In Search of Cryptids

Imagine for a moment that you are a scientist in late 18th century England. You and your collegues are at the height of the scientific community. New discoveries are made everyday, and you are privy to each new discovery and idea. In other words, you are the rock stars of the age of reason.

So when a buddy of yours sends a letter from Australia (a land full of criminals and frauds and all sorts of unsavory characters) describing a mammal that lays eggs, is venomous, has a duck bill and beaver tail, you scoff. What red-blooded scientist wouldn't? So your buddy sends you a package this time, with what he claims is an actual corpse of the animal he described in the early letter. Clearly the remains are a clever hoax, bits and pieces of other animals sewn together, because there is no such animal.

And you, like many scientists before and after, fall victim to a logical fallacy. I am an authority in the scientific community. I have never heard of this creature or anything like it. Therefore, the evidence before me must be fabricated by human agency.

But the platypus is real. Strange, and little mindboggling, but very real. Throughout history, creatures once thought myth or hoax or extinct have been found very much alive. The okapi was called the "African unicorn" until one was found (by white people) anyway, when it became known as a real animal. The ceolacanth (an ancient fish) was known to have belonged to the fossil record, but believed extinct. Until one was caught off the coast of Madagascar. Giant squids were just the drunken ravings of your uncle the sailor. Until seven years ago when a group of Japanese scientists caught one on film. Both the mountain gorilla and the komodo dragon and the devil bird (now known to be a kind of very scary owl) were all thought to be myth by Western Science, and thus cryptids, until they were discovered to be real. It seems most Australian animals were once thought to be cryptids, as well.

Skepticism is an integral part of the scientific process (at least that's how it seems to me, a non-scientist...). A scientist works based on an established set of rules to either discover new rules or disprove those rules or...well, as I said, I'm not a scientist. Most scientists build on the work of others. This is a relatively slow process, much like evolution. Some scientists, however, discard many of the established rules to make astonishing new discoveries. Until they are proven correct, they are often ridiculed and dismissed by the wider scientific community, and not without reason. For every Heinrich Schliemann (the man who proved that the city of Troy was a real place, not just the fruit of Homer's very fertile imagination), there are dozens of Erich von Danikens and Thor Heyerdahls. (Although I think these guys are nuttier than fruitcake, who knows?).

Sometimes it pays to not disregard something as myth simply because there is nothing in your sphere of knowledge to prove it is real. And sometimes it pays to look beyond the literal interpretation of a myth to other possibilities. What once were dragons are now thought to be an ancient explanation for dinosaur bones. The single massive cavity in an elephants skull could be the origin of the cyclops myth and the narwhal the origin of the unicorn.

Of course, there are hoaxes. The Lochness monster that turned out to be nothing more than a toy submarine. Piltdown man. Crop circles (?). Perhaps some people just want to play jokes, and perhaps others are so invested in the existence of these creatures and phenomena that they want others to believe as much as they despite the lack of evidence. Either way, these tricksters are hindering the gathering of genuine knowledge and only giving the mainstream scientific community further reason to disregard genuine evidence.

It was only seven years ago that the giant squid was proven real. The mountain gorilla has only been "real" for 109 years. Chupacabras, a relatively recent recruit to the ranks of cryptids, is more and more thought to be real...really mangy canids. Perhaps in the next decade creatures we once thought to be the figments of unstable minds will be accepted as part of the natural world. Maybe chupacabras will be domesticated and Sasquatch will have his own reality show.

Australia has the platypus on its twenty-cent piece. Canada has a trio of cryptid coins. Maybe Canada is just ahead of its time.

Human Constants

"I saw it! It was hairy all over and walked on two legs. It lives in the forest. It looked like a beast and a man!" Quick! What creature is this obviously hysterical person describing? If you live in the U.S., you probably said Big Foot. But in South America it is Maricoxi, in New Zealand Moehau. Croatia has the sumske dekle and Scotland has the fear liath and India has the kala bandar. Oh! We mustn't forget the venerable Yeti, all the way from Nepal. One creature described all over the world, so it must be real! Right?

Humans the world over have many constants, though the details may vary wildly. Take lefse, injera, naan, pita, bao, bammy, pita, or biscuits. It's all bread in the end. Music, personal adornment, family, art, and mythology are all part of the human experience no matter where you look. But there are other things-strange and unexplainable things-that are shared by cultures that are not geographically adjacent. You can find pyramids in Egypt (of course), South America, Asia, and Northern Europe. Not every culture has the pyramid as part of its traditional architecture, but enough across the globe do to raise eyebrows. The same can be said of dragons, the flood myth, and even sasquatch.

There are many explanations to this seeming anomaly, structures and creatures and stories amazingly similar yet from far flung parts of the globe. Aliens and Atlantis seem to be a favorite explanation. Maybe si, maybe no. In my mind, barring supernatural or superterrestrial origin (which I haven't completely ruled out), the most likely explanations are either a common root, the human mind, or a combination of the two.

We all come from a common place: Africa. Perhaps the constants among humans originated with our original ancestors. Africa is a place of mountains rising from the flat savannah (pyramids), crocodiles and enormous land animals (dragons), periods of drought followed by intense rain or innundation (flood story), and gorillas (sasquatch). Perhaps, as people left for Europe and the Middle East and beyond, they took with them memories of these things with them and passed the memories on to their children. Who passed the stories on to their children, and so on and so forth. If you come across the same thing in many cultures with no visible connection, look to Africa before looking to outer space.

More likely, in my opinion, is that these stories and legends and ideas come from the human mind and how it perceives the world. Just as all cultures had the ability to create bread and clothing and an afterlife, why couldn't they use another human constant to create other things? Imagination is present in every human being, even the most literal and dull. Imagination led someone to bake bread, to wonder about purpose, to wonder what is over the next hill, to see a rock rolling down hill and create a wheel. To see the stars and build wonders and math. Perhaps people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa all saw mountains, saw their power and immortality and wanted to make their own mountains. Perhaps people saw floods and understood the destructive power that brought renewal of land as an important part of their lives. Perhaps people saw themselves, increasingly detached and controlling of nature, saw creatures that are almost human living as a part of nature, not its master. And because we all have the same brain, we created very similar physical and abstract concepts in our own lives. Birds all over the world live differently, eat differently, and look wildly differently. Yet, they all have some sort of nesting behavior. Our brain is the skeleton of culture, the same (very, very) basics all over the world. Our differences are the flesh.