Tag: cryptozoology

  • Cryptozoology in 2026: What Science Actually Says About Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Cryptids

    Jeff Meldrum—the Idaho State University primatologist who spent decades as the most credentialed scientific advocate for the biological reality of Bigfoot—died on September 10, 2025. His book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science remains the most rigorous attempt to apply formal anatomical analysis to the footprint evidence, and his death removes from the field its most prominent figure who held both mainstream academic credentials and genuine conviction that an undiscovered North American primate exists. Queen’s University Library commemorated his passing by declaring October 2025 “Cryptozoology Month,” which tells you something about how the field occupies a peculiar zone between legitimate inquiry and cultural curiosity.

    Meanwhile, in the Scottish Highlands, the Loch Ness Centre launched the World Federation of Legendary Monsters in 2025—a formal alliance between cryptid research organizations across multiple countries, sharing sonar readings, thermal imaging data, DNA samples, and underwater footage. Their next coordinated search is scheduled for May 22–25, 2026. And Professor Neil Gemmell’s Loch Ness environmental DNA study—the most methodologically rigorous scientific investigation ever conducted at the loch—still has not published its full technical paper, years after the preliminary results were announced.

    This is the state of cryptozoology in 2026: the field’s most serious scientist is dead, its most famous investigation remains incomplete, and its practitioners are simultaneously forming international federations and selling Bigfoot Valentine’s Day shirts. The question of what science actually says about cryptids requires separating the methodology—which is sometimes genuinely interesting—from the conclusions, which are consistently disappointing for anyone hoping monsters are real.

    The eDNA revolution (and what it found)

    Environmental DNA analysis has transformed the scientific investigation of aquatic cryptids from speculation into testable hypothesis. The principle is straightforward: every organism in a body of water sheds DNA—skin cells, feces, mucus, decomposing tissue—and that DNA can be collected from water samples, sequenced, and matched against known species databases. If a large unknown animal lives in a lake, its DNA should be in the water. If it’s not in the water, the animal almost certainly isn’t in the lake.

    Gemmell’s team from the University of Otago collected 250 water samples from various depths and locations throughout Loch Ness in 2019. The preliminary results, widely reported at the time, found no evidence of plesiosaur DNA, no evidence of large fish DNA (ruling out the sturgeon hypothesis), no evidence of any large unknown animal. What the study did find was a significant quantity of European eel DNA—more than expected—which led to the widely circulated but somewhat misleading headline that “Nessie might be a giant eel.”

    The nuance, as zoologist Darren Naish has clarified, is that the study didn’t demonstrate that a giant eel exists. What it demonstrated is that virtually all competing hypotheses for the Loch Ness Monster can be excluded by the eDNA evidence, and the eel hypothesis is the only one that isn’t directly contradicted by the data. That’s a very different claim. The eels in Loch Ness are almost certainly normal-sized European eels doing normal eel things. The study’s actual contribution is negative rather than positive: it tells us what Nessie isn’t, which is everything anyone has ever proposed it might be.

    The eDNA approach has been applied more broadly, and the results follow the same pattern. Water sampling in lakes with reported monster sightings consistently identifies known species—pike, trout, char, eels—and consistently fails to identify anything unknown. Camera traps deployed in forests with frequent Bigfoot reports consistently photograph bears, deer, elk, coyotes, and occasionally hikers—but never an unidentified primate. The tools that modern biology uses to detect rare and elusive species are extraordinarily sensitive. They can identify a species from a single skin cell in a liter of lake water. They can photograph a snow leopard in the Himalayas or a Sumatran rhino in Borneo. They have never, in any controlled scientific deployment, detected a cryptid.

    The Bigfoot evidence problem

    The case for Bigfoot rests on four categories of evidence: eyewitness reports, footprint casts, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, and more recently, eDNA sampling and acoustic analysis.

    Eyewitness reports number in the thousands. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, the largest and oldest Sasquatch investigation organization, maintains a database of sighting reports across North America. The problem with eyewitness evidence—as every forensic scientist and cognitive psychologist will tell you—is that human perception and memory are unreliable, particularly under conditions of surprise, poor visibility, and emotional arousal, which are precisely the conditions that characterize most Bigfoot sightings. The statistical work of Floe Foxon, who applies mathematical analysis to cryptid sighting data, has shown that reported sighting patterns correlate more strongly with human population density and recreational land use than with any plausible distribution of an undiscovered species. You see more Bigfoot where more people go hiking, which is what you’d expect if sightings are driven by misidentification rather than actual encounters.

    Footprint casts are more interesting. Meldrum analyzed thousands of tracks and identified anatomical features—a mid-tarsal break in the foot structure, dermal ridges, consistent proportions—that he argued would be extraordinarily difficult to hoax at scale across disparate locations and decades. The counterargument is that a template-based hoax doesn’t require every individual cast to be independently fabricated, and that the “anatomical consistency” Meldrum identified could reflect the influence of earlier, well-publicized casts on subsequent hoaxers. This argument is inherently unresolvable without a specimen.

    The Patterson-Gimlin film, shot in 1967 in northern California, remains the most analyzed piece of footage in cryptozoology. It shows a large, bipedal, hair-covered figure walking away from the camera. In nearly sixty years, neither conclusive debunking nor conclusive authentication has been achieved. The figure’s gait, muscle movement, and proportions have been argued by various analysts to be either impossible to replicate in a costume or entirely consistent with a person in a suit, depending on which analyst you ask and which assumptions they bring.

    The FBI analyzed hair and tissue samples attributed to Bigfoot across multiple submissions. Every sample was identified as belonging to a known species—deer, bear, elk, cow, synthetic materials, and in one memorable case, human. The results were declassified and published. Not a single sample was unidentifiable.

    What cryptozoology gets right (accidentally)

    The most honest defense of cryptozoological inquiry isn’t that cryptids are real. It’s that the history of zoology is full of animals that were dismissed as legends before they were confirmed as species. The coelacanth—a fish from the age of dinosaurs, thought extinct for 66 million years—was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938. The mountain gorilla was considered a myth by Western science until 1902. The okapi, the giant squid, the Komodo dragon, the platypus—all were regarded as fantastical before specimens were obtained.

    The difference, and it’s a critical one, is that every one of those species was confirmed through physical evidence—a body, a specimen, bones, DNA from a real animal. The confirmation came from the standard tools of biology applied in the standard way. No species has ever been confirmed through footprint casts, eyewitness reports, or grainy film alone. The tools that discovered the coelacanth are the same tools that have been deployed extensively in Bigfoot and Nessie territory and have found nothing.

    What cryptozoology does contribute to science—unintentionally, and often to the annoyance of its practitioners—is ecological survey data. The Loch Ness eDNA study produced a comprehensive catalog of species diversity in one of Scotland’s most iconic bodies of water. Camera trap deployments in the Pacific Northwest generate wildlife population data. Acoustic monitoring in alleged Bigfoot habitats produces recordings of documented species. The search for monsters, when conducted with scientific methodology, generates useful data about everything except monsters.

    The cultural question that matters more

    The more interesting question than “is Bigfoot real?” is “why does every culture on earth produce stories about large, elusive, humanoid creatures living just beyond the boundary of settled land?” The Sasquatch, the Yeti, the Yowie, the Yeren, the Almas, the Orang Pendek—the pattern is global and ancient. These aren’t independent inventions of the same hoax. They’re independent expressions of something deeply embedded in how human beings relate to wilderness, darkness, and the limits of knowledge.

    The statistical reality is stark. There is no confirmed physical evidence—no body, no bones, no verified DNA, no specimen—for any large unknown primate species in North America, despite the continent being one of the most extensively surveyed landmasses on Earth, with millions of trail cameras, satellite coverage, and a recreational hiking population that puts human eyes on virtually every square kilometer of forest on a regular basis. If a breeding population of eight-foot-tall primates existed in the Pacific Northwest, the absence of a specimen after 60 years of active searching is extraordinarily difficult to explain.

    But the legend persists. The BFRO database continues to receive new reports. The World Federation of Legendary Monsters continues to organize searches. People continue to see things they can’t explain in the woods and on the water, and some percentage of those people will continue to interpret those experiences as encounters with undiscovered species rather than as misidentifications, pareidolia, or the natural human tendency to find patterns in ambiguous stimuli.

    Cryptozoology in 2026 is a field where the tools have never been better and the evidence has never been thinner. The eDNA sampling, the camera traps, the acoustic analysis, the AI-powered pattern recognition—all of these technologies are capable of detecting cryptids if cryptids exist. They have detected everything else. The absence of positive results, after decades of increasingly sophisticated searching, is itself a finding. It’s just not the finding anyone in the field wanted.

    We cover the epistemology of anomalous claims—including cryptids, Fortean phenomena, and the institutions that investigate them—across our Fortean Phenomena course. If the question of why the absence of evidence isn’t treated as evidence of absence by the people doing the searching is more interesting to you than another blurry photograph, the course is built for exactly that tension.

  • What Are Fortean Phenomena? A Serious Guide to the World’s Strangest Unexplained Events

    In 1919, a largely unknown writer named Charles Hoy Fort published a book called The Book of the Damned. The “damned” in question were not people. They were facts—data points collected over decades from scientific journals, newspapers, and maritime logs that the scientific establishment of the day had either ignored, dismissed, or quietly buried because they didn’t fit any accepted theory. Rains of frogs. Falls of red liquid from clear skies. Unidentified lights tracked by multiple observers. Objects appearing and disappearing. Spontaneous fires. Animals found in places they had no biological business being. Fort spent thirty years in the New York Public Library and the British Museum reading room, copying these reports onto thousands of index cards kept in shoeboxes, assembling what amounted to an enormous filing cabinet of things that weren’t supposed to happen but apparently did anyway.

    Fort didn’t claim these events were supernatural. He didn’t build a theory of the paranormal. He didn’t start a religion or declare that aliens were responsible. What he did—and this is the part that gets lost in a century of people projecting their own agendas onto his work—was point at the data and say: science claims to have a comprehensive model of how the world works, and here are several thousand documented instances where that model doesn’t account for what was observed. He called this data “damned” because it had been excluded from polite scientific conversation, not because it was demonic. The exclusion was the point. As the writer Colin Wilson later summarized Fort’s operating principle: “People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.”

    That’s Forteanism in one sentence. And it’s a more intellectually rigorous position than it gets credit for.

    What actually counts as Fortean

    The term “Fortean phenomena” now functions as a catch-all for anomalous events that sit outside the boundaries of currently accepted scientific explanation. The taxonomy—developed by Fort and expanded by researchers since—covers a genuinely enormous range of stuff, and the breadth is part of the point. Fort didn’t specialize. He collected everything.

    The major categories, roughly organized:

    Anomalous falls from the sky. This was Fort’s bread and butter—his books are packed with documented reports of things falling from the atmosphere that have no obvious atmospheric origin. Rains of fish, frogs, tadpoles, insects, larvae, worms, mussels, snails, and even snakes. Falls of ice blocks, stones, and chunks of calcium. Falls of red, black, or yellow rain. Falls of sulphur, hay, and unidentifiable organic matter. These aren’t all ancient. Fish falls are still reported regularly—hundreds of small fish raining onto the town of Texarkana, Texas in 2021 made national news. The standard meteorological explanation is waterspouts picking up aquatic organisms and depositing them miles inland, which accounts for some cases convincingly and others not at all, particularly when the species involved don’t inhabit any nearby body of water.

    Unidentified aerial phenomena. Fort cataloged unexplained lights and objects in the sky decades before Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting kicked off the modern UFO era. His records include reports from ship captains, astronomers, military personnel, and weather observers describing luminous objects, formations of lights, and structured craft-like things visible for extended periods. Fort invented the word “teleportation.” He also proposed, with characteristic deadpan, that Earth might be the property of some unknown intelligence—”I think we’re property,” he wrote in The Book of the Damned—though whether he meant this literally or as a satirical provocation aimed at scientific arrogance is a debate that Forteans have been having for a hundred years.

    Cryptozoology. Reports of animals that haven’t been formally identified by science—Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Chupacabra, Mokele-mbembe, the Yeti—fall under the Fortean umbrella, though Fort himself was less interested in specific creatures than in the pattern of scientific dismissal that preceded eventual discovery. More on this below.

    Spontaneous human combustion. Documented cases—some backed by coroner reports and forensic investigation—of human bodies found almost completely incinerated in circumstances where the surrounding environment showed minimal fire damage. The wick effect hypothesis (where body fat acts as fuel after ignition from an external source like a cigarette) explains some cases. Others remain genuinely perplexing.

    Anomalous animal behavior. Mass die-offs, mass strandings, animals appearing far outside their known range, coordinated behaviors that defy current ethological models. Fort was particularly interested in cases where conventional explanations required more assumptions than the anomaly itself.

    Earth mysteries. Unexplained sounds (the Taos Hum, the Bristol Hum, the “Bloop” recorded by NOAA hydrophones in 1997), earthquake lights, ball lightning, crop circles (most of which are obviously human-made, though the plasma vortex hypothesis for the handful that aren’t has some interesting physics behind it), and geomagnetic anomalies.

    The surprisingly rigorous intellectual tradition

    Here’s where Fortean phenomena get genuinely interesting from an epistemological standpoint, and where the field diverges sharply from the conspiracy-theory adjacent content it’s often lumped in with.

    Fort’s actual intellectual contribution wasn’t collecting weird stories. It was developing a framework for thinking about how science handles outlier data. His argument—stripped of the deliberately provocative style—was that the scientific establishment has a systematic bias toward excluding observations that don’t fit existing theoretical models, and that this exclusion is driven not by the data itself but by the social and institutional structures of science. Papers that report anomalous findings are harder to publish. Careers are not built on documenting things you can’t explain. Grant funding does not flow toward investigating phenomena that might turn out to be measurement error. The incentive structure of professional science is optimized for extending existing paradigms, not for cataloging their failures.

    This is not a crackpot position. Thomas Kuhn made essentially the same argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962—that normal science operates by suppressing anomalies until enough of them accumulate to trigger a paradigm shift—and nobody called Kuhn a crackpot. He got tenure at MIT. Fort made the same observation forty years earlier, in a more entertaining and less academic style, and was written off as an eccentric. The difference was packaging, not substance.

    The anthropologist Roger Wescott coined the term “anomalistics” in 1973 to describe the interdisciplinary study of scientific anomalies—essentially a formalized version of what Fort had been doing since the 1890s. The field has since developed genuine methodological rigor. The Fortean Times, published since 1973, combines humor and skepticism with original research. The Society for Scientific Exploration publishes peer-reviewed work on anomalous phenomena. Modern Fortean researchers use satellite imagery, digital archives, eDNA sampling, acoustic analysis, and the same statistical tools as any other field to investigate claims.

    The phenomena science denied until it couldn’t

    The strongest argument for taking Fortean data seriously isn’t the data that’s still unexplained. It’s the data that was once “Fortean” and is now just science.

    Ball lightning was reported for centuries—glowing spheres of light appearing during thunderstorms, passing through walls, hovering for seconds before vanishing. Scientists dismissed the reports as hallucinations, optical illusions, or misidentified St. Elmo’s fire until laboratory-produced ball lightning was achieved in 2006 by researchers in Tel Aviv and again by a team in China in 2012 using microwave discharge. It’s now an accepted atmospheric phenomenon with multiple competing physical models.

    Rogue waves—walls of ocean water two to three times the height of surrounding waves, appearing without warning—were considered sailor folklore until the Draupner wave was measured by instruments on the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea on January 1, 1995. The wave was 25.6 meters high in a sea state of 12-meter significant wave height. It was real, it was measured, and it immediately invalidated the standard statistical models for ocean wave height distribution. Sailors had been reporting these waves for centuries. Oceanographers had been explaining to them that such waves were statistically impossible.

    Meteorites. Before 1803, the idea that rocks fell from the sky was considered superstitious nonsense by the scientific establishment. The French Academy of Sciences had formally dismissed the possibility. Then, on April 26, 1803, roughly 3,000 stones fell on the town of L’Aigle in Normandy, witnessed by the entire town and investigated by physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, who confirmed the fall. The scientific consensus flipped overnight. Rocks from space had been “Fortean” the day before and were geology the day after.

    Continental drift. Alfred Wegener proposed in 1912 that the continents had once been joined and had drifted apart. He was ridiculed for decades—the mechanism he proposed was wrong, and geologists couldn’t accept the conclusion without an acceptable mechanism. Plate tectonics wasn’t established until the 1960s. Wegener was right about the observation and wrong about the explanation, and mainstream science rejected the observation because it didn’t like the explanation. Fort would have had a field day.

    The pattern is consistent: observation precedes explanation, sometimes by centuries, and during the gap, anyone who takes the observation seriously is treated as a crank. Fort’s entire body of work is essentially a catalog of phenomena sitting in that gap—things that have been observed repeatedly but not yet explained to anyone’s satisfaction.

    Why rational people engage with this

    The most common misconception about Fortean phenomena is that interest in them requires credulity—that you have to “believe” in Bigfoot or UFOs or spontaneous combustion to find the field worthwhile. Fort himself would have rejected this framing completely. He wasn’t a believer. He was, if anything, a professional skeptic—skeptical of claims of the anomalous, skeptical of claims of normalcy, and especially skeptical of anyone who claimed to have a complete model of reality. His position was that the only honest intellectual posture in the face of anomalous data is to document it, resist the temptation to explain it away prematurely, and maintain a suspension of judgment that he called “intermediatism”—the idea that nothing is entirely real or entirely unreal, and that all knowledge is transitional.

    That’s a position that would fit comfortably in any philosophy of science seminar. It just happened to come wrapped in stories about rains of frogs and mysterious lights over the Atlantic, which made it easy to dismiss.

    The Fortean approach doesn’t require you to believe anything. It requires you to take observation seriously even when the observation is inconvenient, to resist the reflexive urge to explain away data that doesn’t fit your model, and to recognize that the history of science is littered with phenomena that were “impossible” until they were measured, at which point they became textbook material and everyone pretended they’d never doubted them.

    That’s not credulity. That’s intellectual honesty with better source material than most people expect.

    We cover the full landscape of Fortean phenomena—anomalous events, cryptozoology, legendary conspiracies, and the science of why humans believe what they believe—across our Fortean Phenomena & Anomalistics course. If the rogue wave story made you want to know what else science got wrong before it got it right, that’s where to start.