Hunting Monsters Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind Myths Paperback – 15 April 2017

This is a refreshing and thought-provoking book that gets to the heart of cryptozoology.I'm a psychologist, and I've long held the view that any animal known only from eye witness reports fits as much into my field as it does into mainstream biology. I'm fascinated by bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and others, partly because of what they say about how our beliefs and perceptions are shaped (and partly because I'd love monsters to be real, which shows I'm part of the whole belief system!)Naish takes a similar stance. He looks at the classic monsters of cryptozoology - sea serpents, lake monsters, bigfoot etc - and dispassionately looks at the evidence. What emerges are not consistent descriptions of unknown animals, but rather a muddled collection that seems to owe more to belief and misidentification than biological reality.Hardcore believers will no doubt disagree with some of Naish's reasoning and evidence. This is fine. But the overall picture is still worthy of consideration.

It's pretty good. If you're a cryptozoology aficionado, then you won't find anything new here - but then that's sort of the point. Cryptids melt away in the harsh light of objective analysis like ice cream under a blowtorch.If you're looking for a tantalizing discussion of what might be in Loch Ness, or breathless accounts of moonlight encounters with weird humanoids in the woods, go look elsewhere. If you want a chat about what a cryptid might be - and that includes figment of the imagination/folktales - then come here. Sadly, there's not much hope for unknown megafauna.The book is a good riposte to the rampant lunacy that surrounds such cryptozoological superstars as Nessie, Bigfoot, ropens and the innumerable Congo dinosaurs.I have four minor criticisms:1.) Minor errors in the editing of some sentences leaves them a bit mangled.2.) Although there are references for each chapter, they aren't linked to in the text. At times the author seems to be making bald assertions of fact without background support - unless you wade to the references at the end of the book, read each one and trace each comment.3.) It's a bit short (but, then again, it is cheap).3.) The author does make a reference to some cryptids being plausible at this time (notably Orang Pendek). It would have been instructive to see this section expanded so that readers could see what distinguishes (in the author's mind) a plausible hominid from Indonesia from an implausible one from Nepal, for example. It would also restore a little wonder to the world.

I love the idea that there may be undiscovered creatures out there as I'm sure lots of others do. But the evidence for bigfoot and lake monsters gets weaker year after year. As this book says the real question is why do people report these things?A really well- written book. Strongly recommend and bravo to the author.

This book attempts to provide an overview of the entire field of cryptozoology, which is an ambitious undertaking for so short a book. In fact, it often looks more like a demolition job: it seems in places like a Martian fighting machine stalking through a Surrey village, levelling the familiar landmarks of cryptozoology with heat-ray glances. At least the author has the right to survey the field: he is no Chris Packham, a television presenter who in 1998, on the basis of two documents concerning the famous Patterson-Gimlin film, announced not only that he had 'killed sasquatch' but that he had 'put a stake through the bleeding heart of cryptozoology itself'. Darren Naish, a qualified palaeontologist and a blogger on tetrapod zoology, has been involved in cryptozoology for over two decades; he has written books inspired by the subject, attended and spoken at conferences, published papers relevant to the field, and is on at least polite terms with many of its leading figures. Indeed, the book could be taken as part of his continuing attempt to define his relationship with cryptozoology in general and cryptids in particular.It should be recognised at once that much of the assault is entirely justified, and has to receive a regretful nod as childhood favourites are undermined or abolished. There are not even bad reasons for supposing that sauropod dinosaurs have ever wallowed in the swamps of the Congo. The ropen proves to be nothing more than a muddle of confused and mis-translated accounts, seized on by Creationists with their own agenda and sensationalised by the media. I would add, as my own observation, that the iconic flying snake of Namibia has every appearance of being produced by an attack of epilepsy. Even the sea serpent, if not quite demolished, suffers extensive damage; the massive Heuvelmans book "In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents" looks like a study in carefully documented confusion, with a multitude of sightings shoe-horned into categories too many to be plausible and too few to hold their multifarious contents. There are beyond doubt large unknown creatures in the sea, and some of them have been sighted; but, as the author would put it, the data is submerged in such a volume of noise that it is extraordinarily difficult to extract it.Even if cryptids do not exist, the data of cryptozoology does. So how does the author suggest the data be treated? Naish favours the folklore approach, in which man is regarded as a myth-making animal who interprets any unexplained sighting in sea, sky or lake in terms of the prevailing motifs of his particular culture. This view, following the work of Michael Meurger, is deployed to its fullest extent in the chapter on lake monsters; although it is also suggested later that lake monsters are the attempts of adults to scare children away from the dangers of open water, a suggestion which inevitably reminds anyone of the right age and nationality of the 'Lonely Waters' public information film of the 1970s. There is a implication here of the Jungian collective unconscious with the most emblematic cryptids regarded as archetypes, though this may not be the author's intention. Such an idea might actually have strengthened his case, and explained why similar motifs are common across so many different cultures; and I can't resist pointing out that the Animal is one of Jung's archetypes, and that the Lake is not only an archetype but an image of the unconscious itself.Naish believes converting cryptozoology into a branch of cultural studies would make it 'far more interesting', though it may not be obvious why a subject becomes more interesting when stripped of its subject matter. The subject so defined is to be known as post-cryptid cryptozoology; this inevitably suggests the baneful influence of post-modernism, with cryptids reduced to floating signifiers to which any reader is free to attach the meaning they wish, and the source material valued as a basis for Ph.D.s in semiotics. There is even the suggestion that people who persist in searching for flesh and blood animals should be distinguished as 'cryptozoological literalists', though if we are to have this dichotomy I intend to identify myself as a 'cryptozoological realist', and use the term 'cryptozoology-lite' for the content-free version. However, we should abandon cryptozoology to the folklorists only when we have strong reason to do so, and it seems to me that the root-and branch attack goes beyond what can be justified. A great deal is made of the unreliability of humans as data recorders. This is not a new observation: Sir Walter Raleigh, while imprisoned in the Tower, attempted to write a history of the world. He abandoned it after viewing a brawl in the courtyard; the conflicting accounts even of a current event convinced him that no reliable history could be written. Nevertheless, history is still written, and human testimony is not worthless, even if it contradicts our assumptions: on the only cryptid sighting in which I have been involved, both witnesses gave an account of the creature which agreed in the essentials (though it's worth stressing that their accounts were taken within less than an hour of the sighting). He is rightly scathing of North American hominology (the search for sasquatch) which often appears to be a free-fire zone for fraud, personal abuse, credulity, outright insanity and financial exploitation; it is unfortunate (though I have no doubt that they are all men of deep personal integrity) that three of the many figures involved in sasquatch research have the names Crook, Swindler and Moneymaker. Like him, I have no patience with the multitude of anthropoid species - they range from dwarfs to giants that could go three rounds with King Kong - that popular writers have asserted to live within the borders of the United States. Even here however he sometimes goes beyond not only the facts but even his own account of them: after giving a fair account of the Patterson-Gimlin film, and pointing out both that no fraud has ever been demonstrated and that no attempt to replicate the film has ever been successful, we are told later on that the film is 'almost certainly a hoax'.Neverthless, Naish is right: cryptozoology is being transformed. The flying snakes and Ninki-Nankas of its exuberant adolescence are being replaced by a concentration on the core topic: human evolution. This grown-up cryptozoology is receiving the assistance of real grown-up scientists, though at present as individuals rather than institutions. He notices the progress that is being made in the study of the Sumatran orang-pendek, a cryptid which is manifestly an ape but one of considerable interest because of its bipedal habit. Where the author fails most drastically is in his total lack of engagement with the vast body of Russian hominology. The almas (or almasty), when it occurs at all, is given the bog-standard 'cultural motif' treatment. This won't do. When Marie-Jeanne Koffmann began her investigations in the Caucasus in the 1960s she received over three hundred accounts; some were from shepherds and farmers, some from soldiers, geologists and academics. We can suppose that the latter at least received the sort of fantasy-free Marxist-Leninist education that Gradgrind himself would have approved of, uncontaminated by any trace of folklore. When Porshnev began his studies of the same topic in the 1950s he was told that the study of legends was no business of Soviet science, and the proper people were the folklorists; the dialectical materialism of the 1950s joins hands with the post-modernism of the 21st century! Neither do the descriptions suffer from the multiplicity of types that present such a problem with the sasquatch; anybody comparing the descriptions in Bayanov's "In the footsteps of the Russian Snowman" will be struck by their consistency. As for hoaxing: it would be an unusually bold man, in the age of Stalin, who attempted a joke with the local Commissioner of State Security.There is no space here to even mention the evidence that has been accumulated from across the old Soviet Union: enough to say that as well as the usual sightings, casts and hair samples we have examinations of two bodies, one living and one dead, by medical officers of the Red Army, and the extraordinary case of an almas called Zana who lived in a Caucasus village for many years in the 19th century. (Naish makes a small but not trivial mistake here: we have only the skull of her son Khwit, not Zana herself. If only we did!) Zana gave the best possible proof of her humanity by bearing several children, all of whom were themselves fertile. Nevertheless her description (physical and mental) is of a creature in no way matching any known human type. Naish makes good use of a valuable scientific principle called parsimony, or Occam's razor, to prefer explanations that require no new assumptions - except perhaps witness error - to those that introduce a new species. However there is an equally valuable principle summarised in a remark by Aristotle: we should prefer a probable impossible to an improbable possible. I take this to mean that Occam's razor should not become Occam's procrustean bed, in which data is stretched and interpreted beyond all reason to fit our assumptions. Sooner or later, we must introduce a new hypothesis, even if it involves an extension of our idea of the possible; as Einstein would have put it, 'everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler'. We have just such a hypothesis from geneticist Bryan Sykes: that Zana was indeed human, but from a very ancient lineage, one which left Africa before we did (and presumably before language evolved). I suggest that we now have everything we can reasonably expect: a reliable body of data, a field of investigation and a viable working hypothesis. Not enough for a binomial and a place in the textbooks, but more than enough for a a good solid boots-on-the-ground investigation.There is a basic problem as to which field, cryptozoology and cultural studies, is regarded as framing, defining and illuminating the other. Does folklore provide a means of interpreting and explaining the data collected on cryptids, or is it cryptozoology that adds a new dimension to folklore by showing the reality on which stories are based? There is an optical illusion called the 'faces-vase' drawing, in which you can either see two black fields defining a white vase, or a white space defining two silhouettes of faces. The viewer decides which is the image and which the negative space. You pays your money and you takes your choice; but there is at least one consideration which can guide that choice. If cryptozoologists are investigating that which does not exist, they lose only a little time and money, and return with more stories into the bargain; if we assume from the start that there is nothing to find out there, we lose even the theoretical possibility of finding it if it does exist. I know my choice.

I knew that this book would make me sad! After all, there is something romantic and magical about some of the creatures Darren writes about in this book. I finished with a heavy sigh knowing that the conclusions he makes make perfect sense and that I had already come to the same conclusion a long time ago, I’d just stuffed it deep down inside and chosen to ignore it!

Recommend

This is just the book I wanted to read: a book about mysterious creature sightings written from a sceptical perspective. It cleverly explains what causes people to get carried away and think they have spotted these mythical creatures.

This was my first "serious" cryptid book I have ever read, and I must admit that I am glad that this is the book I started with. Darren has such a great and diverse knowledge of all animals, but his knowledge of cryptid a really come across in this book!