Public Forum

Making Time with a Monster Hunter

Click on the above image for a full-framed view of Loren and some hidden friends. Publisher and editor David Lineal’s monthly paper The Skeleton News will hit the Chicago streets on Friday, December 1, 2006. Included in the issue is an interview with yours truly, Loren Coleman. They do not publish online, and instead maintain a humorously skeletal webpage. Because of that, David passes along his interview, and the article’s illustration (above by Chicago artist named Becca Taylor), for the readers of Cryptomundo. All the flattering but too generous (e.g. "great" and "foremost") descriptors are Mr. Lineal’s. Blush, blush. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ [...]

The Beautiful Anthropologist and Vietnam’s Lost World

As opposed to viewing what recently happened during a formal anthropological criticism of cryptozoology as some cause for upset, let’s reframe what occurred as an opportunity for our field to broaden our worldview. When the apparently charming Pamela D. McElwee, Ph. D., Assistant Professor, The School of Global Studies, Arizona State University (shown above), shared some insights, her audience may not have realized the significance of what she was saying. Certainly, however, cryptozoologists need to pay attention, as McElwee’s comment might be useful in reviewing some foundation thoughts within our field. If we wish to remain aware of how fast [...]

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,” [...]

Abominable Snowman’s Writer Dies

One of the most influential television writers of the 20th century and the writer of one of the most important motion pictures in Yeti cryptofiction has died. Earlier this year, I noted that director Val Guest died on May 10, 2006, in California. Now, Nigel has passed away. That would be Nigel Kneale, here pictured from the 1950s. At the Hammer Film’s site, in a remembrance there, writer Robert Simpson shares the sad news: Tom Kneale (better known as Nigel Kneale) died on Sunday 29 October 2006 aged 84. To many he was the godfather of television science fiction, a [...]

Department of Cryptozoology

The Kansas City Star celebrates the opening of the traveling Bates exhibition with an article by John Shultz, in the October 25, 2006, edition: It evokes a hallway out of the X-Files, a parallel universe where government spending skews towards the arcane. At the end of the faux corridor, the very official-looking door for the Federal Wildlife Commission’s Department of Cryptozoology. It’s sandwiched, naturally, between the portals of the National Institute of Comparative Astrobiology and the Bureau for the Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena. The movie set of a hallway, inspired by a piece by artist Mark Dion, is among the [...]