OLL LEWIS: Wanted Dead Or Alive

At least once a year you’ll see a story in the news about somebody offering a reward or taking bets on the discovery of a cryptid. These stories crop up regular as clockwork and always seem the same as the last one. In the case of the rewards story some local entrepreneur will offer a big money reward for irrefutable proof that the local cryptid exists, the reporter will trot out a few clichés and the local entrepreneur and his business will get a nice big plug in the papers.

If it’s a slow news day and the story makes it to the local television news the same formula is followed but they’ll send the weatherman or the jolly reporter that the old ladies seem to like. If he really enters into the spirit of things he might even wear a pith helmet, carry a large net and end his report by making a gurning face to portray his supposed terror after hearing a roaring sound effect off camera. All of this rather makes a mockery of cryptozoology. I have never seen a jolly reporter dressed up in a deerstalker hat parading around with a comic, oversized magnifying glass to report on a hunt for a local serial killer or wearing a face mask and carrying a bag marked ‘swag’ to report upon a spate of burglaries, for example.

The stories about betting on cryptids being discovered tend to be dealt with a bit more sensibly by the press but like the reward stories, they are mainly just an excuse for a business to get free publicity. I can see why a bookmaker would send out stories like this because it is an easy way for them to thwart certain restrictions placed on their advertising, but nearly always the people who believe in the very real possibility of cryptids are there to be portrayed as figures of fun. I recall in particular news reports from the late 1990s of ‘crazy people’ putting bets on the possibility of a UFO, piloted by Elvis Presley crashing into the Loch Ness monster. If such a bet were ever placed my money would be on it having been placed by the owners of the bookmakers shop in the first place in order to get a bit of publicity off the coat-tails of The X-Files. William Hill currently offer 200/1 odds on the discovery of the yeti and 500/1 on Nessie’s discovery within one year of placing the bet.

The worst thing about these stories is that the rewards or winnings will likely never be claimed even if the body of Nessie were slopped down on the floor of William Hill’s Inverness branch by an eager punter or presented to the person offering the bounty. This is because the bookmaker or person offering the reward may have very different ideas to scientists and monster hunters as to what the cryptid may be. If we take, for example, the odds William Hill offer on the discovery of Nessie I mentioned earlier; those odds are dependant on Nessie actually being a new species of animal, so the two most plausible Nessie theories out there, eunuch eels and misidentified large sturgeon, would simply not be admissible. Even if you were to go to Loch Ness and actually find a gigantic eel there the bookmakers still wouldn’t pay up. The people offering bounties for proof of cryptids are even worse, because it is they alone who get to decide if any evidence presented to them is worthy of the reward money, unlike bookmakers who at least have to get it verified by an independent source like the Natural History Museum. Most cryptid bounties are just impressive numbers picked out of thin air that the entrepreneur certainly never intends having to pay. Think about it: where is a person who runs the boat tour of a lake that has its own monster legend going to get their hands on the sort of crazy money they’re offering as a reward to the person who destroys one of their lakes greatest tourist magnets? More often than not the reward is offered under false pretences and it would certainly be interesting if the fraud squad or trading standards took a long look at the next person to offer a bounty on a cryptids head.

When the deadline of a high profile bounty is reached without the reward being paid out, sceptical people will often take the opportunity to proclaim that since ‘no-one has come forward’ to claim the reward the creature must not exist. This is unscientific codswallop. Even if a person seriously offers a reward in the hope that the creature will be found just waving a cheque under somebody’s nose isn’t going to make a creature any more likely to come out of wherever it is hiding.