At least, that’s the traditional definition of a cryptid. Since cryptozoology was established in its modern form in the fifties, the definition has widened to encompass even more fantastical creatures as more people grow interested in the topic. This includes extraterrestrial entities, creatures from folklore such as mermaids and gnomes, sentient non-humans like the Menehune of Hawaii, and even (possibly) robots. This expanding definition of cryptid isn’t just because cryptozoology fans are a welcoming lot. It’s because cryptid has become synonymous with monster, of any kind. Cryptid fans love monsters, and pop culture cryptozoology is basically Pok.mon: we want to collect all the monster stories, and we want the widest variety of them in our collection as possible. It’s this movie from the 80s starring John Lithgow where this family in Seattle hits a Bigfoot and then takes them home and he becomes part of the family. It’s a comedy, and you can only do that movie with Bigfoot. If you tried to do The Enfield Horror and the Hendersons, which is a three legged monster-monster thing, or The Lizard Man of South Carolina and the Hendersons, it wouldn’t be a funny, family-friendly comedy. It’d be a horror show. This picture book is sweet and heartwarming. It tells the story of two young hikers who go into the woods in search of a Yeti. Yeti is afraid and doesn't want to show himself, so they write letters to him to try to get him to come out of the woods. During the hike, a snowstorm is coming, and the hikers aren't ready. Yeti, on the other hand, proves to be a good friend and comes up with a way to help the hikers while still being hidden. The Cryptid Files series by Jean Flitcroft A lot of times, you hear somebody say, “I saw Bigfoot.” You immediately think, “Oh, this guy’s a little bit off right here. They think they saw this creature that probably doesn’t exist.” But when I hear somebody say that, besides thinking, “Oh, I want to hang out with this guy,” I hear a sense of wonder. What he means is, “I’m hoping that the world has more surprises for us.” If we’ve already cataloged everything on this planet, that’s a sad day, right? That’s a sad day when the world has no more new wonders for us. So really, the pursuit of cryptids is just the pursuit of wonder. We’re hoping for something new. And even if those things never come to pass, and you never find a pukwudgieor you never find these other cryptids, you still spend time hoping and really relying on wonder. I think it’s kind of a beautiful thing.

Cryptids for a Living - VICE What It’s Like to Hunt Cryptids for a Living - VICE

But then, there’s another twist where Phil Nichols, who’s a famous skeptic—he’s always like, you know, bursting everybody’s balloons, proving things aren’t as cool as you think they are—he actually has an interesting twist. He says he thinks the hoax never happened. He goes through all these newspapers and says, “You know what, there’s no record of a hotel fire, no record of this person who admitted to faking it.” So it’s a real reversal—the hoaxnever happened. So what about the monster? Is it real or somebody else’s hoax? Here's a book series for young people, but this time it's broken down into deeper dives into one animal at a time. In each book in the Behind the Legend series, we look at a different creature or monster from history through a scientific lens and think about whether or not they could be real based on accounts of sightings and other evidence. Nessie and Bigfoot are two of the subjects of this book series, which also talks about mythical creatures that aren't just cryptids. Fiction Books About Cryptids Dear Yeti by James Kwan I think the favorite thing I learned about was the Silver Lake Serpent in New York. This is a pretty typical story: People see a creature in their local lake, it’s reptilian, serpentine. There’s a few twists where the witnesses sign affidavits to say they saw something, and then people come in with spear guns to try to catch it. But then, the end of that story is, a few years later, a local hotel burns down, and in the hotel, they find the ruins of a sea serpent—metal wires and bladders and stuff. So it was a hoax. Which again, is pretty typical.Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia, a robotic extraterrestrial that crash-landed in rural Appalachia Essential reading for anyone with an interest in unexplained mysteries, folklore, mythology, and the supernatural. An inherently fascinating, impressively informative, truly exceptional, and unreservedly recommended addition to community and academic library Cryptid collections.” —Midwest Book Review Patricia Thang is an educator located in Los Angeles. Though a native Angeleno through and through, her heart also belongs to Tokyo, where much of her family is from. Besides books, she is an enthusiastic devourer of many things, including podcasts, television, and J-pop. She realizes there’s not enough time in the world to consume all of that content, but she’s trying anyway. Other endeavors to which she has dedicated herself include cuddling her dogs until they’re annoyed and taste-testing every vegan ice cream she can find.

Cryptozoology (76 books) - Goodreads Cryptozoology (76 books) - Goodreads

There are a couple of things. There’s a weird relationship between science and belief in America. We go through periods of extreme belief in religion, then we’ll go through periods that are more secular, then we’re trying to do both at the same time. Other cultures are better at embracing the spiritual side, so monsters to them are kind of like, of course there’s monsters. I’ve seen many of these places personally. If you tell me there’s a hodag statue in Wisconsin, I want to see it with my own eyes, same as if you told me there was an actual hodag in Wisconsin. In South Dakota, I took selfies with the world’s largest chainsaw bigfoot sculpture. In Vermont, I hiked an icy mountaintop to find Wampahoofus Trail. In Ohio, I climbed an ancient mound shaped like an underwater panther. I have been to many cryptid museums and gift shops, and I have a shelf full of souvenirs to prove it. I sometimes joke that when I say I’m hunting cryptids, what I mean is that I’m driving to a town to drink a craft beer named after one. But I did also venture into their territories. After dark, I entered the old cement bunkers in the West Virginia forest that are the lair of the Mothman. I boated from New York to Vermont across Lake Champlain looking for sinuous humps in the water. I walked through an Arizona canyon that skinwalkers are known to haunt—but only after I drove to town to see if they had any craft beers named after them.

I love folklore, so naturally, I also love cryptids, since they're basically the scary story versions of modern folklore. Which is precisely what I enjoyed about The United States of Cryptids.”—BoingBoing Batsquatch of Washington, a winged bigfoot that is said to have emerged from the eruption of Mount Saint Helens Essential reading for anyone with an interest in unexplained mysteries, folklore, mythology, and the supernatural. An inherently fascinating, impressively informative, truly exceptional, and unreservedly recommended addition to community and academic library Cryptid collections.”— Midwest Book Review Loren Coleman is a well-known American cryptozoologist who has written many books about the subject and even built a museum in Portland, Maine, called the International Cryptozoology Museum. This encyclopedia, which was written with Jerome Clark, a writer who likes to write about the mysteries of the universe, gives an overview of cryptids, animals that haven't been found yet, and the people who study them. In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of Sasquatch by John Zada

16 Hair-Raising Cryptid Books That Just Might Make You Believe

Ts'ür'i and Aghay are protectors who use language revitalization to save the Earth from bad settlers and cyborg sasquatches in this fun YA comic book about colonialism. Cole Pauls is an artist from the Tahltan First Nation. He wrote this comic in English and Southern Tutchone to help keep the ancestral language alive. City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende Thoughtful and well-researched...a worthy addition to any cryptid enthusiast’s library.”— AIPT ComicsCharlotte Bridger Drummond is an independent, adventurous, and freethinking mother of five sons who made a living writing women's adventure stories in the early 1900s. She did this to make money. On one day, a little girl gets lost in the woods, and Charlotte decides to help look for her. She ends up getting lost herself, and she comes face-to-face with a group of Sasquatch. This book is written as Charlotte's diary entries. It talks about what the real differences are between wilderness and civilization. Devolution by Max Brooks An extremely random and little-known fact about me is that I am obsessed with Nessie (formally known as the Loch Ness monster, but that feels a bit too technical for my taste) (formally known as the Loch Ness monster, but that feels a bit too technical for my taste). At school, my friends and I were doing a group project in Spanish about Nessie. I can't tell you why Nessie was a good theme for a Spanish project or how we came up with it, but here we are. We spent a lot of time on the internet in the late '00s, looking at videos of alleged sightings, articles with questionable credibility, and random documentary clips that had been put on YouTube. I didn't care how good the research was, though. I was hooked. Nessie and cryptozoology are still very interesting to me, even though I don't spend as much time looking for them these days. I still get a lot of excitement when they come up. Here are some books about or about cryptids and cryptozoology to help you satisfy your desire to look into the unknown. Who hasn't watched a "Bigfoot" show on the History Channel? This list isn't complete, but it does try to show how many different kinds of books there are out there, from fiction to nonfiction, and for people of all ages. Nonfiction Books About Cryptids Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark A cryptid is a creature or species whose existence is scientifically unproven. Maybe it’s been witnessed or rumored to exist, maybe it’s even been caught on video, but there is no definitive physical evidence to examine: no body to dissect, no remains to analyze. Scientists place those creatures in the category of fantasy instead of zoology. Cryptozoologists, though, who study and pursue cryptids, place them in the entirely separate category of cryptozoology. While the fantastical Mothman and the Jersey Devil may be the first cryptids you think of, a cryptid can be as comparatively mundane as a New England panther or an American lion; animals that once existed but are now believed by the scientific establishment to be extinct. Sometimes these animals are even discovered: the coelacanth, a fish thought to have gone extinct in the age of the dinosaurs, was discovered alive in 1938. A cryptid can even be an ordinary animal that is supposedly thriving where it couldn’t be, like a population of alligators in the Manhattan sewers, or freshwater octopuses.