This is an excellent book, except when it’s not. And that’s about half the time… It’s a wide-ranging anthology and, as might be expected, the chapters reflect mixed investigative and literary quality. The main problem is how “lesser-known” most of the topics are. A lot of the material would rate only a footnote in another book. On the basis of two 1920s reports by the same man, for example, alleged Myanmar glowing spiders get a whole chapter. Not every cryptid can be Bigfoot, but more, perhaps, is required to get some ink.
Jerry Padilla’s account of New Mexico mystery creatures today and in Native American legend is charming. Michel Raynal’s chapter, ‘Paul Gauguin’s Mystery Bird’, is a comprehensive and masterful account of the possible survival of the takahe or similar bird on the Marquesas archipelago, accidentally documented there by the painter. (This was touched on by Karl Shuker in ‘Crypto-twitching’ (FT222:42–44), which features more and better colour reproductions of Gauguin’s work; three of Shuker’s articles elsewhere appear in the chapter’s bibliography.) Overlooked hippos, mystery pigs and out-of-place octopodes also get their due in the anthology, as does a Kentucky water monster.
The stand-out chapter is about a creature that is not lesser-known at all. Its subject is the cryptozoologist’s poster child, the cœlacanth. Gary Mangiacopra and Dwight Smith engagingly retell the saga, and report that the fish may be far more widespread than previously thought. Besides the waters of South and East Africa, since 1997 the cœlacanth has been caught off Indonesia as well. And the authors persuasively argue, based on rumours of “four legged” fish and iconography dating to the 1600s, that the cœlacanth might in historic times have been found even in the Mediterranean, North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
Quite a bit of the book is given over to unedited newspaper stories, for example a collection of hoaxes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A little of this “cryptofiction”, as Chad Arment dubs it, goes a long way. The last chapter is similarly given over to reprinting clippings of unknowns from all over the world, leaving it up to the reader to decide.Perhaps that’s as well. Most of the authors are at their strongest when simply presenting information. It’s when they try to sound scientific that they go astray. One section, for example, deals with reported dinosaurs across the central and southwest United States. Its author, Nick Sucik, at one point considers an alleged (and not included) photo and concludes, “either it displays a true unknown reptile and potential dinosaur, or it is a fake.” Well, yes…
Still, some of the sightings sound good, and Sucik is to be praised for doing primary research, going over the ground himself and meeting witnesses in person. He suggests misidentifications, and wisely has a little trouble taking everything as fact from Myrtle Snow of Colorado, who has seen living dinosaurs not once, but four times. You’d think she’d move.
Then there are the few scattered sightings of American “flying snakes,” from 1873 to 1917. Arment notes, “we can’t rule out the possibility that a large invertebrate may be responsible.” Or also a mammal, flying fish or bird, as he does not write. It could be something like a whopping dragonfly, but Arment admits that requires the reports to be massaged: it could not then be as described, “as large around as a good-sized human thigh,” “15-feet in length” or “writhing and twisting, with protruding eyes and forked tongue.”
The problem is that if we’re going to start second-guessing historical witnesses, it’s easier to believe that it’s no coincidence that these alleged sightings were made during the heyday of American newspaper hoaxes. But Arment writes that “focused investigation suggests that a ‘flying snake’ is a legitimate cryptid”, whatever that means. Scientific-sounding language does not help. If the flying snake is real, Arment concludes, “it will probably be very different anatomically from other modern animals – particularly if it’s a reptile.”
Well, yes, it would be different. It’s a snake. That flies.
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