[Mb-civic] On Bigfoot's Trail - Stacey Chase - Boston Globe Sunday Outlook

[William Swiggard]

  On Bigfoot's Trail


    Loren Coleman chases legendary beasts, from the Loch Ness Monster to
    the Abominable Snowman to Bigfoot, that science has never been able
    to verify but that make even skeptics wonder: What if?

By Stacey Chase  |  February 26, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

To believers, doubters, even skeptics, Bigfoot makes a big impression. 
The replica 8 1/2 - foot hairy hominoid -- crafted from the fur of musk 
oxen and buffalo, a hulking presence on the porch of a brown-and-yellow 
home in Portland, Maine -- scares the bejesus out of the UPS man. Still, 
it's right at home here on the doorstep of a man who has spent a 
lifetime investigating mysterious animal sightings. "I don't 
particularly feel like a strange person," Loren Coleman says. "It's the 
subject I study that's strange."

He is a leading figure in the world of cryptozoology, a field whose 
legitimacy is disputed. Coleman has trekked to 49 states, as well as 
Canada, Mexico, and Scotland, gathering physical evidence and eyewitness 
accounts of Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, 
Mothman, thunderbirds, and other legendary beasts not verified by 
conventional science but storied enough to make us wonder: What if?

"Eighty percent of all the accounts that come to me are 
misidentifications, are mundane animals - a few fakes, a few hoaxes," 
Coleman acknowledges. "But it's that 20 percent of the core unknowns 
that keep me going." And he's not chasing after unicorns. Coleman cites 
a pantheon of animals once deemed hypothetical but since authenticated: 
mountain gorillas, giant pandas, okapis, coelacanths, ivory-billed 
woodpeckers.

The rumored animals -- so-called cryptids -- may be totally unknown or 
rediscovered species thought to have been extinct. Initial accounts of 
such animals "are always fantastic," he says. "The early reports of 
mountain gorillas said that they all stood upright, that they squeezed 
to death native women and attacked hunters."

Coleman made the news late last year when he, along with a subsidiary of 
the toy giant Hasbro, announced plans for a $1 million bounty for 
evidence that would lead to the live, safe capture of Bigfoot, the 
Abominable Snowman, or the Loch Ness Monster. (The bounty was quickly 
rescinded amid concerns it would spark a frenzy and cause injury to the 
hunters and the hunted.)

A twice-divorced single dad, Coleman shares his four-bedroom home that 
doubles as the International Cryptozoology Museum (visits by 
appointment) with two sons, 16 and 20, and two chirpy parakeets. His day 
job is dissecting human behavior -- specifically, youth suicide. 
Coleman, who has a master's degree in social work, is a consultant to 
the Maine Youth Suicide Program. "Suicide is the ultimate mystery," he 
says. "And I'm very interested in mysteries."

The oldest of four children of a firefighter and a homemaker, Coleman 
grew up in Decatur, Illinois. He recalls being mesmerized at age 12 by 
the Japanese flick Half Human, about a huge, hairy, manlike mammal 
reputed to live in the Himalayas. If the allure of the Abominable 
Snowman, or Yeti, captured Coleman as a boy, it has yet to let him go. 
"So I'm 58," he says. "I feel, sometimes, like I'm 8 or 18."

"It's really about passion and patience," Coleman says of cryptozoology. 
Says Sue O'Halloran, a colleague at the youth suicide program: "We kind 
of joke when we're driving north that he should keep his eyes peeled in 
case something should run across the road."

Along the way from 8 to 58, Coleman became a conscientious objector 
during the Vietnam War, a vegetarian, and a baseball nut. Today, one can 
almost see a little of the Yeti in his pale-blue eyes, framed by white 
hair and beard. But he is dead serious about his pursuit of phantom 
creatures and holds that cryptozoology is another branch of natural 
history, akin to anthropology or biology, even though there are those 
who consider it fringe science. "Among monster hunters, Loren's one of 
the more reputable," says Benjamin Radford, managing editor of Skeptical 
Inquirer magazine. "But I'm not convinced that what cryptozoologists 
seek is actually out there."

Coleman, however, estimates he has taken 8,300 credible eyewitness 
reports of encounters with hypothetical animals. He keeps a smattering 
of evidence at his house-cum-museum -- for example, fur and fecal 
material found in the vicinity of Bigfoot and Yeti sightings. "I'm 
really interested in measurable, tangible, scientific evidence," Coleman 
says. "We need DNA."

His edge-of-reality museum sits on an ordinary street and displays his 
quirky humor as much as his life's work. Taxidermy lines the walls, and 
bookshelves and bins are crammed with oddities, including 150 or so 
Bigfoot or Sasquatch plaster footprint casts, a variety of real and 
reproduction skulls like "Gigantopithecus," monster action figures, and 
souvenir kitsch.

Although none of his work is making him rich, Coleman has written or 
co-written 26 books, including the popular Mysterious America and 
Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America. He also publishes a blog at 
cryptomundo.com. He has consulted on TV shows, among them NBC's Unsolved 
Mysteries, and the Hollywood movie The Mothman Prophecies.

Though he has yet to find Bigfoot, delusional fans have had no problem 
hunting Coleman down. "They thought I was a crackpot and as potentially 
unbalanced as they were," he says, only half-jokingly.

Has Coleman himself ever seen something in the wild he couldn't explain? 
"Not that I'm comfortable saying was definitely a cryptid," he replies, 
then reluctantly admits he saw a black pantherlike creature while 
driving in Anna, Illinois, one night in 1969.

As for Bigfoot and Yeti, Coleman believes they are likely to be 
confirmed as real, while the evidence for Nessie is more elusive. Once 
an animal is demystified, it becomes the province of traditional 
science, but until then, Coleman will continue his hunt. "By pursuing 
something like Yeti," he says, "we begin to understand the Abominable 
Snowman in all of us."

Stacey Chase is a freelance writer in Maine.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/02/26/on_bigfoots_trail/
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