"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?
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.' "
