While legendary tales of mysterious beasts go back to Pliny's Natural History and beyond, the ‘science’ of cryptozoology is comparatively new. In his compelling, multifaceted history of the search for man-like monsters, Regal explores the particularities and peculiarities of this field, which became a fully fledged, if esoteric, enterprise after the term cryptozoology was coined in the mid-twentieth century.
Looking at the history of cryptozoology affords Regal an opportunity to explore a central tension in the history of science – the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ and the role of expertise and authority in creating scientific legitimacy. He gives us the schism of ‘crackpot’ – amateurs less interested in theory who followed the deeply empirical natural-history tradition – and ‘egghead’ – professional academics enamoured with theory and the laboratory. Despite this conceptual framework, Regal's cast of characters, like the elusive Sasquatch of the title, is a distinct group rife with eccentricities that defy simple characterization.
After briefly reviewing the transition from amateurism to professionalism in the nineteenth-century biological sciences, Regal goes on to discuss the development of cryptozoology proper and the search for man-like monsters in particular. The first phase of the hunt for Sasquatch (before that word even became popular) began in the 1940s and 1950s in Asia with the yeti. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and espionage gone awry, Regal narrates a remarkable tale of the CIA, the Soviets, China, Nepal and Tibet and the ‘anomalous primate’ known as the ‘abominable snowman’. We learn that this term is the result of a mistranslation, and that there were two major expeditions undertaken in this era in Asia: one organized by mountaineer Edmund Hillary and naturalist Marlin Perkins (of Wild Kingdom fame); the other by Tom Slick, a Texas oilman turned monster hunter. Neither expedition produced decisive evidence of any kind.
The yeti era gives way in the early 1960s to a new focus on ‘Bigfoot’, a moniker first popularized by an incident involving footprints found in northern California in 1958. The bickering between crackpots and eggheads over the evidence in this case proved indecisive. This becomes a pattern. A few years later, the case of the Minnesota iceman, a confused bit of charlatanism involving the owner of a travelling sideshow, ends up being equally controversial.
Nothing could be more indecisive or controversial than the Patterson film, shot in the northern California forest in 1967 and easily the most famous piece of evidence of the existence of ‘anomalous primates’ such as Bigfoot. Regal does an excellent job exploring the history of the film – the people involved, the public reaction, the expert opinion – while maintaining a solidly sceptical tone throughout. Initially almost dismissed as a hoax, the Patterson film was saved from ‘the wipe’ (a term employed by Charles Fort, the early twentieth-century American fascinated by anomalous phenomena from whom we derive the word ‘Fortean’) by Ivan Sanderson, freelance writer, ‘scientist’ and Bigfoot pioneer. It became a kind of seminal document and, as Regal says, it ‘lurks and skulks and peeps about just off to the side of every believer and skeptic, challenging, mocking, and encouraging’ (p. 130).
Seeking to avoid the problems of an overly local study focused exclusively on the search for Sasquatch and Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest, Regal shifts his attention in Chapter 6 to the Soviet Union and the cryptozoology community there. Here we meet the Almasti, an apeman variously referenced in certain seminal Mongolian history texts. And yet, as the title of Chapter 6 – ‘The problems of evidence’ – suggests, these Russian monster-seekers (many of whom were disapproving of the term ‘monster’) were, like their counterparts in the Americas, at a loss for decisive evidence of any kind.
Regal's central character is Grover Krantz, an enigmatic figure who tries to bridge the chasm between the egghead and crackpot worlds. After surfacing midway into Regal's narrative in the context of a chequered and difficult academic career, Krantz resurfaces defending the Patterson film. What is fascinating here is not whether the film is a hoax or not – that is of no interest to Krantz – but rather what insights the film can give him into the creature's movement, morphology and basic biomechanics. Krantz went on to do work on the structure of the footprint casts purportedly taken of Bigfoot, making particular note of the ‘dermal ridges’ on these prints that he argued could not possibly have been faked. Alas, like so many other ‘findings’ in cryptozoology, Krantz's work was all but ignored by the mainstream scientific community. Regal argues that the reason for this was Krantz's sloppy approach to academia, partly reflected in his ignorance of contemporary anthropological theory and his preoccupation with the Gigantopithecus.
As Regal recounts the problems of politics and infighting that emerged with the founding of the International Society for Cryptozoology in the 1980s, a clear narrative takes shape – and it is one of failure. While figures like Krantz spent entire careers trying to convince legitimate science of the validity of ‘anomalous primate studies’, no conclusive evidence of the yeti, Sasquatch or Bigfoot ever surfaced. More than this, for all their searching and documenting and corresponding and organizing, ‘the monster hunters of the twentieth century failed to ever contribute anything to zoology, primatology, or anthropology’ (p. 182).
Searching for Sasquatch emerges as a tragic, cautionary tale. A field may possess all the accoutrements of a ‘science’ (journals, scientific societies, a ‘Republic of Letters’, etc.), but without any real evidence of the subject of its study it is invariably doomed. Regal's study is a fair and critical assessment of the obvious failings of cryptozoology according to the most basic standards of science. What he fails to explain, however, is why the search continues. To understand this, one could do worse than to look for explanations in the realm of Jung's ‘collective unconscious’. Like UFOs, the mythology of man-like monsters may have very little scientific validity but that does not mean it will not continue to fascinate as long as there are wild places in this world to explore. Arguably, this is not such a bad thing.
