The Flight of the Iguana (14 page)

Sivapithecus
had a double incisive foramen too; and it also pinched down to one opening.

As the science of human origins rocks back and forth on its foamy seas, buffeted by each new fossil discovery, yawing now toward Olduvai Gorge, then pitching toward the Siwalik Hills,
Sivapithecus
is the cannon that's loose on the deck. Keep your eye on this
Sivapithecus. Sivapithecus,
in coming years, is liable to enter the vernacular. The indisputable contribution of Jeffrey Schwartz (or so it seems to me, a confessed ignoramus in this field) has been in recognizing and highlighting that fact.

The rest of his contribution, by contrast, is intensely disputable. It is also fresh, imaginative, tortuous in its logic, abundantly researched, turgidly expressed
(The Red Ape
can't be recommended, alas, as bedtime reading), admirably provocative, downright interesting. And if you happen to like orang-utans, or solitude, or both, it has a certain appeal to vanity.

For seventy years the experts have been arguing over two diametric interpretations of those puzzling
Sivapithecus
fossils. Some have said:
Obviously these creatures were close human relatives!
Others have said:
No, obviously they belong with the orang-utan!
Dignified and intelligent scientists have anguished over that choice, had their minds changed by new specimens, recanted in print. Now Jeffrey Schwartz simply says:
Why not both?

Cryptozoology and the Romantic Imagination

Reality isn't everything. Truth and certainty are fine, as far as they go, but truth and certainty don't supply all the nourishment that the soul of our species seems to require. We also have a need for marvels, for facts that are stranger than truth. We yearn to believe in (or at least to suspect) the existence of paranormalities, patterns and forces beyond rational fathoming, beings that are greater and wilder than anything we have ever seen. This restless instinct is part of what Voltaire had in mind, I think, when he said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” It's the same instinct that makes
The Twilight Zone
a perennial success in reruns, and has put Erich von Däniken's ragged books on the best-seller list. Probably it has also helped nurture that ineradicable notion of an elaborate dark conspiracy of which Lee Harvey Oswald was the dupe. And it goes far, this hunger for marvels, toward explaining the International Society for Cryptozoology.

Cryptozoology is loosely defined by its practitioners as “the science of hidden animals.” There is some latitude in the interpretation of what constitutes a “hidden” animal (and some controversy over whether the whole business can really qualify as a “science”), but it's generally accurate to say that cryptozoologists
concern themselves with creatures that have been rumored to exist in shapes, in places, in sizes, or in time periods whereby they somehow violate what is expected. Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster are classic examples. Sea serpents are another favorite topic for cryptozoologization. The large and mysterious species of animal that supposedly inhabits Lake Champlain, the giant octopus that may or may not attain 200-foot arm spans in the Atlantic off Florida, the mermaid-like beast known as Ri to certain islanders in Papua New Guinea, and the Buru lizard of Himalayan legend are all objects of cryptozoological attention. Even the eastern cougar is included, because it has long been considered extinct but may possibly have survived within remote enclaves of Appalachia or New England. In each case the element of anomalousness, the violation of conventional zoological expectations, is important. But the element of rumor or legend is equally essential.

Cryptozoologists work, at the earliest stage, from testimonial evidence. They are committed (by tradition and preference, they explain, in answer to the cavil that their methods seem willfully limiting) to the search for precisely those hidden animals that have been heard of indirectly through the reports of native peoples and other nonscientist witnesses. They are not interested in the five or ten million species of beetle that remain undiscovered in the Amazon. Their perspective is biased toward
large
unknown animals—not because insects and nematodes are unimportant, they say, but because large animals are the ones most likely to find a place in the legends and rumors and half-incredible reports from which cryptozoologists take their first clues. There is nothing logical about this bias, they admit. It is purely a matter of choice. Entomology for the entomologists, cryptozoology for those who prefer to sneak up on a big new beast by following the spoor of its reputation.

In a sense, then, cryptozoology is really an epistemological enterprise as much as a zoological one. It is concerned with adjudicating
the conflict between two belief systems. It asks: When scientific orthodoxy and local lore contradict each other regarding the existence of a creature, how often might local lore be proven correct?

•   •   •

The okapi is often put forward by cryptozoologists as their best test case.

The okapi is that improbable beast mentioned earlier (“The Ontological Giraffe”) in this book. It is a harlequin sort of creature, with the face of a startled young moose, the ears of a donkey, and zebra-like stripes banding its legs and decorating its rear end in a gaudy starburst pattern. By skeletal anatomy it closely resembles
Helladotherium,
a giraffid that supposedly went extinct about ten million years ago. Reports of such an animal, alive and well in the Congo jungle, began reaching Europe during the nineteenth century. Those reports caught the eye of a young English boy named Harry Johnston, who grew up to be Sir H. H. Johnston and went out in service of the empire as special commissioner for Uganda. While he was in Africa, Johnston questioned some Pygmy tribesmen from the Congo about this supposedly jungle-dwelling, giraffe-like thing. Yes indeed, said the tribesmen, it was quite real and they called it
okhapi.
Johnston pressed the search and eventually, in 1901, a complete skin and two skulls were obtained. On the basis of that evidence, the animal was scientifically classified as
Okapia johnstoni.
Not until 1919 did a live captive okapi arrive in Europe, consigned to the custody of the Antwerp zoo—where, of course, it promptly died.

Sir Harry Johnston is now a patron saint of the International Society for Cryptozoology, and the image of the okapi, this living chimera patched together from parts of giraffe and moose and zebra, adorns the organization's official seal.

•   •   •

The society itself was founded in 1982, by a mixed group of scientists and nonprofessional researchers who had all been
cryptozoologizing independently but wanted a formalized forum through which to share information and ideas. A constitution was drawn up. A board of directors was anointed, including some distinguished paleontologists and biologists such as Leigh Van Valen of the University of Chicago. Bernard Heuvelmans, a French zoologist and writer, was elected the society's first president, based on his status as the “father” of this branch of inquiry, the man who actually coined the word
cryptozoology,
and the most widely read popularizer of the subject. Heuvelmans is famous for two books in particular,
On the Track of Unknown Animals
and
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents
—both of which are heavily researched and encyclopedic, even in some places pedantic, but which contain leaps of credulity that leave a skeptical reader behind. Heuvelmans in fact is probably not the best spokesman for cryptozoology, because he tends to be portentous and make overstated claims. Roy Mackal, the American vice president of the society who has led expeditions to the Likouala swamps of central Africa in search of a (perhaps) surviving dinosaur called Mokele-Mbembe, offers a slightly quieter and more persuasive voice. But the best view of what cryptozoology is, and what it can be, and the range of ideas and questions and intellectual temperaments it encompasses, comes in the society's formal journal,
Cryptozoology.

This journal began publication in 1982 and during the following four years just one issue appeared annually, but those four issues are intriguing, diverse, and mainly quite sane. The contents include field reports on the latest (inconclusive) Mokele-Mbembe expeditions, theoretical articles by Heuvelmans and others concerning the nature and methods of cryptozoology, book reviews, pieces with titles such as “The Status of Wildman Research in China” and “The Loch Ness Monster: Public Perception and the Evidence,” and, most crucially, a section of comments and responses, devoted to debate and dissent over what has previously appeared in the journal. This last section is where ISC members
scuffle with each other over what constitutes dubious evidence or woolly logic, struggling to enforce on themselves a standard of good sense and manifesting a healthy lack of mutual reverence.
Cryptozoology
is edited with admirable rigor and clear-mindedness by a pleasant Englishman named J. Richard Greenwell, now living in Tucson, Arizona. Greenwell is the ISC secretary, and also holds the unenviable position of treasurer. (The ISC is a private and unaffiliated body, and seems to be as impecunious as it is benign.) Greenwell explains that when the journal is late in appearing, which happens not rarely, the problem is usually related to cash flow.

Greenwell himself has accompanied Roy Mackal on one of the Mokele-Mbembe expeditions, and more recently has done fieldwork on the Ri creature out in Papua New Guinea. Trained as an anthropologist, he has thrown himself into cryptozoology because, as he told me by telephone, he is intrigued by the way zoological mysteries interplay with the human, psychological element of testimonial evidence. Then, with the more stern academic critics of cryptozoology obviously in mind, he added: “Anyway, we're not doing anyone any harm. We're not getting any government money. And it's fun. It's fun.” With Richard Greenwell guiding the journal in that spirit, a subscription to
Cryptozoology
seems not such a bad investment.

Nowhere else, after all, can a person find scholarly disquisitions like “The Orang-Utan in England: An Explanation for the Use of
Yahoo
as a Name for the Australian Hairy Man” and “Anatomy and Dermatoglyphics of Three Sasquatch Footprints.” Nowhere else can a curious soul read up on “Vertical Flexure in Jurassic and Cretaceous Marine Crocodilians and Its Relevance to Modern ‘Sea-Serpent' Reports.” At the bottom of the cover of each issue of
Cryptozoology,
aptly, appears the image of the okapi, with all its mismatched parts, looking gentle and improbable and faintly surprised to be alive.

*   *   *

Not everyone takes an indulgent view of the society and its official journal. When
Cryptozoology
made its debut in 1982, just one among many new journals (including
Ferroelectric Letters, Polymer Photochemistry,
and
The International Journal of Robotics Research)
to begin publication that year, it was the only new entry that was reviewed in
Newsweek.
The folk at
Newsweek
may have been bemused, but Robert M. May, a Princeton zoologist writing somewhat later in the august scientific weekly
Nature,
was downright dour. May suggested that the undying popular interest in bizarre, undiscovered, and perhaps undiscoverable creatures was the result of “a tendency on the part of the media—and maybe the public—to prefer meretricious marvels to real ones.” Well,
meretricious
is a strong word (I looked it up, so I know), yet as a member of both the media and the public, I cannot disagree with him. Yes, once in a while we all like a cheap thrill. What of it, Dr. May?

Nevertheless, my own attitude remains divided.

On the one hand, I have no special bias in favor of using cultural lore or testimonial evidence (which can be, as we all know, quite flaky) as a tool of zoological inquiry, and I still think that the question of why there are millions of beetle species awaiting discovery in the tropical canopies is
far
more interesting than the question of whether Kenneth Wilson's 1934 photograph at Loch Ness shows a relict plesiosaur with its neck out of the water or the ass end and tail of an otter.

On the other hand, I acknowledge the legitimate human need for marvels—wild and improbable marvels, as well as the more subtle natural ones.

In his discourse on the subject of miracles, the great Scottish skeptic David Hume wrote: “We soon learn that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind toward the marvelous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from
sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature.”

Why can't it be extirpated, not even in an age as relentlessly analytical as our own? Because the romantic imagination of mankind is itself a hidden animal, a wondrous and inextinguishable beast.