Cryptozoology

This weekend I make the substantial journey to Maine for a friend's wedding. She was getting married in Farmington, a little town two miles from Portland. Flying from Lubbock to Portland is not a simple process, so in order to make it for the Saturday wedding, I had to leave on the Thursday and return on the Monday. This meant I had a fair bit of time to explore Portland, so naturally, I took the opportunity to visit the International Cryptozoology Museum.

As a kid I always enjoyed books about monsters, and was a huge fan of the TV shows like In Search Of... and Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by Leonard Nimoy and Robert Stack, respectively. That's where I learned to scrutinize Bigfoot footage, and observe the rhetorical trends in UFO narratives. My favorite science magazine, Equinox, once had a feature on Mokele-mbembe, a brontosaurus-type creature that apparently lurks in the jungles of the Congo. On more than a few occasions, I have been able to use my knowledge from this article to start conversations with a certain kind of person, i.e. the sort of person who runs a cryptozoology museum. More on that later.

After you enter and pony up your seven dollars for admission, your first priority should be to get a photo with Bigfoot. While Bigfoot is tall, I should note that he was also standing on a pedestal, which I think is cheating.

The displays were, in many senses, even stranger than I would have imagined, in that most of them consisted of well-known animals, like foxes, squirrels, and in this case, beavers. The sign asks the enduring question "Do Giant Beavers Still Exist?" After looking at this display, I feel confident in saying "No." And yes, those are action figures of Indiana Jones and Steve Irwin, one of whom was a real person. I am tempted to read this arrangement of real and fictional people with a real beaver who only looks giant because of the scale of the plastic people as a clever commentary on the ambiguities of cryptozoology as a field of study, but I'm probably giving it too much credit.

Yetis are not white, you racist fools! I should note that this sign was placed in front of a collection of white Yeti dolls, which doesn't really clarify anything.

 This sign, which as you can see, was not well secured to the display case, seems to make a claim for the rationality of the field. However, the contents of the case consisted of stuffed animals with extra parts glued on to them, so I don't think their authenticity was ever in question:

The Bigfoot footage I remember so well from my youth is here presented on a TV, but with a picture frame around the screen, and old-timey flourishes on the sides to make you take it seriously. Are you convinced?

After making the rounds, I approached the curator to ask if he had anything on my old friend, Mokele-mbembe. He admitted that he didn't have much, but that it was one of the most likely candidates to be a real animal, almost as much as the "Giant Panda." I was tempted to inform him that the Giant Panda is a real animal and I've seen them at zoos, in youtube videos, on greeting cards, and just about everywhere else, but I didn't want to seem disrespectful. He lead me over to a display case to show me this:

This, my friends, is a plastic dinosaur toy that was autographed by a guy who wrote a book on Mokele-mbembe. On one level, this is a wonderful object and I would like to have one myself, but I also felt like in this case, they weren't even really trying.