There are exceptions to the generalization that cryptozoologists lack advanced degrees in relevant fields (some of which we will discuss in chapter 7), but even these exceptions may be more complicated than they appear. Some, like Ben Speers-Roesch, got hooked on cryptozoology as teenagers but became critics of cryptozoological research as their scientific training advanced (and as their familiarity with cryptozoology’s shortcomings deepened).24 Others, like paleozoologist Darren Naish, are friendly to cryptozoology in principle, yet highly critical of its claims in practice.25 Among those more wholeheartedly supportive of cryptozoology, Roy Mackal (another co-founder of the ISC) is frequently cited as a legitimate scientist with a doctorate in biology. This is true: he is retired from the University of Chicago, where from the late 1950s to the late 1960s he did highly respectable research in molecular biology and microbiology. Mackal’s later research and writing related to the search for the Loch Ness monster and the alleged Congo dinosaur, Mokele Mbembe, however, displaced his mainstream scientific work—and had no close connection to his area of scientific expertise. Notably, Mackal has no credentials in field biology, paleontology, or ecology. Stronger exceptions include wildlife biologist John Bindernagel and anatomist Jeffrey Meldrum, both of whom are leading proponents of Bigfoot whose formal training is relevant to their area of cryptozoological focus. But the interest of a handful of formally trained authorities tells us little about the robustness of the evidence for Bigfoot (or any cryptid). Thousands of similarly trained anthropologists are just as qualified to examine and critique the evidence for Bigfoot, and they are virtually unanimous in considering the evidence for Bigfoot to be useless or marginal at best.26 This is the process of peer review at work. Even if someone does have proper training, what he or she thinks is not necessarily true or authoritative. The ideas must pass muster in the process of peer review, and he or she must defend the evidence for the rest of the scientific community to take the claims seriously.
• Special pleading and ad hoc hypotheses: One of the marks of pseudoscientists is that when the evidence is strongly against them, they do not accept the scientific method and abandon their cherished hypotheses. Instead, they resort to special pleading to salvage their original ideas, rather than admitting that they are wrong. Such attempts are known as ad hoc (for this purpose) hypotheses and are universally regarded as signs of failure. When a psychic conducts a séance and does not contact the dead, she may plead that the skeptic “just didn’t believe hard enough” or the “room wasn’t dark enough” or the “spirits didn’t feel like coming out this time.” When a creationist is told that Noah’s Ark could not have housed the tens of millions of species of animals, he may use an evasion like “only the created kinds were on board” or “fish and insects don’t count” or “it was a miracle.” Science, however, does not permit such creative, convenient flexibility; ideas in science must stand or fall according to the evidence. This is, as the great Victorian naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley said, “The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”27
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
Humans are storytelling animals, and they are easily persuaded by the testimony of other individuals. Telemarketers and advertisers know that if they get a popular celebrity to endorse a product, it will sell briskly, even if no careful scientific studies or Food and Drug Administration approvals back up their claims. The endorsement of your next-door neighbor may be good enough to make simple decisions, but anecdotal evidence counts for very little in science. As celebrated science historian Frank Sulloway put it, “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”28
Most scientific studies require dozens to hundreds of experiments or cases, and detailed statistical analyses, before scientists can tentatively accept the conclusion that event A probably caused event B. In the testing of medicines, for example, there must be a control group, which receives a placebo rather than the treatment under study, so the experimenters can rule out the possible influence of the power of suggestion as well as random effects. Only after such rigorous testing—which can eliminate the biases of the subjects and the observers, random noise, and all other uncontrolled variables—can scientists make the statement that event A probably caused event B. Even then, scientists do not speak in finalistic terms of “cause and effect,” but only in probabilistic terms that “event A has a 95 percent probability of having caused event B.” Independent replication by other scientists helps to refine the findings—but no conclusion, no matter how often or robustly confirmed, is ever wholly free from uncertainty.
If scientists are obligated to consider the outcomes of the most tightly controlled laboratory experiments to be tentative, they must naturally approach eyewitness testimony with even greater caution. Eyewitnesses may have some value in a court of law, but their anecdotal evidence is necessarily regarded as highly suspect in most scientific studies. Thousands of experiments have shown that eyewitnesses are easily fooled by distractions such as a weapon, are confused by stress, or otherwise are misled into confidently “remembering” events that did not happen.29 The extreme fallibility of eyewitness testimony was vividly demonstrated in a famous psychology experiment, conducted in 1999, in which subjects were instructed to watch a video and count the number of times young men and women dressed in white pass a basketball.30 During the video, a person in a gorilla suit barges into the center of the scene, looks straight into the camera, lingers to pound his chest, and then strolls out of the scene. However, roughly half of first-time viewers are shocked to learn that they overlooked the gorilla entirely! With their attention focused on counting the passes, a majority of people are unable to correctly perceive what happens right in front of their eyes.
The “inattentional blindness” effect, which renders the gorilla invisible, is just one of many ways in which eyewitness perception may critically fail. As A. Leo Levin and Harold Kramer put it, “Eyewitness testimony is, at best, evidence of what the witness believes to have occurred. It may or may not tell what actually happened. The familiar problems of perception, of gauging time, speed, height, weight, of accurate identification of persons accused of crime all contribute to making honest testimony something less than completely credible.”31 Consequently, court systems around the world are undergoing reform as DNA evidence has revealed case after case of eyewitness testimony that resulted in a wrongful conviction. As psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown, eyewitness accounts of events and their memory of them are notoriously unreliable:
Memory is imperfect. This is because we often do not see things accurately in the first place. But even if we take in a reasonably accurate picture of some experience, it does not necessarily stay perfectly intact in memory. Another force is at work. The memory traces can actually undergo distortion. With the passage of time, with proper motivation, with the introduction of special kinds of interfering facts, the memory traces seem sometimes to change or become transformed. These distortions can be quite frightening, for they can cause us to have memories of things that never happened. Even in the most intelligent among us is memory thus malleable.32
Skeptical investigators Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell recount several examples that make this point vividly.33 In 2004, Dennis Plucknett and his fourteen-year-old son, Alex, were hunting in northern Florida. Alex was in a ditch some 225 yards away from his father when someone yelled “Hog!” Dennis grabbed his gun, pointed it at a distant moving object that looked like a wild hog to him, and fired. Instead, he killed his son with a single shot to the head. Alex had been wearing a black toboggan cap, not a hog costume or anything else that would have made him look remotely hog-like. Yet at that distance, and with the suggestion that a wild hog was nearby, Dennis mistook a toboggan cap for a boar, and a tragic result occurred. Indeed, hunting accidents like this are common, since many hunters shoot first and ask questions later, often confused by distant objects that are mov
ing and by the suggestibility of their own imaginations to “see” what they are looking for—not what is really there.
Or take the Washington, D.C., sniper panic of 2002. Early eyewitnesses told the police to look for a white or light-colored box truck or van, with a roof rack. Police officers wasted weeks of time and caused huge traffic jams stopping every vehicle that remotely matched the description. Finally, the suspects, John Lee Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, were caught—and the white van turned out to be a dark blue sedan. Police chief Charles H. Ramsey said, “We were looking for a white van with white people, and we ended up with a blue car with black people.”34 Newspapers reported that the suspects had actually been stopped several times during the period of the panic because they were near the site of one of the attacks, but each time they were released because their car did not match the descriptions.35
Some “memories” of strange experiences or eyewitness accounts of bizarre beasts can be attributed to sleep deprivation, dreams, and hallucinations. For example, Michael Shermer has described how he had an experience of being abducted by aliens in 1993.36 At the time, he was undergoing the stress of competing in an ultra-marathon cross-country bicycle race; badly exhausted, his brain misperceived his own support crew as space invaders and their motor home as an alien spacecraft. As he showed, some famous accounts of alien abductions and out-of-body experiences may be attributable to dreams or hallucinations caused by stress.37 Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy’s research on alien abductees expanded on this, revealing that the seed for abduction beliefs need not be as literal as Shermer’s hallucination. As she explained, “Coming to believe you’ve been abducted by aliens is part of an attribution process. Alien-abduction beliefs reflect attempts to explain odd, unusual, and perplexing experiences.”38 These anomalous experiences include common sleep disruptions, such as sleep paralysis (a viscerally compelling experience that occurs at the transition between wakefulness and sleep, often combining physical paralysis with hallucinations). Seeking an explanation, people find that alien abduction is one of the culturally available scripts for mysterious happenings—and once that seed is planted, it tends to grow. “Once abductees have embraced the abduction theory, everything else tends to fall into place,” cautioned Clancy. “Alien abduction easily accommodates a great variety of unpleasant symptoms and experiences.” Memories are malleable; over time, they may change to better match the abduction narrative. Similar processes distort the cryptozoological literature—and indeed, distort all literature that involves testimonials. Whether “eyewitness” accounts describe cryptids, ghosts, aliens, or muggers, it is an inconvenient fact of human nature that individuals quite commonly imagine things that are not really there, misinterpret known phenomena (such as sleep paralysis, bears, or the planet Venus), and, in an attempt to understand their experience, rely on memories that may include false details.
Scientific investigators must also tread carefully with indigenous, developing societies. Unlike highly industrialized culture, which has very specific ideas of what is reality and what is myth, native cultures can be much less rigid and literal. Thus when investigators go to a remote region and inquire about a legendary animal, such as the Yeti, they cannot determine whether the animal is literally or mythically real. Even worse are attempts to elicit responses by showing photographs or drawing sketches of the animal being sought or, in especially egregious instances, first providing a story and then demanding that local informants confirm it.39 In a court of law, that is considered leading the witness and it is not allowed, since this practice often biases the testimony or plants a suggestion in the mind of the witness. Thus “witnesses” may claim to have seen any animal that remotely resembles that being sought.
What is the proper scientific approach to eyewitness testimony? As we have seen, most scientists give it very little weight unless there is strong physical evidence to support it. Even the most reliable eyewitness account does not meet the standard of “extraordinary evidence” that is necessary to substantiate an “extraordinary claim.”
WHAT IS A CRYPTID? PERSPECTIVES FROM REAL SCIENCE
The term “cryptozoology” comes from the Greek words kryptos (hidden) and zoos (life) and literally means “the study of hidden animals.” The origins of this and related terms (such as “cryptid” and “cryptozoological”) are somewhat unclear and thus a matter for much discussion.40 The word “cryptozoology” is often traced to Lucien Blancou, who in 1959 dedicated a book to Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans as the “master of cryptozoology,” in honor of Heuvelmans’s book On the Track of Unknown Animals, published in French four years earlier.41 Because of his reputation as an early major figure in the field, Heuvelmans is sometimes thought to have coined the term “cryptozoology” himself. But Heuvelmans gave the credit to Scottish explorer Ivan T. Sanderson: “When he was still a student he invented the word ‘cryptozoology,’ or the science of hidden animals, which I was to coin much later, quite unaware that he had already done so.”42 As early as 1941, a reviewer of Willy Ley’s The Lungfish and the Unicorn described it as covering “not only lungfish and unicorns but an array of other marvels, zoological and cryptozoological, from the mushrush of the Ishtar Gate to the basilisk, the tatzelwurm, the sea serpent, and the dodo.”43 In any event, the discipline that we now call cryptozoology goes back much further—certainly to Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans and his book The Great Sea-serpent (and arguably back to Pliny the Elder and other natural historians of classical antiquity, as we will see in chapter 5).44
By most definitions, any purposeful search for unconfirmed animals (or unconfirmed populations of animals) can be classified as cryptozoology, although conventionally the focus is entirely on hypothetical animals of spectacular size, such as Bigfoot, Nessie, and Yeti. The term “cryptid” was coined by John Wall to refer to the animals that are sought by cryptozoologists.45 As Darren Naish has pointed out,46 the definition of cryptids is highly fluid. Heuvelmans wrote that in order to be considered a cryptid, a creature must be “truly singular, unexpected, paradoxical, striking, or emotionally upsetting.” He argued that these characteristics allow such an animal to become the subject of myths and thence become a cryptid.47 Yet Heuvelmans’s list of animals that he thought might soon be discovered includes such cryptids as a marmot-size mammal from Ethiopia, a small wildcat from the Mediterranean, and a flightless rail from the South Pacific—creatures that would not astound most zoologists if they were indeed found.48 Naish redefined “cryptozoology” to refer to the study of animals known only from indirect evidence: eyewitness accounts and anecdotal clues, such as sightings, photographs, stories, casts of footprints, and questionable hair or tissue samples. This definition distinguishes cryptids from animals whose existence is based on the direct evidence of actual specimens that have been captured or bones that have been collected.
The distinction between cryptozoology and conventional biology is not necessarily very big. As Naish points out, several hundred previously unknown species are discovered and described every year,49 although most are insects and other invertebrates that do not capture the imagination of nonscientists. Nor it is unusual for a creature to be known from folk legend before scientists officially “discover” it. A number of these “former cryptids” are suggested by cryptozoology advocates as evidence that many animals are yet to be found. The “former cryptids” include the lowland gorilla, known from legend since the seventeenth century but not described until 1840, and the mountain gorilla, not described until 1901 (figure 1.2). The okapi, the only close living relative of the giraffe, was well hidden in the dense jungles of Central Africa and known to the local peoples before it was officially “discovered” in 1901 (figure 1.3). The Komodo dragon was called the “land crocodile” by Indonesians and frequently reported since 1840, but was not officially named or described until 1912. The kouprey, a large ox native to the jungles of Cambodia, was first mentioned in 1860, but not officially named until 1937.
Figure 1.2 A mountain gorilla in Bwi
ndi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda. (Photograph by Julie Roberts)
Although the rate of discovery of large animals has dropped off considerably in the past century, less spectacular species are found every year. Naish summarizes a considerable catalogue of them.50 They include a number of species of small brocket deer, from Central and South America, and muntjacs, from Southeast Asia, described in the past decade, as well as tree kangaroos and numerous primates, rodents, and bats. Among animals known from native accounts is the kipunji, a Tanzanian monkey, which was described in 2005. The odedi, a bush warbler from Bougainville Island in the South Pacific, was formally described in 2006. In 2008, zoologist Marc van Roosmalen claimed to have discovered a dwarf species of manatee in the Amazon River, although the DNA evidence has so far failed to show that it is really distinct from the large Amazonian manatee, and this “species” may be based on immature specimens.
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