AVON STREET, in the Arts District of Portland, Maine, is a small, narrow avenue that seems more like an alleyway. As I turned onto it and stepped onto the sidewalk—more of a curb—everything seemed all too much of an urban reality. A large graffiti-style mural covered the side of a building, and spray-painted orange arrows pointed out the uneven street. Squiggly graffiti tags surrounded a NO PARKING sign. The traffic of Congress Street hummed along, a car honking. Approaching 11 Avon Street, I stopped to wonder if this were the right place. But then I spotted the flag flapping in the breeze. It said INTERNATIONAL CRYPTOZOOLOGY MUSEUM.
I walked through a bland steel door, down the hall, and, hearing strains of classical music playing on a radio, turned, and there I was, inside the museum.
More often than not, if he’s not on the road, the museum’s founder, Loren Coleman, is at the door to greet visitors. His neatly trimmed white beard and hair, bright blue eyes, and jet-black eyebrows give him an Obi-Wan Kenobi Jedi master appearance. Dressed in a safari style shirt and khakis, he seems wise and scholarly, but he has a certain boyishness to him. That mixture suits him, because Coleman has a unique profession: he is a cryptozoologist.
Cryptozoology, from the Latin, means “study of hidden animals” and purports to study evidence of creatures like Bigfoot and Lake Monsters.* These unknown animals are called cryptids.
I learned about this field through an online program—actual college courses are few and far between. My lessons included “The Foundations of Cryptozoology,” “Existing Species that Were Once Cryptids,” and “Bigfoot Evidence.”
“We are the world’s only cryptozoology museum,” Coleman explained to me soon after I walked through the door. “We’ve become the reservoir for a lot of people’s collections, as well as my own fifty-three years of collecting.”
The museum now has about ten thousand cryptozoology-related items, Coleman said. These are rarities that you won’t find anywhere else in the world. There is a hair sample from a Yowie, Australians’ variant of Bigfoot, a huge hairy creature that wanders the outback.
Another display is dedicated to the Jersey Devil, a horse-faced, bat-winged creature said to terrorize the Garden State. A statue of a Cadbrosaurus, a mysterious Sea Serpent that supposedly swims the Pacific coast of North America, glides through a display in a corner of the museum.
Always a labor of love, the museum opened in 2003 and for its first five years was based out of Coleman’s home. Eventually he found a small public space, sharing it with the Green Hand, a mystical bookstore just up the street on Avon and Congress.
“In 2011 we moved to this space, became a nonprofit, and really expanded,” Coleman told me. The building is more than a hundred years old, and the museum space was originally used as a showroom for a furrier. It is now a two-room boutique museum, a mix of Victorian sensibility and monster folklore.
Handing me a photocopied hand-drawn map of the museum layout, Coleman began to show me around. The first room was called the Evidence Room, he explained, and he led me to the first display: “Classic Animals of Discovery.”
“There’s really two forms of cryptids,” Coleman explained. “The cryptids that are actually new species—brand-new discoveries—and cryptids that are extinct animals that may still be around.”
For example, the International Cryptozoology Museum’s mascot—featured as part of its logo—is the coelacanth, which Coleman called a “darling of cryptozoology.” There was a model of one hanging near the front door of the museum.
“This is the full-size replica of the first living coelacanth ever discovered in 1938 off of Africa,” Coleman explained, pointing at the model. “They’re bright blue like that, five and a half feet long. It had not been seen in sixty-five million years.”
This prehistoric fish embodies the philosophy of cryptozoology: if we didn’t know that the coelacanth still swam in our oceans, despite declaratively being categorized as “extinct,” what other unknown fauna is alive out there?
Underneath the coelacanth Coleman had a display case featuring models of many examples of animals that were formerly known as cryptids. The mountain gorilla, for example, was sort of a nineteenth-century version of Bigfoot. Reports of the animals date back to 1861, but explorers believed the stories were village myth until Captain Robert von Beringe and his crew shot two of them in 1902.
The examples go on and on. The weird-looking megamouth shark, first discovered in 1976. Even the platypus was originally written off as a hoax. Scientists believed a duck’s beak had been sewn to a beaver’s body by a jokester taxidermist.
“What happens is people come in and they begin to understand that we’re interested in animals, we’re interested in mysteries, and new species being discovered, which happens all the time. In cryptozoology, the celebrity cryptids are Bigfoot, Yeti, Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Chupacabras,” Coleman said as we walked through the museum.
“Those get the press, but it’s all these little ones—like the new animal discovered in South America a couple weeks ago related to the raccoons [the olinguito], or a new turtle was discovered in Pearl River, Mississippi [the Pearl River map turtle]. I’m happy when people see we’re skeptical of most of the bizarre cases and really grounded zoologically and anthropologically about normal animals being discovered.”
Discovery of new animals is an ongoing process, even in this modern day and age. A new species of tapir, the kabomani tapir, was discovered in South America in 2013. The animal was known to locals and evidence had been gathered in the past, but it wasn’t scientifically confirmed until December 2013. “The [kabomani tapir’s] discovery was definitely cryptozoological, as this species first came to Western Science’s attention based on ethnoknown information,” Coleman declared in his year-end “Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2013,” on his blog CryptoZooNews (www.cryptozoonews.com).
Also in 2013 a team captured the first video of the giant squid, tempted out of hiding with a bioluminescent lure. Although bodies of the animal had been found, this was the first live footage of the animal that is thought to be the basis of the mythological sailor lore of the Kraken. And so, while some of the inhabitants of the International Cryptozoology Museum might seem bizarre and far-fetched, some of them potentially could be real, and it is this excitement of discovery that the museum tries to tap into.
“All of us—myself, [assistant director] Jeff Meuse, [tour guide and “Crypto Queen”] Sarah McCann—try to be passionate with people here at the museum, in a short term,” Coleman said. He quoted Bernard Heuvelmans, Belgian-French scientist, founding father of cryptozoology and author of seminal cryptozoology book On the Track of Unknown Animals: “He said cryptozoology is about two things: patience and passion.”
Pangboche Hand replica.
COURTESY OF JEFF MEUSE / INTERNATIONAL CRYPTOZOOLOGY MUSEUM
SOME OF THE MANY ITEMS with an interesting story behind them in the International Cryptozoology Museum are the artifacts related to the Pangboche Hand, which come from a monastery in Nepal.
These artifacts were gathered during the 1959 Slick-Johnson Snowman Expedition, which searched for evidence of the Yeti in the Himalaya Mountains. It was bankrolled by Texas millionaire and adventurer Tom Slick and his friend in the oil business F. Kirk Johnson Sr. A large expedition had been undertaken the previous year that featured a trek into the mountains by a team including Irish big game hunters Peter and Bryan Byrne and more than a dozen Sherpas. The expeditions and others sponsored by Slick are documented in Loren Coleman’s book Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology.
After hearing a legend of a mummified Yeti hand in the Pangboche monastery from a monk visiting the expedition camp, Peter Byrne stopped by for a visit and took pictures of the artifact. The Pangboche lamas forbade him from taking the hand or part of it, saying that it must not leave the temple.
Determined to get evidence, Peter Byrne returned to the Pangboche monastery as part of the 1959 expedition. According to an account he gave Unsolved Mysteries in 1992, Byrne gave the lama who had introduced him to the artifact a bottle of scotch. When the lama passed out, Byrne set to work and removed parts of two of the fingers from the Pangboche Hand. He replaced them with bones from a human skeleton, carefully wiring them into place.
“I shall not go into the details of how we got the thumb and phalanx of the Pangboche hand, but we have them. The main thing is that we have them, and that the lamas at the monastery do not know we have them,” Byrne wrote Tom Slick on February 3, 1959.
Now he just needed to sneak them out of Tibet. Byrne turned to an unlikely ally, a friend of expedition bankroller Johnson: actor Jimmy Stewart. Byrne crossed the border into India, where he met Stewart and his wife, Gloria, in Calcutta. The famous couple smuggled the fingers out of the country in Gloria’s underwear bag and took them to England. From India, the samples made their way back to Slick and Johnson, who had them scientifically analyzed. The results were inconclusive.
In 1960 Sir Edmund Hillary voyaged to Nepal to conduct his own hunt for the Yeti, sponsored by World Book Encyclopedia. Hillary visited the Pangboche monastery and examined the hand, and he and his experts concluded that “this is essentially a human hand, strung together with wire, with the possible inclusion of several animal bones.” As Coleman pointed out in his book, Hillary and the world at large were unaware that Byrne had indeed replaced part of the hand with human bones and wired it together.
The ICM has an artist’s representation of the hand on display, along with a skin sample from the hand as well as hair and, yes, even a fecal sample, all of which were also collected on the expedition. “These were donated to me by the scientist who was Slick’s collection point for extra samples not tested, as he was dying,” Coleman said. A letter from Jimmy Stewart to Coleman, which confirms the actor’s involvement in the events, is also part of the exhibit.
Coleman saw the incident as a controversial but historic chapter of cryptozoology. “I strongly disagree with the tactics of mutilating this sacred relic and with the apparent theft of the hand’s parts from Nepal. But I also understand this event in the context of the 1950s and the strong notion that by proving the existence of the Yeti, the Slick-Johnson Snowman Expedition personnel hoped to establish the Yeti’s place in zoology,” Coleman wrote in his book on Tom Slick.
Coleman grew up in Decatur, Illinois. He was the oldest of four, the son of a firefighter and a housewife. “I was a shy young nerd. It’s fascinating that I became a university professor for twenty years and have been on TV, because I started out a quiet boy, and there still is a little bit of that quiet boy in me.”
Coleman’s mother was supportive of him and encouraged him to get books with his spending money. Although his father sometimes helped out by giving him permission to go on jaunts with game wardens, Coleman said, “He was challenged by my intellect. We would get into tussles over who was smarter. I saw my father and I did everything he didn’t do. I was the only one in the family to get an education, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, and I didn’t abuse women, so there’s a lot. In psychology it’s called reaction formation. I decided to be different from him, but I appreciated baseball* like he did.”
Loren Coleman’s introduction to cryptozoology came about when he was twelve and saw a movie that would forever change his life. As he writes in his 2003 book, Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America:
I now look back on one March evening in 1960 as a critical juncture that changed my life. I was watching the broadcast on the local Decatur TV station of a science fiction movie, a Japanese picture entitled Half Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman (Ishiro Honda, 1957), about the search for the Abominable Snowman in the mountains of Asia. It was fascinating, for even though I knew it was fiction, there appeared to be an underlying truth to this tale of an expedition in pursuit of an unknown species of hairy, upright creature. One does not pick their entries into mysteries, I suppose; for me this just happened to be the one.
I went to school the next week and asked my teachers about this elusive, mysterious creature called the Abominable Snowman. They were discouraging and lacked interest. They told me I was wasting my time on a “myth.” But their words did little to put out the fire in my belly. I was one very curious young man. I began looking for everything I could read on the Abominable Snowman.
A framed movie poster of Half Human now hangs on the museum’s wall. The film was originally released in Japan under the title Jūjin Yuki Otoko in 1955. It was created by the Toho film production company, the same company that made the original Godzilla. An American version, which features footage from the original spliced with scenes with actors such as John Carradine, was released in 1958. The film’s movie trailer claims the film also stars “the mountain creature of Asia, whose name has become a symbol of terror and mystery … the Abominable Snowman!” The poster boasts that the monster is 1400 POUNDS OF FROZEN FURY, although the actual movie creature looks to be more like a couple hundred pounds of actor, rubber, and fake hair.
After seeing the film, Coleman began his path to a lengthy career in researching cryptozoology. Nowadays, people interested in cryptozoology just need the Internet to get started. With some simple searching, you’ll be able to find dozens upon dozens of forums, blogs, Internet radio shows, and videos by budding cryptozoologists on the subject. But when Coleman started, he was one of an elite few who was taking the subject seriously, and in the early 1960s making connections on the topic took some effort.
“Younger groups that come in, I point this out,” Coleman said at a “Classic Cryptozoologist Study” exhibit, pointing out an old rotary telephone. “I ask if they know what this is, and sometimes they don’t! The other thing I say is that before e-mail, we actually wrote letters.” Letter writing was the method Coleman used to begin his research into and expertise on the subject at a young age.
“I had four hundred correspondents I wrote to when I was fourteen. I would take a book like Abominable Snowmen: Legend Comes to Life [1961] by Ivan Sanderson, I would go through page by page and find who the experts or newspaper writers were, and I started writing everybody. I wasn’t thinking, Oh, this is an exalted expert or someone I want to put on a pedestal. These were people I wanted to exchange information with or I wanted articles from that they’d written in the past.”
Coleman’s contacts included several who are now considered important researchers of what was then commonly called the “Fortean studies.” Named after writer and unexplained phenomenon researcher Charles Fort (d. 1932), the Forteans became disciples of his philosophy of being neither a “true believer” nor a “skeptic” but somewhere in between.
A novelist and journalist, Fort examined reports of poltergeists, rains of animals, spontaneous combustion, strange artifacts, and UFOs. Fort’s name lives on with publications like the Fortean Times, published in London, and groups like the International Fortean Organization.
Among Coleman’s Fortean researcher correspondents were the aforementioned Scottish zoologist and author Ivan S. Sanderson, the “father of cryptozoology” Bernard Heuvelmans, early ufologist John Keel, Bigfoot researcher John Green, and Peter Byrne, Irish big game hunter turned Yeti tracker.
“So I would write everybody, and before I knew it I had all these correspondents. Back then there wasn’t even Xerox. What I would do is, I worked as a paperboy and knew where the newsstands were. Say there was an article about an Illinois Bigfoot sighting—I would get ten copies of that paper, cut them out individually, put the citation, page number, and what paper, and I would mail it to Ivan Sanderson and my friends all across the country. And they were mailing items to me. I have five hundred boxes of archives in my basement at home that I need to organize someday,” Coleman said.
Coleman’s circle of correspondents became an early newswire of the weird, and information was gladly shared and forwarded.
John Keel’s book Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970) includes a chapter on Bigfoot largely based on reports Coleman had sent him.
“That’s just what we did,” Coleman continued. “I appreciated his thank-you, but I didn’t expect more than that. The only way of getting information was giving information, I thought.”
Coleman was soon doing fieldwork as well. He was traveling around the country in his spare time, interviewing witnesses who had seen Lake Monsters, camping out in Bigfoot hot spots, investigating any strange cases that came his way.
Even life choices like college were influenced by his cryptozoological interests. “I picked my college and its location—Southern Illinois University in Carbondale—because folklorist John W. Allen had written of authentic sightings of these animals by a minister and farmers from the area’s bottomlands. I studied anthropology, minored in zoology, to have some scientific background to pursue these Bigfoot,” Coleman wrote in Bigfoot!
As Coleman’s letters began to stack up, he was encouraged to write.
“I had a friend [Fortean and ufologist] Lou Farish, he was a researcher in Arkansas. He said, ‘You write such good letters, write an article.’
“I wrote an article, and someone said, ‘You write such good articles, put thirty of them together and write a book.’ I never knew I was going to be a writer. I didn’t want to be a writer. I just wanted to share my passion and the cases. It kind of snuck up on me.”
Thirty-some books later, Coleman has written, coauthored, and edited books on cryptozoology from every angle. From field guides on cryptids like Lake Monsters (Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep, 2003) to individual cryptid cases (Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, 2002), state guides (Monsters of Massachusetts, 2013), books on other cryptozoologists (Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology, 2002), and an all-encompassing reference (Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature, 1999).
That last book, coauthored with Fortean researcher Jerome Clark, was not more than an arm’s length away from me as a reference guide while working on this book. In addition to his hundreds of blog posts—he wrote for a popular cryptozoology blog called Cryptomundo before starting his own CryptoZooNews—and short articles for various publications, Coleman is frequently called on to be an expert for a variety of media, including radio shows like Coast to Coast AM and TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries, to cite just a couple of examples.
There are many other noteworthy cryptozoologists, like Dr. Karl Shuker, a zoological consultant and editor of the Journal of Cryptozoology, and Dr. Jeff Meldrum, an anthropologist and leading Bigfoot researcher. But Coleman remains cryptozoology’s most familiar face.
“Now someone said, ‘You’re the world’s leading living cryptozoologist,’ and I say, ‘I’m just glad I’m living,’” Coleman quipped, laughing.
“In the ’60s, Sanderson said to me, ‘You’re one of only five people or so in the country that is into this.’ It was a small fraternity,” Coleman recalled. “And it was a fraternity: there weren’t that many women. We were guys across the country, usually well grounded, balanced, and interested in a wide variety of subjects. We knew that life didn’t start or stop with Bigfoot or Yeti. I was interested in the Civil War, politics, girls. I didn’t live in my parents’ basement, all those things that get portrayed.”
As the fraternity experienced a population explosion, expanding from a handful into the hundreds, though, human nature began to rear its ugly head. People became secretive, jealous, and dismissive.
“It was interesting to me in the ’80s and ’90s when I started noticing Bigfoot researchers weren’t saying where the sightings were and became territorial and ‘my sightings are my sightings.’ Before that, we had all been sharing so much.”
Coleman easily made the transition online around 1995. “I don’t really think Facebook is real,” Coleman said, smiling. “I have over three thousand friends on Facebook and two thousand followers on Twitter. So are there five thousand people that are my friends? No. But it does give you a sense of the four or five in 1960 and then the four hundred in 1963 to 1964. The number started growing and now literally there are thousands! After being on TV last week, I opened my e-mails the next day. There were people who want to volunteer here at the museum, even though they live far away. One said, ‘Hi, I’m thirteen, can you send me everything you know on cryptozoology?’” Coleman chuckled.
Although getting e-mails from budding thirteen-year-old cryptozoologists makes Coleman proud, the Internet culture has also made it easier for those secretive, dismissive, jealous, ugly feelings to spread around, too. And with Coleman’s stature in the media as an expert, he began to experience sour grapes from others in the field, people who perhaps envisioned themselves giving some snapping sound bites for MonsterQuest or Weird Travels.
“It gets into this territorialism that you didn’t have back in the ’60s. It is really brutal now—people are nasty to each other. Here’s something an artist sent me,” he said, pointing to an illustration that hangs by his desk of a cute Bigfoot strolling along with a thought balloon over his head that reads, “Haters Gonna Hate.”
“There is part that is really like that, the trolling and the haters in the Bigfoot field now, because it’s become part of the social media.”
Next to the “Classic Animals of Discovery” display is a life-size bronze statue of the thylacine, commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, yawning hugely. The Tasmanian tiger’s population rapidly decreased due to human development until the last specimen, named Benjamin, died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936.
But did the species somehow survive? Coleman explains that Australians continue to report sightings, with more than four hundred reports since the animal’s alleged extinction.
This dynamic statue was a wedding gift for the museum, bought by an online crowdsourcing effort to cover the cost. About a month after my visit to the museum, Coleman married his fiancée on Halloween day. It was his third marriage. The wedding’s reception was a costume party at the museum and featured a Día de los Muertos-themed cake.
“I haven’t been married in twenty years, so I’ve had time to assess what that should be,” Coleman said. He met his current wife, Jenny, after she contacted him online with some questions about cryptozoology. Love blossomed.
Coleman is also the father to three sons: Desmond from his first marriage, and Malcolm and Caleb from his second. “Being a father, what was always important to me was that my sons follow their dreams, not that they have a certain career or do it my way,” he said.
Although his sons aren’t actively pursuing cryptozoology, it is inadvertently a family thing. “I’ve never taken a vacation that wasn’t cryptozoology related, so we’ll go to places and I’ll investigate. I took [Malcolm and Caleb] to Loch Ness—Drumnadrochit—in 1999. Malcolm wrote this essay about how we went to Scotland and looked for the Loch Ness Monster. His teacher actually called me up and said, ‘We need to have a conference—we think your son has some attention problems.’ I said, ‘No, we really did do that. I may be the one with the problem, he’s OK!’” Coleman laughed.
Although a large body of his work has been on cryptozoology, Coleman has also authored a few titles that have nothing to do with living dinosaurs or mystery hominids but instead highlight his career as a social worker. After his studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, he got a graduate degree in psychiatric social work from the School of Social Work at Simmons College in Boston in 1978. He also studied social anthropology at Brandeis University and sociology at the University of New Hampshire’s Family Research Laboratory.
Topics he has examined in his writing include causes of suicide and suicide prevention. He wrote the acclaimed 1987 book Suicide Clusters and appeared on Larry King Live to discuss it. He also worked on copy for a series of training manuals for suicide prevention at the University of Southern Maine that same year, and trained and consulted around North America on suicide clusters and school violence.
Other titles he has written, coauthored, or edited include Unattended Children (1987), Working with Older Adoptees (1988), Adoption and the Sexually Abused Child (1990), and The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines (2004).
Coleman taught a course on the social impact of documentary films from 1990 to 2003. My visit to the museum fell on a memorable day for both of us—September 25 is my birthday, and a date Coleman will always remember. In 1993, wearing a T-shirt with a Yeti on it and rock climbing with his sons in rural Maine, Coleman slipped and fell about forty feet, bursting one of his vertebrae. He had two weeks of operations in the hospital. Despite the setbacks involved, Coleman views the accident as a blessing in disguise.
“Breaking one’s back can change how you view the world,” he said. “For me, I decided to leave my 50-hours-plus-a-week university jobs. If I was going to devote as much time to cryptozoology and my sons as I wanted to, it was now or never. And so I did it, full time,” Loren wrote in a blog post. His productivity in writing definitive books on cryptozoology increased exponentially.
Back in the ICM, I was joined by more curious patrons wandering through the museum. There was a college student who told Coleman he was from South Carolina.
“I’ve never been to Portland before, and when I saw this, it became my number one need-to-go-to place,” he declared. A young couple on vacation from Long Island looked around curiously. A woman came through, talking to herself, and then cornered Coleman, who politely listened as she rambled on about different theories of aliens and different interdimensional vibrations for a solid ten minutes.
Coleman said that although the museum draws an occasional strange character, about half the museum’s visitors are tourists, who find the museum in a guidebook or online. The other half are people familiar with cryptozoology or his work in particular. “Or it could be a family, and one is really a cryptozoologist at heart. That’s how it was with a family of four who was here this morning before you arrived.”
These visitors have a lot of questions. The most popular one for Coleman is “Have you ever seen a Bigfoot?” he told me. “No, I’ve never seen a Bigfoot. I’ve found tracks and heard high-pitched calls that I was told matched local Southern Illinois unknown apes, but I definitely entered the field out of curiosity, not because I am a participant-observer.”
But Coleman says he did spot a cryptid, back in 1969: a mystery Black Panther, not native to his home state, crossing a highway near Anna, Illinois.
“I was going to work as a therapist at a state mental health hospital with coworkers. I was not driving. They refused to turn the car around to look for signs and prints. I see in that one experience what often happens in short-term observations with uninterested eyewitnesses who do not wish to pursue the matter scientifically but instead use mundane ridicule to continue with their day-to-day activities. No hard feelings against them. I was just disappointed.”
In 2011 the museum became an official State of Maine nonprofit corporation, and in 2012 Coleman began filing for federal 501(c)(3) status. Coleman is hopeful the status will enable him to reach out for larger funding, since it will allow him to get tax-deductible donations from corporations and foundations as well as individuals.
Funding has been a challenge for Coleman. In January 2014, for example, hit by a nasty wave of snowstorms that saw snow day closures and low museum attendance, Coleman had to turn to media contacts and social networks to ask for donations to make rent.
Besides donations, the museum sells merchandise in-house and online. While Coleman talked to me, ICM assistant director Jeff Meuse was in the background, photographing merchandise to post in the museum’s online store. Products included T-shirts, books by Coleman and other cryptozoologists, coelacanth key chains, replicas of Bigfoot footprint casts, even a Chupacabras* finger puppet.
Looking around the museum, one has to pause and wonder, Is this stuff real? Or are the displays filled with invisible monsters?
Although I would label Coleman a “believer,” he said that he is skeptical and scientific in what he examines. He admitted that about 80 percent of reports he gets of cryptids are merely misidentifications. For example, he said a would-be cryptozoologist sent him a photo of what the correspondent said was an unidentified animal. Upon examination, he discovered it was a kinkajou. Coleman smiled. “A fairly common animal, but sometimes people want to believe. Besides the large percentage of misidentification, there is a small percentage which are straight-up fakes or hoaxes.” Leading me to a display case of artifacts related to the Chupacabras, he pointed out a perfectly cast plaster “Chupacabras footprint.”
“In 1995 when there was a big explosion of Chupacabras reports, there were T-shirts online, all kinds of stuff. Then this website came about where someone in Miami said, ‘I’ve got the footprint of the Chupacabras.’ I said, ‘OK, I got to have one’ and sent my twenty-five dollars in, and I get the package, get it open,” Coleman said, miming himself excitedly ripping a package open, like a Christmas present, “and … it’s the best dog print I’ve ever seen!” he laughed.
Such a large wall of fail might be seen as daunting and frustrating, but it is that small 10 to 15 percent of true mystery that keeps Coleman and the field of cryptozoology going.
“I worry about the legacy, obviously, or I wouldn’t have created the museum. People don’t live forever; I’m not going to,” Coleman said. “I wanted to figure out—can I create something that will live on beyond me?
“You need to have a small board in Maine: six people. Two of the people on the board are my sons, not because they’re interested in cryptozoology,” Coleman said. His sons’ involvement is purely to be sure that the legacy doesn’t end with his death.
“They’re not interested in selling this on eBay or breaking the museum up. They want it to live on in my name.” This is important to Coleman, because there have been horror stories of families not quite sure what to do with their relatives’ collections of oddities. Coleman encountered one such cautionary tale when the family of deceased cryptozoologist Scott Norman called Coleman and asked if he would pen his obituary. Norman had gone on six expeditions to Africa to look for the allegedly living dinosaur Mokèlé-mbèmbé (“one who stops the flow of rivers” in the Lingala language), described as a sauropod.
I learned about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé in lesson 12 of my Cryptozoology 101 class. It has been reported in Congo, Gabon, and Cameroon, often in the Likouala Swamp, which covers fifty-five thousand square miles and is largely unexplored. The creature is reported to be anywhere from fifteen to seventy-five feet long, gray or reddish brown, and to feast on the malombo plant. A few brave cryptozoologists have led expeditions over the past few decades to find evidence of the creature, but other than an unclear photo and some possible footprints, the dinosaur remains anecdotal. Norman read works by cryptozoologists Roy Mackal and Herman Reguster on the Mokèlémbèmbé and set up his own website on the cryptid in 1996. Sporting his favorite hat, an Indiana Jones–style fedora, he joined a team of investigators in 2001 in his first expedition to search for the creature in the Republic of Cameroon.
“He came to the museum in 2008, and the following February he died,” Coleman explained to me. “A young guy, forty-three. I got some details and wrote an obituary. A lot of his friends told me it was great. His mother called me a couple days later, said ‘Wonderful obituary that touched my heart. And by the way, you don’t need to worry about any of his possessions—I threw them away in the Dumpster, so no one would have to worry about them,’” Coleman said, smiling grimly at the memory.
“It hit me then in a very real way, that people celebrate death in two fashions. They celebrate the person’s life, they remember them, and they grieve. And then some loved ones want to get as far away as possible, and they don’t want anything around to remind them of that person, and they think they are doing everyone a favor. And of course his whole legacy of going on all those expeditions looking for living dinosaurs was lost—his files … he had an enormous collection, in a huge glass tower, of dinosaur figurines and native art from Africa. Gone, all gone!”
Norman’s mom told Coleman, who was desperate to save anything, that some of the dinosaur figurines had been donated to a local church. Coleman tracked down a couple of the dinosaurs, which now stand posing behind protected glass in the museum.
“It’s not so much that I want people to donate their stuff here, but I want to serve as a model. Donate to your alma mater, have someone inherit it in a university or museum, but think of your cryptozoology collection as worthy of keeping, not destroying or throwing away.
“So I think that’s part of my mission, to say that that stuff is worthy of keeping, there’s a history here, each piece has an individual story,” Coleman concluded.
* Coleman uses the following style guide: unknown animals capitalized, discovered animals lowercase, native names italicized. So, for example, before the okapi was discovered it was the Okapi, and natives spoke legend of an okapi.
* “I grew up a Cardinals fan. Everyone in my family liked the Cubs, and I had to be different,” he laughed. After moving to New England in 1975, he switched allegiance to the Red Sox.
* This cryptid may be referred to in the singular as either “Chupacabra” or “Chupacabras.” I’ve used the latter except when quoting from print sources that have alternate spellings.