David S. Mitchell

Underwhelming and Disappointing

Revisado: 08-22-23

In general, I felt that the narrator did well, but the good things to say about this text end very soon thereafter. My sense was that, while I like some of Naish’s approach to considering cultural and social factors that could influence reports of cryptids, the great paucity of primary and secondary sources to back up the claims, the lack of illustrations or photos connected to cryptids, and the assumption that eyewitness testimony should be all but thrown out as evidence led me to find much to be desired in this text.

Further, as a social scientist (trained in developmental psychology) who has begun developing scholarship in parapsychology and cryptozoology, I find the disparagement of first-person memory and the paranormal as not being scientifically valid or reliable to be lacking in nuance at best and misleading/disingenuous at worst.

Moreover, the poor treatment of evidence in favor of the Patterson-Gimlin film, the Bossburg tracks, the Skokie casting, and some of the other audiovisual and trace evidence in support of relict hominoids felt like the very kind of cherry-picking of data that the author laments in cryptid believers and enthusiasts. The lack of robust support for Naish’s claims that hominoids such as Sasquatch are likely hoaxes or misidentifications led me to reconsider everything else that he said in the text. In other words, because of the lack of fair and rigorous discussion of the merits of the available evidence of these “cryptohominids” led me to take everything else that was stated in the text, both before and after this section, with a very large grain of salt.

If one were to take the book content at face value, one may come to believe that the only reason that cryptids exist is because of some cultural inclination to imagine them, some psychological compunction to misremember or misidentify real animals, or some combination thereof. But given the great wealth of data that exists on cryptids (which actually includes compelling, consistent narratives from Indigenous and other sources the world over), the exact opposite seems to be true, at least in the case of relict hominoids: while misidentifications and hoaxes surely exist, there is enough data to strongly suggest the existence of such beings. And despite what Naish May have the reader believe, there is actually very little to suggest that the Patterson-Gimlin film is a hoax. In fact, it is most likely still, over fifty years after it was taken, one of the best pieces of modern evidence available that suggests the existence of large, hairy hominoids unrecognized by contemporary Western science.

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