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Late one night many years ago, my sister was driving home through the leafy roads of South East England when a strange animal bounded into the headlights of her car and swiftly disappeared into a hedgerow. She was certain, she said, that it had been a wallaby—despite the fact that the kangaroo relative was native to Australia and Papua New Guinea and decidedly not native to Oxfordshire. Our reaction was about what you’d expect from a British family: politely skeptical. It had been dark, the encounter fleeting, and the human brain is decidedly fallible. Surely, then, she must have been mistaken.

My sister would eventually be vindicated when the existence of wild wallabies in the UK was confirmed and even captured on film. Yet, her experience isn’t too different from those who claim to have encountered cryptids, creatures whose existence remains a matter of debate. Yeti, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster are only the beginning; a small but committed community of cryptid hunters is dedicated to proving the existence of doubted beasts like the Mongolian Death Worm, the Honey Island Swamp Monster, and the Skunk Ape. 

This is not a quest without victories. In the early 20th century, tales of a fearsome giant lizard living on an inhospitable island in Indonesia were dismissed as folklore until Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek, an impressively named Dutch lieutenant stationed on nearby Flores Island, investigated and returned with a photograph of the now-famous Komodo Dragon. Other animals to make the switch from supposed myth to firm reality include the duck-billed platypus, the giant squid, and the okapi (or forest giraffe).

Nevertheless, although attitudes may be slowly changing, cryptozoology—to give the field its proper name—is still considered a pseudoscience. So why do cryptid hunters continue to put their reputations on the line, and what other legendary beasts might we discover to be not so legendary after all? In an age when species extinction has reached alarming proportions, perhaps this quest to discover new life carries extra poignancy. The articles collected below offer tantalizing insight into both questions.

Desperately Seeking Mothman (Tara Isabella Burton, The Hedgehog Review, May 2020)

There’s so much to enjoy in this wonderful piece by Tara Isabella Burton, which provides both a fascinating overview of the history of cryptozoology and an insightful exploration of the psychology that drives it. Burton writes with compelling flair, drawing links between our enduring desire to uncover the undiscoverable and the perceived decrease in mystery and magic that has accompanied the modern age. She argues convincingly that interest in cryptids ties into our innate, if often subjugated, wish to believe in something “other,” something beyond the confines of a rational, predictable world. 

Burton also explores cryptozoology as reflected in what she describes as its “parallel and opposite”—the rise throughout the Renaissance of the Wunderkammern, a room kept in any learned gentleman’s house dedicated to the documentation and categorization of scientific specimens. I would go even further and argue that modern cryptozoology occupies a unique place between the realms of science and the magical. Ultimately, it’s a pursuit that hinges more on faith than logic. Yet, it also seeks to move a subject from imagination into reality. Would we be happier if Bigfoot were proven to exist? Or would it fade into the everyday, the commonplace, the explainable, to finally become something less than it ever was? Such are the questions that this excellent article engenders.

Like its Enlightenment-era forebears, contemporary cryptozoology is rooted in that same hunger for strangeness, and for an enchanted world. It’s telling that the contemporary iteration of the phenomenon saw its first major resurgence during the wider postwar optimism of 1950s—when Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, often lauded as one of the forefathers of the field, published On the Track of Unknown Animals in 1955. (Heuvelmans also coined the terms cryptozoology and cryptid.) Featuring entries dedicated to the abominable snowman and Nandi bears alongside examinations of platypuses and gorillas, Heuvelmans’s book celebrates the potential of a world teeming with creatures the scientific record has not yet ossified into fact.

“The world is by no means thoroughly explored,” Heuvelmans writes in his introduction. “It is true that we know almost all its geography, there are no more large islands or continents to be discovered. But because a country is on the map it does not mean that we know all about its inhabitants. There are still more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy.”¹ Neither technological progress nor scientific expansion can expunge the delightful possibility that the abominable snowman (or Bigfoot, or the Mothman) might well be out there.

When Edmund Hillary Went in Search of the Yeti (Tom Ward, Atlas Obscura, February 2022)

This gripping tale takes us back to Nepal in 1960, and Tom Ward’s evocative prose does a splendid job of outlining the atmosphere that gripped a world still coming to terms with the repercussions of two devastating global wars. As Ward points out, one inadvertent result of the conflicts was that the public was used to hearing news from lands once considered intimidatingly remote, setting the stage for this first-class adventure story, which captured the imagination of people the world over. All such stories need a hero, a larger-than-life figure of courage and daring, and New Zealand mountaineer and philanthropist Sir Edmund Hillary fit the bill perfectly.

Seven years earlier, Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, a feat for which Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Coincidentally, news of the climber’s achievement reached England on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.) Prior to that, Hillary had served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II as a navigator on Catalina amphibious aircraft. 

But in 1960, the mountaineer found himself on quite a different mission. Rumors of the existence of the Yeti (a.k.a. the Abominable Snowman) date back centuries, if not millennia, and Hillary was well aware of the Sherpas’ belief that such a creature truly existed. Nowadays, the Yeti has become a B-movie staple, slipping into the “enjoyable nonsense” category alongside the Loch Ness Monster. Not so in 1960; Hillary’s was a well-funded and highly skilled expedition that marked the passing of a more credulous and mysterious time.

When the race to conquer Everest heated up in the 1950s, so too did the number of alleged yeti sightings. Western audiences were hooked, eager for news of this evolutionary hangover halfway between man and beast. Perhaps it was comforting to think that there were beings beyond comprehension surviving at the ends of the wilderness and that, crucially, there were still enough wild places left to hold them.

He Asked the FBI to Analyze ‘Bigfoot’ Hair 40 Years Ago and Never Heard Back. Until Now. (Reis Thebault, The Washington Post, June 2019)

For all its reputation as a pseudoscience, cryptozoology relies on scientific methods to verify evidence, whether that be expert analysis of images and footprints or, as is the case in this story, DNA testing. This decades-spanning piece draws together two fascinating threads: the tantalizing possibility of uncovering undeniable proof, certified by the very gatekeepers who look down upon this field, and the stories of those who go to extraordinary lengths attempting to secure such a thing. 

Our protagonist here is cryptid hunter Peter Byrne, a man whose tireless questing since the 1970s has earned him a special place in the Bigfoot research community. While Byrne first encountered the legendary creature via bedtime stories as a child, his awareness blossomed into passion while stationed in India at the end of WWII; that’s when he met Nepalese people for whom the existence of Bigfoot was a given. Over his lifetime, Byrne has undertaken five expeditions into the Himalayas, spending a total of 38 months in the mountains.

It would be churlish not to admire such dedication, but cryptid hunting is a high-stakes game: struggling for funding while working in a maligned field, all in hopes of one day vindicating your obsession and elevating your name to the history books. Back in 1977, Byrne rolled the dice, sending a sample of suspected Bigfoot hair to the FBI and urging them to test it. After four decades, the FBI wrote back. If you don’t want to know what happens yet, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

When Byrne arrived, he noticed the trees stood close together — far too narrow a space for something with broad shoulders and big feet to make a clean egress. And there, between three and five feet off the ground, snagged in the bark, he spotted the tuft of hair and piece of skin he hoped would bring him one step closer to his idée fixe, the sasquatch itself, a towering hominid of North American lore.

Chasing the Chupacabras (Asher Elbein, Texas Observer, October 2016)

Like many mass social phenomena, widespread panic comes in waves and can often affect communities and individuals in surprising ways. A single sighting of something strange or disturbing often snowballs into many more, with the story growing and mutating via a feedback loop, one fed by sensational media reports and eyewitnesses who are primed and nervous. Such situations are common and stretch back into recorded history. In early Victorian London, a mysterious creature who came to be known as Spring-Heeled Jack terrorized the night-time streets. In medieval Alsace, a bizarre “dancing sickness” spread throughout the city. In possibly the most famous example, a strange being dubbed Mothman haunted 1960s Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Among followers of paranormal news, there’s even a name for such events: flaps.

At their heart, such events are more about human psychology than hard science, and are no less fascinating for it. For proof, let us turn to the mid-1990s flap around the Chupacabra, a doglike creature whose penchant for slaying cattle gave it a name rooted in the Spanish words chupar (suck) and cabra (goat). Stories of the Chupacabra persist, providing a fascinating example of how modern legends circulate and grow. Countless attempts have been made to document proof of this disturbing beast, and with many more surely to come. Asher Elbein’s excellent feature does a fine job of telling the tale.

But the chupacabra wasn’t always a resident of the Lone Star State, and it didn’t always look like a dog. In the 21 years since the first supposed sightings of the creature, it has been a spine-backed alien, a winged kangaroo or a goblin, a predatory monkey or an unusually ambitious mongoose. Only one facet of the tale has remained constant: The chupacabra is out there in dark thickets and empty deserts, and it wants your livestock.

The Devil Went Down To Jersey (Frank Lewis, Philadelphia City Paper, October 1997)

Journalist Frank Lewis has a rich tapestry of material to draw from in this piece about one of our most enduring cryptids. The Jersey Devil (sometimes known as the Leeds Devil) likely originates in the legends of the Lenape, an indigenous people whose historical territory ranges across the northeastern United States. The Lenape called “it” M’Sing—a mysterious deer-like creature with leathery wings. The beast owes its modern twist to pre-Revolutionary America, and a popular folktale concerning a woman named Jane Leeds (often referred to as Mother Leeds) who, after discovering she was pregnant for the 13th time, cursed the child, which transformed into a strange, twisted and winged creature following its birth. By the early 19th century, the legend was ubiquitous throughout New Jersey. In 1859, the Atlantic Monthly published a detailed and evocative account, and waves of sightings continue to this day. (As do pop-culture portrayals: like many of the other creatures on this list, the Jersey Devil became the focus of a popular X-Files episode.)

What fascinates here is that such tales persist, transmitted from generation to generation, despite the rise of scientific skepticism. Perhaps in part that’s due to our need for community, and therefore communal stories and myths, which have traditionally brought people together and fostered a sense of collective belonging. But can that explain why New Jersey residents continue to have close encounters with the Devil? Whatever you might believe, this splendid article is full of sumptuous detail and quotes drawn from across the long life of Jersey’s own cryptid, and will surely have you chasing down further articles in search of answers.

The nearly 6-foot-tall beast stood no more than 3 feet away from her front bumper; she couldn’t see its feet, that’s how close they were. Its fine coat was all one color, a light brown or beige, like a camel, but it had the forward-leaning shape, short front legs and long, thick tail of a kangaroo. Short, rounded horns sprouted from its head, small wings from its back. To this day, she can’t fully describe the face; the expression was almost human.

“It looked right at me,” she says. “He just looked like a sad little thing. I felt sorry for it, whatever it was.”

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
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Katya Cengel | The Atavist Magazine |November 2023 | 1,709 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 145, “The Truth Is Out There.”

Bruce Champagne stood in a small clearing next to a stump. It was mid-November 2022, and snow was already visible on the nearby mountains. All around Bruce were stands of reeds known as phragmites, some so tall they reached well over his head. Just a short walk away, through a swampy area, was the western edge of Utah Lake.

Bruce, a retired cop in his sixties, had come to this no-man’s-land to research a mysterious sighting. A few years back, an elderly couple living in a house on a nearby bluff saw something they couldn’t explain. The couple refused to recount their experience over the phone, so Bruce visited them at their home in Saratoga Springs, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City. They told him that they went into the backyard one day because their dog was barking. Not far away, near a stump in the field behind the house, they saw a figure. A creature.  

It appeared to be six or seven feet tall. It was dark, hairy, and humanlike. The creature stood up, paused, then walked away, disappearing into the reeds. The whole thing lasted three or four seconds.

After he heard the couple’s account, Bruce measured the distance between the backyard and the stump. It was 60 yards, a range at which, Bruce knew, the couple would have been able to see the contrasting shades of clothing or skin. But they said that the creature was uniform in color. Bruce also noted that it was May when the sighting happened, which is when carp spawn in Utah Lake. Perhaps the animal, whatever it was, had been feeding.

Now Bruce was weighing whether it was worth placing game cameras in the area. He’d installed them at dozens of sites over the previous decade; a blue dot marked each location on a map on his computer. He told me that retrieving data from the cameras, usually after 30 days or so, felt like Christmas morning. Except in this metaphor, Bruce’s gifts always turned out to be socks and underwear. He spent a lot of time watching footage of deer and squirrels, because the cameras never caught what he was looking for: the relict hominoid Sasquatch, popularly known as Bigfoot.

Bruce considers himself a cryptozoologist, someone who searches for and studies animals whose very existence is disputed. Unlike some of the more eccentric types in the field, Bruce is organized and methodical. He has published papers every bit as dry as those in other areas of study—they just happen to be about relict hominoids, sea serpents, and lake monsters.

His specific obsession with Bigfoot began when he was a kid, more than 50 years ago. In fact, it was right around the time his father disappeared. Bruce is reluctant to allow that the two things might be connected, but it’s hard to see it any other way.

Bruce hasn’t looked for the truth about what happened with his father nearly as hard as he’s looked for Bigfoot. Still, the truth keeps finding him and his family. Over the past five decades, revelations about a man who left home one day and never came back have taken Bruce and the rest of the Champagnes by surprise—again and again and again.

1.

Bruce’s parents met in the Navy. Alan Champagne, the oldest of five from an East Coast family, joined up right out of high school. Lynn Marie Brown enlisted after a brief stint in college studying art. An eccentric young woman who loved science fiction, especially Ray Bradbury, Lynn was 19 when the couple married. After several more years in the Navy, including a posting in Japan, Alan and Lynn settled in Bakersfield, California, a sprawling city of oil wells and orchards populated by the descendants of dust bowl migrants. It was where Lynn had grown up.

Alan found work in the communications sector and then as a probation officer. He attended and graduated from college while working. Lynn took care of the children. There were four boys—Bruce, Brad, Brian, and Barry—and one girl, Deirdre, whom everyone called DeeDee. The boys all had the same middle name: Alan.

Bruce was the oldest. His dad took him shooting, and Bruce used his father’s Winchester 12-gauge. Once when they went fishing at a bass pond, Alan oared out in a rowboat to dislodge a fish his son had caught when it became tangled in some underwater weeds. He could have cut the line, but Alan wanted to make sure Bruce saw the fish he’d caught.

Alan also liked to fish in the ocean. Bruce didn’t go on longer fishing trips, like the one his father scheduled in the late winter of 1972. On Friday, March 10, Alan drove two and a half hours from Bakersfield to Morro Bay, a small community about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was meeting a group of friends who worked in law enforcement; they would be gone for the weekend.

Morro Bay got its name from the 576-foot volcanic plug sitting at the mouth of the narrow channel connecting the bay to the Pacific—morro means “snout” in Spanish. The harbor, completed in the 1940s, was a popular launch point for recreational fishing and boating. But there were times, especially in winter, when big swells made navigating the foggy channel treacherous.

According to the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol logbook, word that Alan’s fishing trip was in trouble reached shore at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday. Someone reported that they’d heard a voice calling out for help from a sandspit stretching like a spindly finger up the bay’s western edge. The voice belonged to 15-year-old Steven Stranathan. The boat he was on that morning had capsized.

Steve had been excited to embark on his first fishing trip with a group he called “the guys.” It included Steve’s stepdad, Jack Stranathan, 58, a deputy sheriff and veteran of the Navy and Coast Guard; Joseph Boydstone, 64, a doctor at a Bakersfield jail; and Harry Morlan, 58, and Irlan Warren, 39, both probation officers like Alan, who at 32 was the youngest of the adults aboard.

Steve would later remember kneeling next to Alan just before the accident happened. They were on the cabin deck of a boxy, 28-foot leisure craft made by a company called Land N’ Sea. It was part boat, part travel trailer. It belonged to Jack, who was down below steering. The vessel was more than a mile south of the entrance to Morro Bay and a few hundred yards from the sandspit. The seas were rough. As the boat battled the waves, Steve joked to Alan, “Well, if we go, at least we’ll go laughing.”

The next thing Steve knew it was dark. The boat had split in two and capsized, and he was in the water trying to swim. The cowboy boots his stepdad had mocked him for wearing on the boat were dragging him down. Steve kicked them off, then wriggled out of his Levi’s, flannel shirt, and parka—everything but his underwear. He swam toward the surface. The water got brighter, then brighter still. Steve wondered if he’d make it. Just as he felt sure his lungs would explode, his head burst out of the water.

Steve saw his stepfather floating lifeless nearby. He also saw Harry Morlan clinging to the engines at the stern of the overturned hull. Steve and Harry managed to swim to the sandspit, where another body had washed up: It was Joseph Boydstone. Steve dragged him from the surf.

Soon a Harbor Patrol boat arrived. By 9 a.m. the Coast Guard cutter Cape Hedge was conducting a shoreline search of a five-mile area. Rescue personnel found debris from the boat: two fenders, a canopy. Irlan Warren was also found, alive. Irlan said that after being flung into the water, he swam to the surface. Sometime later, he was able to grab the boat’s propeller shaft and wait for rescue.

The only man unaccounted for was Alan.

At 10:57, an Army helicopter was dispatched to the scene, followed by one from the Navy. By 11:05, a Coast Guard plane had arrived. The pilots made low passes along the ocean side of the sandspit but found nothing.

Meanwhile a dozen firefighters and harbor patrolmen headed toward the white and yellow hull, which by then had beached. Scattered among the driftwood and kelp on the sand were ripped sections of fiberglass, a yellow seat cushion, and a paper plate. Using axes, a crowbar, and a power saw, the men cut a hole in what Land N’ Sea claimed was a “virtually unsinkable” boat. Someone reached into the boat’s cabin and pulled out a leather sandal and a gray plastic box. The crew shone a flashlight inside but couldn’t get a clear view. A rescuer was lowered headfirst into an opening, but if Alan’s body was inside he couldn’t see it.

The Navy tried to flip the hull upright. A rope was slipped under the bow and the other end was attached to a chopper. Three times an attempt was made to lift the wreckage, without success. Shovels came out, and men loosened the sand around the hull. On the fourth try, the helicopter was able to lift the hull and then slam it back down, right side up.

It was now 12:40. The tide was coming in, the ocean lapping at the men’s ankles. From the hull they pulled a waterlogged suitcase, a pillow, and a dented teakettle. Scouring the beach once more, they found a sleeping bag and a tabletop. But there was no body.

There never would be. Which was strange.

“We do have probably a disproportionate amount of accidents out here just because the coast is rough,” said Eric Endersby, who recently retired as director of the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol. Endersby didn’t work the 1972 rescue, but he knows the history of the bay as well as anyone. He said that boating accidents resulting in death are rare. But what’s even more unusual is someone disappearing after a wreck. “If somebody’s lost in the surf, even if they sink, they eventually wash in just because all the wave energy pushes them,” Eric said.

“In my thirty years,” he continued, “we’ve never not recovered somebody.”

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

I spent this morning exploring The Museum of Unnatural History in Washington D.C. Fueled by the likes of Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman and Paul Simon, the museum is the storefront for 826DC, which holds workshops and tutors local kids in creative writing and reading. A venue combining my fascination with cryptozoology, contemporary literature, and teaching kids to write? Sounds positively mythical.

But I’ve been fascinated by cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, since middle school; I devoured Paul Zindel’s Loch and Reef of Death. In college, I read that essayist and poet Wendell Berry’s daughter, Mary, said, “I hope there is an animal somewhere that nobody has ever seen.  And I hope nobody ever sees it.” A week ago, Dan Harmon, creator of “Community” proposed to his fiancé at Loch Ness. And today I admired stencils of chupacabras and jars of unicorn burps. Cryptozoology reveals all the best and worst parts of human nature, and it makes for great storytelling.

1. “The Private Lives of the Cryptozoologists.” (Martin Connelly, The Morning News, March 2013)

Step into the cabinet of curiosities: The International Cryptozoology Museum is in Portland, Maine. It’s stuffed with artifacts ranging from a taxidermy Bigfoot to children’s drawings to blurry photos. It’s staffed by sweater vest-clad Loren Coleman, a foremost authority on cryptozoology and a wonderful tour guide.

2. “Bigfoot.” (Robert Sullivan, Open Spaces Magazine, 2012)

Sullivan interviews several of the men most invested in finding Sasquatch; these profiles read like entries from a delightful almanac. Though their methods range from field work to anthropological study, these men share a rivalry with each other and anger toward the scientific community’s contempt for them.

3. “Dr. Orbell’s Unlikely Quest.” (Eric Karlan, All About Birds, Winter 2004)

Cryptozoology isn’t only Bigfoot and Nessie. These scientists are also interested in animals thought to be extinct. Here, Eric Karlan delves into Dr. Geoffrey Orbell’s triumphant search for the Takahe—a bright, flightless, stocky bird native to New Zealand, supposedly gone forever–which took over 40 years of scrupulous research in the face of naysayers.

4. “Loch Ness Memoir.” (Tom Bissell, Virginia Quarterly Review, August 2006)

With weird, wonderful humor, skeptic Tom Bissell explores Loch Ness with two writer friends and his childhood love of Nessiteras rhombopteryx.

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Photo: JD Hancock