u/lprattcryptozoology

Moving a mile a minute, have had around 200 new contributions to the CDP Library over the last two weeks. Have started writing and revamping some essays as well...

Everything from the later half of April has been compiled here

All articles from volumes 1-12 from the ISC Journal Cryptozoology have been split into individual PDFS here. Working on comment & response, and book reviews currently. Still working on getting volume 13 scanned.

Have also started splitting other periodicals, starting with The Cryptozoology Review

All issues of Gazette De La Bête, a French-language annual magazine for the Beast of Gevaudan have been compiled here

Got three new books:

Sharon Eby's "Bigfoot Beyond Belief"

Terrance James' "Sasquatch Discovered - The Biography Of John Bindernagel"

B.J. Hollars' "In Defense Of Monsters"

and have uploaded some cryptozoology-themed mockumentaries as well:

Bigfoot Captured (History Channel); features Jeff Meldrum 3-D printing a Bigfoot skeleton

I Was Bitten: The Walker County Incident (Animal Planet)

Several different versions/dubs of Mermaids: The Body Found and Mermaids: The New Evidence (Animal Planet)

More to come in the future, goal is to not have this be just the Digitization Project updates sub. Of course huge thanks to Rich, Paisano, CryptoArchive, Tyler Greenfield and everybody else who has helped, contributed, gotten access to articles for me, and so on!

Bottom shelf (image 2) will be scanned in due time. Coleman's mermaid book is en route.

https://archive.org/details/heuvelmans-tras-la-pista

Just uploaded to Internet Archive the volumes of this extremely rare Spanish translation of On the track of Unknown animals by Heuvelmans.

As I said in my previous post, this edition from 1958 has very good an introduction written by Heuvelmans instead of Gerald Durrell. Also the chapter "There are lost worlds everywhere" has some paragraphs that were removed in the English translation, including a bit of Heuvelmans' opinion about UFOs. Personally, the covers are gorgeous.

If you have any rare Cryptozoological literature that is not online please consider digitizing it in the future, it doesn't matter the language.

Cryptozoological digitization project

Over the last several months I've been slowly organizing and pruning my personal cryptozoological file collection, which originally consisted of well over 2,000 files spread across multiple devices, drives, and Discord servers. The number of files has waxed and waned with new additions, now totaling just shy of 1400 (excluding magazines and journals). I'm in the process of uploading what I can to Internet Archive, linked below. This library is, of course, not just cryptozoological but contains a lot of anthropological literature as well, I hope to have it better organized in the future.

Uploads 1 and 2 are "papers" (mostly papers from peer-reviewed academic journals, though a few are from magazines and other not-so-academic sources). These are built primarily off of The Cryptozoological Reference Library, with many additions, most of which are not specifically cryptozoological.

3 was books, but that got flagged. Unsure exactly why just yet (though I have my suspicions) - am going to hold off on these for just now, but can provide a list if anybody is looking for a specific book. Until then this remains the primary compilation of cryptozoological books.

4 is the one I'm still actively working on, being non-English materials. Hoping to get as many of these translated as possible down the line.

5 is miscellany from periodicals - previously unavailable issues of Fortean Times and such. My uploads of Fortean Times 1-30 and 270-468 can be found here and here. Working to fill the gap of 31-269, if anybody can contribute please reach out!

6 is a collection of things that didn't fit the other categories. There's pdf copies of blogposts, college theses, various essays, and other such things. I'm also still contributing files to this one actively.

NOTE - in some collections (1 and 2 particularly) there is also a .zip file. This includes .pdfs which Internet Archive could not process for one reason or another. Can offer file lists and directly send those to folks if interested.

https://archive.org/details/cdp-bckup-1
https://archive.org/details/cdp-bckup-2
https://archive.org/details/cdp-bckup-4
https://archive.org/details/cdp-bckup-5/
https://archive.org/details/cdp-bckup-6/

If any of these go down, if there are any broken/corrupt files, any duplicates, or any other problems please reach out immediately! Enjoy!

The Cryptozoology Digitization Project is still alive and well. u/Richtherium scraped together the majority of the pages for this book and the wonderful CryptoArchive scanned the last pages we needed! Huge deal because this is a very thorough academic book containing relevant commentary on cryptozoology as a whole. Enjoy!

This weekend, a channel named Thorn’s Jungle released this video, discussing how cryptozoology needs a “reset” - a change in form and focus from both casual enthusiasts and the body of authors, investigators, and properly qualified cryptozoologists. I’m glad to see conversations of this sort happening in the casual sphere, as it’s something academics and the more academic enthusiasts among us have been saying for some time.

I know very little about Adam Thorn’s cryptozoological stuff other than the fact that he seems to be quite zoologically-literalist, especially in regards to wildmen - a stance which, if anything, is contradictory to some of the points he makes. I think this is an interesting dichotomy and therefore a good jumping-off point to discuss the idea of a “cryptozoological reset” here, especially since I haven’t seen the video posted much elsewhere.

Adam’s points are as follows:

- Cryptozoology is due for a “big change” because it has stagnated, even despite a rise in popularity and the development of methodologies and technologies which should, in theory, be leading to the discovery of cryptids. Instead of bodies and academic descriptions, we just have tracks and testimonies. 

- There is a focus on megafaunal cryptids (e.g. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster) and complete absence of time spent looking for microfaunal cryptids (i.e. lizards, bugs, birds, fish, rodents), and as a result few cryptozoologists have ever actually discovered a cryptid (note - Thorn asserts that “no” cryptozoologist has ever discovered a cryptid, but there are several examples to the contrary. Marc Van Roosmalen is the clearest example). 

- Fraud, fabrications, and goalpost shifting are common within the circles focusing on these megafaunal cryptids. We get claims of “gift-giving Bigfoot” but never samples or photographs of them, and instead an explanation that “Bigfoot is interdimensional” to explain away the lack of proof. This attitude scares away academics. 

- Cryptozoology is generally a community engaged in fantasy and seeking mystery - the closer to “real” or “solved” a subject gets within cryptozoology, the less interest it receives. In some cases it’s like LARPing, which of course is a far cry from the zoological-focus of the subject. This is permitted by the lack of hard, provable conclusions in some cases.

- We should “reset” and start from square one, trying to prove or disprove whether or not these are animals first and foremost, and we should go about this inquiry academically. We may actually find something this go around…

I’ve sat for the past few days trying to articulate my problems with these points, and have yet to do so in a satisfactory way - I hope to produce a full overview in the future. To summarize, though:

- Cryptozoology is not a discipline but a cluster of subcultures. These subcultures focus primarily on the most accessible “cryptids” - the ones in their own backyards. The community can regularly contribute to the lore, something they can’t do for the cryptids of the Congo, Amazon, or far off islands. These cryptids - Bigfoot, lake monsters, extant Thylacines - are all ultimately “dead ends”, they’re not zoological animals awaiting (re)discovery, so naturally discourse is going to stagnate.

- These communities aren’t ever realistically going to change their perspectives, they will rationalize further and further (e.g. woo Bigfoot) or die off slowly (e.g. Nessie truthers). Rather than reigning them in, cryptozoology needs to focus on building its academic bases back up. On both an amateur and academic level, do interesting things with cryptozoological data - conduct ethnographies, do historical research, try to figure out how evidence was hoaxed, conduct studies of cryptozoological “memes” (like paleoart memes). Us, as an amateur community, can do actual work and contribute to the discipline, and can get academics interested in this unorthodox data.

- To do this, however, we need to shed out zoological-literalist tendencies and essentially start from square one. We need people invested in ethnozoological, anthropological, and sociological approaches first and foremost, rather than zoological. We need to be dealing with anecdotes at their source and building up a history of our unknown animals long before determining identity, if identity is being determined at all. We need more Meurger, more Forth, more Naish, more Regal, more Shine, more Paxton, more Hill, more Lewis & Bartlett - a cryptozoological “reset” requires a complete rewrite.

In the absence of a detailed opinion/rebuttal, I’d like to use this as a discussion post - what are your opinions on a cryptozoological reset?

Phenomenal video which uses Zana as a jumping off point for a nice, thorough history of Africans across the former Soviet Union, Some nice discussion on early cryptozoology included.

As part of the cryptozoological digitization project, Richard Muirhead was kind enough to provide back issues of Flying Snake magazine. I've uploaded the first 10 volumes, spanning issues 1-29. Currently working on an organized index of articles, there's a lot of interesting content to delve into. Enjoy!

Volume 11 is still ongoing, issues 30 and 31 have been published, and 32 is due around fall this year. I'm going to hold off on uploading Volume 11 until Volume 12 comes out, but issues 30 and 31 can be purchased from Richard (PayPal address richardmuirhead66@outlook.com) for £3.99 or $5.32 per issue. More information can be found at https://www.cosmicpolymath.com/. Links to purchase the first omnibus of Flying Snake (issues 1-5) can be found here - https://cfz.org.uk/book/flying-snake-volume-one-1/ - I just picked this up, it's a nice book.