The Chicago Sun-Times contacted me and Roy Mackal’s family last week, and published a superb tribute in their Sunday edition today. The obituary, “Of Monsters And Mysteries; U. of C. Professor Roy Mackal Chased the Unknown,” by Maureen O’Donnell, appeared in the Sun-Times on Sunday, December 29, 2013. O’Donnell’s article mentions that Mackal died in September 2013. Personally, the reporter told me that the family noted Mackal died on the 13th or 14th. As O’Donnell wrote me, “I think sometimes people die very early in the morning and it’s hard to tell if it was before or after midnight.”
The news site Anomalist.com nicely summarized the Sun-Times article this way:
The death of Roy Mackal finally gets the attention of the mainstream media in this colorful review of his dazzling life. A hat tip to Loren Coleman for making it all happen with his own obituary of the famous cryptozoologist/biochemist, which ran almost two weeks ago. Mackal described his own encounter with Nessie this way: “…the back of an animal surfaced, rising 8 feet out of the water. The skin was slick and black and very smooth. I saw something like a flipper protruding from the skin. Then, with a huge splash, it was gone.”
The article online has a series of photos of Mackal that I assisted them in finding, and which they also discovered in their own archives. We may never see some of these images again so widely disseminated. Or, at least, until, as Jerry Clark said to me, “Maybe one day there will be a full biography of the man.”
People experienced their own personal remembrances in social media and email exchanges, like this from Patrick Huyghe: “I ran into Roy a few times over the years. The first time was at an ISC conference at NYU where I met Loren!”
The Champ investigator Joseph Zarzynski, wrote, “Pat [Meaney, his wife] and I recall testing Roy’s sonar in 1981 for his Central Africa search for the mokele-mbembe. We made dives in Button Bay, VT. Roy and Richard [Greenwell] then camped out on the island in the bay a forerunner to their pioneering fieldwork in Africa. “
I have to agree with Mackal’s old Chicago friend Jerry Clark, who said to me, “This old earth seems a little smaller without Roy’s presence in it.”
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