Digitizing Cryptozoological Literature

Within the last few weeks, some collaborators and I have made an attempt to digitize and upload our personal cryptozoological literature collections, as well as a significant effort to seek out hard-to-find articles, reviews, and books. Cryptozoology as a subject suffers immensely from inaccessibility - the key pieces are often decades out of print and outrageously expensive, or available only to restricted markets. The lack of a dedicated academic forum has led cryptozoology enthusiasts to become insular - those with similar perspectives congregate in Discord servers, email chains, or private forums and don't share their work with others. r/cryptozoology remains the most accessible mixing ground, with regular contributions by a wonderful assortment of individuals I've had the pleasure of associating with over the last five years, but even then the quality of content shared has fallen significantly in recent memory - this is a byproduct of insularity, everyone is on such different levels of understanding and appreciation. Our digitization campaign is an attempt to aid in resolving one small part of these issues - if the literature is accessible, it then becomes a problem of awareness and cultivation (things which can be aided by curating academically-minded cryptozoological spaces - maybe soon...). 

This is a large undertaking simply due to the scale of published cryptozoological literature. The most prolific authors (e.g. Heuvelmans, Shuker) have written hundreds of articles, not to mention books, digital outings, video/audio interviews, or any other contributions. Language barriers make this issue much worse - as a filthy monolingual, I can only confidently say I have a grasp on the English cryptozoological output. Heuvelmans wrote primarily in French, the early hominological output was in Russian, Latin America has a vibrant cryptozoological scene larger than most, Japan's scene may be on par with America's, and few have a clue as to what China is publishing, much less any smaller countries across the globe - each community is likely missing out on very significant developments from the other. Even within language communities, geographic barriers lead to issues - independently published books from Australia never hit the U.S. market and vice versa. The temporal problem compounds with these factors immensely - finding and then getting access to Russian literature from the 60's as an American may, in fact, be impossible. Currently, we've restricted our scope primarily to literature we "need" - works cited in other works, books containing the most vital information on specific subjects, pieces essential for finishing projects (e.g. renovating Wikipedia's Cryptozoology page), or simply things we've wanted to read but haven't gotten to yet. This is a long list, well over 200 pieces currently, but only a sliver of the whole. We likely won't get all of them - by virtue of being cryptozoological enthusiasts, we're broke. The "rich cryptozoologist" died with Tom Slick long ago.

We're accessing works by a variety of means. Supporting authors is a priority, and as such we're trying to avoid recently published works (post-2023) for the time being. We're buying older books, magazines, etc. and either scanning or photographing what we need (but again, we're broke). This is especially useful when supplemented by scans of pages available on Google Books. These can be easily scraped, which saves us time in the long run. The best part about this is that it allows others to get involved without committing money or an unreasonable amount of time - if you own a book we're looking for and can take a twenty minutes out of your day to photograph the few pages we're missing then things become a million times easier for everybody. Thus far, we've had wonderful people online photograph pages from Heuvelmans, Mackal, and even scan entire rare books - their contributions are summarized and credited below (if you'd like to be one of them, please reach out!). There are many articles which are subscription-walled, and we're in the process of shaking down folks with institutional access or personal subscriptions. Old magazines and non-English books are currently our biggest roadblocks. 

Listed below is what we've done so far, and what we intend to do soon; these are areas where you all can contribute. Hopefully, by circulating this blogpost and our digitization efforts to date, we can rope a few more individuals in. This list will be updated with each upload. Further down is our section of things we need. This list will be updated sporadically.

Three big contributions started this project for me, personally -

Swampy uploaded and machine-translated Bernard Heuvelmans' Les Ours Insolites d'Afrique
fish-n-gritz uploaded Meurger & Gagnon's Lake Monster Traditions

The former is significant as a primary or sole source for cryptozoological writing on Africa's mystery bears, while the latter is the keystone text of modern, anthropological cryptozoology. 

My colleague Rich joined my cryptozoology Discord server and immediately started sharing rare stuff both in English and Spanish, helping bridge the language gap. I'd already photographed pages from the Heuvelmans biography and started work on a small, private cryptozoological library server, but Rich's contributions made me take this much more seriously. 

Together we've shared - 

Roumeguère-Eberhardt's Les Hominidés Non Identifiés des Forêts d'Afrique

Arment's Cryptozoology - Science And Speculation

Heuvelmans' The Natural History Of Hidden Animals

Hayward's Making a Splash: Mermaids (and Mer-Men) in 20th and 21st Century Audiovisual Media

Ruickbie's The Impossible Zoo 

IndividualCurious322 over on reddit helped us significantly by photographing the last missing of Heuvelmans' The Kraken And The Colossal Octopus

Kathy Strain's Giants, Cannibals, & Monsters

In the coming days we're aiming to upload Ronald Binn's The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded & The Decline And Fall Of The Loch Ness Monster, Jean Jacques-Barloy's Un rebelle de la science, Roy Mackal's A Living Dinosaur?, & Karl Shuker's Mystery Cats Of The World Revisited. 

Within the near future we'd like to share Robert France's Disentangled & Philip Senter's Fire Breathing Dinosaurs? (if you own these books please reach out!), Karl Shuker's A Manifestation Of Monsters, Dmitri Bayanov's In The Footsteps Of The Russian Snowman, and the volume The Tasmanian Tiger - Extinct Or Extant?. 

These are just about everything we have accessible at the moment, and this is where we turn to the cryptozoological community for aid. If you digitize or otherwise have access to any of the following, please reach out over reddit (u/lprattcryptozoology), Discord (hitchhikingfrog), or email (lprattcryptozoology@gmail.com). 

A digital Skeptical Inquirer subscription or back issues of Fortean Times (particularly those from before 2010)

Issue 12 of Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine (Editorial - Perceptions and Cryptozoology)
Strange Magazine Volume 1 No 4 (The Shelbysville Swamp Monster Exposed)
BBC Wildlife 16 (Meldrum, J. & Greenwell, R. 1998. Bigfoot: take two)
Fate, November 1995 (Smith, Richard D. “The Classic Wilson Nessie Photo: Is the Hoax a Hoax?”)
Discover, November 1985 (Jared Diamond, "In Quest of the Wild and Weird")

Access to -
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15456870.2025.2489367
https://doi.org/10.3366/E0260954108000041
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12850
https://doi.org/10.3366/anh.1995.22.1.1
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16h2ngc
https://journals.openedition.org/gc/21868
https://doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2025.011
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003374138
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003408475
https://brill.com/display/title/70911

The Track Record - A Bigfoot Encyclopedia (MultiMedia CD)
Marc E.W. Miller's cryptozoology trilogy
Barbara Wasson's Tracking The Sasquatch & Sasquatch Apparitions
Monsters - A Guide To Information On Unaccounted For Creatures
America's Bigfoot - Fact, Not Fiction
Von neuen und unentdeckten Tierarten
The Sasquatch And Other Unknown Hominoids
Out Of The Shadows - Mystery Animals Of Australia
Mystery Animals Of Britain And Ireland
Du Bigfoot Au Yeti
The Man Who Filmed Nessie
In The Wake Of Bernard Heuvelmans
The Wild Man Of North America
Pickled Punks and Girlie Shows
Sasquatch Sightings - Real And Imagined
Lore And Legend Of The Yeti
The Soviet Sasquatch
The Archetype Of The Ape-Man
Fatfoot - Encounters With A Dooligahl
The Encyclopedia Of New And Rediscovered Animals

We'd also love people that speak German, French, Italian, or Russian to aid in overseeing translations of non-English materials.