CRYPTOMANIA BY JORDAN DOLL Being a cryptozoologist is not an honorable life. It is a life lived in shady internet back alleys, trading blurry pictures of Mothman and scraps of information with a character known only as “H4mBurgl4r666." It is one spent courting mystery and intrigue, but also foolishness and disappointment. For cryptozoology is, by and large, a disappointing field. Too many kooks willing to overlook evidence in favor of fame, too many hoaxes and too little substantiation. People feel pretty comfortable openly ridiculing Bigfoot and chupacabra enthusiasts alike, and we feel pretty comfortable letting them. Because deep down, we know the truth. We can sense it like a stone in our shoe. There are animals out there, living unknown or forgotten by humanity, glimpsed every so often by the occasional off-duty cop or hysterical hillbilly. Creatures so rare and strange that it is easier to consider them myths than to believe they ever walked alongside us. But they did, and they do. And every so often, one of them reveals itself to us. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek explorer Hanno the Navigator returned from an expedition to West Africa touting tales of strange man-beasts! His interpreters called them "Gorillai" and he had never seen anything quite like them. Of course nobody believed him. "Manbeasts?" Hanno? Sure, cool story. The creature was considered a thing of fantasy to Westerners for another two thousand years before a British explorer of the region, Andrew Battel, reported the same beasts visiting his camp every morning after the humans had left. One thing led to another and a pair of the creatures were shot and killed in 1902, proving to "civilized" minds that the legendary "Gorilla" was real, and furthermore it could be killed by ordinary household bullets. Then there was the coelacanth: living fossil and top-shelf Scrabble word. The coelacanth is a very metal looking fish from ancient times. It belongs to a family of lobe-finned fish that are sort of lizard-fish hybrids that were supposed to have been extinct since the late Cretaceous Period. Then on December 23, 1938, one was popped-up among the No. 148
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