1. CRYPTOZOOLOGY
1 “Americans ‘Find Body of Bigfoot,’” August 15, 2008, BBC News,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7564635.stm; “CNN—Has Bigfoot Been Found?” August 17, 2008, YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMrKrphWAEk&feature=related; Ki Mae Heussner, “Legend of Bigfoot: Discovery? Try Hoax,” August 15, 2008, ABC News,
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5583488&page=1; “Bigfoot Body Found in Georgia!!!!” August 14, 2008, YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NzB5xfTSDY (all accessed October 10, 2011).
3 Writing about the collaboration between “fast-talking Tom Biscardi” and Bigfoot hoaxer Ivan Marx, reporter Richard Harris was already asking in 1973 whether the for-profit team was composed of “adventurers or con-men” (“The Bigfoot: Fact, Fiction, or Flim-Flam?”
Eureka [Calif.] Times-Standard, June 8, 1973, 13).
11 For an excellent essay on the way science is practiced and the way creationists subvert these processes, see Stephen Jay Gould, “An Essay on a Pig Roast,”
Natural History, January 1989, 14–25, reprinted in
Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1991), 432–447.
12 Carl Sagan,
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 30.
13 Michael Shermer,
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (New York: Holt, 2011).
14 Michael Shermer,
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: Freeman, 1997), 48; Sagan,
Demon-Haunted World, 10.
18 See, for example, John Bindernagel,
North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch (Courtenay, B.C.: Beachcomber Books, 1998), x.
19 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark,
Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster / Fireside, 1999), 102.
20 See, for example, British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, “Mokele Mbembe,”
http://bcscc.ca/mokele.htm (accessed January 28, 2012).
21 Daniel Loxton asked the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (the regional accreditation body for degree-granting higher-education institutions in Georgia and other southern states) whether Immanuel Baptist College has ever been accredited to grant academic degrees in Georgia. A representative responded, “Immanuel Baptist College has never been accredited by SACSCOC” (Terri Latimer, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, February 15, 2012).
24 Ben S. Roesch and John L. Moore, “Cryptozoology,” in
The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience, ed. Michael Shermer (New York: ABC-Clio, 2002), 1:71–78.
25 Darren Naish, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, February 5, 2012.
26 Matt Cartmill, reviews of
Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend, by David J. Daegling, and
Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, by Jeff Meldrum,
American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135, no. 1 (2008): 117–118; David J. Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend (Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press, 2004).
27 Thomas Henry Huxley, “Biogenesis and Abiogenesis” (1870), in
Critiques and Addresses (London: Macmillan, 1873), 229.
31 A. Leo Levin and Harold Kramer,
Trial Advocacy Problems and Materials (Mineola, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1968), 269.
32 Elizabeth F. Loftus,
Memory: Surprising New Insights into How We Remember and Why We Forget (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1980), 37.
33 Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell,
Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’
s Most Elusive Creatures (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 160–163.
36 Shermer,
Why People Believe Weird Things, 88–89.
38 Susan A. Clancy,
Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 33.
39 The search for the cryptid Mokele Mbembe provides a stark example: the interrogation of Congolese villagers by Roy Mackal’s armed party in 1981. When local informants denied knowledge of the creature, Mackal “confronted” them with “a barrage of information” until they became “visibly disturbed, and some, in their confusion, admitted to a great deal more knowledge” (
A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe [Leiden: Brill, 1987], 160).
40 See, for example, Loren Coleman, “The Meaning of Cryptozoology: Who Invented the Term Cryptozoology?” 2003, The Cryptozoologist,
www.lorencoleman.com/cryptozoology_faq.html (accessed February 12, 2011), and “Cryptozoology’s Fathers,” June 19, 2010, CryptoMundo,
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/czfather/ (accessed May 5, 2012).
41 Bernard Heuvelmans,
Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1955); Lucien Blancou,
Géographie cynégétique du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959).
42 Bernard Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, trans. Richard Garnett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 508.
43 The word “cryptozoological” appears at a line break and so is hyphenated: “cryptozoological.” It is unknown if the reviewer intended the word to have a hyphen, but he used it in much the same way that writers use it today. See Ralph Thompson, review of
The Lungfish and the Unicorn, by Willy Ley,
New York Times, April 22, 1941, 19; and Willy Ley,
The Lungfish and the Unicorn: An Excursion into Romantic Zoology (New York: Modern Age Books, 1941).
44 A. C. Oudemans,
The Great Sea-serpent: An Historical and Critical Treatise. With the Reports of 187 Appearances … the Suppositions and Suggestions of Scientific and Non-scientific Persons, and the Author’s Conclusions (Leiden: Brill, 1892).
45 Coleman and Clark,
Cryptozoology A to Z.
47 Bernard Heuvelmans, “How Many Animal Species Remain to Be Discovered?”
Cryptozoology 2 (1983): 5.
48 Bernard Heuvelmans, “Annotated Checklist of Apparently Unknown Animals with Which Cryptozoology Is Concerned,”
Cryptozoology 5 (1986): 1–26.
49 Naish, “Monster Hunting?”
51 Ralph M. Wetzel, Robert E. Dubos, Robert L. Martin, and Philip Myers, “
Catagonus, an ‘Extinct’ Peccary, Alive in Paraguay,”
Science 189 (1975): 379–381.
52 N. F. Goldsmith and I. Yanai-Inbar, “Coelacanthid in Israel’s Early Miocene?
Latimeria Tests Schaeffer’s Theory,”
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 17, supplement 3 (1997): 49A; T. Ørvig, “A Vertebrate Bone from the Swedish Paleocene,”
Geologiska Föreningens i Stockholm Förhandlingar 108 (1986): 139–141.
53 Michael A. Woodley, Darren Naish, and Hugh P. Shanahan, “How Many Extant Pinniped Species Remain to Be Described?”
Historical Biology 20 (2008): 225–235.
54 Darren Naish, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 30, 2012.
55 Andrew R. Solow and Woollcott K. Smith, “On Estimating the Number of Species from the Discovery Record,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B 272 (2005): 285–287.
56 So devastating has the beetle infestation become in the new global-warming climate regime that British Columbia’s forest industry currently depends on the logging of dead trees that were killed five or ten years ago by beetles. With the looming exhaustion of these stands of dead trees as a result of urgent harvesting, fires, and rot, the province faces such a catastrophic shortage of trees that its government has considered opening up the remaining protected areas of forest for logging—not to save the industry, but simply to
delay the predicted loss of 11,000 forestry jobs. See, for example, “Confidential Pine Beetle Report Warns of ‘Economic and Social’ Havoc,” April 18, 2012, CBC News,
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/04/18/bc-timber-supply-mpb.html (accessed April 28, 2012).
57 James H. Brown and Brian A. Maurer, “Macroecology: The Division of Food and Space Among Species on Continents,”
Science 243 (1989): 1145–1150. Other important publications include James H. Brown, Pablo A. Marquet, and Mark L. Taper, “Evolution of Body Size: Consequences of an Energetic Definition of Fitness,”
American Naturalist 142 (1993): 573–584; James H. Brown and Brian A. Maurer, “Evolution of Species Assemblages: Effects of Energetic Constraints and Species Dynamics on the Diversification of the North American Avifauna,”
American Naturalist 130 (1987): 1–17; James H. Brown and Paul F. Nicoletto, “Spatial Scaling of Species Composition: Body Masses of North American Land Mammals,”
American Naturalist 138 (1991): 1478–1512; William A. Calder III,
Size, Function, and Life History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); John Damuth, “Home Range, Home Range Overlap, and Species Energy Use Among Herbivorous Mammals,”
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 15 (1981): 185–193; A. S. Harestad and F. L. Bunnell, “Home Range and Body Weight—A Reevaluation,”
Ecology 60 (1979): 389–402; Stan L. Linstedt, Brian J. Miller, and Steven W. Buskirk, “Home Range, Time, and Body Size in Mammals,”
Ecology 67 (1986): 413–418; Brian K. McNab, “Bioenergetics and the Determination of Home Range Size,”
American Naturalist 47 (1963): 133–140; Robert Henry Peters,
The Ecological Implications of Body Size (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Michael Reiss, “Scaling of Home Range Size: Body Size, Metabolic Needs and Ecology,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution 3 (1988): 85–86; Marina Silva and John A. Downing, “The Allometric Scaling of Density and Body Mass: A Nonlinear Relationship for Terrestrial Mammals,”
American Naturalist 145 (1995): 704–727; and Robert K. Swihart, Norman A. Slade, and Bradley J. Bergstrom, “Relating Body Size to the Rate of Home Range Use in Mammals,”
Ecology 69 (1988): 393–399.
58 Johan T. du Toit, “Home Range–Body Mass Relations: A Field Study on African Browsing Ruminants,”
Oecologia 85 (1990): 301–303.
59 Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson,
Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).
60 Donald R. Prothero and Robert H. Dott Jr.,
Evolution of the Earth, 7th ed. (Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw-Hill, 2004), chap. 1.
61 Lars Werdelin and William Joseph Sanders, eds.,
Cenozoic Mammals of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
2. BIGFOOT
1 John Napier,
Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (New York: Dutton, 1973), 202–203.
2 Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe,
The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates (San Antonio, Tex.: Anomalist Books, 2006), 88–89.
3 Loren Coleman,
Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America (New York: Paraview, 2003), 27.
4 “Mythology of the Two Americas: Iroquois and Hurons,”
Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York: Prometheus, 1959), 437–438.
5 Anthony Wonderley,
Oneida Iroquois Folklore, Myth, and History: New York Oral Narrative from the Notes of H. E. Allen and Others (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 98–99; Raymond Fogelson, “Stoneclad Among the Cherokees,” in
Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and Modern Evidence, ed. Marjorie Halpin and Michael M. Ames (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980), 134.
6 Grover Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (Surrey, B.C.: Hancock House, 1999), 143.
7 Wayne Suttles,
Coast Salish Essays (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1987), 90.
10 The Dzunuk’wa figure from the Royal British Columbia Museum’s Thunderbird Park appears, for example, on the cover of John Green,
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (Surrey, B.C.: Hancock House, 2006), and in the interior of Christopher L. Murphy,
Meet the Sasquatch (Surrey, B.C.: Hancock House, 2004), 17, and Jeff Meldrum,
Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (New York: Forge, 2006), 75.
11 Suttles,
Coast Salish Essays, 78–79.
12 Coleman,
Bigfoot!, 27.
13 Suttles,
Coast Salish Essays, 74.
14 J. W. Burns, “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants,”
Maclean’
s, April 1, 1929, reprinted in John Green,
The Sasquatch File (Agassiz, B.C.: Cheam, 1973), 10–11.
15 John Green,
On the Track of the Sasquatch (Agassiz, B.C.: Cheam, 1968), 3.
16 Quoted in Burns, “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants,” 10–11.
17 John Burns, as told to Charles Tench, “My Search for B.C.’s Giant Indians,”
Liberty Magazine, 1954, reprinted in Murphy,
Meet the Sasquatch, 32.
20 Green,
On the Track of the Sasquatch, 3.
22 “Let’s Not Forget the Sasquatchewan Trade,”
Vancouver Sun, May 7, 1957, 5.
23 “Wanted: Sasquatch—$5000 Reward,”
Vancouver Sun, May 4, 1957, 25.
24 “Sasquatch Hunt Delayed by Intrepid Lillooet Band,”
Vancouver Sun, May 10, 1957, 3.
25 Jack Brooks, “Sasquatch-Hunters Get Sasquatched,”
Vancouver Sun, May 24, 1957, 3, final edition.
26 Don Hunter, with René Dahinden,
Sasquatch: The Search for North America’s Incredible Creature (New York: Signet, 1975), 83.
27 “‘Nothing Monstrous About Sasquatch,’ Says Their Pal,”
Vancouver Sun, May 25, 1957, 14.
28 Although there are chimpanzee- or gorilla-like monster yarns that predate that of Roe, they are distinct in two ways: they are outside the direct lineage of Sasquatch tradition, and their descriptions differ in one or more important respects from the modern composite description of Bigfoot. For example, the creatures featured in the Ape Canyon story of 1924 are retroactively included in Bigfoot lore, but their description is very different: “Their ears are about four inches long and stick straight up. They have four toes” (
Oregonian [Portland], July 3, 1924, reprinted in John Green,
The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot [Surrey, B.C.: Hancock House, 2004], 61).
29 Green,
On the Track of the Sasquatch, 10.
31 Quoted in ibid., 11–12.
33 Daniel Loxton, “Junior Skeptic 20: Bigfoot Part One: Dawn of the Sasquatch,”
Skeptic 11, no. 2 (2004): 96–105.
34 John Green to Daniel Loxton, August 10, 2004.
36 Green,
On the Track of the Sasquatch, 10.
38 John Green to Daniel Loxton, August 20, 2004.
39 John Kirk to Daniel Loxton, July 21, 2004.
40 Quoted in Roger Patterson and Christopher Murphy,
The Bigfoot Film Controversy (Surrey, B.C.: Hancock House, 2005), 98.
41 It is possible that one or more Bigfooters eventually did see photographs of Roe, after his death (perhaps supplied by his daughter), but I am not aware of any published photograph of him.
42 Coleman,
Bigfoot!, 68–69.
44 Ivan T. Sanderson,
Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (New York: Pyramid Books, 1968), 153.
45 Quoted in “This Yeti Has Big Feet: Abominable Snowman on Klamath,”
Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach, Calif.), October 5, 1958, 19.
46 “Promised Hoax Exposé of Mysterious Footprints Fails to Materialize,”
Humboldt Standard (Eureka, Calif.), October 14, 1958, 11.
47 Coleman,
Bigfoot!, 80.
49 Joshua Blu Buhs,
Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 105.
50 Quoted in Green,
Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot, 12.
51 “Eye-Witnesses See Bigfoot: Humboldt Sheriff’s Office Has No Jurisdiction in Footprint Case; Scene of Activity in Del Norte,”
Humboldt Standard,
October 15, 1958, 1.
52 Michael McLeod,
Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 179.
53 David J. Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2004), 212.
56 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 180.
58 Loren Coleman to Daniel Loxton, August 24, 2004.
60 Murphy,
Meet the Sasquatch, 109.
61 Green,
Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot, 15.
64 Quoted in Greg Long,
The Making of Bigfoot: The Inside Story (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 192.
65 Green to Loxton, August 10, 2004.
67 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 122.
68 Meldrum,
Sasquatch, 135.
69 Napier,
Bigfoot, 91–92.
70 Quoted in Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 126.
71 Sanderson,
Abominable Snowmen, 150.
72 John Kirk, interview with Daniel Loxton, Kitsilano, B.C., March 27, 2004.
73 John Green, quoted in Long,
Making of Bigfoot, 179.
78 Benjamin Radford, “Bigfoot at 50: Evaluating a Half-Century of Bigfoot Evidence,”
Skeptical Inquirer 26, no. 2 (2002): 31.
79 Patterson and Murphy,
Bigfoot Film Controversy, 30.
80 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 116.
81 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 32.
82 Long,
Making of Bigfoot, 39, 109–110.
83 John Green, letter to the editor,
Skeptical Inquirer, July 25, 2004 [forwarded to Daniel Loxton by Green, August 9, 2004].
84 Long,
Making of Bigfoot, 47, 364.
87 Quoted in Long,
Making of Bigfoot, 70.
89 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 47.
90 Coleman,
Bigfoot!, 127.
91 Most recent sources tend to name a local butcher, Joe Rhodes, as the discoverer of the tracks, perhaps because of Marx’s reputation as a hoaxer. However, newspaper reports at the time identified Marx as the actual discoverer: “Rhodes suggested Marx might look for possible tracks of Big Foot when he was hunting, and during the early fall Marx spotted some tracks at a dump” (“Cold Freezes Hounds off Humanoid’s Trail,”
Montana Standard [Butte], December 7, 1969, 20).
92 Hunter, with Dahinden,
Sasquatch, 151.
94 Krantz says, “The trail also began and ended on a steep slope coming out of and going back into Lake Roosevelt behind the Grand Coulie Dam” (
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 43); John Green agrees that “the tracks came out of the water and went back to it” (
Year of the Sasquatch [Agassiz, B.C.: Cheam, 1970], 50).
95 Hunter, with Dahinden,
Sasquatch, 154–157.
97 “Searchers Seek Big-footed Sasquatch,”
Idaho State Journal (Pocatello), February 1, 1970.
98 René Dahinden’s account of the Metlow affair is detailed and fascinating, as recounted in Hunter, with Dahinden,
Sasquatch, 159–165.
100 “Legendary Big Foot Is Captured on Film,”
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, November 14, 1970, 3.
101 Tom Page offered $25,000 for a copy of the film, as reported in Hunter, with Dahinden,
Sasquatch, 168.
103 “Footprints Add to Tale of Giant Creature Living in Washington,”
Idaho State Journal, February 17, 1971; “Tourtists Flock to See Sasquatch’s Foot Prints,”
Lebanon (Pa.) Daily News, February 18, 1971.
104 Byrne, “Hoaxed Ivan Marx Footage.”
105 Quoted in “Sasquatch Quashed Again?”
Walla Walla (Wash.) Union Bulletin, April 9, 1971, 1.
106 Hunter, with Dahinden,
Sasquatch, 169–170.
107 Quoted in “Sasquatch Tracks Were Made by Man,”
Centralia (Wash.) Daily Chronicle, April 1, 1971, 4.
108 Byrne, “Hoaxed Ivan Marx Footage.”
109 Murphy,
Meet the Sasquatch, 109.
110 Grover Krantz, interview with John Yager, KXLY-TV, 1992, quoted in Michael Dennett, “Bigfoot Evidence: Are These Tracks Real?”
Skeptical Inquirer 18, no. 5 (1994): 499–500.
111 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 84.
112 Napier,
Bigfoot, 125.
114 McLeod,
Anatomy of a Beast, 126.
115 Green,
Year of the Sasquatch, 66.
116 “Scoftic” is a derisive jargon term coined by Roger Knights in 2003. The word is now used by cryptozoological enthusiasts to describe those they view as unreasonable, dogmatic skeptics. According to Knights, “scoftic” refers to someone who “gives witness testimony no weight whatsoever, on ideological grounds, and who asserts numerous other bits of unreasonable dogma, such as that the quantity of reports is insignificant. Scofticism is thus fanaticism behind a pose of reasonableness” (quoted in Loren Coleman, “Is ‘Scoftic’ a Useful Term?” April 28, 2007, CryptoMundo,
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/scoftic/ [accessed March 19, 2010]).
117 Green,
Year of the Sasquatch, 66.
118 Green,
Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot, 9.
119 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 41.
120 Green,
Year of the Sasquatch, 55.
121 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 250.
122 See, for example, “Phantom Bigfeet and UFOs,” in Janet Bord and Colin Bord,
Bigfoot Casebook Updated: Sightings and Encounters from 1818 to 2004 (Enumclaw, Wash.: Pine Winds Press, 2006), chap. 7.
123 Napier,
Bigfoot, 198.
125 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 5.
126 Jeffrey D. Lozier, P. Aniello and Michael J. Hickerson, “Predicting the Distribution of Sasquatch in Western North America: Anything Goes with Ecological Niche Modeling,”
Journal of Biogeography 36 (2009): 1623–1627.
127 Murphy,
Meet the Sasquatch, 123.
128 John A. Bindernagel,
North America’
s Great Ape: The Sasquatch (Courtenay, B.C.: Beachcomber Books, 1998), 28–29.
130 Green,
On the Trail of the Sasquatch, 30.
131 Green,
Sasquatch File, 48.
133 Radford, “Bigfoot at 50,” 31.
134 Murphy,
Meet the Sasquatch, 124–125.
135 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 36.
136 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 175.
138 Green,
On the Track of the Sasquatch, 71.
139 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 125–126.
140 Meldrum,
Sasquatch, 261–262.
141 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 207.
143 Doug Haijcek, dir.,
Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (Minneapolis: Whitewolf Entertainment, 2003).
144 Meldrum,
Sasquatch, 270.
145 Lead author Melba Ketchum’s claims to have DNA evidence to proved the existence of Bigfoot have been bouncing around the mainstream press since at least 2011 (and even earlier in the cryptozoological corners of the blogosphere). See, for example, Monisha Martins, “Sasquatch: Is It Out There?” August 16, 2011, Maple Ridge News,
http://www.mapleridgenews.com/news/127905518.html (accessed February 14, 2013).
146 M. S. Ketchum, P. W. Wojtkiewicz, A. B. Watts, D. W. Spence, A. K. Holzenburg, D. G. Toler, T. M. Prychitko, F. Zhang, S. Bollinger, R. Shoulders, and R. Smith, “Novel North American Hominins: Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies,” special issue, DeNovo Scientific Journal (2013): 1–15.
151 Ketchum et al., “Novel North American Hominins,” 1, 11.
155 Green,
Year of the Sasquatch, 51.
156 Hunter, with Dahinden,
Sasquatch, 169–171.
157 Michael Dennett, “Evidence for Bigfoot? An Investigation of the Mill Creek ‘Sasquatch Prints,’”
Skeptical Inquirer 13, no. 3 (1989): 272.
158 Meldrum,
Sasquatch, 110–112, 237–240.
159 Coleman,
Bigfoot!, 40–42.
161 Loren Coleman to Daniel Loxton, August 11, 2004.
162 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 34.
163 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 75.
164 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 42.
165 Robert Carroll,
The Skeptic’
s Dictionary (New York: Wiley, 2003), 65.
166 Tim Mendham, “The Carlos Hoax,” in
The Second Coming: All the Best from the Skeptic,
1986–1990, ed. Barry Williams and Richard Saunders (Sydney: Australian Skeptics, 2001), 26–28.
168 “Sasquatch Tracks Were Made by Man.”
169 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 257.
170 John Rael to Daniel Loxton, March 21, 2010. I was apprised of the hoax early and asked to contribute some discussion. I was uncomfortable with the derisive tone of the project, so I declined. More information on the hoax is available at “Bigfoot Gets Kicked in the Nuts,” February 7, 2010, Skepticallypwnd,
http://skepticallypwnd.com/?p=79 (accessed March 22, 2010).
171 Green,
Year of the Sasquatch, 73.
172 “Sasquatch Wanted,”
Washington Post, March 2, 1970, A9.
173 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 190.
174 Quoted in ibid., 193.
175 Quoted in Coleman,
Bigfoot!, 236.
176 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 10.
177 The James Randi Educational Foundation tested just such a claim in 2007. Rosemary Hunter “applied for the JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge with the extraordinary claim that she can make people urinate with the power of her mind,” but failed the preliminary test (Alison Smith, “Rosemary Hunter’s Challenge Test,” November 11, 2007, James Randi Educational Foundation,
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/108rosemary-hunters-challenge-test.html [accessed March 18, 2010]).
178 John Bindernagel to Daniel Loxton, November 29, 2004.
179 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 194.
180 Jason Loxton to Daniel Loxton, March 19, 2010.
181 Quoted in Coleman,
Bigfoot!, 236.
182 Bindernagel to Loxton, November 29, 2004.
183 Green,
Sasquatch, 409–410.
184 Several such cases are described by Janet Bord and Colin Bord, including that of Richard Davis, alleged to have shot a Bigfoot in the chest with a revolver in 1975—at close range. According to the tale, Davis saw the bullet hit the creature, which then ran off. (This case also has a paranormal aspect, with Davis psychically prevented from emptying the remainder of the cylinder into the creature’s chest.) See Bord and Bord,
Bigfoot Casebook Updated, 140–141.
185 Daegling,
Bigfoot Exposed, 194.
186 I have argued that all parties should be able to agree that it is possible for entire categories of paranormal claims to be completely bogus, with hundreds or thousands of supporting testimonials comprising nothing but mistakes and hoaxes. All that’s needed to demonstrate this to the satisfaction of almost everybody is to go through a list of similar claims: Bigfoot, fairies, ghosts, alien abduction, mermaids, and so on. See Daniel Loxton, “An Argument That Should Never Be Made Again,” February 1, 2010, Skepticblog,
http://skepticblog.org/2010/02/02/an-argument-that-should-never-be-made-again/ (accessed February 28, 2010).
188 Green,
Sasquatch, 233.
189 Krantz,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, 236.
3. THE YETI
1 Simon Welfare and John Fairley,
Arthur C. Clarke’
s Mysterious World (New York: A&W Visual Library, 1980), 14.
2 Brian Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31.
3 Reinhold Messner,
My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas’
Deepest Mystery (New York: Pan, 1998), viii.
4 Colonel [Charles K.], Howard-Bury, “The Attempt on Everest,”
Times (London), October 21, 1921, 11.
5 C. K. Howard-Bury,
Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance (New York: Longmans, Green, 1922), 141.
7 Howard-Bury, “Attempt on Everest.”
8 Howard-Bury,
Mount Everest, 141.
9 Henry Newman, “On Everest: The ‘Wild Men’ Myth,”
Leader (Allahabad, India), November 6, 1921, 9.
10 Henry Newman, “The ‘Abominable Snowmen’” [letter to the editor],
Times, July 29, 1937, 15.
11 For useful introductions to the varied vocabulary of the Yeti, see, for example, Edmund Hillary and Desmond Doig,
High in the Thin Cold Air (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962) 32; and Messner,
My Quest for the Yeti, viii.
12 William L. Straus Jr., “Abominable Snowman,”
Science 123 (1956): 1024–1025. Pranavananda published his interpretation in many venues; see, for example, Swami Pranavananda, “Abominable Stories About the Snowman,”
Times of India (Mumbai [Bombay]), May 22, 1955, 5. Srimat Swami Pranavananda is identified as “Sreemat Swami Pranavananda, an Indian religious notable,” in “The ‘Abominable Snowman’ Unmasked: The Red Bear Believed Guilty of a Himalayan Fraud,”
Times, July 3, 1956, 7.
13 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 32.
14 B. H. Hodgson, “On the Mammalia of Nepal,”
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1 (1832): 339n.
15 John Napier,
Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (New York: Dutton, 1973), 36.
16 Ivan T. Sanderson,
Abominable Snowmen: Legend Comes to Life (New York: Pyramid, 1968), 43–45. Sanderson first offered a page of introductory fluff, waxing nostalgic about nineteenth-century British officer-explorers and their “wealth of wisdom” and “extraordinarily keen interest in the world about them,” and then gave a wildly inaccurate, paraphrased version of Laurence Waddell’s tale—both embellishing it with made-up details not found in the original (“tracks made by some creature walking on two legs and two bare feet … brought whoops of admiration from the Major’s mountain-born porters”) and omitting the key detail:
Waddell had assessed the tracks as coming from a bear. The most charitable view would be that Sanderson was bluffing about his citation rather than deliberately misrepresenting the evidence, and he simply had not read the original. (He complained on the following page about the “time-consuming and frustrating” difficulty of trying to track down primary sources that are “either lost in some archive or truly lost forever.”) Bernard Heuvelmans at least quoted Waddell, but similarly omitted the key fact that Waddell had considered these footprints to be those of a bear and blamed “an atmosphere of superstition” for the claims of hairy wild men (
On the Track of Unknown Animals, trans. Richard Garnett [New York: Hill and Wang, 1959], 128).
17 L. A. Waddell,
Among the Himalayas (1899; rept., Delhi: Pilgrims Book House, 1998), 223–224.
18 Napier,
Bigfoot, 36–37.
19 William Woodville Rockhill,
The Land of the Lamas: Notes of a Journey Through China, Mongolia and Tibet (New York: Century, 1891), 150–151.
22 Quoted in ibid., 39–40
23 Joe Nickell,
Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011), 56.
24 Consider the case of Man Bahadur, a thirty-five-year-old Nepalese pilgrim who spent an extended period with Edmund Hillary’s high-altitude medicine team (1960/1961). As described by team member and doctor Michael Ward, Bahadur
stayed for 14 days at 15,300 ft and above, and throughout this period wore neither shoes nor gloves, and walked in the snow and on rocks in bare feet without any evidence of frostbite. He wore minimal clothing and had no sleeping bag or protective equipment other than a woollen coat. He was continuously monitored whilst spending four days without shelter between 16,500 ft and 17,500 ft, with night temperatures between −13°C [8.6°F] and −15°C [5°F], and day temperatures below freezing. Eventually he developed deep cracks in the skin of his toes, which became infected, and he returned to lower levels for this reason. Had any European members of the party followed this regime they would undoubtedly have become severely frostbitten and hypothermic. (“The Yeti Footprints: Myth and Reality,” Alpine Journal [1999]: 86)
For photographs of Bahadur and his feet, see “The Highest Livers,” Life, May 12, 1961, 92.
26 Ernst Schäfer,
Dach der Erde: Durch das Wunderland Hochtibet Tibetexpedition 1934/1936 (
Roof of the World: Through the Wonderland of Upper Tibet, Tibet Expedition, 1934–1936) (Berlin: Parey, 1938).
27 Christopher Hale,
Himmler’s Crusade: The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race (Edison, N.J.: Castle Books, 2006), 53.
29 Schäfer,
Dach der Erde, 81–87 (translated by Hans-Dieter Sues).
30 Quoted in Messner,
My Quest for the Yeti, 108.
32 “A Himalayan ‘Snowman’? Alleged Signs. Strange Imprints at 16,000 Ft.,”
Times of India, December 9, 1936, 11.
33 F. S. Smythe, “Abominable Snowman. Pursuit in the Himalayas,”
Times, November 10, 1937, 15–16.
34 Balu [H. W. Tilman], “Are the ‘Snowmen’ Bears?”
Times, November 13, 1937, 13. Tilman’s climbing partner Eric Shipton explained that same year that in 1936 he had been “amused to find that these men [Mana porters] had nicknamed Tilman ‘Balu Sahib’ (Balu meaning a bear) owing to the speed with which he moves over steep, forested ground” (“Survey Work in the Nanda Devi Region,”
Himalayan Journal 9 [1937],
http://www.himalayanclub.org/journal/survey-work-in-the-nanda-devi-region/ (accessed May 17, 2012). Frank Smythe pretty clearly knew that Tilman was Balu, as evidenced in “Mr Smythe’s Reply,”
Times, November 16, 1937, 17. Tilman rather theatrically denied that he was Balu: “Mr Smythe’s facility for putting two and two together and making five is seen … in his identification of Balu with Your obedient servant, H. W. Tilman” (“Abominable Snowman” [letter to the editor],
Times, December 1, 1937, 12). Despite this denial, Tilman made Balu’s argument the central plank in his defense of the Yeti in 1938. See H. W. Tilman, “Notes on the Abominable Snowman,” in
Men and Mountaineering: An Anthology of Writings by Climbers, ed. Showell Styles (New York: White, 1968), 105 (excerpted from
Mount Everest, 1938 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948]).
35 Tilman, “Abominable Snowman,” 12.
36 Ralph Izzard,
The Abominable Snowman Adventure (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), 14.
37 Tilman, “Notes on the Abominable Snowman,” 105.
38 Izzard,
Abominable Snowman Adventure, 44.
39 Hale,
Himmler’s Crusade, 58.
41 Messner,
My Quest for the Yeti, 107–122.
42 Napier,
Bigfoot, 46–47.
43 Sanderson,
Abominable Snowmen, 269.
45 Edmund Hillary, “Abominable—and Improbable?”
New York Times Magazine, January 24, 1960, 13; Ward, “Yeti Footprints,” 81.
47 Eric Shipton, “A Mystery of Everest: Footprints of the ‘Abominable Snowman,’”
Times, December 6, 1951, 5.
49 Peter Gillman, “The Most Abominable Hoaxer?”
Sunday Times Magazine (London), December 10, 1989, 39–44, and “The Yeti Footprints,”
Alpine Journal (2001): 143–151.
50 The photograph appears as an unnumbered figure, whose caption reads, “The abominable snowman’s trail, photographed by Eric Shipton in 1951 with (
inset) a single footprint …” in Heuvelmans,
On the Track of Unknown Animals, facing 136.
51 Shipton passed away on March 28, 1977, as noted in “Obituary: Mr. Eric Shipton: Mountaineer, Explorer and Writer,”
Times, March 30, 1977, 19; Gillman reported that Sherpa San Tenzing was dead by 1989, in “Most Abominable Hoaxer?” 44; and Ward died in 2005, as recorded in Jim Perrin, “Obituary: Michael Ward,”
Guardian, October 27, 2005,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/oct/27/guardianobituaries.everest (accessed May 21, 2012.) In 1999, Ward wrote his rebuttal to Gillman: “Yeti Footprints,” 81–83.
52 Ward, “Yeti Footprints,” 81–83.
53 Quoted in Gillman, “Most Abominable Hoaxer?” 44.
54 See, for example, “The Abominable Snowmen,”
New York Times, December 27, 1951, 18; “Abominable Himalayan,”
Life, December 1951, 88; Wladimir Tschernezky, “A Reconstruction of the Foot of the ‘Abominable Snowman,’”
Nature 186, no. 4723 (1960): 496–497.
55 Ward, “Yeti Footprints,” 83.
56 Gillman, “Yeti Footprints,” 145.
58 Ward, “Yeti Footprints,” 85.
59 Gillman, “Yeti Footprints,” 150.
61 Gillman, “Most Abominable Hoaxer?” 42.
62 Gillman, “Yeti Footprints,” 145.
64 Edouard Wyss-Dunant, “The Himalayan Footprints: New Traces Seen by Swiss Expedition,”
Times, June 6, 1952, 5.
65 Edouard Wyss-Dunant, “The Yeti: Biped or Quadroped?”
The Mountain World, 1960/61, ed. Malcolm Branes (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1961), 252–259.
66 “Abominable Snowman: Hairy Beast Seized Him, Says Porter,”
Globe and Mail (Toronto), December 30, 1952, 11, second edition.
67 Joshua Blu Buhs,
Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 36.
68 “Everest Climbers Given Medal by Ike,”
Joplin (Mo.) Globe, February 12, 1954, 20, final edition.
69 “Now Seek Abominable Snowman Says Col. Hunt,”
Daily Express (London), June 16, 1953, 2.
70 Quoted in “Tenzing Saved His Life, Hillary Says in London,”
Globe and Mail (Toronto), July 4, 1953, 8.
71 P. McL., “A Man of the Mountains,”
Winnipeg Free Press, August 13, 1955, 28.
72 Richard Crichfield, “In the Land of the Abominable Snowman,”
Sunday Herald Magazine (Chicago), May 20, 1979, 10.
73 Izzard describes hiring “nearly 300 coolies” plus, as a result of a supply problem, “a second coolie team of 70 men to follow our main party” (
Abominable Snowman Adventure, 95–96).
74 Quoted in ibid., 108–109.
75 Charles Stonor,
The Sherpa and the Snowman (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955), 118.
76 Izzard,
Abominable Snowman Adventure.
80 Stonor,
Sherpa and the Snowman, 38.
81 Quoted in Izzard,
Abominable Snowman Adventure, 103.
82 Stonor,
Sherpa and the Snowman, 78.
83 “‘Abominable Snowman’ in Tibetan Zoo,”
Times of India, November 15, 1953, 1.
84 Stonor,
Sherpa and the Snowman, 30.
87 Loren Coleman,
Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology (Fresno, Calif.: Craven Street Books, 2002), 74, 36–37, 186, 45.
88 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 37–40.
89 Loren Coleman,
Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 178–203.
90 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 37–41.
91 Buhs,
Bigfoot, 42. Tom Slick was reported to have left Kathmandu for the mountains around March 14, and to have returned to Kathmandu on April 19. See “Texan to Hunt Asian ‘Snowman,’”
Lawton (Okla.) Constitution, March 14, 1957, 13; “Slick About Convinced Giant ‘Snowman’ Exists,”
Miami (Okla.) Daily News Herald, April 19, 1957, 9; and “Texan Finds Footprints of ‘Snowman,’”
Pacific Stars and Stripes (Tokyo), April 20, 1957, 5. However, Byrne later wrote that they “spent three months in the mountains” during the 1957 expedition (
The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Myth or Man? [Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, 1975], 117).
92 “Slick About Convinced Giant ‘Snowman’ Exists,” 9. Byrne, however, mentions only two sets of tracks: “I found one set of footprints, in the Chhoyang Khola at 10,000 feet, and Tom [Slick], working with a separate party in another area, found a second set” (
Search for Bigfoot, 117).
93 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 42–43.
94 Tom Slick, “Abominable Snowman—No Longer a Legend,”
Daily Boston Globe, May 18, 1958, B22.
96 Peter Byrne, “Hope to Take Him Alive with Drug-Bullet Gun,”
Daily Boston Globe, May 19, 1958, 8.
97 Peter Byrne, “We Dress Up as Natives to Fool Wary Animals,”
Daily Boston Globe, May 20, 1958, 10.
98 Buhs,
Bigfoot, 43–45. However, Byrne reports that the end date is less clear: “[O]ne by one, the various members had to leave and before four months had passed all, with the exception of my brother and I, had departed. We stayed on for another five months, making nine months in all” (
Search for Bigfoot, 118).
99 “Snowman Reported Seen Eating Himalayan Frogs,”
Washington Post, June 17, 1958, A3.
100 “Americans Find Cave of Abominable Snowman,”
Daily Boston Globe, April 30, 1958, 9.
103 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 43.
106 “Abominable Snowman” [season 3, episode 59],
MonsterQuest, History Channel, October 25, 2009, “MonsterQuest: Abominable Snowman, Pt. 4,” YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syLd4zx1BWU&feature=related (accessed October 22, 2011).
107 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 47.
109 Tom Slick, “Expedition a Success, Proves Yeti Exists,”
Daily Boston Globe, July 26, 1958, 4.
111 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 46–47.
114 For a discussion of the scientific team, see Michael Ward, “Himalayan Scientific Expedition, 1960–61,”
Alpine Journal (1961): 343. The team’s 150 porters are noted in Buhs,
Bigfoot, 112.
115 Edmund Hillary and Desmond Doig,
High in the Thin Cold Air (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962) 130–131.
121 The loan agreement for the scalp specified that “Sir Edmund Hillary and the members of the expedition put into effect an appeal to the sponsors of the expedition, mountaineering societies, and the general public to establish and support a school for the benefit of the people of Khunde and Khumjung villages.” With help from the World Book Encyclopedia, the Indian Aluminum Company, and the International Red Cross, and labor from Hillary and his friends from the expedition and local village, the school was soon made a reality. See Hillary and Doig,
High in the Thin Cold Air, 88. That school was only the beginning. “At the request of Sherpa residents,” Hillary reflected in 2003, “we helped establish 27 schools, two hospitals, and a dozen medical clinics—plus quite a few bridges over wild rivers. We constructed several airfields and rebuilt Buddhist monasteries and cultural centers. We planted a million seedlings in Sagarmatha National Park to replace the vast number of trees destroyed for firewood and used to build the small hotels that came with the growth of tourism” (“My Story,”
National Geographic, May 2003, 40).
125 Quoted in “British Climber Says He Saw Abominable Snowman,”
Stars and Stripes (Darmstadt), June 13, 1970, 4.
126 Quoted in “Names and Faces,”
Boston Globe, June 8, 1970, 2.
129 Quoted in “Dogs from U.S. Will Hunt the Yeti in Nepal: Search for Snowman Opens This Month,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, January 4, 1958, A8.
130 Regal,
Searching for Sasquatch, 144–147.
133 Quoted in Michael Dennett, “Abominable Snowman Photo Comes to Rocky End,”
Skeptical Inquirer 13, no. 2 (1989): 118–119; Jerome Clark,
Unexplained! Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Visible Ink Press, 1999), 599–600.
135 Messner,
My Quest for the Yeti, 7–8.
141 Messner,
My Quest for the Yeti, 156.
145 Messner,
My Quest for the Yeti, 157.
4. NESSIE
1 As Ronald Binns explains, “In fact there had been a road along the north shore of Loch Ness since the end of the eighteenth-century. Tourists and motor vehicles had been passing along it well before 1933…. All that happened in 1933 was that sections of the north shore road were improved. The road was resurfaced along its entire length and there were a number of repairs carried out” (
The Loch Ness Mystery Solved [London: Open Books, 1983]), 63.
2 Tony Shiels,
Monstrum! A Wizard’
s Tale (London: Fortean Times, 1990), 69.
4 More specifically, both the River Ness and the Caledonian Canal open into the innermost section of Moray Firth, called Beauly Firth. For its part, the length of the River Ness varies, depending on what is counted. Loch Ness empties first into a man-made body of water called Loch Dochfour (created when the water level of Loch Ness was raised during the construction of the Caledonian Canal). In total, the river route from Loch Ness proper to the mouth of the River Ness at Beauly Firth is a little over 8 miles. Sources that estimate the length of the River Ness at 6 or 7 miles are excluding the length of Loch Dochfour.
5 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 72.
6 Quoted in ibid., 63–65.
7 “The Sea Serpent in the Highlands,”
Times (London), March 6, 1856, 12, reprinted from the
Inverness Courier.
8 Lewis Spence, “Mythical Beasts in Scottish Folklore,”
Scotsman (Edinburgh), March 4, 1933, 15.
9 Carol Rose,
Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth (New York: Norton, 2000), 109, 205, 388.
10 Thomas Hannan, “Each Usage: The Water Horse,”
Scotsman, October 25, 1933, 10.
11 Spence, “Mythical Beasts in Scottish Folklore,” 15.
12 Hannan, “Each Usage,” 10.
13 John Graham Dalyell,
The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, Illustrated from History and Practice (Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes, 1834), 543–544, 682.
14 W. M. Parker and S. M. Young, letters to the editor,
Scotsman, October 24, 1933, 17.
15 John Noble Wilford, “Legends of the Lochs: Quests by Saints and Science,”
New York Times, June 5, 1976, 8.
16 Michel Meurger, with Claude Gagnon,
Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (London: Fortean Times, 1988), 122–123, 126.
19 “Sea Serpent Hoax of 1904 Is Bared,”
New York Times, April 25, 1934, 17.
20 Inverness Courier, October 8, 1868. Incidentally, this is an early use of the word “monster” in relation to Loch Ness, contradicting the common claim that Alex Campbell coined the term for Nessie in 1933. Campbell’s use of the word was, however, instrumental in the creation of the modern legend of a Loch Ness “monster.”
21 Adrian Shine,
Loch Ness (Drumnadrochit: Loch Ness Project, 2006), 7.
23 “A Scene at Lochend,”
Inverness Courier, July 1, 1852.
24 The newspaper quotes him as having said, “Dia mu’n cuairt duian, ‘a iad na h-eich-uisg’ tk’enn!” Catriona Parsons was kind enough to tackle a translation for this book: “I’m pretty confident this inscription is a garbled version of the Gaelic phrase ‘Dia mu’n cuairt dhuinn, ‘s iad na h-eich uisg’ a’ tighinn!’” she concluded. Literally, “(Let) God be around us, and the water-horses [kelpies] coming!” My thanks to the Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia.
25 The three men were Ian Milne, R. C. M. Macdougall, and G. D. Gallon, all of whom were Inverness locals. See Rupert T. Gould,
The Loch Ness Monster (1934; repr., Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1976), 36.
26 Quoted in “What Was It? A Strange Experience on Loch Ness,”
Northern Chronicle (Inverness), August 27, 1930.
27 The keeper’s story, itself a contender for “first recorded Nessie sighting,” is an important case about which little seems to be known. Is this anonymous “keeper” the same person as William Miller, who is discussed in Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 35? Miller is identified as a “keeper,” and his alleged sighting in 1923 matches the description and timescale of that of the keeper mentioned seven years later in “What Was It?”
28 Piscator, letter to the editor,
Inverness Courier, August 29, 1930.
29 “Lake Mystery in Scotland,”
Kokomo (Ind.) Tribune, October 8, 1933, 12.
30 Most books identify her as “Mrs. Mackay” or even “Mrs. John Mackay,” although she was the primary witness. I take her first name from Tony Harmsworth, who interviewed her in 1986,
Loch Ness, Nessie and Me: The Truth Revealed (Drumnadrochit: Harmsworth, 2010), 91–93.
31 Today, this building is home to the Loch Ness Exhibition Center and its associated research effort (Loch Ness and Morar Project).
32 Alex Campbell, “Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness: What Was It?”
Inverness Courier, May 2, 1933.
33 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 39–40.
34 “Loch Ness ‘Monster’: Ship Captain’s Views on Occurrence,”
Inverness Courier, May 12, 1933.
36 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 208.
37 There is some uncertainty about this date. Most sources date the Mackays’ sighting to April 14, 1933 (which was the date provided by Gould in 1934). However, Campbell’s original news item dates the sighting to “Friday of last week,” which would be April 28, 1933. Compare Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 39, with Campbell “Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness.”
38 Dennis Dunn, “
King Kong Caps the Lot,”
Daily Express (London), April 19, 1933, 3.
39 “
King Kong and the Schoolboy,”
Scotsman, May 9, 1933, 6.
40 George Spicer, letter to the editor,
Inverness Courier, August 4, 1933.
41 Tim Dinsdale,
The Loch Ness Monster (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 41.
43 Quoted in F. W. Holiday,
The Great Orm of Loch Ness: A Practical Inquiry into the Nature and Habits of Water-Monsters (New York: Norton, 1969), 30–31.
44 Quoted in Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 44.
45 Quoted in Holiday,
Great Orm of Loch Ness, 31. Note, however, that Spicer’s initial letter to the
Inverness Courier estimated the creature’s length as “six to eight feet long.” He swiftly revised this measure upward to what became the canonical description of 25 or 30 feet long. In 1934, Spicer told Gould, “After having ascertained the with of the road, and giving the matter mature thought in every way, I afterwards came to the conclusion that the creature I saw must have been at least 25 feet in length” (quoted in Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 46).
46 Quoted in Holiday,
Great Orm of Loch Ness, 30–31.
47 Spicer, letter to the editor.
48 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 46.
50 Adrian Shine, e-mail to James Loxton (
Junior Skeptic research assistant), June 22, 2006.
51 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 26.
52 Denis Lyell, letter to the editor,
Scotsman, April 30, 1938, 17.
53 “Loch Ness Monster: The Plesiosaurus Theory,”
Scotsman, October 17, 1933, 9.
54 “Loch Ness ‘Monster’: Ship Captain’s Views on Occurrence.”
55 Duke of Portland, letter to the editor,
Scotsman, October 20, 1933, 11.
56 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 30.
58 See, for example, Henry Bauer,
The Enigma of Loch Ness: Making Sense of a Mystery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 51; and Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 50–51. In addition, in early 2010 I made my own failed attempt to locate the story using the searchable “ProQuest Historical Newspapers” archive and other newspaper archives.
59 Bauer,
Enigma of Loch Ness, 159.
60 Charles Thomas, “The ‘Monster’ Episode in Adomnan’s
Life of St. Columba,”
Cryptozoology 7 (1988): 40–41. The Latin in the original article has been omitted.
64 Robert Bakewell,
Introduction to Geology (New Haven, Conn.: Howe, 1833), 213.
65 Philip Henry Gosse,
The Romance of Natural History (London: Nisbet, 1861), 357–360. Gosse, it should be noted, is best known for his book
Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London: Van Voorst, 1857), which underlies much of creationist thinking to this day.
66 Elasmosaurus was a plesiosaur with an exceptionally long neck that lived in the late Cretaceous period (98–65 million years ago). After lopping off the top of the elasmosaur’s head with a machete, the hero bizarrely—and successfully—transplants a young companion’s brain into the beast. Eventually, its human intelligence fading, the creature (I can’t help but think of it as “Elasmosaurenstein”) turns on the protagonist and devours him. See Wardon Allan Curtis, “The Monster of Lake LaMetrie” (1899), Gutenberg Consortia Center,
http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/WorldeBookLibrary.com/lametrie.htm (accessed September 12, 2011).
68 Rupert T. Gould,
The Case for the Sea-Serpent (London: Allan, 1930; New York: Putnam, 1934).
69 Quoted in Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 25–26.
71 Philip Stalker, “Loch Ness Monster: A Puzzled Highland Community,”
Scotsman, October 16, 1933, 11.
72 Philip Stalker, “Loch Ness Monster: The Plesiosaurus Theory,”
Scotsman, October 17, 1933, 9.
73 Alex Campbell to Ness Fishery Board, October 28, 1933, quoted in Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 110–112.
74 Quoted in Dinsdale,
Loch Ness Monster, 126.
75 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 79–80.
76 Stalker, “Loch Ness Monster: The Plesiosaurus Theory,” 9.
78 Rupert Gould, “The Loch Ness ‘Monster’: A Survey of the Evidence,”
Times, December 9, 1933, 13.
79 “The Monster of Loch Ness: New Accounts from Eye-witnesses,”
Times, December 18, 1933, 9.
80 Douglas Russell, letter to the editor,
Scotsman, October 20, 1933, 15.
81 Nicholas Witchell,
The Loch Ness Story (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 72.
82 Daily Express (Glasgow), December 16, 1933, 8.
83 Daily Express, May 10, 1934, 6; “Trips to See the ‘Monster,’”
Scotsman, October 31, 1933.
84 “Buses to the ‘Monster,’”
Scotsman, March 10, 1934, 11.
86 “Loch Ness in the Films,”
Scotsman, December 11, 1934, 8.
87 Daily Express, November 13, 1933, 10; September 3, 1934, 20; January 25, 1934, 7.
88 “Sandy, the Loch Ness Monster,”
Times, January 30, 1934, 12.
89 Daily Express, January 9, 1934, 11.
90 Scotsman, February 28, 1934, 14.
91 Dennis Dunn, “Monster Bobs Up Again … Hotels Doing Fine,”
Daily Express, April 24, 1934, 3.
92 Scotsman, December 16, 1950, 6.
93 Steuart Campbell,
The Loch Ness Monster: The Evidence (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1997), 37–38.
94 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 23.
95 Elwood Baumann,
The Loch Ness Monster (New York: Franklin Watts, 1972), 12.
96 Roy P. Mackal,
The Monsters of Loch Ness (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976), 95–96.
97 Campbell,
Loch Ness Monster, 38.
98 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 95.
99 Holiday,
Great Orm of Loch Ness, 26.
100 Mike Dash, “Frank Searle’s Lost Second Book,” December 27, 2009,
Dry as Dust: A Fortean in the Archives, Charles Fort Institute,
Blogs.forteana.org/node/95 (accessed July 4, 2010).
101 Quoted in Holiday,
Great Orm of Loch Ness, 26–27.
102 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 95.
103 Quoted in “Mr. Wetherell and a Broadcast,”
Daily Express, December 23, 1933.
104 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 28.
105 Quoted in “Hunter’s Story of Finding of Spoor,”
Scotsman, December 26, 1933, 10.
106 Strix [Peter Fleming],
Spectator, April 5, 1957, quoted in Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 28–29.
107 David Martin and Alastair Boyd,
Nessie: The Surgeon’s Photograph Exposed (London: Thorne, 1999), 34.
108 “Monster Mystery Deepens,”
Daily Mail, January 4, 1934.
109 Martin and Boyd,
Nessie, 27.
110 The “Surgeon’s Photograph” is really two photographs: the famous image and a less impressive image said to show the creature diving. Cryptozoologists criticize skeptics for concentrating on the famous image and ignoring the second, but I will also follow that pattern. In my opinion, the second photo offers little to no additional information. It is consistent with the same model sinking or tipping over or with another object—but the image is too poor to answer for itself.
111 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 98.
112 Roy Chapman Andrews,
This Business of Exploring (New York: Putnam, 1935), 59–60.
113 “The Making of a Monster,”
Sunday Telegraph (London), December 7, 1975, 6, quoted in Martin and Boyd,
Nessie, 14.
114 Martin and Boyd,
Nessie, 17.
116 Robert Kenneth Wilson to Constance Whyte, 1955, quoted in ibid., 62.
117 Robert Kenneth Wilson to Maurice Burton, April 27, 1962, quoted in ibid., 57.
118 Major Egginton to Nicholas Witchell, November 3, 1970, quoted in ibid., 68–69.
120 Nicholas Witchell,
The Loch Ness Story: Revised and Updated Edition (London: Corgi, 1991), 47.
121 Martin and Boyd,
Nessie, 77.
122 Major Egginton to Nicholas Witchell, November 9, 1970, quoted in ibid., 72.
124 Denise Wilson to Tim Dinsdale, 1979, quoted in ibid., 58.
126 Quoted in ibid., 77–78.
127 Ibid., 83; Paul H. LeBlond and M. J. Collins, “The Wilson Nessie Photograph: A Size Determination Based on Physical Principles,”
Scottish Naturalist 100 (1988): 95–108.
128 Quoted in Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell,
Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’
s Most Elusive Creatures (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 17.
129 Witchell,
Loch Ness Story, 75–77.
131 Witchell,
Loch Ness Story: Revised, 82–83. The man who Stuart took to see the props is identified by Witchell as “another Loch Ness resident, who is known to me and with whom I confirmed the following details.” His name is revealed as Richard Frere in Campbell,
Loch Ness Monster, 44.
132 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 102.
133 Quoted in Radford and Nickell,
Lake Monster Mysteries, 19.
134 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 13.
135 Dinsdale,
Loch Ness Monster, 5–6.
143 Mavis Cole, “Summer’s Here and Britain Sees Loch Ness Monster,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, June 14, 1960, B6.
144 Donald White, “The Great Monster Hunt,”
Boston Globe, December 6, 1970, G57.
145 Tim Dinsdale,
Project Water Horse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 159–160.
146 White, “Great Monster Hunt.”
147 Dinsdale,
Project Water Horse, 11.
150 Shine,
Loch Ness, 12.
151 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 121.
153 Quoted in Henry Allen, “On the Monster Trail,”
Washington Post, April 16, 1972, E9.
154 Dinsdale,
Project Water Horse, 154–155.
156 Quoted in Allen, “On the Monster Trail.”
158 Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe,
The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (New York: Penguin / Tarcher, 2003), 21.
159 Dunn, “Monster Bobs Up Again.”
160 Dinsdale,
Loch Ness Monster, 13.
162 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark,
Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster / Fireside, 1999), 140.
163 Michael Thompson-Noel, “The Day I Saw Five Loch Ness Monsters,”
Financial Times (London), September 13, 1997, 17.
164 Bernard Heuvelmans, “Review of the Monsters of Loch Ness,”
Skeptical Inquirer 2, no. 1 (1977): 110.
165 Karl Shuker,
The Beasts That Hide from Man: Seeking the World’s Last Undiscovered Animals (New York: Paraview Press, 2003), 187.
166 Dinsdale,
Loch Ness Monster, 232–233.
167 Shine,
Loch Ness, 26.
168 Adrian J. Shine, “Postscript: Surgeon or Sturgeon?”
Scottish Naturalist 105 (1993): 271–282.
169 Bauer,
Enigma of Loch Ness, 56.
170 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 200–201.
171 Dinsdale,
Loch Ness Monster, 81–82.
172 John Kirk,
In the Domain of the Lake Monsters (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1998), 115, 119.
173 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 29.
174 Bentley Murray, letter to the editor,
Scotsman, October 30, 1933, 13.
175 A. T. C., letter to the editor,
Scotsman, November 4, 1933, 15.
176 “Loch Ness Monster Theory,”
Inverness Courier, September 5, 1933.
177 “The Loch Ness ‘Monster’: Is It a Giant Eel?”
Inverness Courier, September 15, 1933.
178 W. P., letter to the editor,
Scotsman, November 2, 1933, 11.
179 Alan MacLean, letter to the editor,
Scotsman, November 16, 1933, 11.
180 John Moir, letter to the editor,
Scotsman, November 6, 1933, 13.
181 Holiday,
Great Orm of Loch Ness.
185 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 136.
186 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 74.
187 Binns quotes an article from the
Inverness Courier, but seems not to provide a citation for it, in
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 20.
188 Campbell, “Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness.”
189 “Loch Ness ‘Monster’ Again,”
Inverness Courier, June 9, 1933.
190 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 142.
191 Because the word “porpoise” has both formal and informal meanings, it is not clear what type of animals are described in this story. They may have been true porpoises, or they could just as well have been dolphins. See “Captured by Nature,”
Daily Mail, September 16, 1914, 3.
192 Gordon Williamson, “Seals in Loch Ness,”
Scientific Reports of the Whales Research Institute, no. 39 (1988): 151–157.
195 “The ‘Monster’—Scientists’ Views After Seeing Film,”
Scotsman, October 5, 1934, 9.
196 “Film That ‘Removes Doubt’ to Be Shown in Scotland,”
Scotsman, November 3, 1936, 10. This appears to contradict a quote from Irvine, not clearly sourced, that the creature had “a huge body … over 30 feet long” (quoted in Witchell,
Loch Ness Story, 52–53).
197 “The Monster of Loch Ness: New Accounts from Eye-witnesses,”
Times, December 18, 1933, 9.
200 Compare “What Was It? A Strange Experience on Loch Ness,”
Northern Chronicle, August 27, 1930, with Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 37–38.
201 Quoted in Witchell,
Loch Ness Story, 29–30.
202 It is interesting to note, however, that those who claim to have been abducted by aliens are more prone than control subjects to form false memories in a laboratory setting. See Susan A. Clancy, Richard J. McNally, Daniel L. Schacter, Mark F. Lenzenweger, and Roger K. Pitman, “Memory Distortion in People Reporting Abduction by Aliens,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111 (2002): 455–461.
I know of no similar research involving people to claim to have seen cryptids, but it is intriguing to speculate that this population might also exhibit increased vulnerability to false memories. In either event, a significant rate of false memory is common to us all.
203 “Sea Serpent in the Highlands.”
204 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 99. The claim of twenty-one photographs conflicts with news reports at the time, such as “Five Photographs Secured by Searchers—Seen 21 Times,”
Scotsman, August 9, 1934, 9. However, Mackal claims to have examined all twenty-one photographs from Mountain’s expedition.
205 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 37–38.
206 The Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau (LNPIB; now Loch Ness Investigation Bureau [LNIB]) was formed in 1962, and Adrian Shine says that its camera surveillance began the same year. See “Loch Ness Timeline,” Loch Ness and Morar Project,
http://www.lochnessproject.org/adrian_shine_archiveroom/loch_ness_archive_timeline.htm (accessed July 5, 2010). Holiday says that the camera rigs were built for the 1964 season, and mentions earlier work by the LNPIB, in
Great Orm of Loch Ness, 64–65.
207 Holiday,
Great Orm of Loch Ness, 65–67.
208 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 200.
211 Rikki Razdan and Alan Kielar, “Sonar and Photographic Searches for the Loch Ness Monster: A Reassessment,”
Skeptical Inquirer 9, no. 2 (1984–1985): 153–154. Based on the shape of the fin, Sir Peter Scott, a noted naturalist and a co-founder of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau, gave the creature the scientific name
Nessiteras rhombopteryx (monster of Ness with the diamond-shaped fin) so it could be registered as an endangered species. See Peter Scott and Robert Rines, “Naming the Loch Ness Monster,"
Nature 258, no. 5535 (1975): 466–468. But it was soon pointed out that the name can be anagrammed into “monster hoax by Sir Peter S,” as reported in “Loch Ness Monster Shown a Hoax by Another Name,”
New York Times, December 19, 1975, 78. To counter this insinuation with another anagram, Rines “came up with the anti dote—‘Yes, both pix are monsters—R’” (Dinsdale,
Loch Ness Monster, 171).
212 Mysteries of the Unknown: Mysterious Creatures (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1988), 73.
213 Campbell,
Loch Ness Monster, 67.
214 Harmsworth,
Loch Ness, Nessie and Me, 181.
215 Witchell,
Loch Ness Story: Revised, 165.
216 Campbell,
Loch Ness Monster, 72–74.
217 Witchell,
Loch Ness Story: Revised, 168.
218 Gould,
Loch Ness Monster, 120.
219 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 35.
220 David S. Martin, Adrian J. Shine, and Annie Duncan, “The Profundal Fauna of Loch Ness and Loch Morar,”
Scottish Naturalist 105 (1993): 119.
222 Quoted in Holiday,
Great Orm of Loch Ness, 201.
223 Binns,
Loch Ness Mystery Solved, 148–149.
224 Shine, “Loch Ness Timeline.”
226 Karen DeYoung, “Sonar Search for ‘Nessie’ Reveals 3 Wobbly Scratches,”
Washington Post, October 12, 1987, A1.
227 For a thorough discussion, see Adrian J. Shine and David S. Martin, “Loch Ness Habitats Observed by Sonar and Underwater Television,”
Scottish Naturalist 100 (1988): 111–199.
230 Quoted in “Commander Gould to Investigate,”
Scotsman, November 10, 1933, 11.
231 Meurger and Gagnon,
Lake Monster Traditions, 135–139.
232 Mackal,
Monsters of Loch Ness, 25.
233 Shine and Martin, “Loch Ness Habitats Observed by Sonar and Underwater Television.”
5. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SEA SERPENT
1 Benjamin Radford,
Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011).
2 Sherrie Lynne Lyons,
Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science in the Margins in the Victorian Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).
4 Dennis Loxton to Daniel Loxton, April 8, 2005.
5 Depending on the movie, Godzilla’s height ranges from a measly 167 to 334 feet tall, according to Robert Biondi, “So Just How Big Is Godzilla? A Model Builder’s Guide to Godzilla’s Size Changes,”
Kaiju Review, no. 4 (1993).
6 Emily Vermeule,
Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 183.
7 The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (Glasgow: Collins, 1952).
8 For an overview, see J. V. Kinnier Wilson, “A Return to the Problems of Behemoth and Leviathan,”
Vetus Testamentum 25, fasc. 1 (1975): 1–14.
9 John K. Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo, “A
Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World,”
American Journal of Archaeology 106, no. 2 (2002): 213.
12 Katharine Shepard,
The Fish-Tailed Monster in Greek and Etruscan Art (New York: Privately printed, 1940; repr., Landisville, Pa.: Coachwhip, 2011), 78.
13 Papadopoulos and Ruscillo, “
Ketos in Early Athens,” 216–219.
14 John Boardman, “‘Very Like a Whale’: Classical Sea Monsters,” in
Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada, ed. Anne E. Farkas, Prudence O. Harper, and Evelyn B. Harrison (Mainz: Zabern, 1987), 73–84.
15 Diego Cuoghi, “The Art of Imagining UFOs,” ed. Daniel Loxton, trans. Daniela Cisi and Leonardo Serna,
Skeptic 11, no. 1. (2004): 43–51.
16 Bernard Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 508. For further discussion, see Loren Coleman, “The Meaning of Cryptozoology: Who Invented the Term Cryptozoology?” 2003,
www.lorencoleman.com/cryptozoology_faq.html (accessed February 12, 2011).
17 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 96–99.
18 Boardman, “Very Like a Whale,” 78.
19 A. C. Oudemans,
The Great Sea-Serpent (1892; repr., Landisville, Pa.: Coachwhip, 2007), 89.
20 Adrienne Mayor, “Paleocryptozoology: A Call for Collaboration Between Classicists and Cryptozoologists,”
Cryptozoology 8 (1989): 12–26.
21 Pausanias Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones (London: Heinemann, 1918), Paus. 1.44.8.
22 Pliny the Elder,
The Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 353 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 3:bk. 9.5, 173.
23 Richard B. Stothers, “Ancient Scientific Basis of the ‘Great Serpent’ from Historical Evidence,”
Isis 95, no. 2 (2004): 223–226.
24 Aristotle,
History of Animals, trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (Sioux Falls, S. Dak.: NuVision, 2004), bk. 4, chap. 8.
25 Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 28.
26 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 82.
27 Apollonius of Rhodes,
Jason and the Golden Fleece, trans. Richard Hunter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 102.
28 W. R. Branch and W. D. Hacke, “A Fatal Attack on a Young Boy by an African Rock Python
Python sebae,”
Journal of Herpetology 14, no. 3 (1980): 305–307.
29 Richard Stothers, “Ancient Scientific Basis of the ‘Great Serpent’ from Historical Evidence,”
Isis 95, no. 2 (2004): 228–229.
30 Pliny used the word
Dracones; John Bostock’s translation of
Natural History (1855) renders it as “dragons,” while H. Rackham’s translation (1940) substitutes “serpents.”
31 Pliny the Elder,
Natural History, 3:bk. 8.11, 25–27.
32 Edward Topsell,
The Historie of Serpents; or, the Second Booke of Living Creatures (1608; LaVergue: ECCO Print Editions, 2011), 168.
33 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 82.
34 Indeed, during my research I realized that this connection has occasionally been made. For example, the question was raised in this 2006 cryptozoology forum thread, in which poster Fel Faralei wondered, “It’s a long shot but from what I’ve learn’t about Caddy it seems to fit the description of a hippocampus quite well…. What if they were real only less beautiful and horse could it be caddy?” (
http://www.cryptozoology.com/forum/topic_view_thread.php?tid=5&pid=372181 [accessed May 28, 2011]).
35 I based my drawing on eyewitness sketches and a composite drawing in Paul H. LeBlond and Edward L. Bousfield,
Cadborosaurus: Survivor from the Deep (Victoria, B.C.: Horsdal & Schubart, 1995). In addition, I referred to artworks of Cadborosaurus by cryptozoological enthusiasts, including David John and Darren Naish.
36 Helen Scales,
Poseidon’
s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality (New York: Gotham Books, 2009), 20–22.
37 Shepard,
Fish-Tailed Monster in Greek and Etruscan Art, 26.
38 Scales,
Poseidon’
s Steed, 31–33.
39 Publius Vergilius Maro,
Fourth Georgic of Virgil, trans. R. M. Millington (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), 59.
40 Michael J. Curley, trans.,
Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xvi–xix.
42 James Carlill, trans.,
Physiologus, in
The Epic of the Beast, ed. William Rose (London: Routledge, 1900), 189, 199–200, 231, reprinted in
The Book of Fabulous Beasts: A Treasury of Writings from Ancient Times to the Present, ed. Joseph Nigg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 116.
43 Curley, trans.,
Physiologus, xxvi–xxxiii.
44 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 260.
45 Richard Barber, trans.,
Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford M.S. Bodley 764 with All the Original Miniatures Reproduced in Facsimile (London: Folio Society, 1992), 10.
46 Ian Whitaker, “North Atlantic Sea-Creatures in the
King’s Mirror (
Konungs Skuggsjá),”
Polar Record 23 (1986): 3–13.
48 Paul Henri Mallet,
Northern antiquities: or, An historical account of the manners, customs, religion and laws, maritime expeditions and discoveries, language and literature of the ancient Scandinavians, trans. Thomas Percy, rev. I. A. Blackwell (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 514.
49 George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, eds.,
The New American Cyclopedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge (New York: Appleton, 1869), 14:470–471.
50 According to Samuel Hibbert, “The faith in the Edda of the great serpent that Thor fished for, did not, as Dr Percy conceives, give rise to the notion of the sea-snake, but a real sea-snake was the foundation of the fable” (
A Description of the Shetland Islands: Comprising an Account of Their Geology, Scenery, Antiquities, and Superstitions [Edinburgh: Constable, 1822], 565).
51 Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 298.
52 Snorri Sturluson, prologue to
The Prose Edda, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeeur (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916).
53 Charles Mackay,
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841; New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002), 105.
54 Albertus was also associated with astrology and alchemy, which were at that time respectable areas of intellectual inquiry. Still, his alchemical interests were probably exaggerated. As Mackay noted, many magical tales were associated with Albertus and Aquinas, including the rumor that Albertus could control the weather: “Such stories as these shew the spirit of the age. Every great man who attempted to study the secrets of nature was thought a magician” (ibid., chap. 4).
55 Albert the Great,
Man and the Beasts: De animalibus, Books 22–26, trans. James J. Scanlan (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 350.
56 Olaus Magnus,
A Description of the Northern Peoples: Rome 1555, ed. Peter Foote, trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens (London: Hakluyt Society, 1998), 1124.
57 Ray Gibson “Nemertean Genera and Species of the World: An Annotated Checklist of Original Names and Description Citations, Synonyms, Current Taxonomic Status, Habitats and Recorded Zoogeographic Distribution,”
Journal of Natural History 29, no. 2 (1995): 271–561; Adriaan Gittenberger and Cor Schipper, “Long Live Linnaeus,
Lineus longissimus (Gunnerus, 1770) (Vermes: Nemertea: Anopla: Heteronemertea: Lineidae), the Longest Animal Worldwide and Its Relatives Occurring in the Netherlands,”
Zoologische Mededelingen 82, no. 7 (2008): 59–63.
58 Olaus,
Description of the Northern Peoples, 1128.
59 Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 91.
60 “Recreations in Natural History … Ancient Flying Dragons, Pterosaurians, &c.,”
New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, pt. 3 (1843): 38–39.
61 For example, cryptozoologists regularly discard Bigfoot cases with which paranormal or inexplicable elements are associated (such as glowing eyes, telepathy, or a UFO). Some cryptozoology Web sites even have policies that forbid discussions of the paranormal, which can badly distort the eyewitness record—and destroys cryptozoology’s foundation. For more on this issue, see Daniel Loxton, “An Argument That Should Never Be Made Again,” February 2, 2010, Skepticblog,
http://www.skepticblog.org/2010/02/02/an-argument-that-should-never-be-made-again/ (accessed October 4, 2011).
62 Erich Pontoppidan,
The Natural History of Norway: Part II (London: Printed for A. Linde, 1755), 207–208.
63 Michel Meurger, with Claude Gagnon,
Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (London: Fortean Times, 1988), 24.
65 Pierre Belon,
De aquatilibus (Paris: Charles Estienne, 1553), bk. 1:26–27.
66 Conrad Gesner,
Historiae animalium, bk. 4,
Qui est de piscium & aquatilium animantium natura (Zurich, 1558), 433 (translated by Donald Prothero and Doug Henning).
67 Conrad Gesner,
Nomenclator aquafilium animantium (1560), quoted in Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 92.
68 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 99–100.
69 Ambroise Paré,
On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 112.
70 Historians warn of the distorting effects of labeling figures of the past as belonging to modern movements. For example, consider the first warning expressed by Rebekah Higgitt (curator and historian of science at the Royal Observatory Greenwich & National Maritime Museum): “Do not ever call anyone a scientist who would not have recognised the term. The word … was not actually
used until the 1870s. If we use the term to describe anyone before this date we risk loading their views, status, career, ambitions and work with associations that just do not exist before this date” (“Dos and Don’ts in History of Science,” April 17, 2011, Teleskopos,
http://teleskopos.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/dos-and-donts-in-history-of-science/ [accessed September 7, 2011]). The modern tradition of scientific skepticism dates to the twentieth century. However, centuries of earlier thinkers tried their hands at similar debunking projects. They might not have felt a kinship with my work, but I feel a connection to theirs!
71 Sir Thomas Browne,
Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into Commonly Presumed Truths (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2009), 242.
72 There is some controversy about the attribution of the
Codex canadensis. Here, I have deferred to François-Marc Gagnon of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, who concludes, “Until there is proof to the contrary, he can be considered the author of the
Codex canadensis” (“About Louis Nicolas: Biographical Notes on Louis Nicolas, Presumed Author of the
Codex canadensis,” Library and Archives Canada,
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/codex/026014–1200-e.html [accessed May 2, 2011]).
73 Quoted in Meurger, with Gagnon,
Lake Monster Traditions, 212.
74 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 95.
76 Hans Lilienskiold,
Speculum boreale eller den finmarchiske beschrifwelsis (1698), quoted in Ole Lindquist, “Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises in the Economy and Culture of Peasant Fishermen in Norway, Orkney, Shetland, Faeroe Islands and Iceland, ca. 900–1900
A.D., and Norse Greenland, ca. 1000–1500
A.D.” (Ph.D. diss., University of St Andrews, 1994), 2:sec. A.18, 1003–1006,
www.fishernet.is/is/hvalveidar/19/35 (accessed May 25, 2011).
77 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 114.
78 Pontoppidan,
Natural History of Norway, iv.
84 Henry Lee,
Sea Monsters Unmasked (London: Clowes, 1883), 63.
85 Meurger, with Gagnon,
Lake Monster Traditions, 17.
86 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 112.
87 Lee,
Sea Monsters Unmasked, 2–3.
89 Pontoppidan,
Natural History of Norway, 208.
90 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 34.
91 Pliny the Elder,
Natural History, 3:bk. 9.4, 171.
92 A True and Perfect Account of the Miraculous Sea-Monster or Wonderful Fish Lately Taken in Ireland (London: Printed for P. Brooksby and W. Whitwood, 1674).
93 “Wernerian Natural History Society,”
Philosophical Magazine 33 (1809): 90–91.
94 Rupert T. Gould,
The Case for the Sea-Serpent (London: Allan, 1930; New York: Putnam, 1934), 239.
95 James Ritchie, “More About Monsters: The Sea-Serpent of Stronsay,”
Times (London), December 16, 1933, 15.
96 “Here’s First Genuine Sea Monster Captured: Odd Fish Stumps Scientist,”
Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1934, 3; “France Has Sea Monster and the Body to Prove It,”
New York Times, March 1, 1934, 1.
97 “Sea ‘Monster’ Is Declared a Basking Shark: French Scientists Say It Is Not an Odd Fish,”
New York Times, March 16, 1934, 18.
98 Associated Press, “‘Sea Serpent’ Body Is Found in Pacific,”
New York Times, November 23, 1934, 21.
99 Associated Press, “Canada’s ‘Sea Serpent’ Found to Be Only Shark,”
New York Times, November 27, 1934, 23.
100 John Saar, “Fishermen Made a Monstrous Mistake,”
Washington Post, July 21, 1977, 2.
101 John Saar, “‘Plesiosaurus’ Find: Monster Mystery Surfaces in Japan,”
Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1977, B6.
102 Ellis,
Monsters of the Sea (New York: Lyons Press, 2001), 69.
104 Christopher McGowan,
The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin (New York: Basic Books, 2001), ix.
105 For example, Thomas Jefferson suspected that mammoths or mastodons might survive in his time in the western interior of the North American continent. Avidly interested in fossils, but unconvinced about extinction, Jefferson hoped on the basis of Native American fossil lore that the Lewis and Clark expedition might encounter living specimens. (Today, we might call Jefferson’s speculation an example of cryptozoology.) For a discussion of Jefferson’s thoughts, see Adrienne Mayor,
Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 55–61.
106 William D. Conybeare, “On the Discovery of an Almost Complete Skeleton of the Plesiosaurus,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Geological Society of London, 2nd ser., 1 (1824): 381–389; McGowan,
Dragon Seekers, 78–84.
107 William Hooker, “Additional Testimony Respecting the Sea-Serpent of the American Seas,”
Edinburgh Journal of Science 6 (1827): 126–133.
108 Robert Bakewell,
Introduction to Geology (New Haven, Conn.: Howe, 1833), 213.
109 Benjamin Silliman, footnote in ibid., 214.
110 John Ruggles Cotting,
A Synopsis of Lectures on Geology, Comprising the Principles of the Science (Taunton, Mass.: Published for the author, 1835), 58–59.
111 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 276.
112 Lyons,
Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls, 19.
113 Gould,
Case for the Sea-Serpent, 96, 99.
114 This request for a report was recorded in the Admiralty records, according to ibid., 96.
115 Peter M’Quhae, “The Great Sea Serpent” [letter to the editor],
Times, October 14, 1848, 3.
116 Gould,
Case for the Sea-Serpent, 97–101.
119 F. G. S., “To the Editor of the Times,”
Times, November 2, 1848, 3.
120 Philip Henry Gosse,
The Romance of Natural History (London: Nisbet, 1863), 347.
121 [Richard Owen], review of
On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin,
Edinburgh Review 111 (1860): 487–532.
123 Quoted in Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 219.
124 Richard Owen, “The Sea Serpent,”
Times, November 14, 1848, 8.
125 Louis Agassiz, “Extract from the Thirteenth Lecture of Professor Agassiz, Delivered in Philadelphia, Tuesday Evening, March 20, 1849,” in Eugene Batchelder,
A Romance of the Fashionable World (Boston: French, 1857), 153–157.
126 Louis Agassiz, “Eugene Batchelder, Esq.—,” in ibid., 152–153.
127 Edward Newman, in
Zoologist 7 (1849): 2356.
128 Willy Ley,
Willy Ley’
s Exotic Zoology (1959; New York: Bonanza Books, 1987), 224.
129 Newman, in
Zoologist, x–xi.
130 Gould,
Case for the Sea Serpent, 84–85. I was not surprised to see this. Gould was among the more thorough and responsible of the early-twentieth-century proponents of both the sea serpent and the Loch Ness monster.
131 Gosse,
Romance of Natural History, 368.
132 An instantly created river implies previous rain; sand implies previous erosion; tree rings imply seasons past; an animal’s body implies gestation, growth, respiration, and so on. Consider fur: if God created, say, bunny rabbits, their silky pelts imply a prior period of hair growth. As Philip Henry Gosse put it,
We have passed in review before us the whole organic world: and the result is uniform; that no example can be selected from the vast vegetable kingdom, none from the vast animal kingdom, which did not at the instant of its creation present indubitable evidences of a previous history. This is not put forth as a hypothesis, but as a necessity; I do not say that it was probably so, but that it was certainly so; not that it may have been thus, but that it could not have been otherwise. (Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot [London: Van Voorst, 1857], 335)
133 Stephen Jay Gould, “Adam’s Navel,” in
The Flamingo’
s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1985), 100.
134 Philip Henry Gosse,
The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (London: Van Voorst, 1856).
135 Gosse,
Romance of Natural History, 298.
136 Gosse and Darwin were socially acquainted and exchanged friendly correspondence on orchid cultivation and variation, as well as other topics. Darwin was especially impressed by Gosse’s experiments with marine aquariums: “I saw Mr Gosse the other night & he told me that he had now the same several sea-animals & algæ living & breeding for 13 months in the same artificially made sea water! Does not this tempt you? it almost tempts me to set up a marine vivarium” (Charles Darwin to J. S. Henslow, March 26, 1855, Darwin Correspondence Project,
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-1655 [accessed September 10, 2011]).
137 Gosse,
Romance of Natural History, 364.
139 Jules Verne,
Journey to the Center of the Earth, trans. Willis T. Bradley (New York: Ace Books, 1956), 187–188.
141 Gould,
Case for the Sea Serpent, 277.
142 “The Hydrargos sillimanii, or Great Sea Serpent,”
New York Daily Tribune, August 29, 1845, 1.
143 “Orange County Milk,”
New York Observer and Chronicle, January 25, 1845, 14.
144 “Hydrargos sillimanii, or Great Sea Serpent.”
145 Douglas E. Jones, “Doctor Koch and His ‘Immense Antediluvian Monsters,’”
Alabama Heritage 12 (1989): 2–19.
147 Jeffries Wyman, “Hydrarchos sillimani,”
Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 2 (1848): 65–68.
148 Jones, “Doctor Koch and his ‘Immense Antediluvian Monsters.’”
149 James D. Dana, “On Dr. Koch’s Evidence with Regard to the Contemporaneity of Man and Mastodon in Missouri,”
American Journal of Science and Arts 9 (1875): 335–346.
151 Quoted in George E. Gifford Jr., “Twelve Letters from Jeffries Wyman, M.D.: Hampden-Sydney Medical College, Richmond, Virginia, 1843–1848,”
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 20, no. 4 (1965): 320–322.
152 Dr. Lister, in
Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 2 (1848): 94–96.
153 Albert Koch,
Journey Through a Part of the United States in the Years 1844 to 1846, trans. Ernst A. Stadler (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 104.
155 Oddly enough, thanks to the rules of taxonomic priority, it is
Basolisaurus that remains enshrined in the nomenclature. For Owen’s analysis, see Richard Owen, “On the Teeth of the Zeuglodon (Basilosaurus of Dr. Harlan),”
Proceedings of the Geological Society of London 3 (1842): 23–28.
156 Jones, “Doctor Koch and his ‘Immense Antediluvian Monsters.’”
157 Brian Switek,
Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2010), 152, 277.
158 Robert Silverberg,
Scientists and Scoundrels: A Book of Hoaxes (New York: Crowell, 1965), 67.
160 Owen, “Sea Serpent,” 8.
161 George R. Price, “Science and the Supernatural,”
Science 122 (1955): 363.
162 “The Great Sea Serpent,”
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 17, no. 2 (1849): 234.
164 Captain Elkanah Finney, description of a sighting in 1815, recorded in 1817, quoted in Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 128.
165 Edward Newman, “Notes on the Zoology of Spitsbergen,”
Zoologist 24 (1864): 202–203.
166 Province [Vancouver], March 9, 1943, 1, quoted in LeBlond and Bousfield,
Cadborosaurus, 70.
167 Ley,
Willy Ley’
s Exotic Zoology, 213.
168 Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 53.
171 Alex Campbell to Ness Fishery Board, October 28, 1933, quoted in Rupert Gould,
The Loch Ness Monster (1934; Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1976), 110–112.
172 McTaggart-Cowan went on to serve as head of the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, and then the dean of graduate studies. See “Ian McTaggart-Cowan, Part 2,” Heritage Conservation Trust Foundation,
http://www.hctf.ca/AboutUs/mctaggart2.html (accessed September 26, 2011).
173 Quoted in Ray Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,”
Maclean’
s, June 15, 1950, 43.
174 Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 345.
175 Gosse,
Romance of Natural History, 338–340.
176 Indeed, these cases are so similar that a few have suggested the possibility of plagiarism. Gould wrote, “The accounts given by Smith and Herriman are so singularly alike that one might be pardoned for thinking that one was copied from the other” (
Case for the Sea-Serpent, 138–139). However, he felt that this “very remarkable string of coincidences” was unlikely to be anything more sinister than coincidence. Heuvelmans was more suspicious, saying that the story Captain Smith told of his adventure aboard the
Pekin “seems most unlikely to have happened to him at all” (
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 201–202).
177 Quoted in Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 342.
179 Pontoppidan,
Natural History of Norway, 201.
180 Oudemans,
Great Sea-Serpent, 396.
181 Archie H. Wills, “All in a Lifetime” (ca. 1985), 61–62 (hand-bound, typed manuscript), Central Branch, Greater Victoria Public Library, Victoria, B.C.
183 The
Victoria Daily Times managed not to resort to layoffs, but only because the staff accepted two waves of across the board wage cuts. See ibid., 61.
184 “A Cure for the Sea Serpent,”
Critic, July–December 1885, 153.
185 Quoted in Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 24.
186 See, for example, Bruce S. Ingram, “The Loch Ness Monster Paralleled in Canada, ‘Cadborosaurus,’”
Illustrated London News, January 6, 1934, 8; “Animals: Cup & Saucer,”
Time, October 16, 1933; and Bert Stoll, “Sea Serpent Appears Off Vancouver Island,”
New York Times, February 11, 1934.
187 Archie Wills, in
Victoria Daily Times, June 8, 1959, 12, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds, University of Victoria Archives, Victoria, B.C.
188 Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 43.
189 “Yachtsmen Tell of Huge Serpent Seen off Victoria,”
Victoria Daily Times, October 5, 1933, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.
190 “Not Humpback Says Langley,”
Victoria Daily Times, October 18, 1933.
191 Quoted in Ingram, “Loch Ness Monster Paralleled in Canada.”
193 R. G. Rhodes, “The Diplodocus” [letter to the editor],
Victoria Daily Times, October 16, 1933.
194 Quoted in “Says Serpent Not Conger Eel,”
Victoria Daily Times, October 17, 1933.
195 Quoted in “Caddy,”
Victoria Daily Times, October 20, 1933.
196 “The 8th Wonder of the World! Starts today for three days. Adventure that Leaps Far Beyond the Bounds of Imagination! Unique! Thrilling! Startling!” proclaimed the advertisement in the
Victoria Daily Times, May 20, 1933, 9.
197 Quoted in Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 42.
198 Wills, “All in a Lifetime,” 62–63.
199 G. Clifford Carl,
Guide to Marine Life of British Columbia (Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, 1963), 134.
200 Wills, “All in a Lifetime,” 62.
201 Quoted in Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 24.
202 Jim McKeachie, “$200 Offered for Caddy Photo,”
Victoria Daily Times, March 31, 1951, and “Doctor Carl Enters First ‘Photograph’ of Caddy in Times’ $200 Competition,”
Victoria Daily Times, April 16, 1951, clippings, Archie H. Wills Fonds.
203 Michael A. Woodley, Darren Naish, and Hugh P. Shanahan, “How Many Extant Pinniped Species Remain to Be Described?”
Historical Biology 20, no. 4 (2008): 225–235.
204 John Kirk, “BCSCC Member Sights Cadborosaurus-like Animal in Fraser River,”
BCSCC Quarterly, September 2010, 6. Kirk has also reported several sustained daylight sightings of 60-foot, serpentine Ogopogo—“I have had 11 sightings” (John Kirk, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 21, 2012)—and to have shot several sequences of video in association with those sightings. In one dramatic report, Kirk claimed to have seen two Ogopogos traveling together “like a series of arches. I could see the other shore through the gap between the underside of the humps and the water’s surface. By being able to see under the arched humps I knew I was definitely not seeing a boat wake or an unusual wave effect, but rather the enormous forms of two huge aquatic animals which were members of the Ogopogo brood” (
In the Domain of the Lake Monsters [Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1998], 18–20; see also 44–26, 52–53, 69–74, 80).
205 As of this writing, other skeptical investigators and I have seen only those segments of the video that appeared in previews for
Alaskan Monster Hunt. At first glance, the “creatures” in the film appear more like a boat wake than a family of Caddys, but I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve had a chance to review the entire video in detail.
206 Owen, “Sea Serpent,” 8.
207 Edward L. Bousfield and Paul H. LeBlond, “Preliminary Studies on the Biology of a Large Marine Cryptid in Coastal Waters of British Columbia,”
American Zoologist 32 (1992): 2A, and “An Account of
Cadborosaurus willsi, New Genus, New Species, a Large Aquatic Reptile from the Pacific Coast of North America,”
Amphipacifica, suppl. 1 (1995): 3–25. Bousfield was a retired research associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, and LeBlond was a professor of oceanography at the University of British Columbia.
209 LeBlond and Bousfield,
Cadborosaurus, 79.
211 LeBlond and Bousfield,
Cadborosaurus, 55.
212 “Baby Sea Serpent Found in Stomach of Whale,”
Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1937, 3.
213 Jim Cosgrove, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, July 11, 2002. At the time, Cosgrove, a marine biologist, was the acting manager of natural history at the museum.
214 Or is there? I have long regarded the case of the Naden Harbour carcass as permanently unsolvable, so I was very surprised when Darren Naish contacted me during the last stages of preparing this manuscript to let me know that he and his colleagues believe that they have solved the mystery (Darren Naish, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, September 28, 2011). I look forward to reading their argument in print!
215 This bit of fakelore tells of “a beautiful Indian maiden, Cadboro,” whose lover was transformed into a monster. See, for example, T. W. Paterson, “Sea Serpents Might Exist,”
Daily Colonist, May 23, 1965, 10. However, Cadboro Bay was actually named for a ship that belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company around 1842: the brigantine
Cadboro, said to have been the first European vessel to anchor in the bay. The British Columbia Geographical Names Office adds, “Note that her log book and journal (copies of which are in the Provincial Archives) confirm the spelling ‘Cadboro’” (BCGNIS Query Results,
http://archive.ilmb.gov.bc.ca/bcgn-bin/bcg10?name=38867 [accessed September 28, 2011]).
216 Associated Press, “Amy,
Cadborosaurus,”
San Francisco Examiner, November 3, 1933, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.
217 Bob Davis, “Bob Davis Reveals: Authentic Sea Serpent Due to Arrive Any Moment off Canada,”
New York Sun, October 31, 1940, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.
218 Archie Wills to Paul LeBlond and John R. Sibert, August 16, 1970. My thanks to Paul LeBlond for sharing his correspondence with Archie Wills—essential original sources that are not otherwise part of the public record.
219 William Carpenter, “On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying and Directing Muscular Movement, Independently of Volition,”
Notices of the Meetings of the Royal Institution, March 12, 1852, 147–153.
220 Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe,
The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (New York: Penguin / Tarcher, 2003), 26.
221 Jack Nord, letter to the editor,
Victoria Daily Times, October 11, 1933, Archie H. Wills Fonds.
222 Robin Baird, “Elephant Seals Around Southern Vancouver Island,”
Victoria Naturalist 47, no. 2 (1990): 6–7.
223 Ray Wormald, “Caddy Has Three Heads,” [
Victoria Daily Times], April 6, 1951, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.
224 Stephen Cosgrove, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 17, 2012.
225 Myths and Monsters, broadcast on CBC, October 29, 1950, script or transcript, Archie H. Wills Fonds.
227 T. H. Huxley, “The Sea Serpent,”
Times, January 11, 1893, 12.
228 Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe,
The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates (San Antonio, Tex.: Anomalist Books, 2006).
229 Many authors confidently credit this sighting to Hans Egede; others either are vague about whether he personally witnessed this monster or assert that it was instead his son Poul who was the witness. Oudemans, for example, credits this as “the Sea-Serpent, as seen by Hans Egede, drawn by Bing” (
Great Sea-Serpent, fig. 19), presumably after Pontoppidan, who specifies, “Mr. Bing, one of the missionaries … took a drawing of it (
Natural History of Norway). Ellis concurs: “Since Egede was known as a sober, reliable observer, this picture thus became one of the earliest illustrations of a sea monster based upon a reliable eyewitness account” (
Monsters of the Sea, 44). Others, however, clarify the record: “Hans Egede (1686–1758) was not a witness and his account is second-hand based presumably on the recollection of his son Poul (1708–1789) which was published separately later (P. Egede, 1741)” (Charles G. M. Paxton, Erik Knatterud, and Sharon L. Hedley, “Cetaceans, Sex and Sea Serpents: An Analysis of the Egede Accounts of a “Most Dreadful Monster” Seen off the Coast of Greenland in 1734,”
Archives of Natural History 32, no. 1 [2005]: 1–9). It is in Poul Egede’s book
Continuation af den Grønlandski Mission: Forfattet i form af en Journal fra Anno 1734 til 1740 (1741) that a well-known early sketch of a sea serpent (drawn, according to Paxton and his colleagues, “by Egede senior,” on the basis that the map is signed “H. E.”) is found. The authorship of the map remains uncertain, though, according to Charles Paxton, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 22, 2012.
230 Pontoppidan,
Natural History of Norway, 199.
231 A young gentleman of the Customs, in
Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, August 24, 1786, 3.
232 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, September 9, 1786, 3.
233 Charles Gould,
Mythical Monsters (London: Allen, 1886), 263.
234 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 572–573.
235 Coleman and Huyghe,
Field Guide to Lake Monsters, 73.
236 Heuvelmans,
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 277.
239 A meme is a small unit of “idea”—a piece of culture, like a catchy tune or the notion of teacup—that can be passed along from one host (a mind, a book, or any other place where an idea can survive and replicate) to another. Just as genes can be connected into successful organisms, so small ideas (memes) can be connected into successful collaborations. A classic example is the collaboration of the idea of “god” with the idea “tell people.” These two ideas mutually reinforce, spreading farther and more quickly together than apart. It is an idea that is most usefully considered as a metaphor. Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme in his book
The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), although others had proposed similar ideas in the past.
240 Owen, “Sea Serpent,” 8.
241 Archie Wills, “Cynics,”
Victoria Daily Times, October 11, 1933.
242 Edward Cadogan, letter to the editor,
Times, December 20, 1933, 8.
243 Dennis Loxton to Daniel Loxton, April 8, 2005.
6. MOKELE MBEMBE
1 “The Last Dinosaur” [season 3, episode 52],
MonsterQuest, History Channel, June 24, 2009, “MonsterQuest: The Last Dinosaur, Pt. 1,” YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CeHwgMtvXQ (accessed November 2, 2011).
2 Martin G. Lockley,
A Guide to Dinosaur Tracksites of the Colorado Plateau and the American Southwest (Denver: University of Colorado, Department of Geology, 1986), and
Tracking Dinosaurs: A New Look at an Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Martin G. Lockley and David G. Gillette,
Dinosaur Tracks and Traces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Martin G. Lockley and Adrian P. Hunt,
Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of the Western United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Martin G. Lockley, Barbara J. Fillmore, and Lori Marquardt,
Dinosaur Lake: The Story of the Purgatoire Valley Dinosaur Tracksite Area (Denver: Colorado Geological Survey, 1997); Martin G. Lockley and Christian Meyer,
Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
3 William J. Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe: Mystery Beast of the Congo Basin (Landisville, Pa.: Coachwhip, 2010), 133.
4 “Last Dinosaur, Pt. 1.”
5 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 162.
6 For example, Rory Nugent describes this conversation with the Boha village witch doctor (near Lake Tele, in the heart of alleged Mokele Mbembe habitat): “My talk of a living dinosaur doesn’t interest him. He believes Mokele-Mbembe is a powerful deity that constantly changes appearance, varying by divine whim and human perception. People have come to him with wildly differing descriptions of Mokele-Mbembe, and he believes them all, sure that no one would risk their own well-being by lying about the gods.” Nugent further quotes the man as saying, “Sometimes people say Mokele-Mbembe is small, like a goat, and sometimes they say he is bigger than the tallest tree” (
Drums Along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosaur [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993], 163–164).
7 This idea seems to have originated from James Powell’s visit in 1976 to Cameroon, where local informants told him that
hippos (not dinosaurs) used riverside caves “for dens and hibernated in them (but did not wall themselves up) during the great rains (not the dry season, as in current Mokele Mbembe mythology).” Hearing this, Powell arbitrarily decreed, “While nsok-nyen normally refers to the hippopotamus, it would probably also be applied to any large aquatic animal reminiscent of an elephant”—an inexcusable bit of cultural license, given that his “informants’ response to the picture of a long-necked dinosaur was that they were unfamiliar with the animal, had never seen anything like it, and were quite sure it did not occur in the area” (“On the Trail of the Mokele-Mbembe: A Zoological Mystery,”
Explorer’s Journal, June 1981, 86–87).
8 His Web site discusses how his planned “discoveries” of cryptids will undermine evolution. See William J. Gibbons, “Welcome to Creation Generation.Com … We Are Still Under Construction,” Creation Generation: Genesis 1:1,”
http://www.creationgeneration.com (accessed November 2, 2011).
9 Robert Mullin’s author biography at Crimson Moon Press (the home of his Christian allegorical science-fiction novel) describes him as a “seven-year editor with Creation Research Society” (Crimson Moon Press: Where Apologetic and Fiction Meet,
http://crimsonmoonpress.com/Authors.html [accessed May 5, 2012]).
10 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe.
12 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 205.
13 Abbé Lievain Bonaventure Proyart,
History of Loango, Kakongo, and Other Kingdoms in Africa (1776), in
A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, trans. and ed. John Pinkerton (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 16:557.
14 For example, Roy Mackal cited “a strange animal” painted on a rock in Kirumi Isumbirira, Iramba, Tanzania, that previous scholars had identified as mythical or fabulous. Mackal offered this as “cave rock art that could represent an unknown, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged animal. This evidence should not be taken as more than suggestive because positive identification or conclusions certainly cannot be drawn. But the evidence cannot be dismissed” (
A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe [Leiden: Brill, 1987], 9–10). Perhaps—but this Tanzanian rock art also cannot be linked in any way to the Mokele Mbembe of Lake Tele (1,200 miles away), except by wishful thinking. African rock-art specialist Fidelis Taliwawa Masao warns that the meaning and interpretation of Central Tanzanian rock painting—including that cited by Mackal, which Masao labeled “Semi naturalistic paintings of animals”—is extremely conjectural. While Mackal claimed that the figure “definitely is not a giraffe,” he had neither the training nor the grounds to assert this. Certainly, it
looks more like a giraffe than a sauropod, and as Masao pointed out, “the giraffe is the most common single [animal] species represented” in rock art in this region (“Possible Meaning of the Rock Art of Central Tanzania,”
Paideuma 36, Afrika-Studien II [1990]: 189–199).
15 See, for example, Willy Ley,
Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology (1959; New York: Bonanza Books, 1987), 66–74.
16 Surviving ichthyosaurs were advanced as an explanation for sightings of sea serpents in Robert Bakewell,
Introduction to Geology (New Haven, Conn.: Howe, 1833), 213. This scenario was brought to life in Jules Verne,
Journey to the Center of the Earth, trans. Willis T. Bradley (1864; New York: Ace Books, 1956), 187–188. For discussion of the influence of nineteenth-century fossil plesiosaur discoveries on cryptozoology, see chapters 4 and 5.
17 “Big Thunder Saurian Viewed and Approved,”
New York Times, February 17, 1905, 9.
18 “Old and Young Call to See the Dinosaur,”
New York Times, February 20, 1905, 12.
19 R. W. W., “Mr. Carnegie’s Imitation Dinosaur ‘Makes a Hit’ in England,”
New York Times, June 4, 1905, X7.
20 “Diplodocus Dinner in Berlin,”
New York Times, May 14, 1908, 4.
21 “Hunting the Dinosaurus,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1910, G7.
23 “The Dinosaurs of East Africa,”
Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 45, no. 3 (1913): 193–196. The taxonomic history of Eberhard Frass’s sauropod fossils is quite complicated, but note that the name he selected,
Gigantosaurus, is no longer recognized.
24 Carl Hagenbeck was the premier supplier of exotic game animals for zoological gardens, traveling menageries, and circuses. During his career, he imported more than 1,000 lions, over 1,000 bears, 300 elephants, 150 giraffes—and countless other animals besides. Hagenbeck developed lower-stress animal-training techniques and in 1876 patented a bar-less approach to constructing zoo enclosures. This became the design theme for the enormously popular private zoo that Hagenbeck opened on May 7, 1907—and the same principles influenced the construction of zoos throughout the world. See Herman Reichenbach, “Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark and Modern Zoological Gardens,”
Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 9, no. 4 (1980): 574, 577–582.
25 Carl Hagenbeck,
Beasts and Men: Being Carl Hagenbeck’s Experiences for Half a Century Among Wild Animals, trans. Hugh S. R. Elliot and A. G. Thacker (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), 95–97.
26 Hagenbeck was also the first to import the African black rhinoceros (
Diceros bicornis), the Sumatran rhinoceros (
Dicerorhinus sumatrensis), the southern elephant seal (
Mirounga leonine), and the leopard seal (
Hydrurga leptonyx), among others. See Reichenbach, “Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark and Modern Zoological Gardens,” 580–581.
27 “A Memorable Book on the Traits of Wild Beasts,”
New York Tribune, January 29, 1910, 8; “‘Sea Serpent’ of the Forest,”
Times of India (Mumbai [Bombay]), January 6, 1910, 8.
28 “Brontosaurus Still Lives,”
Washington Post, January 23, 2010, M1.
29 “Prehistoric Cement Zoo,”
Washington Post, December 26, 1910, 6.
30 Both terms actually appeared in the early Western press coverage of the alleged African
Brontosaurus. For example, Hagenbeck himself asserted that the region where the dinosaur dwelled was “infested with bloodthirsty savages,” while one headline asked, “Are Scions of the Prehistoric Monsters That Once Roamed the Earth Still to Be Found Within Little-Known Parts of the Dark Continent?” (“Searching for Saurians in African Jungle,”
Washington Post, February 19, 1928, SM9). Of course, it is unfair to judge people of the past by modern standards. Hagenbeck was speaking of literally violent encounters, and even today the suspicious-sounding phrase “dark continent” is sometimes used without any intention to refer to race. For a recent discussion of the controversial term, see Ombudsman, “Should NPR Have Apologized for ‘Dark Continent’?” February 27, 2008, NPR Omdudsman,
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/2008/02/should_npr_have_apologized_for.html (accessed April 27, 2012).
31 “British East Africa,”
Uganda Herald (Kampala), February 14, 1913, 12.
32 “Startling Rumour,”
Bulawayo [Buluwayo, Zimbabwe] Chronicle, December 3, 1909, 3.
33 “A Fearsome Beast,”
Rhodesia [Zimbabwe] Herald (Harare), December 17, 1909, 9.
34 “The ‘Brontosaurus’: More Hearsay,”
Bulawayo Chronicle, January 14, 1910, 7.
35 “Across Africa by Motor Boat,”
Nyasaland Times (Blantyre, Malawi), May 11, 1911, 5.
36 Untitled article,
East African Standard (Nairobi, Kenya), July 15, 1911, 13.
37 Quoted in Bernard Heuvelmans.
On the Track of Unknown Animals, trans. Richard Garnett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1959), 450.
39 “Hunting the Dinosaurus,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1910, G7. (The spelling of his surname varies by source, spelled either “Brookes” or “Brooks.”)
40 Quoted in “Sure the Diplodocus Is Not Yet Extinct,”
New York Times, October 2, 1910.
41 May Bosman, “Does Prehistoric Monster Still Live?”
Atlanta Constitution, May 22, 1921, G8. This seems to have been a projection of the then-current African
Brontosaurus idea on preexisting South African regional lore about the Groot Slang, a giant snake that was itself an expression of an effectively global folkloric “big snake” monster template projected since classical antiquity on regions from Libya to India.
42 Quoted and discussed in Ley,
Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology, 71–72.
43 Heuvelmans,
On the Track of Unknown Animals, 461.
44 Quoted in “The Congo Monster. Story Ridiculed,”
Beira [Mozambique] News, December 16, 1919.
46 “A Tale from Africa:
Semper Aliquid Novi,”
Times (London), November 17, 1919, 11.
47 “Much Interest Aroused,”
Rhodesia Herald, November 25, 1919, 5.
48 “Dragon of the Prime,”
Times, December 12, 1919, 13.
49 “No Brontosaurus There: ‘Wholly Fabulous Report,’”
Beira News, December 23, 1919, 3.
50 Quoted in “Missionary’s Leg Pulled,”
Rhodesia Herald, December 23, 1919, 5.
51 “The Brontosaurus Myth,”
Dar-es-Salaam [Tanzania] Times, March 19, 1921, 6.
52 Wentworth D. Gray, “The Brontosaurus” [letter to the editor],
Times, February 23, 1920, 10.
53 “Game Hunter’s Encounter,”
Rhodesia Herald, December 23, 1919, 23.
54 I mention Lester Stevens and his dog partly because Heuvelmans chose to feature his hunt for the “giant reptile” as the chapter opener on the topic in his book, and partly because the expedition was both widely reported and silly. Heuvelmans gave his name as “Captain Leicester Stevens,” not “Lester Stevens” (
On the Track of Unknown Animals, 434). See also “Experts Who Believe in It,”
Bulawayo Chronicle, December 26, 1919, 5.
55 Ley,
Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology, 62–74; Ivan T. Sanderson, “There Could Be Dinosaurs,”
Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1948, 17, 53, 56; Heuvelmans,
On the Track of Unknown Animals, 434–484.
56 Powell, “On the Trail of the Mokele-Mbembe.”
57 Mackal,
Living Dinosaur.
58 Hans Schomburgk, quoted in Ley,
Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology, 69. Schomburgk was in a position to make an informed complaint about the difficulty of ethnozoological investigation, having been the first Westerner to confirm the existence and describe for science the pygmy hippopotamus.
59 Powell does pose a question: “Was Michel sincere, or had his African creativity been fired by the publicity he had received in Heuvelmans’ book? I shall probably never know” (“On the Trail of the Mokele-Mbembe, 87–88). However, he seems to have been very impressed with his informant’s sincerity, and gives no account of close questioning about the complete reversal of the man’s story.
60 “The Last Dinosaur” [season 3, episode 52],
MonsterQuest, History Channel, June 24, 2009, “MonsterQuest: The Last Dinosaur, Pt. 2,” YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfYqA4n0qow (accessed May 4, 2012).
61 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 73, 83.
62 Tokuhara Takabayashi, “The First Japanese-Congolese Mokele-Mbembe Expeditions,”
Cryptozoology: Interdisciplinary Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology 7 (1988): 67.
63 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 94.
64 For example, Congolese biologist Marcellin Agnagna led several tours to Boha village in the Congo, and Pierre Sima led several tours to Langoue village in Cameroon. Whatever the significance, both Agnagna and Sima claimed personal Mokele Mbembe sightings. See Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 57–58, 170–171.
65 Mackal,
Living Dinosaur? 59.
66 Mackal gives the name as “Antoine Meombe” in
Living Dinosaur? 61; Powell gives it as “Miobe Antoine” in “On the Trail of the Mokele-Mbembe,” 84–91.
67 Mackal,
Living Dinosaur? 73.
69 Powell, “On the Trail of the Mokele-Mbembe.”
72 Mackal,
Living Dinosaur? 160.
74 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 74.
75 Redmond O’Hanlon,
No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 375.
76 John H. Acorn, “Good-Humored Adventure in the Congo,”
Skeptical Inquirer 19, no. 3 (1995): 46–48.
78 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 109.
79 Mackal,
Living Dinosaur? 93–95.
80 Quoted in Dembart Lee, “Proof of Dinosaur Sighting May Hinge on What Develops,”
Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1981, A16.
81 “Developed Film Fails to Show Any Dinosaur,”
Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1981, A3.
82 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 81.
83 Gibbons writes that Agnagna threatened “to have us arrested as spies,” and implies that Agnagna may have stolen the expedition’s undeveloped film (ibid., 81, 83).
84 Takabayashi, “First Japanese-Congolese Mokele-Mbembe Expeditions,” 66–69. (This article also describes a previous visit by Takabayashi and two colleagues to speak with missionary Eugene Thomas in 1986, and another Japanese expedition in 1987 that included Agnagna.)
86 Nigel Burton, “Real Life Dinosaur Hunt,”
Northern Echo (Darlington, England), June 5, 1999, 7.
87 John Kirk,
In the Domain of the Lake Monsters (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1998), 258.
88 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 86.
92 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 112–125.
93 The search benefited from $15,000 from the British Broadcasting Corporation, and $50,000 from Canadian wealth manager and Young Earth creationist Paul Rockel. See ibid., 127–128. For a statement by Rockel on evolution, see “Where Are the Facts?” [letter to the editor],
Waterloo Region Record (Ontario, Canada), January 10, 2011,
http://www.therecord.com/opinion/letters/article/318832--where-are-the-facts (accessed May 2, 2012).
94 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 139.
96 On an episode of the podcast from Divine Intervention Radio, Milt Marcy is introduced as a creationist with an active involvement in the notorious Paluxy River “man tracks” (a mixed set of misidentified dinosaur footprints, inorganic indentations, and outright fakes that are found alongside dinosaur trackways, interpreted by a subset of “creation scientists” as proof that human beings lived at the same time as non-avian dinosaurs). See “Living Dinosaurs? Cryptozoologists and Dinosaur Hunters, Dr. William Gibbons and Milt Marcy,” Divine Intervention, podcast, March 28, 2008,
http://divineintervention.typepad.com/divine_intervention/2008/03/episode-6-livin.html. (accessed May 5, 2012). The story of Marcy’s offer to fund Gibbons is in Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 151–152.
97 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 158–159.
101 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 180–183.
102 “Inside Story: Mullin on Mokele-Mbembe”; Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 187–189.
103 Neil Mandt and Michael Mandt, “Wild Man & Swamp Dinosaur” [season 2, episode 3],
Destination Truth, Syfy, March 19, 2008 (Ping Pong Productions).
104 “Last Dinosaur, Pt. 2.”
105 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 197.
106 “Inside Story: Mullin on Mokele-Mbembe.”
107 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 187–188.
108 Peter Dodson, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Robert T. Bakker, and John S. McIntosh, “Taphonomy and Paleoecology of the Dinosaur Beds of the Jurassic Morrison Formation,”
Paleobiology 6 (1980): 208–232.
109 Bruce H. Tiffney, “Land Plants as Food and Habitat in the Age of Dinosaurs,” in
The Complete Dinosaur, 2nd ed., ed. M. K. Brett-Surman, Thomas R. Holtz Jr., and James O. Farlow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 569–588.
110 Paul C. Sereno, Allison L. Beck, Didier B. Dutheil, Hans C. E. Larsson, Gabrielle H. Lyon, Bourahima Moussa, Rudyard W. Sadlier, Christian A. Sidor, David J. Varricchio, Gregory P. Wilson, and Jeffrey A. Wilson, “Cretaceous Sauropods from the Sahara and the Uneven Rate of Skeletal Evolution Among Dinosaurs,”
Science 286 (1999): 1342–1347.
111 Donald R. Prothero,
After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Lars Werdelin and William Joseph Sanders, eds.,
Cenozoic Mammals of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
112 Mackal,
Living Dinosaur? 152.
113 “Living Dinosaurs? Cryptozoologists and Dinosaur Hunters.”
114 Gibbons,
Mokele-Mbembe, 63–66.
116 William Gibbons and Kent Hovind,
Claws, Jaws and Dinosaurs (Pensacola, Fla.: CSE, 1999), 3.
118 Donald R. Prothero,
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
119 Gibbons, “Welcome to Creation Generation.Com.”
120 N. F. Goldsmith and I. Yanai-Inbar, “Coelacanthid in Israel’s Early Miocene?
Latimeria Tests Schaeffer’s Theory,”
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 17, supplement 3 (1997): 49A; T. Ørvig, “A Vertebrate Bone from the Swedish Paleocene,”
Geologiska Föreningens i Stockholm Förhandlingar 108 (1986): 139–141.
121 Prothero,
Evolution, 50–85.
122 Gibbons, “Welcome to Creation Generation.Com.”
123 Prothero,
Evolution, xvii.