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Where the wild things are
Topic Started: Jan 10 2009, 10:30 PM (199 Views)
XNavyGunner
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Gunner

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 (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 Wolf Man (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 yak 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?

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.' "

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Isis
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The Goddess of Darkness & Desire

I'm starting to wonder if they are ever going to find prove that BF is real... "bigfoot"
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Isis, The Goddess of Desire & Darkness. In The Darkness, We Find The Light.

This is a Drama Free Zone..!
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