Why I Like My Cryptids Plausible

I’ve always been fascinated by the unknown, the unexplained. But with a caveat: I still want the scientific method to matter. I want mystery, but explainable mystery.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to believe that we don’t know everything, that the world still has secrets to discover. As a kid, even into early adulthood, I firmly believed that Bigfoot, Nessie, Mokele Mbembe, and any number of other cryptids could actually exist. After all, the gorilla was considered a mythical creature by western science until 1847 (1908 for the mountain gorilla). The coelacanth was definitely extinct for millions of years until a fisherman brought one up in 1938, and the kraken—the giant squid—was only formally acknowledged fairly recently. The world is a big place.

Alas, satellite imagery has made “we haven’t looked everywhere” harder to swallow, and the fact that we haven’t been swamped in Bigfoot pictures now that every hiker has a high resolution video camera in their pocket at all times seems to imply that there’s simply nothing to take a picture of. If Sasquatch really did exist, he’d be on Instagram by now.

But even if we can’t find them, I still love trying to explain what cryptids might actually be. In the case of Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti, etc., my favorite explanation was that they were remnants of Gigantopithecus, a very large Asian ape distantly related to the orangutan, which actually did co-exist with early humans. Remnant populations in extremely remote areas—say, high in the Himalayas—could have given rise to legends passed down through generations.

The best explanation I’ve ever seen for the Loch Ness Monster comes from Steve Alten, the author of The Meg, in his novel, The Loch. He depicts Nessie as a population of migrating Anguilla eels that got trapped in the loch long ago when an undersea passage collapsed, and like isolated populations sometimes do, developed gigantism. Anguilla eels swim with an undulating motion, matching the way Nessie is often depicted, and are even known to come on land from time to time, walking on their fins. A grounded, twenty-foot eel would match a number of Nessie accounts just about perfectly.

Werewolves are often explained as a combination of hypertrichosis and the Lunar Effect. Vampires may have been humans with rabies or tuberculosis. The chupacabra is almost certainly a coyote or raccoon with mange.

But to me, coming up with a plausible explanation for cryptids doesn’t diminish the wonder that they existed in the first place. Rather, it reinforces that they were always part of our world, even when the bulk of us didn’t believe in them. That the world is wider and weirder than we want to admit. Even if there is a good reason for it all, finding that reason gives us an excuse to keep searching, keep wondering.

Even in a world where Bigfoot isn’t on Instagram.

Photo by Ahmet Sali on Unsplash