It's Secretary, J. Richard Greenwell, a displaced Englishman who once spent 6 years in Peru, has traveled to many parts of the world searching for such things as the Yeren (the Chinese wildman), and Mokele-Mbembe (the supposed dinosaur in the Congo). The society includes many scientists, and publishes a newsletter and a scholarly journal. Although it has a scientific bent, membership is open to all. This interview was conducted by Jay Glickman at the Society's office.
At that point, I'd barely heard of things like the Loch Ness Monster, but later in life I read about such supposed unknown animals. I thought: "if there's anything to it, science will take care of it.' Later, as an adult, I realized more and more that these reports were being ignored, and I wondered whether it was because there wasn't anything to them, or whether it was because they didn't fit into a conceptual framework. So I looked into it, and eventually did some survey work in the psychology deptartment, studying scientific attitude formation and change, and I found that most scientists simply weren't very interested in "unknown" animals.
DE: Is this because scientists aren't as interested as they used to be in discovering or exploring?
There's always been what I call a "temporal provincialism," when authorities, at any given time, think that they're on top of everything. By the early 20th century, it was thought that what all we needed to do was refine our knowledge on everything we had already found. Now, in the late 20th century, we're more and more into ecology, and relationships between species and their environments, but we're not looking for new species, hardly at all.
DE: So what motivates you to go against the grain?
RG: Because I'm not arrogant. I don't think that we've discovered everything. In terms of small animals, zoologists will admit that most species have not yet been discovered, but they're talking about invertebrates.
Most zoologists don't think that cryptozoology is very valid because we tend to be interested more in the large animals, vertebrate terrestrial animals, and especially mammals. Cryptozoology deals with information about animals that might exist, but have not been scientifically verified. That information may come through eye-witness reports, folklore, artwork, archaeological remains, historical literature ... that's when we say "let's investigate." Then, we try to determine if it's real or not - that can go on for decades. For humans to have knowledge about animals, through whatever medium, they have to have a certain critical size for native peoples to pay attention to them in the first place. It's not that we're only interested in big animals because they're big - we're interested in big animals because they're the ones that tend to be what we call "ethno-known": known to native peoples.
DE: So then, you're also interested in information...?
RG: If a large animal is discovered that wasn't known to humans, it's a big discovery, but technically it isn't cryptozoology. The difference between cryptozoology and zoology is that a zoologist goes out and does a biological inventory of an area, and, as part of that process, he may discover a new species by chance. Cryptozoology doesn't do that: specifically, it targets a reported animal in order to see if it really exists or not. The analogy I always give is that a zoologist throws out a net, whereas a cryptozoologist throws a spear. It's harder with a spear, and it's also harder to get funding for.
But I haven't fully answered your first question: how did I get into this? I'm very interested in animals, and frankly, I'm appalled at the way that zoology has neglected cryptozoological reports. I was taught scientific methodology, that when a problem confronts you, you evaluate it according to the scientific method: you formulate a hypothesis, test it, and in the end you give a probability to something, reaching a conclusion if you can. Sometimes you can't - and that's something that the public, and even some scientists, don't understand. There is no requirement in science to reach a conclusion at any particular time. You can spend 300 years gathering data if you want. But there seems to be this thing today, with our on-demand, off-the-shelf, instant-gratification society, that scientists are supposed to have an immediate solution to a problem. If they don't, well, then they can't be very good scientists. That sort of thinking is completely cockeyed.
My point is that scientists are often following a socio-political process, without even knowing it, rather than a strictly scientific process. In terms of cryptozoology, these animals are being ignored because the models for their existence are unconventional, and most zoologists don't want to take risks. Most say "I'm not going to mess with it; why should I look at something that's probably bogus." That's prejudice, pre-assuming that there's nothing to it.
What I and a number of us have tried to do is to look at the data objectively. I don't think all these animals exist; there's about one hundred kinds of claims for various unknown animals around the world, and perhaps only a third or a quarter of them actually exist. But it's a lot of fun trying to find out which ones do; that's another stimulus for me - that it's fun. I get to play around with history, linguistics, ethnology, with zoology, with molecular science . . . it's very interdisciplinary.
I'm planning an expedition to a lake in Western Mongolia, where herders have reported seeing large animals - physical evidence has also been found implying that large animals are coming out of the lake. This area is very remote, and has been off-limits since the 1920's. We're doing an international expedition - Bulgarians, Russians, Mongolians, Americans. It'll be the biggest expedition I've ever ran.
DE; What do you think will happen if you find something? And, are you trying to capture it?
RG: This first expedition is just to see if there's anything to it, to observe and film . . . if we come back with good evidence, governments will then get involved, and institutions, like the University of California . . . and people who specialize in what these animals might be. Eventually, we would probably want to get a specimen, a live one, but it's not like in the old days when you shot at anything that moved.
But all this has happened before, with the coelacanth, a six-foot fish that was found in 1938. You have to go back about 400 million years ago, before the dinosaurs had even been thought of. There were some fish that began to stick their heads up above the water; one of these forms eventually evolved into something that walked on land. They became amphibians, which led to reptiles, birds, and eventually mammals and humans. That's how far back this fish goes. Now, all of these coelacanths were thought long extinct - the last fossil specimen is eighty million years old. But, in December of 1938, a young naturalist in East London, South Africa, went down to the dock and found a big fish that she couldn't identify. She made a drawing of it and sent it to the fish expert J.L.B. Smith. Smith wrote later that when he saw the drawing "a bomb exploded" in his brain, because he could tell that it was a coelacanth. It was like finding a living dinosaur. He couldn't get to East London until February of 1939, but when he did, he verified that it was a coelacanth. He published a paper on it, and it was sensational - it was on the front pages all over the world. All the ichthyology and pleontology textbooks had to be re-written.
The coelacanth sort of got forgotten during the Second World War, but in 1952 Smith found a second one. Now there are about two hundred specimens. There's a lot more to the story, and I've always wished that they'd make a movie about it.
DE: Well, it certainly destroys our sense that this is the present and that was the past . . .
RG: I went to a lecture last year given by Stephen J. Gould, the famous Harvard paleontologist, and he pointed out how museums and textbooks always make this mistake, in exhibits or pictures of "Life in the Cretaceous Period," or "Life in the Jurrasic Period," where they give you the impression that all previous things died out. But that's wrong. Things spill over, many surviving into later periods, but the books and museums don't portray that. Coelacanth forms have been living for 400 million years! It's rare, but it's still alive. It's really the zoological discovery of the century.
DE: I have a theory that the upcoming millennium is making people worry about animals, because we're developing a greater psychological affinity with the other forms of life that exist on this planet.
RG: Well, I try to keep these things separate. In cryptozoology we're really not concerned with the conservation status of an animal; we're just interested in whether or not it exists. Some members of our society feel that it should be combined more with conservation efforts, but I don't agree. I think that once we've proven that an animal exists, our job as cryptozoologists is done. We can then hand it over to the conservationists, and let it become their problem. I should say this too: just because an animal is rarely seen or reported, like the Sasquatch (Bigfoot), does not necessarily mean that it's endangered. Again, that's just our arrogance, thinking that just because we don't see something often, there aren't a lot of them. Animal species have their own behavioral repertoires; one is to be nocturnal, and elusive; for example, badgers in England, who are certainly not rare, but yet are rarely seen. They're just good at hiding! So, it could be the same with the Sasquatch. People are always saying "Bigfoot's got to be protected," but I think that's nonsense. We don't have a clue if it's endangered or not. There could be thousands of them - the Pacific Northwest is just immense!
I don't stay away from conservation issues, I keep them separate from cryptozoology. I'm very concerned about extinctions, especially about the damage that is being done in developing countries, where 80% of the human population growth is occurring. A lot of environmental damage is being done in certain areas, and a lot of species are very threatened because choices have to be made between human lives and animal lives - and you know who's going to win. And instead of addressing that, some conservationists ...well, to use a local example, on Mt. Graham [near the AZ-NM border], the University of Arizona is building one of the largest observatories in the world. There's a subspecies red squirrel there, a population of several hundred, and some environmentalists are very concerned that the observatory is going to harm that population, and they've put an enormous amount of energy and funds into battling this. Of course, they're failing, but what I think is tragic is that these well-meaning conservationists are putting all this energy into that - I mean, astronomy's about the cleanest industry you can imagine - when they could be putting it into the real, real, crises that are occurring down in Mexico, or Brazil, or any other country where things are being destroyed. In some of these areas it's not just animals but entire biomes, forests, everything is being destroyed, vs. a few acres up on Mt. Graham. I was quoted once as saying: "I don't think a single red squirrel will miss a single afternoon nap as a result of that observatory."
DE: Do you think we'll one day use "Jurassic Park"-type technology to bring back extinct animals?
RG: We've been asked that a lot. Yes, it could be, because we have a lot of extinct animal tissues, where we have the DNA - with dinosaurs we have just fossils. We have tissues, for example, from the dodo, and we have frozen mammoths from Siberia. As recently as ten years ago I was hearing that cloning mammals was "impossible" - you know, that word always gets me. And then they did it last year! That word keeps coming up again and again - "impossible" - there's no end to it!
DE: Do you feel that we are living in a period of extinctions?
RG: Not compared to the geological ones, no - this is not a period of cataclysmic extinctions. Actually, the number of vertebrate species that are going extinct every year is very low, although you never hear that. It's the invertebrate species, the insects, that are decreasing more rapidly. The vertebrates are more adaptable than we give them credit for. And that has implications for cryptozoology, because if some of these animals exist, but have remained unverified, then there are reasons for that. The reasons are behavioral and ecological. These reasons aren't going to go away, and those animals will continue to exist unverified by science. I think part of the reason that cryptozoological animals are not discovered is because of the arrogance - social and scientific arrogance - in assuming that we would know about them if they existed. It's like the previous assumption we had about meteorites, believing that stones simply can't fall from the sky, that it's impossible. In 1759, the president of the Royal Society in Britain went on record stating that not only was it impossible for such a thing to be happening, but if it were, he would be the first to know about it!
Some anthropologists have said the same thing to me about the Sasquatch, that if such a thing existed, they would already know about it, because that sort of thing is what they study.
DE: Let's be specific about that famous animal - Bigfoot - have real studies been done?
DE: And what does the evidence so far suggest?
RG: Well, there have been about 1,500 good Sasquatch reports, most of them going back 40 years; eyewitness reports with names of people and what they were doing, in great detail. There is a consistency in the reports that gets to be tedious, boring, always reporting the same thing. The lack of variation in the physical descriptions lends credibility to the sightings. The picture that emerges is of a large, muscular primate standing about 7-8 feet tall, and weighing between 600 and 900 pounds. Although it walks bipedally, as humans do, it is almost certainly an ape. There's also the Patterson film, there are tracks . . . do you want to see track casts? {Note: at this point Mr. Greenwell goes over to a wooden cabinet and pulls out plaster casts of footprints - they are, to put it mildly, physically enormous, and thrilling}. These are from Gray's Harbor County, in Washington State, and they were found by the Sherrif's Dept. They've been analyzed, and the conclusion is that they are real. There are some fake tracks, but these aren't fake. There are certain anatomical features that are so obscure that you'd need to be an anatomist to understand them. The foot length averages 15 or 16 inches.
DE: So Bigfoot is a real animal? In terms of placing the animal in the historical past, what does the evidence suggest?
RG: Well, the only thing it could be, in my opinion, is something called Gigantopithecus, a large ape that lived in China from about 8 or 9 million years ago to about three or four hundred thousand years ago, when it supposedly became extinct. It stood about eight feet tall, and was probably bipedal, as with humans. What's thought is that, 11,000 years ago, it crossed the Bering land bridge [a stretch of land then connecting the Asian continent with North America] where the Asians came over and became American Indians. What we're suggesting is that this thing might have come over too, and restricted itself to forest biomes in North America.
DE: What do you think of the idea that human beings have created an imbalance on the earth, that we've become so dominant a species that we're endangering the lives of the other animals, and perhaps endangering the earth itself?
RG: I'd agree with that up to a point, but what I take strong exception to is the opposition to technology. The problem is that, in the big picture, we've become technological only very recently; it's like a new plaything, and we've made a lot of mistakes with it. But the more time that goes by, the more we're improving technology, and our understanding of how best to use it. It's like a kid who breaks his toys when he's small, but as he grows older he learns how to play with them properly. I think that in the 21st century, technology is going to help us solve most of the problems we have created through the use of technology.
The main danger to the planet's wellbeing lies in the developing countries. There are 90 million people - 90 MILLION - being born every year, with 80% of them born in poor countries where they don't have proper health care, clean water, even food. It's a population explosion that's terrible, and it's in those places that the worst environmental damage is going to occur. The only way to prevent that is to reduce the number of human births. Anything else is stop-gap.
Interview with Richard Greenwell
Thinking about the Loch Ness Monster? Or Bigfoot? Who are you going to call? Well, you could try someone in Tucson, because the world headquarters of the outfit that studies unknown or mystery animals - the International Society of Cryptozoology - is located in Southwest Arizona.
President of the International Society of Cryptozoology
Desert Exposure: How did you first become interested in "unknown" animals?
Richard Greenwell: When I was a child naturalist in Surrey, England, I would sometimes catch curious or rare species or forms, like a melanistic viper. And I noticed the behavioral change in people when I caught something like that. A melanistic viper or adder is just an adder with black skin, but everyone went bananas because it was black, and the teachers were saying it's much more poisonous, and there was a whole panic at my boarding school. I tried to tell everyone that it was really no different from an ordinary adder, because there was a move to have it killed. Eventually I prevailed, and I was allowed to release it in another valley. The whole experience really got me thinking about the human psyche in relation to animals.
. . . . . Desert Exposure
For more information about this fascinating group, write to ISC, P.O. Box 43070, Tucson, AZ 85733; Phone/Fax 520/884-8369; E-mail: iscz@azstarnet.com
