Monster hunters tend to take givens pulled from thin air and make them the basis for their quest, rather than reviewing the evidence and drawing the takeoff points from that.

Monster hunters say “no one ever sees them because…” in direct contravention of evidence that suggests that many people, in fact, are.

Monster hunters say that “they leave no evidence,” in direct contravention of evidence that says they leave much the same kind of sign as other animals.

Or, monster hunters make claims based on no evidence whatever. and consider outlying individual reports to have all the weight of voluminous reports seeming to point to a consistent source.

The public has seen so much of this – and is generally so unschooled in how science works – that they swallow whole the supposition that there’s no fire where all the smoke is coming from.

Cryptozoology should ideally be based in science and adhere to its methodologies. Ideally, they have scientific backgrounds or at least a good understanding of how science works. Cryptozoologists are critical and examine the evidence from all angles. They understand natural history and basic tenets of biology and zoology. They are careful with evidence and their analysis of it. They are prepared to concede to mundane explanations if that is indeed where the evidence leads. Cryptozoologists do not “believe,” but are rather driven to come to an honest and scientific understanding of the truth.

Monster hunters on the other hand are as Loren put it, primarily driven by passion and enthusiasm.

They may not have an understanding of science or its principles. There may be a biased or unscientific approach to some evidence. For instance, every strange sound or piece of footage is the creature and all hypothesizing takes that as a given. There may be cherry picking of data to favor the unknown explanation or efforts to push evidence into that direction without fully approaching all possibilities.

In this sense, I feel monster hunters as I have defined them here are more likely to lean towards “belief” or faith based hypotheses. This may not always be intentional, but rather derived from a lack of understanding of scientific approaches.

The methodology or conclusions of monster hunters will often have holes in them. There may be an unwillingness to put up evidence for peer review or to accept that a particular piece of evidence is not as strong as they think it is.

Monster hunting is more likely to be associated with sensationalism, ratings, or a desire to profit off of mystery rather than an earnest willingness to find the truth.

I think the problem is that many people and the media confuse the distinction between these two. They tend to view cryptozoology as monster hunting, and I think there is in fact a big difference.

Okay, that’s a lot of rambling (especially for a guy with no real field experience: I fall into the ‘chronicler’ category). Sasquatch would be easily the biggest discovery of the past century, bigger than Vu Quang, the biggest thing since the last big African mammals were hauled into the sunlight before WWI. I hope he’s out there, I salute the dedicated searchers, and I hope someone finds him. Until then, I can’t help picturing sasquatch watching with puzzlement and maybe even amusement as people make such a fuss over him.

Looking firmly in the other direction from the mountain of evidence, the scoftics go: where’s the evidence? They mean: where’s the proof? They think of course that the words are synonyms. They make the further mistake of misunderstanding the difference between personal proof and scientific fact. If you have seen a sasquatch, you know science is wrong, just like when you see a zebra, you know science is right. But your proof doesn’t have to satisfy science. THEY need to have it proven to their satisfaction. That hasn’t happened, yet.

Science is responsible for proof in our society. Period. The proponents are responsible for one thing: providing the evidence for science’s review. They indeed have laid the evidence in front of science, which has not even looked at it. (A few intrepid scientists have. The mainstream, however, has ignored it.)

Refusing to even look at evidence that possesses the only two things that should be needed to compel scientific interest – frequency and coherence?

Sounds like failure to me. That’s how history will record it, trust me there.

If the sasquatch is eventually proven real, of course. That’s gotta happen first, Science.

The central misconception about squatchery is that “we’ve been looking” for fifty years, when the amount of serious looking that’s been done doesn’t amount to more than a few months or so of serious fieldwork. And that’s scattered all over the place, not concentrated at all in the way that scientists concentrate effort (and – key word – funding) when they expect discovery.

Another apparent misconception is that there is “no physical evidence.” Well, a theme that I find running like wildfire through the field is mishandled evidence. Either he never even touches it (and wishes he had later, when he knows better); or his girlfriend makes him toss it; or he and his buddy look at each other, wonder which one is gonna say the other one is crazy, and they sort of mutually agree to toss it; or it just kinda gets tossed in an am-I-crazy moment; or he gets frustrated and tosses it; or the lab goes are you kidding me here? And tosses it. Serious, grounded scientists NEVER toss ANYTHING until they know what it is. Unless, of course, they have been carefully schooled by their peers and the society at large *not* to take this particular evidence seriously. Or else…

The problem with squatchery is not the amateurishness of the amateurs so much as it is the amateurishness of the PROFESSIONALS. As I have said here times beyond my counting: scientists forget what they are when certain topics are under discussion. Scientists cannot afford – in fact, science flat forbids – two things: cynicism and close-mindedness. ON ANY TOPIC. The advancement of civilization flat depends on this. Yet scientists, being human, engage in both pretty much constantly. What the scoftics fail continually to understand is that science and scientists are mutually exclusive. The former is a virtually perfect discipline. The latter, and sometimes unfortunately, is who practices it.

There was only one way for science to react to the Patterson-Gimlin film: This is interesting. One thing we can’t do is discourage anyone – ANYONE – who wants to know what that is. Unfortunately, science doesn’t encourage or discourage. That is left up to scientists. Who fail to live up to science more often than any of us want to think about.

The whole social tourism aspect of cryptozoology has a parallel in the ghost-hunting world. You also get the people who buy all the technology and get into it for a while, or go out on a lark to a graveyard. There is probably even some crossover. I know I have been interested in Bigfoot, UFOs, and ghosts since I was a kid.

My own beliefs have evolved with my worldviews. When I was a kid, I believed in all of it (my “Legend of Boggy Creek” period). Then when I was a teen and into my young adulthood, I learned more from my Native American views of Bigfoot as a spirit, on the one hand, and the Fortean-Keelian world on the other. “Goblin Universe” and your own books that not only included Bigfoot but also Clowns, Gassers, MIB, etc. When I went to University and majored in Anthropology in my twenties, I had a physical anthropology teacher Charlene Smith in the 1980s who believed in the biological reality of Bigfoot, and I also heard stories from other Native students, and then through cultural anthropology learned more about folklore and phenomenology.

Finally, I came across the shunka warak’in info in my graduate work, and then the mounted “ringdocus” mystery began. You and I corresponded (I was thrilled to be emailing with the guy who wrote all those books I read), my info was included in your Cryptozoology book. The internet took off back around then (mid-90s) and soon I found mentions of the shunka warak’in all over the Internet. It had become part of the ouevre of cryptozoology. Soon it was conflated with all kinds of other reports. Culture and urban legends in the making (which I am sure you have seen yourself many, many times over the last few decades).

At last the mount resurfaced in the museum in Ennis and I got a look at it. From my time in natural history museums, in the woods, owning dogs and coyotes (2 coyotes) and being around wolves in zoos, I knew this animal as something different. Alas, they refused to let me take a tuft of hair for DNA analysis.

Due to all these different experiences and paradigm shifts, I realized that cryptozoology has multiple meanings for many people. And I still enjoy the hell out of it all!

Now if you happen to have some friends who just happen to share your interests there is always the possibility of also combining a hunting/photography trip with some fairly serious cryptid hunting.

So, then people with an interest in cryptozoology really have to depend on themselves for the financial backing for expeditions. This is made harder by the fact that most people have to hold down a full time job (because you can’t get funding for such things). Also, where you live limits the ability to hunt cryptids…if you say, oh I don’t know, live in Iowa, just to throw out a random place, hunting cryptids is limited to hunting BF, the Beast of Bray Road, maybe a mothman sighting, and UFO’s. Unless you have the cash to world hop or go places.

I think there are a fair amount of passionate people out there who are interested in this field, but they’re limited as to how much time and resources they can commit because of their circumstances. AND, while I don’t think going camping, drinking beer til all hours and calling it a BF expedition is the best way to approach it, as we’ve seen evidence has come in from a variety of sources from an array of people from all different social and economic groups.

There is more scientific interest and more people putting their education and practical skills to the cryptids, but it is limited to those who have that passion.

However, weirder things are possible than a group of drunken college students going out for a weekend bash and accidentally stumbling upon a BF carcass…Wait, or was that already a Sci-Fi channel movie?