A clutch of cryptozoologists in search of an unknown animal - it turned out to be a domesticated rhea in the grounds
There was excitement as a dozen cryptozoologists crowded at the window. Someone insisted they'd seen "an out-of-place animal… an ostrich or something" walking past. Some were sceptical; there were cryptozoology in-jokes about "the unreliability of the witness" and ironic cries of "Canular!" ("hoax" in French). Our out-of-place animal turned to be a rhea pottering around its small "hobby farm" in the hotel's extensive grounds.
We were in Day Two of 'Rencontres Europeennes de Cryptozoologie (European Cryptozoology Meeting) organised by Abepar in Dinant, Belgium, where the Ardennes mountains begin. I had attended the event 11 years previously and struggled to follow the talkls in French. At the event in Brussels in 2017 I gave a presentation on pygmy elephants in my own very poor French. They asked me back this year, but for a talk in English.
Shortly after my arrival there was a "round table" discussion presented by conference instigator Eric Joye. Bernard Heuvelmans, the "father of cryptozoolgy", was, of course, Belgian. I learnt during the round table that besides his zoology gig, Heuvelmans also had a brief career as a jazz singer in wartime and post-war Paris, where he reportedly met Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker.
Eric described the proto-cryptozoologists who predated Heuvelmans - Erik Pontopiddan, a Danish Lutheran bishop whose two-volume The Natural History of Norway (1752-1753) covered kraken and mermaids and was the first published work to describe the giant squid. Other pre-Heuvelmans cryptozoolists included Pierre Denys de Montfort who in the 1770s collected possibly dodgy accounts of giant octopuses off France's Atlantic coast. There was also Antonie Cornelius Oudemans, director of The Hague Zoo, whose English-language The Great Sea Serpent concluded that these could be a long-necked species of seal (FT348:38-39). French dictionaries, noted Eric, have defined cryptozoology as "scientific study" for some time; it's firmly categorised as "pseudoscience" by an army of sceptical editors on today's English-language Wikipedia.
Some 15,000 new species are discovered each year, of which only a handful are mammals. The Kobomani tapir was discovered in 2013, three species of monkey, including the lopunji, have been described to science within the 21st century, while Caprimulgus solala, the Ethiopian nightingale, has been scientifically described without a complete specimen having yet been found - we just have one of its wings.
I did my talk on big cats in Britain (Suffolk in particular, it's all in my book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.) I was pleasantly surprised that I could understand all the French-language questions afterwards. One young first-time punter, a local vet's assistant, said he'd been inspired by recent news reports of a big cat seen on the Belgian-German border. (Eric thinks it might have been this report from 2021, confirming lynxes have returned to Belgium after an absence of well over 250 years.) I mentioned in my talk that two fortean investigators in the UK - Neil Arnold in Kent and Darren Mann (the Paranormal Database) in Ipswich - regularly get big cat reports from Belgium or the Netherlands as there seems to be no one easily identifiable to report big cat sightings to in those countries.
The tigre de Tasmanie (Tasmanian tiger or thylacine) - and whether it still lives among us-was the subject of Adele David's talk. Thylacines had been hunted for about a century in the belief that they killed sheep, with bounties offered for their skins. The practice was finally banned in 1936 - too late: the last known thylacine died that year in Tasmania's Hobart Zoo. Reported sightings of thylacines in the wild started almost immediately. The species was declared extinct in 1982. But Adele told us there have been around 3,000 witness reports, including many on the Australian mainland. There have been possible thylacine tracks, videos and recordings of its calls. There is consistency in sightings with descriptions of something "like a dog with a broken back", a "steep" sloping tail, a "particular" gait and a distinctive, strong odour.
Veteran cryptozoologist Michel Raynal explained how "the Belgians failed to discover the okapi". The British pipped them to the post by a few months, when Philip Sclater formally described Equus(?) johnstoni (now Okapi johnstoni) for the Royal Zoological Society of London in 1901, based on a striped okapi-skin belt sent by Sir Harry Johnston from Uganda. From the 1870s various explorers, first Germans then French and Belgians, reported "strange antelopes", donkey-like animals, something "zebra-like" or an "antelope-ass-giraffe". These were known by various peoples as ku-mbutti, atti, makapi, ndumba, abuttu or okapi.
Local chiefs showed their status by wearing belts made from the animal's striped hide. Lieutenant Leon Vincart, in the service of "the authorities of the Belgian Congo", in 1899 sent one such belt to Maredsous Abbey, not far from Dinant, where his brother was a monk and where Father Gregoire Fournier had a zooiogy collection which exists to this day. Michel tracked down the okapi-skin belt, still in the collection and logged just a few months before Sclater's description.
Dr Charles Paxton presented work "in its very early stages" that asked: "How can we explain cryprozoological experiences?" There are, he said, no rules for explaining encounters with creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster, for which there are now over 100 different hypotheses on offer, mostly involving misidentifications.
Charles's studies are now taking him from marine biology and statistics into the realms of philosophy and "thought experiments". Concentrating on historic sea serpent sightings with multiple witnesses, he described what happens if we have two hypotheses of "equal explanatory power'': we choose the simplest one. He went into offsetting complexity and explanatory power in explaining sea serpent sightings, "abductive arguments" as used by Sherlock Holmes and "the problem of causation". He admitted that he was "trying to find a tame philosopher to help me get through the philosophical literature" on this.
Looking to the future, Eric has plans for a cryptozoology "festival" next time, aimed at a broader, non-specialist audience. Details will be on the Abepar website www.cryptozoologia.eu.
Thanks to Eric (on the left), Pierre-Yves ("Pierro") on audio-visual and all at Abepar, and in particular to the equipe de traduction - the translation team, on the right: Cassandra, Corentin and Anna - all students from The University of Mons, who rendered my talk into French as I gave it.
The town of Dinant's unique selling point is being the birthplace of Adolphe Saxe, whose birthday it was the day I left. The open-all-hours supermarket and the laundrette in Dinant celebrate the saxophone.
Rows of giant saxophones on the Charles de Gaulle Bridge. (The future President of France was wounded defending the bridge as a lieutenant in the opening days of World War One, when the town also witnessed a massacre of civilians by the advancing Germans.)
A statue commemorating De Gaulle's stand on the bridge at Dinant as a young lieutenant in 1914, although he seems to have lost a hand!
Dr Charles Paxton
The author with Abepar's Tintin in Tibet-inspired conference banner.
Michel Raynal on "how the Beglians missed out on discovering the okapi".
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