Cryptid Creatures: “The Feel Good Field Guide of 2019”

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Kelly Milner Halls and Rick Spears go way back. Not as far as the legends featured in their work, but far enough to have worked on eight projects together, including their latest book Cryptid Creatures, which just hit the real (and cyber) shelves today. 

Cryptid Creatures is a field guide featuring 50 mythical animals (AKA cryptids). Each entry presents a description of the creature, its history, and evidence suggesting that it exists—which often includes colorful accounts told in newspaper articles. Every cryptid also gets a “reality rating” represented by a scale of 1-6 stars. One star means the cryptid has been confirmed as a hoax, while six stars means the once-mythical creature has been proven real. 

Cryptids covered in the book range from well-known beasts like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, to the more obscure—such as the Iliamna Lake Monster of Alaska (which has the head of a wolf and body of an orca whale) and the Con Rit (a centipede purported to be larger than any known shark).

The creature illustrations depict the beasts in two stages of their lives, both as full-grown monster legends, and also as baby beasts—when the creatures were nothing but whispered tales around the campfire.

Halls is a prolific children’s book author and freelance writer, and Spears is an illustrator and sculptor with a focus on animals, science, and natural history.

I talked to both about the artistic inspiration behind Cryptid Creatures, why cryptids should be examined like real animals, and how they bonded over the bizarre in the first place.

So how did you two meet? 

K: Well, I was working on this book called Dino-Trekking in 1996, and I was looking for a paleontology expert from Georgia State to interview. And some guy in Georgia—I can’t remember who it was—said, “You really shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Rick Spears. He’s everything dinosaur.” And I said how do I get a hold of him?

R: He made it seem like I was a crackpot or something.

K: Well, so was I, so it worked out. Rick was just the best; he and I talked and he asked. “Who is illustrating the book?” And I said we don’t have a budget for illustrating, and he said, “Well, I’ll do it for free.” And I said, ‘“This guy is the best guy ever!” 

Letters from Willow Creek: The Bigfoot Capital of the World

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Me, standing in front of the Willow Creek welcome sign on Labor Day weekend, 2018 // Photo by Jordan Cerminara // Full size image here

Last year, I made my first trek to Willow Creek, California, a town known as the “Bigfoot capital of the world.”  Today marks the 59th annual Bigfoot Daze Festival, and while I won’t be there this year, I encourage you to check out this collection of letters from yours truly chronicling my visit. I write all about the town’s history, the mystery, and what’s it like to get lost in the Bigfoot craze—one giant step at a time.

These letters were originally published in California magazine, but I’m running them here on my blog for your viewing pleasure (with a bonus of extra photos not included in the California mag story). Enjoy.

Friday, August 31, 2018
11:00pm

It’s a cool summer night in Willow Creek, California, and I just chose to spend three hours of it in a hot, humid hotel room, holding the hand of a Bigfoot. Well, a Bigfoot’s hand cast, anyway. 

Daryl Owen, a white-haired man with a big grin and a small gap in his teeth, invited me over to show off his Bigfoot evidence. I met him outside the Bigfoot Motel just as I arrived. He was explaining to the front desk clerk that a news team had followed him and his crew, known as the NorCal Squatchers, to Willow Creek in a van, and that it was “so hard being famous.” He had been on Ancient Mysteries after all, and Good Day Sacramento, he said. I was standing next to Sasquatch royalty.

“I wanna say we’re pretty famous. I mean, we’re pretty good,” Owen told me in his motel room. “We’ve been on TV a couple of times. I’ve been on a TV show. People know our names. They know we’re NorCal Squatchers. They drive up beside our truck and give us the thumbs up, or the bird, or whatever, but… we’re well known.” 

He pulled the cast of a Bigfoot hand from a military spec storage container, cradled the lumpy mass of plaster in his arms and called it his baby. Owen said that when he died, he’d pass it on to his son-in-law Russell Stater, who was seated on one of the beds, while Owen’s daughter Taryn looked on silently from a seat in the corner of the room. These three were the NorCal Squatchers from Sacramento, and just like me, they were here for the Bigfoot Daze Festival, Willow Creek’s annual summer event where people from all over come together to celebrate Sasquatch. 

There’s No Sasquatch Conspiracy Afoot, Scientists Say

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"A Mere Big Foot From Discovery" // Artistic masterpiece by Rick Spears // Full size image HERE

A popular theory among some Bigfoot researchers or “Bigfooters” is that there’s a Sasquatch conspiracy afoot. They think the scientific community seeks to thwart Bigfoot’s discovery by ostracizing scientists who search for the creature and suppressing evidence of Bigfoot’s existence. Purported reasons for this range from petty feuds to ego to secret plans within the government.

But some scientists strongly disagree with this idea, including those who have faced the legendary subject of Sasquatch during their careers—and lived to tell the tale.

“I don’t think there’s any sort of conspiracy to disprove the existence of Bigfoot at all,” says geneticist Bryan Sykes, author of Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal: A Geneticist’s Search for Modern Apemen. “It’s blatant paranoia or delusion to think that.” 

In 2014, Sykes led a study where scientists asked people to send them hairs that they suspected were from cryptids (mythological animals) like Sasquatch. They received 57 hair samples and were able to sequence 30 of them. While most of the samples revealed known mammals, two samples revealed what appeared to be a previously unrecognized species of bear. The study’s findings were published in The Royal Society journal.

“There’s all the conspiracy theorists saying that scientists or the government are covering [Sasquatch] up,” Disotell says. “It doesn’t hold water.”

“The idea that the scientific community is actively conspiring to prevent Bigfoot evidence from ever reaching the popular attention is nonsense. Editors of top journals would jump at the chance to publish a paper [proving Bigfoot exists] if it ever materialized,” says Norman MacLeod, curator of paleontology at London’s Natural History Museum. Adding jokingly: “Probably walk over their mothers to publish it.” 

Molecular primatologist and New York University professor Todd Disotell, who has been on TV programs like Ancient Aliens and 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, agrees that there is no anti-Sasquatch plot.

“There’s all the conspiracy theorists saying that scientists or the government are covering [Sasquatch] up,” Disotell says. “It doesn’t hold water. No one’s career is going to end or be damaged if Bigfoot is discovered. I think the average scientist would be super excited. Primates went extinct in North America 30 million years ago. If you find out one didn’t… that’s cool!”

When discussing his 2014 cryptid study, Sykes says no other scientists or establishments stood in the way of him getting published because he did “proper scientific work, which was the best way to do it.” 

“I have quite a lot of faith in the scientific peer review process,” Sykes says. “My paper was published in a good journal. It wasn’t held up at all by the peer review system.”

But not everyone shares this point of view.

Should I Capitalize the Word ‘Bigfoot?’ The B vs. b Debate

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I’ve been making the decision to capitalize the word Bigfoot for the last year and a half now, and it occurred to me recently that I might be doing it all wrong.

While curled up in bed last week, snug as a bigfoot in a rug, I flipped through the pages of books like Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, Monster Trek, Searching for Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, Anatomy of a Beast, etc., and I realized there was no consensus on capitalization. Authors would use big B’s and little b’s at different times—sometimes with multiple variations in one text.

Were these decisions arbitrary? I refused to believe it! If each author had enough time to write a book about Sasquatch, then they surely had enough time to deeply ponder the writing mechanics—or at least do whatever a random editor told them to do.

I decided to capitalize the word Bigfoot mostly because that’s what I’d seen most modern journalists doing. I was a mimicker. A sheep! A wild, black sheep by nature—but a sheep, nonetheless. I couldn’t believe I had overlooked this for so long.

It plagued me for hours, even whole days. I would lie awake for minutes. I nearly dreamed about it. It was clear that I was a fraud. How could I call myself a professional writer if I hadn’t solved the ultimate Bigfoot mystery of B vs. b?

On Bigfoot Research, My Life, and the Craft of Writing

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Me, Krissy Eliot, with blue hair and a stare // View larger photo here

Last week, I did an interview with the San Diego Voyager about my Bigfoot research, this blog, and journalistic writing as a craft. For those of you who didn’t see the article posted to my social media accounts, I figured I’d post an excerpt here and link out to the extended interview so all of you have the opportunity to check it out.

Now, more than ever, I think it’s vital to get to know the people we look to for knowledge. Misinformation and biases are rampant—not just in the dark corners of the Internet—but in the pretty black and white pages of our established news outlets.

I want to be someone you can trust and rely on for honesty and accurate information. I hope that my work speaks for itself, but I also think knowing more about the woman behind the Hot Alien can’t hurt.

Hopefully, this interview provides you with a little more insight into my experience as a writer and editor, my motivations for studying Bigfoot and other strange phenomena, and my philosophy on the craft of journalism.

So many of you continue to share your wishes, hopes, thoughts and dreams with me. I figure it’s only fair to give some of that back. So! Behold, the interview…