Cryptozoology is awesomely cool - Loren Coleman interview

Via Phenomena: The Loren Coleman Interview in Full

Some might dispute it, even Loren Coleman might dispute it, but there is very little argument that Loren is not only the leading cryptozoologist in the world today and has been for some considerable time, but that he will also turn out to be the leading cryptozoologist of all time.

...If you go out to the Pacific North west, 80% of the land surface from northern California through Oregon and Washington State and southern British Columbia are covered with trees. You have another vast rain forest out there that really hides a lot. That’s one point.

The second point is about the creature we’re talking about. We know there are only 350 to 500 mountain gorillas in the mountains of east Africa. That’s a viable breeding population. If you look at that same type area in North America, then I envision this being from the Pacific Northwest across the hardwood forest-covered northern border of the United States and the southern border of Canada, in that unexplored area, we’re talking about 2,000 to 4,000 Bigfoot who are almost as highly evolved as humans, even though we never want to give them credit for being as too highly evolved. They are an intelligent creature that has avoided man, that has pulled deeper and deeper into the wilderness areas, have been decimated in their population and yet have ways of communicating with high pitched whistles and valley to valley vocalisations that seem to keep them somewhat connected.

...The late Grover Krantz got upset with me when my The Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide came out because he was in the small school of Bigfoot investigators who feel that the only way that we’re going to get mainstream scientists to pay attention to us is by having a united front and that there’s only one Bigfoot throughout the world. But what I see is a classic Bigfoot that is bipedal all the time in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), which is very different from the Abominable Snowman/Yeti of the Himalayas, which is much more a rock ape, or the Orang Pendek of Sumatra that is a smaller, reddish, more orangutan-like creature. Then there’s the Wild Man or the Yeren of China, and the Yowie of Australia. These are more than local names. They really are reflective of the diversity that shows there are different, higher primates out there and different species waiting to be discovered.

It wasn’t until within the last decade that anthropologists and palaeontologists in Africa accepted that there were 6 different hominids living at the same time one million years ago. Grover Krantz existed in the old school that one species evolved into another and evolved into yet another. This school held that Man was at the top of this pyramid and that the only existing hominid without hair on earth is Human, and the other hominoid with hair on it is Bigfoot. I think the evidence of tracks where there is a hallux, a big toe out to the side, which is so much different from the classic Bigfoot footprints from the PNW that I can’t ignore that evidence that there’s something different in different parts of the world.

...I know that it took over 60 years to prove that the giant pandas existed and those were well funded expeditions, by museums and zoos. And I know that it took about many years for the first mountain gorilla to be shot and about 50 years for the first mountain gorilla to be captured alive. So Human Beings today and the MTV generation have no patience. We’re just at the beginning of the search for Bigfoot, if you see 1958 as the beginning of searching for it. We’re not even up to the fiftieth anniversary yet, so I think people have no patience and as Heuvelmans said, you have to have patience and passion to be a cryptozoologist and I certainly have that. I don’t necessarily get frustrated because Bigfoot hasn’t been discovered.

I think if you look at the Flores people, that finally there’s remarkable sub fossil evidence, a mere 12,000 years ago, of little people, littler than pygmies, half the size of pygmies really, existed in Indonesia which could in fact relate to the Orang Pendek or some of those little people stories we hear from all over, from Oceania and south east Asia. So, to me finding the Flores people, the “Hobbits,” is a cryptozoological discovery that we should be celebrating, and many of us have been celebrating that. It is almost as fantastic as finding a Bigfoot in our back yard.

...Encroachment on habitat is decimating all kinds of animals from mountain lions to Sasquatch. I think what Europeans did to Native Americans is probably quite reflective of what Native Americans, as they tell in their own folklore and legends, did to Bigfoot. There’s 435 different First Nations or Native American/Canadian/Alaskan tribes in America. Most of them have some kind of creation tales or different folklore about creatures like Bigfoot and in many of those, they talk about how they, that tribe, killed out the previous people that were there and those people were the Bigfoot or the Sasquatch. So yes, I very definitely think that the decimation, more often than not, has been at the hands of Humans, whether bringing in new diseases, encroaching on the habitat or actually killing them outright.