Digitizing Cryptozoological Literature

Within the last few months, some collaborators and I have made an attempt to digitize and upload our personal cryptozoological literature collections, and further 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, 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 (which are being addressed elsewhere).

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. Folks across Latin America and I'm sure other parts of the world simply cannot afford the most important books, and therefore rely on pirated copies, snippets, and retellings - we want to ensure everybody is on the same page.

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. Accordingly, for older works, we're trying to reach out to publishers and authors where and when we can, but this isn't necessarily feasible. This is primarily a self-funded endeavor - I buy older books, magazines, etc. and scan or photograph what's needed. As such, we're always seeking donations - not of money, but of time. If you have old cryptozoological literature, either on your bookshelf or at your local library, reach out so we can figure out how to get them online!! If you don't own cryptozoological literature, but speak languages other than English, you can also help by translating non-English books and articles! Just shoot me a message wherever works best for you!

(reddit - u/lprattcryptozoology, discord - hitchhikingfrog, email - lprattcryptozoology@gmail)

Listed below is what we've done so far!. 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 new upload.

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 

Kathy Strain's Giants, Cannibals, & Monsters

Ronald Binns' The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded & The Decline And Fall Of The Loch Ness Monster

Karl Shuker's Mystery Cats Of The World Revisited

Jean-Jacques Barloy's Bernard Heuvelmans - Un rebelle de la science

Chad Arment's The Historical Bigfoot 

Mike Quast's Big Footage 

and shared an upgrade of Karl Shuker's Extraordinary Animals Revisited

We've also shared the 2001 BBC series Congo, featuring an episode focused on Mokele-Mbembe

IndividualCurious322 over on reddit helped us significantly by photographing the last missing of Heuvelmans' The Kraken And The Colossal Octopus and A Living Dinosaur? - these books are incredibly significant and expensive, so having them is a huge deal. Thank you so much for your help!

The_Robot_Jet_Jaguar on reddit volunteered to scan their copy of The Man Who Filmed Nessie, now available online for the first time! It's amazing that somebody actually went through the list, had something we needed, and scanned it for us; these kinds of requests are a shot in the dark, so succeeding is much more satisfying, especially when it's a book as interesting as this. Thank you so much!!

Millipededragon photographed their copy of David Attenborough's Fabulous Animals book, a companion to the television series. This is phenomenal to see, as the television series was uploaded online for the first time only last year - thank you so much!

CryptoArchive was kind enough to share the last pages we needed of Dennis Jay Hall's Champ Quest 2000 and Robert L. France's Disentangled - thank you!!

Richard Muirhead was kind enough to provide back issues of Flying Snake magazine, the first ten volumes of which can be found here. Volume 11 will be uploaded soon, but until then can be purchased from Richard (PayPal address richardmuirhead66@outlook.com) for £3.99 or $5.32 per issue. More information can be found here - https://www.cosmicpolymath.com/. A searchable index of articles is to be uploaded soon as well. Thank you Richard! 

Rich, myself, and several other translators have been at work on some translations as well, which includes this paper on the Sisimite and Amazonas: Pleistocene Park? More to come in the near future.