OLL LEWIS: 5 Questions on… Cryptozoology - DALE DRINNON

Today’s guest is Dale Drinnon. Dale hails from the United States of America and you’ll all recognise him as one of our most regular contributors to the CFZ blog. He is the author of the checklist of cryptids that features in the 2009 yearbook (available now on pre-order at a discount).


So, Dale, here are your five questions on... Cryptozoology.

1) How did you first become interested in cryptozoology?

I had a long-standing interest in palaeontology as a child, including reconstruction work, since possibly age six. A maiden aunt who took care of my maternal grandmother gave me a book that had pictures of dinosaurs among others and I immediately fell in love with them. I was somewhat precocious as a young child and was much advanced in comparison with my peers especially in art but I was always known as the ‘Dinosaur Kid’. The library nearest to me (about a half-hour's walk for me these days) used to have a copy of Tim Dinsdale's Loch Ness Monster near the dinosaur books on the adult side, and somewhere about the age of 11, I found it and was smote well and mightily by the implications. That was the edition that had a foreword by Ivan T. Sanderson, somebody I vaguely recognised as being on TV with animals and who reminded me of Walt Disney. The same library had a copy of his book on abominable snowmen, which smote me mightily once again. From my readings I had already known about cavemen but because my family was very religious we were not supposed to believe in evolution. Eventually I grew out of that and grew into reading everything of Sanderson's that I could find. Then, about the time Investigating the Unexplained came out, I found a defunct address for Sanderson and sent him, essentially, my first attempt at a cryptozoological checklist. By some miracle it found its way to the SITU and I was enrolled shortly after that. I had regular letters from his secretary (MLF AKA SWS) and one from Sanderson himself. I later exchanged letters with Heuvelmans also.

2) Have you ever personally seen a cryptid or secondary evidence of a cryptid, if so can you please describe your encounter?

When I was very young I saw a very large and very gaudily-coloured robber fly, which was a species I have never been able to identify. That was unknown to me but it might actually have been catalogued somewhere and I did not know it. That is one of the pitfalls about cryptids: some of them might be unknown to the witness but identifiable to an expert. As to what I had witnessed as a cryptid, I would say my most significant sighting was a cryptid that was not a cryptid: I witnessed a 'String-of-buoys' effect in a boat wake and after wishing for several days it was a sea serpent, I realised more pragmatically that it was only the effect of the wave pattern. That led to the insight that probably most, if not all, such sightings had a similar origin. I have also been in the field investigating rumours of bears and Bigfoots, and Bigfoot tracks (the bears are supposed to be extinct in Indiana) and I now own a board cut into the template of a Bigfoot footprint, which came into my possession after the owner died, together with the old army boots the templates had been strapped to; somebody else got the other track-template. And I have seen several birds that were unusual enough to be noteworthy, one of them on a road trip with that aunt and my grandmother plus another aunt, and we saw an outsized vulture-like bird that was not a turkey buzzard - as my other aunt pointed out, the flight characteristics were all wrong. This was during a 'Big Bird' flap in Indiana; the same time as one was going on in Illinois, in the mid-1970s. And recently I saw a large pigeon with the colouration of a passenger pigeon in Indianapolis, at least twice, and once very close-to. I do not say that it was a passenger pigeon necessarily, but it had the colouration.

3) Which cryptids do you think are the most likely to be scientifically discovered and described some day, and why?

That would depend primarily on how densely the cryptid's population was and how ardently it was being searched for. It is my contention that several cryptids are already represented in our museums if we could only realise the importance of the specimens. Once a gigantic orangutan was killed in Sumatra and its body sent to the museum of the Asiatic Society. We do not know its whereabouts but it would cause quite a stir to announce to the world that we have had a specimen of an orangutan over seven feet tall in storage for many years. The trouble is that nobody seems to know where it is right now. And from what illustrations I have seen, it is possible that the largest specimens of the Indo-Pacific crocodile that have been collected are a separate species from the more common one, possibly one of the creatures called ‘Marine Saurian’ by Heuvelmans. And then all sorts of new species are turning up all the time when DNA tests are being made to determine how closely different populations of certain animals are related. I have called those "Cryptic-cryptids"

But it is more a case of correlating data from different sources than going out with a shotgun and hoping that you kill something valuable. That, and a good dose of good luck to recognise what the descriptions are recounting or that the specimens in storage go with the descriptions, or even finding new specimens from the field. What is known and what is unknown is the heavy work that. DNA testing goes towards proving.

Estimating anything, for example, how much remains unknown and what unknown is most likely to become known when and how, seems to me a pretty futile exercise in speculation. Many cryptids are already known animals, but unrecognised as such and many people have entirely the wrong idea of what a cryptid actually is. Some people think cryptids are something supernatural. Cryptids are really only species of animals that have not been catalogued as yet, and they can turn up anywhere, anytime.

4) Which cryptids do you think are the least likely to exist?

I have a blog entry on that one: String-of-buoys Sea-serpents, Water-horses as an unknown species, Mothman, Chupacabras or Animal-mutilation beasts, and Alien big cats. Nearly all the cats reported in cryptozoological literature are known species; that makes them non-cryptids, even if you never catch them. The Chupacabras that most people are more stirred up about are canids of known species, often missing a lot of hair. But Chupacabras are a mixed bag and some of the creatures that have been called by that name are very likely cryptids. Only they are not weird creatures that drain corpses of blood or surgically remove only certain body parts. Dogs are mostly to blame for that also. We know that fact because they leave dog tracks, if for no other reason.

5) If you had to pick your favourite cryptozoological book (not including books you may have written yourself) what would you choose?

I include two; the standards: Bernard Heuvelmans's On the Track of Unknown Animals and In the Wake of Sea-Serpents. Of course, you are forcing me to say only one and so I cannot also include Ivan T. Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen: Legend come to Life. If you seriously mean only one title, I would have to say George Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures, but only because you said to pick one title, not three.