This year’s winners of the MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as the “genius grants,” will be announced tomorrow, on Tuesday, September 23, 2008. The $500,000 prizes are awarded each year with no strings attached to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Past winners include poets, musicians, historians, mathematicians and teachers, among many other professions. But not a one has been a hominologist or a cryptozoologist.

Look, I understand the MacArthur folks will not pick out anyone connected to cryptozoology, again, for their fellowships. Even we, it appears, are viewed as so far beyond the published and academic mainstream these days, no MacArthur grants will be coming the way of the pursuers and chroniclers of cryptids anytime soon.

Therefore, allow me to make a preemptive plea to the past and future MacArthur Fellows: think about supporting a good, outside-the-box cause, and please donate to the International Cryptozoology Museum (ICM).

Times are bleak here. The accountants and legal defenders for the ICM, who have been working unpaid for months during this IRS review (now in month number fourteen), delivered a “final notice” bill of $3848, which must be paid or they are off the case. And we have not even received the thousand of dollars bill and penalties that the IRS may be sending us someday soon.

The ICM had to forego a mortgage commitment and other bills to make a partial payment, and we are looking for more donations and work to come up with the rest. Can you donate anything?

So MacArthur fellows, please consider donating just a mere 1/500 of your grant to the International Cryptozoology Museum, via check or money order to PO Box 360, Portland, ME 04112, or via PayPal, at lcoleman@maine.rr.com

As I told a reporter from the Boston Globe on Wednesday, the ICM’s downtown public move is still the objective for 2009, and hopefully an angel will appear. But donations have a way of drying up when people think the stock market is going to crash. Perhaps some MacArthur fellows could come to our aid?

BTW, a special thanks to Anomaly Magazine for their recent special feature to “Help Save the International Cryptozoology Museum”.

We need to build up some steam in this donation drive, and construct a base from which to work, instead of fighting fires all the time. Contribute what you can. The bank is empty. The past donations saved us from foreclosure and got us back on firm enough footing to stay open, but we need to move to the next level. Thank you!!