Cryptozoology

Keel News Now & Mothman 40 Years Ago

Today is the symbolic 40th anniversary of the beginning of the modern era of Mothman sightings. On this date, I am happy to pass along the news (from Doug Skinner) that John A. Keel, 76, uncomfortable but very much alive, has been released from the rehab facility to his home. My very best wishes to Keel for a speedy recovery. Four decades ago, Keel did not know his life was going to take him down this road to Mothman. Intriguingly in 1966, a new book of his, The Fickle Finger of Fate, had just been published. Events were unfolding in [...]

My Comic Life

My sinister dark side (above) is given some cartoon life, circa 2000, by an unknown artist on Fox TV’s “Freaky Links” production team (who had just become famous for their Blair Witch Horror). It is weird to see yourself through others’ eyes and realize the vision can be so similar, or not, among different artists. I’ve been on television, my photograph is not rare, and yet, here’s how artists, years apart, “see me.” In 2004, racing through the pages of Swamp Thing #7 and #8, I was depicted as “Coleman Wadsworth,” cryptozoologist (above and directly below, running for my life [...]

El Reno’s Dermals

Click on image for full-size version Dr. Grover Krantz did not bring to the attention of hominology the possible importance of dermal ridges found in unknown hominoid footprint casts until 1982. Could there be a photographic record of dermals from a dozen years before then? "Handprints" resembling those of a gorilla-like man or man-like gorilla are part of the question of unknown anthropoid cryptids in the southern United States. Near El Reno, Oklahoma, in December 1970, something which moved on all fours raided a chicken coop, leaving a handprint on the door. Local media called it the "El Reno Chicken [...]

Crypto Urban Safari

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Catholic Left Attacks Cryptozoology

Misunderstandings come on the Right from the creationists, and now comes the subtle assaults from Roman Catholics on the Left. A blog which calls itself a “progressive Catholic site,” Catholic Sensibility attacks the new Cryptozoology exhibition in Missouri by noting that “Sunday’s Kansas City Star reports on an art exhibit that will raise eyebrows.” So much for any open-mindedness among the Catholic progressives. First it was the creationists and now it is the Catholic progressives that seem ready to assault cryptozoology. Is this evidence that cryptozoology really occupies the excluded middle and is surely damned, as per the Fortean “damned,” [...]

New Review of CZ in KC

A new review of the Kansas City cryptozoology exhibit was published today, Sunday, November 12, 2006, in the Kansas City Star. Please find it here.

New Zealand’s Waitoreke

Could the Waitoreke be related to the Oriental small-clawed otter (Amblonyx cinereus)? Next to the giant moa reports, the most discussed mystery animal of New Zealand is the waitoreke. Maoris and early colonists on the nation’s South Island frequently reported a small otterlike animal known as the kaureke and also as the waitoreke. Late nineteenth-century writers on New Zealand’s natural landscape tried to fit the sightings into some logical framework, notwithstanding the reality that no otters, beavers, or other European animals then existed in that country. Around 1855 the Rev. Richard Taylor interviewed a man who claimed repeated observations of [...]

Wamsley’s Mothman Interview

Let the anniversary articles begin. Let the 40th anniversary parties commence. Above: Mothman Museum director Jeff Wamsley holds his most recent book, Mothman: Behind the Red Eyes. With him is museum co-worker Todd Wiseman, an Ohio University film student making a documentary about Mothman. I earlier today posted on the question of whether the 12th, not the 15th, might be more correctly the “first” date of the “first” multiple sighting of Mothman. That aside, historically, the Scarberry-Mallette encounter will be remembered as the “first,” and here’s the local media’s kickoff to the 40th year celebration. In the The Herald-Dispatch of [...]