Where can I find an active cryptozoology/cryptid society? Most of the groups I've discovered have disbanded.
I swear, at this point, it's easier to actually find a cryptid than a cryptozoologist. I know they're out there, I'm just struggling to find an active community of cryptid-lovers. Any pointers? I'm aware that this subject is easy to laugh at, but this is a genuine question.
Answers ( 1 )
Reading and theorizing on almost anything imaginable is something you can likely find a forum dedicated to online where people chatter back and forth and argue from almost every imaginable perspective. I’m assuming that you want to be involved in a group that actually seeks to make a potential discovery.
Cryptozoology groups focused exclusively on cryptids that make a sustained effort to take a genuinely scientific approach to the subject are extremely rare. What you’ll find is that most groups that identify with cryptozoology happily embrace most of the paranormal, pretty much anything goes. You have a group of believers forming a support community, and science is generally seen as the enemy. You’re more likely to have someone read your aura, discuss their past lives or warn you about the reptilian extraterrestrials running the Illuminati than people who are willing to go out in nature and carefully collect data and samples.
Most groups fall apart after a while because they aren’t able to make any actual progress. They are usually a discussion club that reads books/websites or watches videos produced by people who are themselves convinced that Bigfoot, Nessie, Mokele-mbembe or whatever definitely exist. They are an in-person version of the online forum. These are armchair “experts” who want to trade stories and argue about theories based on speculation. Less common are those who might actually go on camping trips as a group and perhaps see or hear some odd things, maybe even take a blurry “blobsquatch” picture to post online. Being an actual Naturalist takes considerable knowledge, hard work, rigor, and great patience. It is not for everyone - I know that I couldn’t do that job, especially considering the salary they are paid. Lab work is often required to identify biological samples, which requires an equipped lab, trained personnel, or additional money to pay a lab to run tests.
Oddly enough, The odds of a crytpid being discovered by an amateur is reasonable because working Naturalists have their hands full finding employment or funding just to research the species that we currently know about, and the number of working taxonomists is shrinking. A surprising amount of species are known only by the solitary holotype preserved in a museum somewhere.
A group of amateur Naturalists who want to focus on cryptids is rare to the point where such groups likely can exist only online. Perhaps in an area as densely populated as Southern California or Manhattan Island people could eventually find enough others who live close enough together to meet in person. You might need to start such a group yourself, but the place to start is by pursuing education in the tools and techniques that a Naturalist employs and putting them into practice on prosaic animals first.
If you are interested in Bigfoot, you might want to reconsider and look into other potential creatures. The below episode of the podcast Monster Talk features an interview with Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner, authors of the two volumes of Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon, which are a pair of books that detail the cavalcade of weird paranormal phenomena that have long been a part of the stories of Bigfoot such as eyes that glow from within and change color, the ability to vanish, and various others. These have been ignored or excused away by many people who want Bigfoot to seem more like a genuine creature that we don’t yet have a sample of and less like a supernatural monster, what the authors have decided to call “Weirdwashing.”
https://www.monstertalk.org/227-bigfoot-and-the-paranormal/
If you are mainly interested in tales of strange creatures, the above podcast may be of interest, I subscribe to it. The stories of monsters, ghosts, magic, and mysterious creatures is actually the province of folklorists, those who study the legends and stories that people of various cultures pass down and how they change over time.