Beyond Bigfoot and Loch Ness

Loren Coleman is the father of American cryptozoology, or the exploration for animals whose existence is generally doubted. There’s more to it than Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, Coleman says. “People are interested in what Brad Pitt’s doing, not what his understudy or some other minor actor is doing. In the same way, people know the words Yeti, Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster. So if you’re telling them about reports of a bird—a warbler, say—that’s been seen by the native peoples of the Congo, and how zoologists and cryptozoologists are studying that and think they’re going to find it (which happened last year), you don’t get people in the media or even in the general public interested in that. Because it’s not splashy, it doesn’t get a lot of press.”