Loren Coleman

Loren Coleman

“Maine Mutant” Celebrated

When the media began dealing with the report of a body of uncertain identity in Maine on the 16th of August, they soon went wild with the story of the find and the even older tales of a killing mystery beast in the woods. For background, see: August 16, 2006 – Mystery Animal Photos and August 17, 2006 – Mystery Beast Update Cryptozoology is revealed in many ways. It is intriguing to see what kind of media frenzy is occurring because of this story. For the record, here’s some headlines that were used on the 16th and 17th of August, [...]

Marcos Wild Boy

Source: Sedilia, Missouri’s Daily Democrat August 21, 1875 Credit: Fabio Picasso Could such reports as this “Wild Boy” from the Philippines be a record of contact with an adult hairy little person related to the Flores people, Homo floresiensis?

Mystery Beast Update: ‘Like horns of a devil’

Photograph by Douglas Van Reeth, Sun Journal. The story about the body linked to the central “Maine Mutant” broke over the second weekend in August and was discussed here when I was consulted on the case. The events continued, building steam as soon as both the Cryptomundo blog and Lewiston Sun Journal reporter Mark LaFlamme’s article hit the newsstands. As it turned out, worried about parts of the body being picked over, I rushed to Turner, Maine, on Wednesday afternoon, August 16, 2006, with LaFlamme and the paper’s photographer Douglas Van Reeth. There we met up with Michelle O’Donnell and [...]

Mystery Animal Photos

Please click on image for full-size version Photograph by Michelle O’Donnell. Used by permission. Click on image for full-size version Photograph by Michelle O’Donnell. Used by permission. Click on image for full-size version Photograph by Michelle O’Donnell. Used by permission. When the reporter from the Sun-Journal hinted via a comment on my blog at Cryptomundo, then called me, saying he had pictures of a “mystery animal” he wished for me to examine, of course, I thought he was talking about another coyote with mange, running through a field somewhere. I was surprised when he sent along photographs of the body [...]

Snakes on Plains – Part Deux

Various readers from part one of this blog, Snakes on Plains, wanted to see some of the following images, spanning one hundred years of giant snakes. In 1906, twenty years before explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett vanished without a trace in the Amazon, he was sent by the Royal Geographic Society to make a thorough survey of the Rio Abuna and Acre Rivers. Thirty-nine at the time, Major Fawcett, as Ivan T. Sanderson once observed, was known for two sometimes contradictory character traits: he was a dreamer whose dreams led him to envision lost jungle cities of fantastic wealth and [...]

Giant Spiders

How big do spiders get? To get an idea of scale, here is spider owner Ged Casserley with some of his former pets, a Goliath birdeater and other real-life giant spiders. Photo: Ged Casserley.

Snakes on Plains

The ultimate snake on a plain, The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio may represent a giant snake swallowing an egg. Accounts of giant snakes have circulated throughout the United States, across the plains, into the forests of Middle America, and from coast to coast. Reports from the area around Bridgewater, Massachusetts, tell of CCC workers in the 1930s encountering huge coiled serpents along the pathways through the Hockomock Swamp. From Hastings, Michigan, comes tales of the twenty-foot-long Carter’s Snake, so named because it was always seen near Carter’s Lake. Near another lake, Reynold’s Lake in Kentucky, local people began to [...]