Last week, the California Magazine from the Berkeley Alumni Association published a two-part profile on UC Berkeley grad and anthropologist Grover Krantz, known to many as the original “Bigfoot scientist.” (You can find the first part of the profile here and the second half here.) Today, we examine the question of whether mythological creatures like Bigfoot are worthy of scientific analysis. The answers we discovered might surprise you.
By Krissy Eliot
It’s difficult to get respect when you work in a field that is referred to as pseudoscience.
Cryptozoology, the study of animals as yet undiscovered, relies heavily on folklore, citizen accounts, and amateur data collection to “prove” that legendary creatures like Bigfoot and Yeti actually exist. In the absence of empirical evidence—and of the skepticism intrinsic to scientific inquiry—such methods can be troubling if not irritating to mainstream scientists.
However, there appears to be some agreement among academics that creatures of folklore deserve scientific investigation. Why? Because cryptid studies have long led to discoveries.
“Through the history of time, there have been things that were once perceived outside of nature that were then brought into it and understood to be a part of nature,” said Cal grad and folklore professor Lynne McNeill, in an interview with Radio West. “I think that a lot of this interest in the science, or pseudoscience, of [creatures like] Bigfoot—is in crossing that bridge, bringing something unknown into the known.”
Take, for example, the giant squid.
Since Greek and Roman times (and probably before) people have been telling tales of a terrifying, tentacled sea monster of titanic size that could swamp small ships and sailboats, scaring sailors while providing fiction writers with a plethora of material. The giant squid was considered nothing but a fiction by the scientific community for centuries until 1857, when Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup managed to find a squid beak so enormous that it could only belong to a cephalopod of jumbo proportions. “From all evidences,” Steenstrup concluded, “the stranded animal must thus belong not only to the large but to the really gigantic cephalopods, whose existence has on the whole been doubted.”
It’s difficult to get respect when you work in a field that is referred to as pseudoscience.
Cryptozoology, the study of animals as yet undiscovered, relies heavily on folklore, citizen accounts, and amateur data collection to “prove” that legendary creatures like Bigfoot and Yeti actually exist. In the absence of empirical evidence—and of the skepticism intrinsic to scientific inquiry—such methods can be troubling if not irritating to mainstream scientists.
However, there appears to be some agreement among academics that creatures of folklore deserve scientific investigation. Why? Because cryptid studies have long led to discoveries.
“Through the history of time, there have been things that were once perceived outside of nature that were then brought into it and understood to be a part of nature,” said Cal grad and folklore professor Lynne McNeill, in an interview with Radio West. “I think that a lot of this interest in the science, or pseudoscience, of [creatures like] Bigfoot—is in crossing that bridge, bringing something unknown into the known.”
Take, for example, the giant squid.
Since Greek and Roman times (and probably before) people have been telling tales of a terrifying, tentacled sea monster of titanic size that could swamp small ships and sailboats, scaring sailors while providing fiction writers with a plethora of material. The giant squid was considered nothing but a fiction by the scientific community for centuries until 1857, when Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup managed to find a squid beak so enormous that it could only belong to a cephalopod of jumbo proportions. “From all evidences,” Steenstrup concluded, “the stranded animal must thus belong not only to the large but to the really gigantic cephalopods, whose existence has on the whole been doubted.”
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