BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY
NO 47. THERE AIN’T NO SUCH ANIMAL
Hunting Monsters THE HIEROPHANT’S APPRENTICE
The author of this month’s essential reading lays his cards out early on: “Like many people, I became interested in cryptozoology because – as a much younger person – I originally thought it likely and plausible that such mainstays of cryptpzoology as bigfoot, the yeti, sea monsters and so on probably did exist. It seemed only a matter of time before physical remains would confirm their existence. Today, the complete absence of convincing evidence for cryptids – combined with possible explanations for claimed cryptid sightings – leads me to mostly regard cryptozoology as a hybrid subject that, while sometimes incorporating information from animals at its core, is more to do with how humans perceive and describe the world. There certainly are new animal species to discover, but the superstar ‘targets’ of cryptozoologists are almost certainly not among them. Bigfoot, Nessie, and the various other mystery creatures discussed in this book may well not be mystery creatures at all, but selfperpetuating cultural phenomena.” So that’s what it says on the tin...
Now, we have commended books of roughly this nature before, and no doubt will do so again if equally good ones come under our eye. This has irked some people. Someone on the forteana.org message board once even complained that the books on cryptids that we’d covered “weren’t really about cryptozoology at all”, although what else they might have been about escapes us faster than a rat scooting up a drainpipe. That puzzler aside, we can say that Darren Naish’s small-butperfectly-formed, and brilliantly, copiously illustrated Hunting Monsters will save you much time and a great deal of money, as it deals with all the virtues and flaws of such now-ridiculously-expensive classics of the genre as those penned by Bernard Heuvelmans, and a few more besides. By trade Naish is a palaeontologist, and a conservationist biologist, and may be taken to know whereof he speaks. Those with long memories will recall his presence at FT UnConventions, back in the day.
His first self-set task is to ponder whether crypozoology is actually a science. Insofar as it proposes hypotheses based on observations and other reliable data, and adjusts its ideas as new knowledge comes to light, he argues, it is scientific. Insofar as it draws unwarranted conclusions from scant or mistaken evidence, especially when that’s cherry-picked to suit a preconception, then it’s a pseudo-science. Looking across the whole field, it’s fair to say that there are cryptozoologists in both camps. Naish deals with both, evenhandedly, and with great tact; and amid this discussion you get a succinct and pithy history of the subject. And he is careful to say: “An interest in mystery animal reports does not... demand or require the ‘belief’ that the reports concerned describe encounters with unknown animals – maybe some other explanation exists.” So, we come back to the subject as “more to do with human behaviour and culture than pure zoology.” This could be called a psychosocial approach.
Chapter by chapter, Naish works his way through cryptozoology’s major fields of enquiry. Starting with monsters of the deep, and his first great heresy. He is distinctly underwhelmed by the ‘father of cryptozoology’, Bernard Heuvelmans, and his 1968 tome In the Wake of the Sea Serpents. Heuvelmans’s approach was, at the time, radical: he proposed that there were nine sets of species of ocean-going cryptids, judging from their reported morphology; and he abandoned the idea that those that resembled plesiosaurs and other large extinct creatures were survivors from prehistory – rather, he proposed that they were evolved descendants of the Great Extinct Ones. That at least made some of the reports more plausible. Close examination of Heuvelmans’s taxonomy makes even that moot, however, since it reveals not so much a meticulous ordering of cryptid genera as a right old shambles. Naish happily disassembles Heuvelmans’s too-frequent reliance on hoaxes and his arbitrary assignment of creatures to his chosen categories, which end up being markedly inconsistent, leading to their ultimate invalidity. His “most enigmatic” category is the “surreal” yellow-belly of tropical seas, “shaped like a gigantic’ long-tailed tadpole, and striped on its upper surface with dark bands”. This would appear to be alone of all its kind, and is based on one sighting, in 1876. Heuvelmans’s precise definition is somewhat undermined when Naish tells us that “the eyewitness [accounts] are hopelessly ambiguous, referring to a giant dragon-type or salamander-shaped monster suggested by some to be a giant turtle or ray”.
Naish seems to be covertly amused at Heuvelmans’s habit of giving fancy Latin scientific names to his alleged sea-serpents, but politely eschews the opportunity to make mock of a ‘core report’ of a super-otter seen in 1734. In 2005, Charles Paxton et al. concluded that what the witnesses saw was a “large whale, [with] its S-shaped penis that resembled a ‘tail’ perhaps reflecting the fact that this was a male in a state of sexual arousal.”
Of course, it doesn’t follow that an attempt at sea-monster taxonomy shouldn’t be made but, Naish remarks, “one of the most obvious aspects of sea monster accounts is their variety and lack of homogeneity. The picture that emerges is not of a specific number of well-demarcated unknown animals with particular traits... but of a hodgepodge of anecdotes relating to all manner of different things seen at sea.” And
people will persist in fitting something ‘unidentified’ that they see into pre-existing patterns, often unconsciously. Naish spends some pages dissecting the sighting of an odd animal spied from the Daedalus off Namibia in 1848. Commentary on this seems to have revolved mainly around two London Illustrated News drawings, which weren’t that accurate; the best bet, based on an eyewitness sketch, is that the animal was a sei whale, skim-feeding as they do. We report with relief that the condition and contours of its wedding tackle are unrecorded. Naish calls the encounter “pivotal”, because one of the most popular interpretations of the sighting was that it was a plesiosaur, a creature discovered only a couple of decades previously and high in public awareness. “If we combine these two cultural set-pieces... the result was a rise in the belief that people might see ‘living plesiosaurs’ when peering across the waves.”
Naish continues his chapter by offering rather more plausible, if not always incontrovertibly proven, mundane explanations for various creatures defended in the cryptozoological literature, and spends some entertaining time on various rotting corpses that have been claimed as anomalous. It’s almost surprising how many proclaimed ‘plesiosaurs’ turn out to be decomposing whales and sharks. And while he’s also honest enough to note when a case remains unresolved, he is at his deadpan best in regaling us with a number of modern hoaxes. Finally, he observes that fabled monsters seen cavorting in the waves on old maps weren’t meant to be taken real, at least not by the cartographers: they were mostly meant to warn unwanted visitors off, or warn seafarers that such areas were uncharted and thus potentially dangerous.
If we’ve spent so much space on sea monsters it’s because this chapter illustrates Naish’s systematic approach to the evidence that cryptozoology presents and, crucially, why it’s so fragile. His next (so to speak) port of call is lake monsters, more or less inevitably kicking off with Nessie. Following the unsung hero of Loch Ness research, Adrian Shine, Naish makes an interesting connection between an amphibious sauropod dinosaur featured in the movie King Kong and the Spicers’ description of what they saw in 1933. It’s known they had seen the movie. (The Spicers, incidentally, retailed more than one version of their sighting, with the dimensions of the ‘creature’ they saw tending to enlarge as time went by.) Naish rapidly disposes of claims that there was a tradition of Nessie sightings before the 1930s. Considering sightings and photographs since, Naish concludes from this collection of “hoaxes, tall tales and mistakes” that “there is no consistent biological signal emerging from that pool of accounts; and people engineer or construct monsters based on their preconceptions, pet ideas or influences.” Among which is a tendency to what he calls “creaturebuilding” – generating hypothetical evolutionary histories for all manner of animals from squids to giant seals, not forgetting the obligatory plesiosaurs, none of them supported by actual evidence. The story continues in like vein through other alleged lake monster reports in other countries (including a splendid hoax from Siberia) – problematic zoological rationalisations, inconsistent witness accounts, dodgy photographs, and plain ol’ pranks. His conclusion isn’t wholly original, but bears repeating: large bodies of water are both dangerous in fact and threatening psychologically. Legends of monstrous creatures in ‘bottomless’ lakes that harbour deadly whirlpools and never give up their dead serve to warn off the reckless, the immature, and the naïve, and encourage them to live to fight, or farm, another day.
And so Naish takes to dry land and the abodes of bigfoot, sasquatch, yeti and the like. He takes a good-humoured look at the claim of one Bob Hieronymus to have been ‘the man in the suit’ in the (in)famous 1967 Patterson–Gimlin film purporting to show a female bigfoot scuttling through the woods in northern California. Hieronymus’s claim to fame (he is but one of several claimants) is pretty leaky, which doesn’t get us any closer to who was in the suit. “This seems,” comments Naish, “to be an accolade worth striving for: saying ‘I was bigfoot!’ sure makes your life sound more interesting.” Professor of anthropology Grover Krantz made his own life more interesting – if less so to his academic colleagues – by endorsing the Patterson–Gimlin film and the reality of bigfoot, which he preferred to call sasquatch. Part of the problem was that the tracks on which Krantz based his conviction were consistently discovered by people who, as Naish delicately put it, were “associated with suspected hoaxes”. And their apparent resemblance to hominid footprints is an artefact of the way plaster dries. Among other problems. Naish becomes rather more light-hearted in telling the story of the Minnesota Iceman, allegedly shot in Vietnam. Heuvelmans, it’s irresistible to note, thought this stinking hoax was the real deal. Naish makes an important point, though: because of the authority of Heuvelmans and others, the Iceman created an archetype – with attendant expectations – that influenced other accounts and their interpretation, especially of ‘wildmen’ from Asia. A deeper archetype, he suggests, is that wildmen represent a ‘missing link’ between modern humans and wild nature, a reassurance we seek because civilised man is so estranged from the natural world.
The two-way trade between our culture, of which we are mostly unconscious, and reportage, anecdote, or even hoax, likewise underlies Naish’s treatment of such elusive entities as the bunyip, ropen, and the mokele-mbembe. Of the last he sensibly reminds us not to forget “the abilities of Congolese people to be clever hosts to their exotic visitors.” Irishmen and Scotsmen living near large lakes have probably developed a similar talent.
Darren Naish, Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, Sirius Publishing 2017.
“GOOD FRIENDS, GOOD BOOKS, AND A SLEEPY CONSCIENCE: THIS IS THE IDEAL LIFE.” Mark Twain