Abominable Snowman

Pynchon’s New Cryptofiction

Most people have heard the rumors about alligators-in-the-sewers, in large part, because of Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel, V. Pynchon wrote of the cute little pet alligators purchased as Florida souvenirs, eventually discarded, then growing and reproducing in the sewers of New York City. Moving through the underground system, Pynchon told us, they were big, blind, albino, and fed off rats and sewage. Pynchon envisioned an Alligator Patrol going into the depths of the sewers, working in teams of two, with one man holding a flashlight while the other carried a twelve-gauge repeating shotgun. As no one before him had, Thomas [...]

Dzungarian Bare Knees

Why do some unknown hominoids have bare knees? Wooden representation of a Proto-Pygmy from Africa. Witness drawing of a Yowie from Australia. In 1913, Muscovite V. A. Khakhlov submitted to the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences his extraordinarily detailed report about the unknown hairy hominids of eastern Asia. In one section of the document, Khakhlov gathered reports from the native Kazakhs of Dzungaria. Dzungaria is named after a Mongolian kingdom which existed in Central Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, Dzungaria is a geographical region within the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwestern China. The area is a largely [...]