described as having glowing red eyes or has been connected with other, even more mysterious lights, such as a luminous sphere carried in the hand or the glowing bronze light that rose from one Bigfoot’s hiding place in the woods and shot away into the sky.81

  The connection between Bigfoot and UFOs is especially strong. For example, Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph Baker discuss a well-known incident that occurred in the vicinity of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1973, in which two huge ape-like creatures with glowing green eyes allegedly appeared alongside a radiant white dome 100 feet in diameter.82 This is not an especially unusual report. In one 1974 case, two witnesses allegedly saw several Sasquatches in the vicinity of a bright red, hovering light that rotated like a police car’s beacon.83 In 1976, one man saw a Bigfoot in Montana and also spotted a hovering gray UFO half a mile away.84 In 1983, logger Stan Johnson claimed that a certain Bigfoot Allone of the Rrowe family of Bigfeet had explained to him that the Bigfoot Peoples are from the fifth dimension, where they originally lived on the planet Centuris. When Centuris was about to be destroyed, the Bigfoot Peoples were rescued by beings from the nearby planet Arice. They then lived happily on Arice until the rise of an evil ruler caused some of them to come to Earth during the last Ice Age. Here they competed with dinosaurs and rampaging cave dwellers. (This story has all the confusion of prehistoric events found in pop-culture entertainment like The Flintstones, as well as creationist chronology. Perhaps not surprisingly, Johnson also claimed that the Bigfeet pray “to God, and to Jesus Christ.”) There was a war on Earth between good and bad Bigfeet, both of which still live in remote regions of Earth.85

  Some Bigfoot followers claim that Sasquatches can vanish into thin air86 or that they are shape-shifters—or even that they are “paraphysical, inter-dimensional nature people that are profoundly psychic.”87 The late Jon-Erik Beckjord (a persona non grata among more conventional Bigfoot researchers) regularly appeared on radio talk shows, Today, and Late Night with David Letterman. During many public appearances, he asserted that Bigfoot is a shape-shifter that cannot be caught or shot and that can “manipulate the light spectrum they’re in so that people can’t see them.” Bigfoot uses its telepathic powers to sense the presence of humans, and it shares a “space-time origin and connection with UFOs and come[s] from an alternate universe by a wormhole.”88

  (Supernatural elements are not restricted to the subtopic of Bigfoot, but are found intertwined with the lore of, testimony about, and modern search for many cryptids. For example, a video of what was purported to be the Loch Ness monster that made global media waves in 2007 was shot by a man who also claimed to have filmed fairies.89 One of the top ten or so photographs of the Loch Ness monster was shot by a man who claimed to have successfully summoned Nessie using a team of psychics.90 Second in Nessie fame to only the Surgeon’s Photograph, Robert Rines’s “flipper” pictures were apparently captured with the psychic assistance of a local dowser.91 The vampiric chupacabra (goat sucker) is as much a part of UFOlogy as it is of cryptozoology. From fortune-telling mermen to Scandinavian lake serpents whose appearance foretells the rise and fall of royal dynasties, monsters and the supernatural have always gone hand in hand.)

  Many cryptozoologists are unhappy that the boundaries between their area of interest and other paranormal subcultures are so thin and so frequently crossed—so unhappy that some prominent cryptozoology portals do not permit any mention of the paranormal, even for the purpose of relevant comparison.92 The impulse to sanitize away the monster literature’s supernatural elements is very old; even classical authors attempted to demythologize the lore of fabulous animals. Such selective filtering can lead, warned folklorist Michel Meurger, to “gross distortion” of the very testimony on which cryptozoology depends in the first place.93 But it is easy to sympathize with cryptozoologists who refuse to entertain “any ludicrous paranormal, occultic or supernatural viewpoints when discussing the nature and origins of such animals” when they know all too well that “it is hard enough making a case for [cryptids] as flesh and blood biological entities without having to deal with quasi-scientific nonsense.”94 It is a difficult situation: skeptics justifiably complain when cryptozoologists sweep the supernatural aspects of cryptid testimony under the rug, and yet skeptics also justifiably complain that cryptozoology is not sufficiently scientific (as we are about to do here once again). How are cryptozoologists supposed to be taken seriously or to aspire to any sort of scientific rigor when they are lumped together with believers in ghosts and Atlantis and alien abduction? As Aaron Bauer and Anthony Russell put it: “Cryptozoology as a science suffers from an image problem. Many critics regard cryptozoology as the bailiwick of the fringe element, of credulous individuals with no real credentials as scientific researchers. Certainly, the field does attract a disproportionate number of adherents whose interests tend toward the bizarre, and even to the supernatural.”95

  Nor are cryptozoology’s problems limited to poor public relations. The fact is that cryptozoology has deep and ongoing challenges of focus and quality control. These challenges are not lost on cryptozoologists themselves, as we see in a stinging editorial from John Kirk:

  No other scientific field sees the kind of half-cocked, pseudoscientific babble that cryptozoology seems to produce…. Once you jettison science, the whole field of cryptozoology collapses into a pit of speculation and conjecture…. We get to the finish line when we have completed a thorough and exhaustive examination of actual tangible pieces of evidence which are utterly irrefutable. This is the standard that applies to all other areas of science be they mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry or biology. Nothing else is acceptable. Now please … keep your “skepticals” on.96

  Richard Greenwell was another among those who pushed cryptozoologists to raise their scientific standards and look more critically at the evidence. For example, he was skeptical about a photograph of the alleged monster of Lake Champlain and was not even sure that it shows a living thing.97 His article on the black cat of Puerto Penasco debunks the myths that had grown around a story about a huge 5-foot-long black panther in Mexico.98 Throughout the ISC Newsletter, he sprinkled quotes about the importance of science and the philosophy of science.

  In 1985, Greenwell published an influential article in which he suggested a classification scheme for unknown animals—from the conventional creatures that are discovered and named every year to the extreme cryptids that most scientists reject. His classification scheme has seven categories: I–IV, which include animals that are known and described; and V–VII, which contain creatures that are unconve
ntional. For instance, animals in category IV are known taxa that may survive, even though they are thought to be extinct in historic times. As examples, Greenwell gave the White-winged Petrel and the marsupial thylacine (which is known as the “Tasmanian wolf” or “Tasmanian tiger” and appears on the coat of arms of Tasmania).99 The petrel was thought to be extinct but was rediscovered, while the last known thylacine died in a zoo in 1936 and wild Tasmanian tigers have not been seen since. These animals are unremarkable, since there is physical evidence that they existed—in the form of the petrels themselves and the last tigers in the zoo—and most scientists would consider it surprising but not shocking if the thylacine still survives.

  But then Greenwell made the error of false equivalence of categories. Category V includes animals that are known from fossils, but may have survived into historic times. For a precedent, he gave the coelacanth, and then claimed that the plesiosaur fits that category, too. This reasoning may also include the alleged dinosaur Mokele Mbembe as well as Bigfoot or the Yeti as a surviving Gigantopithecus—but by any classification system, the existence of one “living fossil” does not imply the survival of another. Coelacanths live in very deep water in only a few areas along the perimeter of the Indian Ocean (from South Africa to Indonesia). Given how rare they are and how seldom they come near the surface, it is not surprising that they were not found until 1938. But plesiosaurs were surface-dwelling, air-breathing reptiles that lived in the tropical waters of the epicontinental seas and the Tethys Sea during the Cretaceous period (144–65 million years ago), and it is extremely unlikely that any survive. Not only is it geologically impossible that lakes like Loch Ness harbor them, but the excellent fossil record of marine vertebrates of all sizes, from seals to whales, includes not a single plesiosaur fossil in any rocks younger than 65 million years. Greenwell made a serious error in conflating the idea that just because coelacanths were first known from fossils, any extinct creature can conceivably have survived into the present. Some prehistoric survivor-type cryptids would be harder to overlook than others, in either the living world or the fossil record.

  Despite Greenwell’s attempts to raise the scientific standards of cryptozoology, it continues to be performed as it has always been performed, and its methods leave a lot to be desired. Almost any piece of evidence, no matter how weak or incredible, is taken seriously, and eyewitness accounts are given much more weight than modern psychological research shows they deserve.100 As geologist and cryptozoology critic Sharon Hill explained,

  I’ve researched and published on why amateur investigation groups fail to reach the high bar of science. I see these groups doing what I call “sham inquiry.” It sounds sciencey, it looks sciencey, and it can fool a lot of people into thinking it’s scientific but there are clear reasons why it is not. “Sham inquiry” is about the process and why the results they get out of that process are inferior to scientific inquiry.

  The primary problem … is that cryptozoologists, by and large, assume that a mystery creature is out there for them to find. They begin with a bias…. They are not testing a hypothesis but instead seeking evidence to support their position…. They also begin with the wrong question. Instead of “what happened?” they ask “Is it a cryptid?” …

  Some are worse than others, for sure. I admire many so-called cryptozoologists…. I don’t admire when the basic ideals of science are ignored—good scholarship in research, quality data collection and documentation, proper publication, skepticism, and open criticism. Instead, the bulk of popular cryptozoology is a jumble of the same old poor-quality evidence, a ton of hype, rampant speculation and unfounded assumptions, even conspiracy theories, and, too often, paranormal explanations.

  I want to make two clarifications. First, amateurs and non-scientists CAN do science. And, second, cryptozoology CAN be a science. But right now, I don’t see that occurring often. It takes a lot of effort to do this and resources that the average enthusiast does not have. Too much is missing to call cryptozoology a science at this moment in time.101

  If its adherents want cryptozoology to be taken seriously as true science, rather than as pseudoscience or “sham inquiry,” they have to begin to play by the rules of real science. At a minimum, they must

  • Rethink their fundamental assumptions: As Hill pointed out, in response to an odd occurrence or sighting, the cryptozoologists’ first thought is: Is it a cryptid? or, worse, Is it cryptid X? But they should start several steps back, and ask the more basic scientific question: What really happened? One of the most powerful rules of science is Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the best, because it involves the fewest leaps or assumptions. Generally speaking, it is a good idea not to invoke additional “what if” forces or factors or creatures unless the evidence really demands it. Real scientists do not try to force the data to fit their expectations and biases, but consider all hypotheses that explain the circumstances and rule them out, one by one. This is neatly captured in another aphorism that has long been favored in medical circles: “When you hear hoofbeats in the night, think first of horses, not of zebras.” Almost every cryptozoological “observation” or bit of “evidence” can be plausibly accounted for by simple explanations that involve animals and phenomena that we know to be real, such as bears, boat wakes, and practical jokes. Cryptozoologists tend to preferentially and prematurely discard these simpler explanations in favor of the more desirable, less parsimonious assumptions that support their views.

  • Test the null hypothesis: Related to this point is a concept in science that comes from statistics: the null hypothesis. Most statistical tests begin with the assumption that the null hypothesis is true and indicate whether there is enough evidence to reasonably reject it. Applied to testable scientific claims (for example, plesiosaurs live in Loch Ness), the null hypothesis is that the hypothesis formed by the researcher is not true or that the effect or animal or relationship hypothesized does not exist. In an experiment, a researcher might treat one group of subjects differently from another group to determine if the treatment makes the groups different in another way. For example, he might leave two slices of bread in the sun for several hours, covering one with plastic wrap, and then compare the amount of mold that grows on each. The null hypothesis is that plastic wrap will not affect the amount of mold that grows. However, if the researcher has a good reason to think that it should and there is significantly more mold on the covered slice than on the other, he can reasonably reject the null hypothesis.

  Applied more generally, the null hypothesis is that what we know about the world is accurate. We continue to accept that hypothesis until we have sufficient evidence to reject it in favor of an alternative hypothesis. In other words, the default scientific assumption is that any strange observation can be explained by known natural causes; the less likely explanation—cryptid activity or paranormal phenomena—should be accepted only when all natural causes can be ruled out.

  • Meet the burden of proof: In the sciences, most conventional ideas require only modest evidence to show that they are reasonable. But the more extreme the idea, the greater the burden of proof required. As Marcello Truzzi said, “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof,” and Carl Sagan echoed, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”102 The evidence needed to support the claims of cryptozoologists does not have to be as “extraordinary” as that required to overturn the germ theory of disease, for example, but it must be sufficiently strong and solid to overcome the long history of failure of all organized attempts to find any cryptid or any part of any cryptid. It follows from the claim that eyewitnesses fairly often see cryptids that carcasses or bones of those cryptids should also fairly often appear—but they do not. The absence of physical remains is not just a lack of evidence for cryptids, but strong positive evidence that hypothesized cryptids do not exist. This evidence against cryptids could be overbalanced by robust evidence for cryptids, but that would take more than easily faked footprints, inconsisten
t “eyewitness accounts,” or inconclusive photographs or videos.

  • Collect high-quality data: There is still no credible physical evidence in the form of carcasses, bones, hair, or other biological samples to support the claims for the existence of cryptids. This is the barest minimum that scientists demand to establish the existence of any cryptid (or any new animal species). Even crisp, high-resolution photographs or videos are merely suggestive (when those are available, which is rare in a field that gives us the cliché of the distant, blurry “blobsquatch”). Cryptozoologists take eyewitness testimony, which is subject to error, far too seriously, while simultaneously failing to be serious about how they collect that testimony. They tend not to take sufficient care to question stories, even when those stories are clearly false; they fail to quarantine prize evidence that is associated with known hoaxers and to disclose when evidence is so contaminated; and they often exaggerate or misreport accounts when they compile them. It is far too rare for cryptozoologists to do the necessary hard work of consulting primary documents or of interviewing witnesses and double-checking their stories for consistency and cultural bias, which Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell discovered in their investigations of a number of purported cryptids.103 When they do interview witnesses, they may often lead the witnesses to desired testimony.

  • Publish work that meets scientific standards: Scholars and scientists like Darren Naish, Leigh Van Valen, Christine Janis, Colin Groves, and Adrienne Mayor not only regularly publish mainstream academic papers, but also occasionally write articles on topics of interest to cryptozoologists (such as the possibility of prehistoric animals having survived into the historical past and influenced human mythology) or on the chance of presumedly extinct creatures, such as the marsupial thylacine, having held on in remote areas of the world. These scientists publish their papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and their work exhibits the appropriate degree of skepticism and caution. Most cryptozoologists, however, write only for their like-minded audience, publish in their own journals and on their own Web sites, and make no effort to write high-quality papers with proper documentation that could be accepted by a mainstream science journal.