There Be Beasts - report on London Cryptozoology Club's first conference - April 2013

Locals in a village in Burma with Richard Thorns's pink-headed duck lure. Photo: copyright Richard Thorns used with permission

This article first appeared in Fortean Times FT 302. Following a letter to Fortean Times from Paolo Viscardi, I have corrected a conflation of two different stuffed mermaids that appeared in the original article, this passage is indicated in bold type.

It was a full house in the basement at Treadwell's "esoteric beliefs" bookshop in Bloomsbury for There Be Beasts, the first London Cryptozoology Club (LCC) mini-conference in April. Treadwell's had helped out at the eleventh hour after the original venue fell through. James Newton, founder of the LCC and one of the conference's organisers introduced the day's proceedings before allowing

Richard Freeman, zoological director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, to kick off, resplendent in a waistcoat emblazoned with gold dragons. His pet hate is Hollywood's tendency to depict dragons as having only two legs, when they should have four. The two-legged versions aren't dragons, they're wyverns, says Richard. "People who put wyverns in films and pass them off as dragons" drive "cryptozoological pedants like me" into a murderous rage.

He reeled off a list of mystery animals, a list that until 1904 would have included the gorilla, then regarded as just "a hairy ogre from 'native' folklore." Richard feels that Gigantopithecus – a huge fossil Asian ape whose fragmentary remains suggest it walked upright – is a good candidate for the identity of a current cryptid, the yeti.

Richard Freeman at previous talks - CFZ's Weird Weekend 2006 (above) and the Fortean Times UnConvention 2010 (right)

While earlier researchers perceived Bigfoot – North America's manimal – as an ape akin to Gigantopitchecus, "armchair cryptozoologist" James Newton introduced us to current trends in Bigfoot research, which suggest we're dealing with something much closer to us humans. James worked as a volunteer at South Dakota's Cheyenne River Youth Project with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, a division of the Lakota Nation. Over twenty years of experience in youth work means he's good as spotting when children are trying to pull his leg, but he was struck by how Lakota kids he worked with described their attitudes and encounters with Bigfoot in a matter-of-fact way. Like the time in 2006 when, out of the blue, a girl named Misti Bad Warrior pointed to an illustration of Chewbacca in a Where's Wally? book and said, "That's Bigfoot."



Self-described "armchair cryptozoologist" James Newton, pictured when he was a youth worker with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe division of the Lakota Nation in South Dakota. Photo by kind permission of James Newton

Recent takes on Bigfoot, by the likes of researchers Autumn Williams – herself a childhood Bigfoot witness – and the "Tennessee Bigfoot lady" Mary Green, describe "habituation scenarios" – years of interactions between rural families and Bigfoot communities. The witnesses "were people who lack the sophistication to make it in cities… but were tuned in to their environment". Encounters could take the form of gift exchanges – missing animal feed, "artwork" gifts like knotted stalks of grass left in return, or a mother looking out of the kitchen window to see their child handing some biscuits over the fence to their "big hairy friend".

Suburban south London's Horniman Museum has in its collection a specimen known as "Japanese Monkey-Fish; Merman (Ningyo)." The Horniman's natural history curator, Paolo Viscardi,took us through an "unnatural history of mermaids."

It seems that in nineteenth century Japan, small representations of nature spirits were made – from a monkey and a fish – for shrines. When the first Western sailors turned up at Nagasaki, Japan's only trading port, a of monkey-fish mermaid cottage industry grew in response to demand.

Everyone assumed the Horniman mermaid, and all other mermaid "gaffes", were made from the head, arms and torso of a monkey sewn on to the back end of a fish. It transpired the Horniman "monkey fish", while it probably the back end of a carp, has no monkey parts at all. It has wire for fingers, a clay and papier-mâché head, fish jaws, bamboo neck, arms of wood and wire. Under X-rays or put through medical scanners, most "monkey-fish" mermaids display an absence of actual monkey bits. Leiden's small mermaid known as the Blomhoff Specimen can be traced to one of the nineteenth century trade fairs that took place around Nagasaki, but an extant mermaid specimen from India seems to be the only known still extant example of a mermaid that actually contains monkey body parts.

Richard Thorns, the "pink-headed duck guy" has been on three trips to Burma in search of that elusive bird – a large, mallard-sized diving duck with a long, ramrod-straight neck, chocolate brown in colour with a "bubble-gum pink" head (a gentler pink in the females). The duck was shy and solitary, preferring deep pools in wetlands. We're unsure if it was a species of pochard or a genus all of its own. It was always a rare bird, regarded from the early days of the British Raj as "a good day's bag." A 1920s captive breeding programme in Surrey failed, and the last recorded pink-headed duck (P-HD) was seen in 1935, in the north Indian state of Bihar. The wetland habitats around India's mega-cities have gone the same way as the pink-headed duck, but numerous marshes resembling those "vanished ecosystems" still exist over the border in Burma. "How could you possibly not want to go after that?" asked Richard.

His first Burma trip took Richard to Kachin State, three days upriver from Mandalay. You "can only stay at approved hotels" in Burma, so he had to use the services of a clandestine guide who had to hurry home when news came that "Immigration" were questioning his wife. In Richard's video interviews with locals, the camera's often pointed to the ground. People apparently didn't want to be photographed. Eventually, witnesses reported two P-HD sightings at one lake, and Richard heard about an unconfirmed sighting – lasting only a few seconds – by a Dutchman atop a hired elephant during a 2003 expedition to a lake at Naung Kwin. One fisherman said of the mystery duck, "it was here once." A broken hand from a motorbike accident cut short Richard's most recent expedition, while the Kachin Independence Army insurgency meant "unauthorised contact with foreigners" would land his guides in jail. He thinks one of the photographs he took just might show a P-HD on the lake. Time may be running out for the duck, if it does still live in Burma. Saffron and mustard cultivation are encroaching on the wetlands. Says Richard, "if Burma opens up, it would be very bad news for the pink-headed duck."

London Fortean Society coordinator Scott Wood described the legendary parakeets of London and friends. (The "friends" include the brand new Fordham Park panther – sighted by a woman in a street of that south London neighbourhood earlier that week.) Ring-necked parakeets are now endemic to a 30-kilometre stretch of West London (and Ramsgate), while South London is home to the Monk parakeet. Scott's fascinated by the urban legends and far-fetched "escape scenarios" surround the parakeets' arrival in the capital. These include Jimi Hendrix's two parakeets escaping from his Portobello Road flat at the moment of his death, fugitives from the Twickenham aviary of the exiled King Manuel the Unfortunate of Portugal, (still commemorated in Twickenham's Manuel Road,) break-outs during the filming of Anthony and Cleopatra and/or The African Queen at Shepperton Studios – except the later was filmed in Isleworth. Parakeet lore has turned the birds into a metaphor for immigration panic, a celebration of London's multiculturalism or a harbinger of global warming. The problem with these "scenarios" is that a DEFRA report says parakeets have been kept in English captivity since 1855, and are known to have been "naturalised" by 1960, before the demise of Hendrix.

James said of There Be Beasts that it "proved far more successful than we had imagined. We are hugely thankful to the speakers who gave their time and knowledge for free." There are plans afoot for "a bigger event in 2014" and for a summer LCC expedition to Dorset, in the company of "large cat" expert Jonathan McGowan, searching for traces of British Big Cats.



Barry Tadcaster, compere at the Centre for Fortean Zoology's Weird Weekend 2012, shown here with his partner in crime Orang Pendek. Several attendees pointed out Tadcaster's uncanny resemblance to Richard Freeman in a fez. Photo copyright Matt Salusbury

Since this article appeared in Fortean Times, I've spotted a parakeet in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington, London N17 - much further east than London parakeets have been reported before. And I've heard - but not yet seen - parakeets even further east, in London's Victoria Park.


The LLC is on Twitter: @WeAreTheLC
email: london.cryptozoology@gmail.com

© Matt Salusbury

‘There Be Beasts' The First London Cryptozoology Club Mini-Conference - 13 April

I'll be helping out at ‘There Be Beasts ....’, the London Cryptozoology Club Mini-Conference is on Saturday 13th April 2013
11am – 7pm (first presentation at 11.30)
Upstairs at The Old Kings Head, 47-49 Borough High Street, London, SE1 1NA
Tickets: £5 / £2 concessions (students, OAPs, people in receipt of benefits)

To register and purchase tickets please email london.cryptozoology@gmail.com or call James Newton on 07805 356461

Confirmed talks:

• “On the Track of Unknown Animals Worldwide” Richard Freeman, Zoological Director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology



Richard Freeman of the CFZ at the Fortean Times UnCon 2010

• “Mermaids: A Natural and Unnatural History” Paolo Viscardi, Natural History Curator and Mermaid Anatomist (works at the Horniman Museum).

• “Current Developments in Bigfoot Research” James Newton, self-confessed Armchair Cryptozoologist. This includes recent research suggesting that Bigfoot may be much closer to us humans than we thought, not a Gigantopithecus at all but a manimal with a culture and a language, that knows how to stay hidden!

• “Does the Pink-Headed Duck Still Survive in Burma?” Richard Thorns, Writer, Ornithologist and Explorer

• 'The Legendary Parakeets of London and Friends' Scott Wood, Co-organiser of The London Fortean Society

Getting here: Nearest train: London Bridge (5 minutes walk)
Nearest tube: London Bridge (5 minutes walk)

Buses: 17, 21, 35, 40, 43, 47, 48, 133, 141, 149, 343, 381, 521, RV1

I've heard James Newton, Richard Freeman and Richard Thorns speak on these topics, all recommended!

See here for London Crytozoology Club's sceptical, pub-based "Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot" investigation earlier this year.

Chasing shadows – London Cryptozoology Club's "Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot" expedition

Investigating a Tunbridge Wells mystery

In November last year, there were widespread news reports of a sighting of what became known as the Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot, a roaring, black hairy figure "eight feet tall" with red eyes that startled an eyewitness walking on The Common at night. London Cryptozoology Club decided to investigate.

It should be noted that we went to Tunbridge Wells with a very sceptical view of this so-called "Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot" (TWB) phenomenon. We were particularly sceptical of an online posting by "Greham S," who claimed that a courting couple on a bench in The Common had witnessed the "Ape-Man" back in World War Two. Greham S left no other identifiers, and didn't give his source. There was also said to be an encounter with the "Kentish Apeman" by Territorial Army soldiers in 1991 at Bluebell Hill, Kent, which they saw off by throwing stones at it. We were not expecting to find TWB, we felt that the answers, if any, were more likely to be in what they diplomatically call the "pyscho-social realm".

"Do Well, Doubt Not!" Motto on bridge near Tunbridge Wells station (click on the image to enlarge)


Our plans, such as they were, mostly involved going to the pub and asking locals if they'd seen anything odd. Sitting around the pub was particularly high on our list of priorities.

Light snow over Wellington Rocks

So myself, "Other Matt", Rosie and Dewey set off on a January morning, and (mis)adventures already came our way before we'd even hit the platform at (Royal) Tunbridge Wells. One of our number caused us to miss a train with a complicated transaction involving getting a few quid off his ticket on the basis of his Oyster season ticket, and I left my bag on the train and had to jump back in and get it before the doors closed. That's how intrepid we are in the London Cryptozoological Club!

Wellington Rocks on Tunbridge Wells Common

Someone had come all the way from Brighton to run his radio-controlled all terrain cars over Wellington Rocks

Sophisticated Metropolitan city slickers that we are, we naively imagined that Tunbridge Wells Common would be some well-manicured Home Counties park with beds full of flowers in orderly rows, and perhaps a boating lake or something. Google Maps didn't really indicate just how wild it is either. In my naivety I half expected to bump into prolific letter-writer Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

It turns out The Common is a 200-acre wilderness, with bogs and spooky dead trees and three rock formations – Wellington Rocks, beloved of BMX bandits – High Rocks and Toad Rocks (we didn't get to see the last one). It was extraordinarily bleak, not the sort of landscape I'd associate with the Home Counties. There was even a mysterious disused railway running through the woods on The Common.

An uphill struggle

After about an hour of up hill and down dale, along Hungershall Park (Hunger shall lead us to the pub!) and Cabbage Stalk Lane, we finally made it to the Beacon pub. On the way, we talked to one dog-walker whose little dogs were shivering in the cold, and when we said we were looking for Bigfoot he joked that we must have been to the pub already.

Winding roads on the Common

The excellent Beacon pub – near High Rocks - has in a stain glass window the coat of arms of the Harrison family, with hedgehogs on it (herrison in French) and two golden crescent moons with red in the middle. While some of us felt they might be something to do with the red eyes on the TWB, the waitress said, "We call them stuffed olives." Over drinks and food, we speculated on the rock formations and various "Stone Tape" theories about geological formations and faults having an influence on the human brain, making people see things.

Hedgehogs and "stuffed olives" (red eyes?) on the Harrison coat of arms (click on the image to enlarge)

There followed a brisk walk across The Common and back to the station, as it was getting dark and we did not want to be out on the Common in the middle of a winter's night. A follow-up expedition involving a night vigil was suggested as we took the train back to Charring Cross.

Night manoeuvres on the Common


The previous evening, I'd emailed Neil Arnold, the go-to guy for all things strange and cryptozoological in Kent, about our outing. The morning after our trip out of town, I got this email from him:

"Hi Matt, there is no Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot and I've had to spend the last few months trying to tell so many papers etc this. I have a piece in next month's FT [Fortean Times] regarding it. The report in question was dubious to say the least, and not sure why anyone would go chasing shadows around TW. The common is relatively small. All this has been investigated by myself over two years ago after reports of a monkey on the loose around 1949. I've just had published a book called Haunted Tunbridge Wells.Regards, neil."

Oh well, chasing shadows it may have been, but a fun time was had by all.

A strange, dark, vaguely human shape looms out of the dark on the Common!

London Cryptozoology Club investigate the Wellington Rocks


Text and photos copyright Matt Salusbury

update: 4 December 2022 - the song "Where's you car, Debbie?" by Tunbridge Wells-based punk duo Slaves is apparently based on the early 2010s Tunbridge Wells Bigfoot sighting. Its official video features an ape-like creature lumbering around in the dark. There's a glimpse of one of band reading a mocked-up Tunbridge Wells local newspaper with a "Bigfoot-Spotted" headline. There's a link here.

"Colloque Cryptozoolgie", Dinant, Belgium

This first appeared in Fortean Times, issue 290, July 2012. I have corrected the French-language spelling mistakes that appeared in the print article, and for which I apologise. (Thirty-year old French O Level, as alluded to in the report!)

Dinant local boy Adolphe Sax immortalised sitting on a bench in the street outside his former house

The Belgian town of Dinant lies at the foot of the Ardennes mountains and at the end of the railway line from Brussels. You've done Dinant in a couple of hours, taking in the grey, onion-domed church and the cable car ride to the citadel that dominates the town. Local boy Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, is immortalised in bronze, sitting on a bench on the pavement with his instrument outside La Maison De Monsieur Sax, "more or less on the spot where his original house stood."

But I wasn't in this underwhelming small town in Belgium to pay homage to Monsieur Sax. I had come to Dinant for the annual "Colloquium of Cryptozoology" – a whole weekend of cryptozoology talks – in French!

The eleventh colloque de crypotozoologie was in a nearby hotel that had its own forest in its grounds. The colloque had long breaks for meals – with cherry beers and chocolate mouse because, "we are in Belgium, after all." Talks were generally a shortish 40 minutes or less – of which I was glad, seeing as they were in a foreign language in which I had only a 30-year-old O-Level.

The town of Dinant, onion-domed church on the River Meuse in the foreground, citadel built by the Dutch during their brief occupation of Belgium in the background

It was a cosy affair with less than forty attendees. Most punters hailed not from Belgium but from France – a mother and daughter from just outside Paris, two Parisians of Russian origin and a retired couple the way from Marseilles, another six hours by train after a change at Brussels. This made my Eurostar commute from London to "any Belgian station" (according to my ticket) look easy. I found those from the South of France easier to understand than the Parisians and Walloons, (Francophone Belgians) whose French was harder to follow.

"Any Belgian station"

Ornithologist Jean-Jacques Barloy kicked off proceedings, lecturing on (as far as I could tell!) "Audubon's mysterious birds." Apart from his better-known encounter with a huge "Washington's eagle" (FT 262), ornithologist and artist John James Audubon described in his 1839 masterwork Birds of America other birds unknown to science (FT222:42–44). These included the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated swamp warbler, Cuvier's kinglet and Townsend's bunting.

The mystery bunting, based on a specimen sent to the Smithsonian by one John Townsend, may have been a more colourful bird that lost its pigment during its preservation or storage. Barloy says Audubon's mystery kinglets, warblers and flycatchers were down to his tendency to name birds based on their resemblance to bird families in Europe, when they were really nothing of the sort. These birds were "misidentified or confused" rather than unknown.

Chemist and telecommunications engineer Michel Raynal said reading about the "Florida Monster" in Charles Fort’s Lo! first got him into cryptozoology thirty years ago. The lack of concrete evidence for cryptids "poses a problem of proof", but Raynal gave examples of, "in the total absence of sightings," animals whose existence was correctly predicted before their eventual discovery.

Michel Raynal

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both noted that Madagascan orchids "each had a corresponding pollinating insect" but for the magic orchid Angraecum sesquiipedale, the pollinator was unknown. The 20cm nectar tubes sticking out of the magic orchid suggested that whatever pollinated it would need a proboscis around 25cm (11 inches) long. Wallace compared the "search for such a creature" with the then recent discovery of the planet Neptune – found by observing "perturbations" in other planetary orbits. Walter Rothschild discovered the mystery missing moth Xanthopan morgana praedicta ("predicted") in 1902, with a proboscis of the anticipated length.

The entire population of the small, dark brown Guyanan lizard Gymnopthalamus underwoodi is female. It reproduces pathogenically. Raynal said that many pathogenic lizard species started as hybrids between two sexually reproductive species, and a sexually reproducing lizard Gymnopthalamus speciousis was known from the same habitat. Some bits of DNA in G. underwoodi weren't in G. speciousis, allowing scientists to predict the DNA sequence of the missing species that hybridised to produce G. underwoodi – with considerable accuracy, as it turned out when the aptly-named lizard species Gymnopthalamus cryptus was finally discovered up in 1993.

Raynal also noted reports of rhinos from apparently rhino-free Gabon. The African nation of Gabon does, however, have some recently evolved ticks now feeding on a range of big mammals – bison, for example – but very similar to specialised rhino ticks. Rhinos ticks are, notes Michel, easier to produce than “testimonial proof”.

A selection of rhino ticks

Doctor of cinematography Florent Barrère looked at the now well-known giant squid, and the more dubious giant octopus or "kraken octopus", once believed to lurk somewhere off the Cote d’Azur. Pierre Denys De Montfort's 1802 Histoire Naturelle de Mollusces includes a "colossal octopus" along with De Montfort's drawing from an ex-voto in the chapel of St Omar in St Malo, Brittany, giving thanks for saving the life of a sailor threatened by a gigantic octopus.

De Montfort's drawing of a common octopus, suspiciously similar to his "kraken octopus"

In De Montfort's drawing, the octopuses' huge tentacles coil round the rigging of a ship. The problem is the De Montfort's is the only existing account or image of the ex-voto in the chapel, which was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. The ex-voto, possibly based on secondhand accounts collected from Dunkirk sailors by De Montfort, may never have existed. And elsewhere in Historie Naturelle de Mollusces there's a drawing of a common octopus looking exactly like its colossal cousin.

We were then treated to the "Belgian premiere" of Marie Voignier's documentary L’Hypothèse du Mokélé Mbêmbé – with English subtitles, hurrah! It follows a permanently glum Michel Ballot through the dense, noisy jungle of Congo Brazzaville in search of an alleged living dinosaur. Ballot has a remarkable resemblance to scary German actor Klaus Kinski. His appearance and demeanour lend an already odd enterprise that otherworldly quality familiar from the tense Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski going-mad-in-the-jungle movies Fitzcorraldo and Aguirre: Wrath of God. Recommended! Ms Voignier (on the left, with Ballot on the right in this photo) couldn’t make it in person, nor did she provide any more information about her mysterious film, although she hopes to do so next year.

Sunday's talks started early so those with a train to catch in Paris could get there before French presidential election campaign madness gripped the city. The day opened with sixth-form college English teacher Alain Bonet. The fortean-tinged French blockbuster movie Le Pacte Des Loupes (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) inspired him to research the "Beast of Gévaudan" – the creature (or creatures) that terrorised a region of southwestern France from 1764. Several official hunts, some with thousands of royal dragoons, led to several courtiers and military men ending their careers when attacks resumed again, before these fizzled out three years later.

Bonet found a surprising number of original documents still survive from that era. Some attacks were recorded twice or mis-transcribed – one boy victim of La Bête became a girl in the next report of the same incident. From this data Bonet has drawn up "the definitive list" of La Bête's victims – 128+ attacks, 49+ attacks with wounds, deaths 104, total 281+. Most attacks were on girls or women, or males under 16 – men outdoors would have usually carried tools or weapons.

English teacher and Beast of Gévaudan enthusiast Alain Bonet

One of the two animals shot in hunts for La Bête was an "extraordinary wolf" but smaller, with too many teeth. Hybrid wolf-dogs and unlikely wolf-hyena hybrids were among the explanations offered. Bonet suggests La Bête was a wolf showing unusual behaviour, so startling that witnesses misidentified it. While there are records of attacks on humans by wolves in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, these were definitely wolves, not a “bête exotique”. Contemporary France had more of these, such as la Bête de Toulon and la Bête de Cote’Azur.

Father of cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans was, of course, Belgian, and Catherine Gravet, doctor of literature at UMONS University in Brussels, examined the 25 different "argumentative techniques" Heuvelmans employed in his apparent mission to convert the world to his cryptozoological ideas.

Dr Gravet's revelations on Heuvelmans were more bizarre than any of the weekend's mystery animals. Heuvelmans regarded cryptozoology as "more important than oncology" – the study of cancers. He was disturbingly keen on indoctrinating "the youth" to his crypto-crusade. He sent Tintin's creator Hergé a dossier of cuttings and drawings – made by one of Heuvelman's several brief wives, an illustrator – of the yeti. This insinuated its way into Hergé's interpretation of the yeti in Tintin in Tibet. Heuvelmans used his influence to ensure that bestselling Belgian adolescent paperback thriller series Bob Morane (he's a secret agent who saves the world) included a Heuvelmans-quoting sidekick and a civilisation of tool-using yetis who join Morane in fighting the perfidious Chinese Communists.

Dr Catherine Gravet

The signature of Tintin's creator Hergé greets Eurostar arrivals at the top of the escalator at Brussels South Station

And another woman who was briefly Madame Huevelmans – Monique Watteau, aka Alica Lindburgh – channelled Heuvelman's eccentric mission to convert unbelievers to cryptozoology through a series of messianic "eroto-fantastique" novels.

There was one other Brit at the Dinant gig, marine biologist Dr Charles Paxton, and we both learnt an important French word that weekend – témoignages –"sightings". With Monsieur Bonet the English teacher translating into French, Dr Paxton told how he number-crunched data from sea monster accounts from 1758-2000. He concluded that the creatures seen were "closer than you'd get by chance alone", suggesting witnesses underestimated the distance they were from the animal. He put a two-metre high model of a "tall black monster" on Lake Windermere, and asked people to describe it. While it was actually 337 metres away, most people described it as 500 metres away.

Children proved "lousy witnesses" in Paxton's Windermere experiment, female witnesses "significantly underestimated" the upright object's size, "males slightly over-estimated" its height. This prompted much Gallic giggling and a joke by Monsieur Raynal in French, the only word of which I caught was "pénis."

Dr Paxton has also extrapolated from a curve of discoveries of marine animals over two metres in length since Linnaeus that there remain quite a few whales yet to be discovered. There are only two known marine reptiles "above two metres", the leatherback turtle and the estuarine crocodile (sea snakes aren't quite long enough to make the grade). This, concludes Dr Paxton, makes it "statistically unlikely" that any sea monsters out there yet to be discovered will turn out to be plesiosaurs or other reptiles.

Dr Charles Paxton, en Anglais!

Self confessed "Belgian bigfooter" Eric Joye is the director of Abepar asbl, the organisation that organises the colloque, although Eric pretty much is Abepar asbl. Eric ended the colloque with his account of his latest trip to British Columbia in search of the elusive hominid. He had already treated attendees to his impressions of sasquatch grunts, screams and calls over dinner. He described the chilling experience of hearing a sasquatch call, imitating it and getting a response. Although coyotes are also good mimics, and Eric once got a coyote yelp in response to his impressions, the sasquatch call was "recognisably not a coyote."

Eric Joye

The French-speaking crypto-scene seems more rigorous in its researches than its English-language equivalent, which is too often reliant on enthusiasm alone. At the Dinant crypto-gig, cryptozoology was seen as a discipline, not a hobby, with consideration given to "investigative tools and "the rules of evidence". And Francophone "cryptos" understood that you also have to write up your findings in a way that engages the reader. It's a pity so much Francophone crypto-literature, of an intimidatingly high standard, never crosses the language barrier.

Next year, Abepar asbl's director promises conference-goers Dinant's famous koek biscuits traditionally made in the shape of animals, churches and such – but custom-made in the form of a sasquatch footprint.


* "Cryptozoologia", Abepar asbl's website, is at http://www.cryptozoologia.eu, where there are proceedings from its conferences as (paid-for) downloads. The 12th colloque crytozoologie is in Dinant in April 2013.

* There's a five-minute video of this year's event here.

© Matt Salusbury

Weird Weekend 2006

This Fortean Bureau of Investigation report from the December 2006 issue of Fortean Times (FT 217) appears as part of a general update of the site.

All pictures copyright Matt Salusbury



Woolfardishworthy, North Devon, so good they named it twice. Also known as Woolsery

Just getting to the village of Woolfardishworthy, Devon, home of the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) and its Weird Weekend 2006 convention, was already beginning to look like one of the CFZ’s own expeditions to the ends of the Earth in search of unknown animals. Here’s a travel tip: be wary of any railway branch line that’s named after an otter. My journey along the “Tarka Line,” which (eventually) takes passengers from Exeter to Barnstable, became a two-hour nightmare wait, followed by standing room only in a packed carriage. The stress and tedium was relieved only by the tall man in the orange ponytail, with his loud and clear recitations from a battered copy of A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy.

The “Tarka Line” experience was followed by a cross-country bike ride featuring a series of terrifying 1 in 5 gradients that dropped down sharp to disappear into dark, misty woods. Washed out at the campsite, I had my own cryptozoological encounter the next morning, picking strange yellow snails off my sodden bike.

Down at the barn-like Woolfardishworthy Sports and Community Hall, posters for the young farmers tractor pull event shared noticeboard space with an exhibition of Bigfoot images. Fiancées, girlfriends and neighbours’ kids had been roped into helping out, including “Little Ross” the microphone runner, and 14-year-old David Philips who ran the Weird Weekend sound and lights.

Highlights of the 12-hour endurance marathon that was ‘Weird Saturday’ included Chris Moiser from the Big Cats in Britain Group. The group made a Freedom of Information Act request for data on Big Cat sightings from all the UK’s 600-odd councils and 36 police forces. Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s three-inch thick file of police logs revealed that the police force keeps a tranquiliser gun in its stores, and that many more sightings are reported to the police than to the press. Paul Crowther uncovered a local cottage industry in faked Big Cat photos.

Richard Ingram’s talk on the fall of civilizations listed the usual catastrophes, and some unexpected threats – the financial markets leaving ‘The City’ would pretty much finish off Britain’s economy overnight, while a sudden epidemic could take out the very small pool of people who keep nuclear power stations ticking over.

Ufologist Lionel Beer looked at several dozen potential locations for that “elusive historical butterfly,” King Arthur’s court at Camelot, and concluded that it may all be (literally) a load of rubbish, or a camelotte in French.

UFO researcher Nick Redfern – one of very few people who makes a full-time living out of what he calls “the subject”, had flown in from the States to talk about “saucer spies” – Special Branch, M15 and RAF Provost and Security Service’s surveillance of ufologists in general, and his colleague Matthew Williams in particular. Redfern’s thesis is that the security services wrongly believe that ufologists are being used as cover by other “subversive” groups.

In the CFZ quiz, “one of the greatest events of the Fortean year,” the punters team beat the experts’ team to walk away with Alien Big Cat models as prizes. By then, events were running a little late, on “Devon time.”

Paul Cropper arrived after a 37-hour journey from Australia at his own expense to give two talks in an afternoon, pretty much straight off the plane. He showed rare footage of a purported Australian black panther, and footage of a mainland thylacine, (Tasmania tiger) which we all agreed looked very much like a fox – an animal introduced to Australia to keep down rabbit numbers, and which quickly went feral.

Mr Cropper also treated us to a history of the Yowie, the Australian Bigfoot. Reports go back to Aboriginal traditions of the Dulgar (“hairy man”) from rock paintings and from stories collected and written down by Alexander Harris in the 1840s. (He thought he was being hoaxed at the time.) Many newspaper reports in the 1870s and 1880s refer to “many hairy men”, but then the Yowie disappears between 1910, reappearing only in 1975. Before 1975 they were known as Yahoos or “hairy men.”



Guardian columnist and fellow NUJ London Freelance Branch member Jon Ronson on owl-worshipping frat boy summer camp Bohemian Grove

“By the way, Ronson, you’re not going to say the Queen Mother was a reptile, are you?” asked CFZ Director Jonathan Downes as he introduced Guardian columnist and Channel 4 investigator Jon Ronson. After hanging out with subsequently banned fundamentalist Omar Bakri Mohamed, and a politically correct Ku Klux Klan faction that banned robes, cross burnings and racism, Ronson sneaked into gatherings of the Bilderberg group and then disguised himself in “preppy clothes” to gatecrash and film Bohemian Grove. This is a frat-boy “white flight” resort set up in the redwoods outside San Francisco in the 1920s, and is the venue of a bizarre two-week world leaders’ summer camp where the immensely powerful dress up in robes and do a mock human sacrifice of a wicker figure which they burn in the belly of a giant stone owl. Part pantomime, part Rocky Horror Show, part burlesque drag show and all tacky sub-Shakespearian pageant, the greatest mystery of Bohemian Grove is why the likes of (allegedly) George Bush Snr, Conrad Black, John Major and Clint Eastwood would want to spend their scarce holidays in a juvenile all-male environment where “80-year old men piss against trees.”

Although this Weird Weekend saw 140 people coming through the door from nine countries, it is also becoming a family-orientated event “for ordinary people, not just Fortean insiders.” A terribly nice Norway-based Satanist couple complete with upturned pentangle necklaces rubbed shoulders with the “very God-fearing” people of Woolfardisworthy. There was a kid’s treasure hunt and mad hatter’s tea party (Richard Freeman in his usual top hat,) while punky local schoolboy band C.A.S entertained us with their “Hunting the Yeti” song as one of their mates cavorted in a borrowed yeti costume. Mr Downes laments that “kids don’t keep caterpillars anymore” and has been working to reinvigorate the enthusiasm of the village children for natural history. “I believe in community,” says Downes. When Weird Weekend started seven years ago, he found the “Fortean scene was a bloody shambles – ‘official’ investigation teams, 40 or 50 groups with five members, everybody at each others’ throats.”

Goth zoologist and former head zookeeper for reptiles Richard Freeman reported back on the CFZ’s Gambia expedition in search of two elusive beasts – “Gambo”, a finned, crocodile-like carcass found washed up on Bungalow Beach and buried in the dry sand by holidaying missionary Owen Burnham in 1983, and “Ninka Nanka” a huge, swimming crested serpentine dragon that makes you drop dead within five years of seeing it.

Bungalow Beach is now heavily developed, and the team quickly found that after more than 20 years the sand had become too wet to preserve any Gambo bones. Witnesses they interviewed describe something very like a large dolphin.

The expedition found only one living witness to the Ninka Nanka, who claimed a witch doctor saved his life after his sighting, but even then he still lost his hair. Others told how relatives had seen it and then died. Some reports described a “fantastic, Godzilla-sized” animal. A story about a lorry crashing after running into a huge furrow left by a slithering Ninka Nanka in 2000 didn’t match the wreckage of a much older-looking, rusty wreck with trees growing through it. Alleged Ninka Nanka scales were passed around the audience. We agreed they were probably mica chips.

Mr Freeman concluded that if there is a Ninka Nanka – maybe a large, crested or combed swimming snake – it has died out in Gambia, and we will have to look for it over the river in more remote Guinea.


Footprint casts and photos of tracks on Paul Vella's Bigfoot stall

Paul Vella, of the Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers, set out a stall laden with Bigfoot footprint casts and photos of more Bigfoot prints. Mr Vella is a UK-based crime scene investigator specializing in computers and mobiles, but his interest in Bigfoot was kicked off by the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film – 40 years old next year – “it really bugged me.” Mr Vella asserts that, Patterson aside, “nobody makes any money out of Bigfoot… a lot of people spend a lot of money on Bigfoot research” and he knows of “five Bigfoot-related divorces. It consumes you.” He has promised his wife he will give up his research in 2010 and put all his Bigfoot books on E-bay. He presented convincing evidence for Bigfoot being real – prints, casts, and spine-tingling recordings of Bigfoot screams, which he played to us. He has heard rumours that logging interests were behind some obvious Bigfoot hoaxes in a conspiracy to stop their patch becoming a logging-free Bigfoot reserve.

Weird Weekend speakers, from left: Rendlesham witness Larry Warren, Ufologist Nick Redfern, Creaturama's Mussosaurus, cryptozoology's First Lady Corinna James, CFZ Directory Jonathan Downes, Danish lake monster investigator Lars Thomas
“It wasn’t a lighthouse,” insists Larry Warren, former USAF Security Police patrolman and witness to the UFO encounter at Rendelsham Forest around Christmas 1980, events so famous they have become known as the “British Roswell.” Warren, who now lives in Liverpool, recalls seeing a “craft under intelligent control” which fired “pencil-thin beams” into the sheds containing “the ordinance.” By “the ordinance” he meant a vast store of tactical nuclear weapons. As someone who grew up holidaying with my grandparents in the area, I found this the scariest Rendelsham revelation. It was Europe’s most important nuclear arms dump and nuclear target, and “Greenham Common was a diversion, we were guarding the nukes.” Warren went public in 1982 after the suicide of a colleague and fellow witness, “who should not have been allowed to carry arms” and alleges “brutal interrogation… violation of human rights in the 48 hours after the incident” by the Base authorities. The Rendlesham investigation is unusual in that “the witnesses push forward the investigation rather than the UFO community at large.”

The fallout from the alleged terrorist plot in the week before Weird Weekend grounded many flights to and from the UK, but in the event there was only one speaker who cancelled. The ever-hilarious Ronan Coghlan began his talk on the legendary “goatman” by apologizing in advance in case his dentures flew out during his talk – his denture fixative had been confiscated as he boarded his plane at Belfast as a suspected possible “liquid explosive.”

Coghlan’s goatman turns out throughout Europe – Pan and the Satyrs of Greece and Rome, the Danish geetman, the Scottish urish, and the nastier German bokschit. Pan is far older than the gods of Olympus, and was originally part of a whole race of Pans. Modern American legends – like the axe-wielding, murderous goatman of Prince’s County, Virginia – superimpose gone-wrong genetic experimentation nonsense onto older spooky campfire stories.

If you missed the Weird Weekend talks, you can still see highlights on CFZ TV, accessible via the CFZ website.


Jackalope, a fake monster made from deer antlers and a stuffed hare, on show in the CFZ museum
Weird Weekend was also a chance to visit the CFZ’s new headquarters at Myrtle Cottage, Back Street, Woolfardishworthy. The new office was as busy and crowded as my carriage on the “Tarka Line” when I visited, and the conservatory featured a jackalope, a pilot whale skull connected to the Mogwar sea serpent legend, and live snapper turtles and soft-shelled turtles, some of which came the CFZ’s way following Customs seizures. Cuthbert, one of their soft-shelled turtles, is the only known example of a newly discovered species.

Mr Downes rounded off by promising more CFZ expeditions soon – to Orange Country, Texas, in search of a mystery “double-bed sized” snapping turtle, a trip to look for mystery lizards on uninhabited islands in the Canaries, a second Mongolian Death Worm trip, and an expedition to find “the world’s largest earwig” in the South Atlantic on St Helena – the island of the giant insects.

Veteran Fortean John Michell is among the speakers already booked for Weird Weekend 2007, back in the Sports and Community Hall on 17th-19th August. Over dinner in the Farmer’s Arms pub afterwards, eating from a cryptozoology-themed menu that included Beast of Bodmin Steaks, Mr Downes promised the next Weird Weekend would also include Morris dancing and a parade by the local village kids dressed as monsters. “A bit like in The Wicker Man, or like one of those strange villages coming out of the mists in Hammer House of Horror?” I asked.
“Yeah! That’s right!”

© Copyright Matt Salusbury 2006

UPDATE: The local Morris team were unavailable for Weird Weekend 2007, and the proposed children's fancy dress monster parade turned into a Chinese-inspired dragon dance at the opening ceremony and a youth cavorting in a gorilla suit during a rendition of "Hunting The Bigfoot" by a local teenage band.

Redfern on Ranton - the Man-Monkey

Nick Redfern, one of very few Forteans who makes a full-time living on the subject, gave a talk at the CFZ's Weird Weekend (Sunday 19 August 2007) on one of those 'zooform phenomena' - a term that describes animals that are way to weird to possibly be able to exist, but which are nonetheless still being reported - the Man-Monkey of Ranton, Staffordshire, near where Redfern comes from.

There are reports from England, Scotland and Wales that broadly fit the description of a Bigfoot-type creature, but these reports are 'not as straightforward as they seem' - there are weird folk stories around these creatures about ghostly attacks, disasters that they bring about, objects passing straight through them. And how come they've never been caught? Is this thing a real animal or an apparition?

Redfern has uncovered 20-30 descriptions of this phantom Man-Monkey creature from around the UK, including interviews with eyewitnesses.

The classic Man-Monkey sighting comes from 1879, when a skinny monkey jumped onto a cart at Ranton along the Shropshire Canal, at a point where a worker on the canal had earlier died. The victim of the Man-Monkey attack struck the creature with a whip, but it went right through him, as if it was somehow spectral. The area around Renton was the scene of UFO sightings in 1954, and Ranton seems to be a 'window area for strange activity.' Nearby Camelford Chase is a folklore hotspot. The local 'German Cemetery - where German POWs killed in the 1918 'flu epidemic were buried - has seen a recent spate of 'werewolf' sightings. Nearby Shugborough Hall - the name comes from 'shug', a mythical cross between a mastiff and a monkey - saw a sighting of a 'wildly running' man-monkey creature in the garden in 1981.

Also in the area is Cannock Chase - where animals have been found dead and mutilated, including dead foxes arranged in a circle among candles - there have been reports of 'animal sacrifices' and 'ritual activity.' I was interested to see during Redfern's talk a slide of BT's Telecom tower in Cannock Chase, and asked Redfern whether the electronic pollution from a microwave transmitter like this one could be somehow inducing visions or other weirdness. I discussed this with Redfern over dinner in Wolfordisworthy's Farmers Arms pub afterwards, and another area of weirdness with a microwave transmitter in the middle of it - Highgate in North London, scene of the 'Highgate Vampire' events of the 1970s, including reported attacks by ghostly entities.

I later ran microwave towers as a possible hallucination generator past my brother, who has a civil service background. He commented, 'Sigh. Done to death, at length. Call the press officer at the Radio Communications
Agency. There is lots of data on the harmlessness of microwaves. But it doesn't matter what us scientists say - people will still claim that LittleJohnny is sick because there is a mobile phone antenna 250 meters from his bedroom. Mind you, the early microwave techies building the Post Office Tower (opened in 1966, now BT's Telecom Tower) used to warm their hands in the focal point of the beams...'

Nick Redfern's latest book, Man-Monkey: In search of the British Bigfoot, is published by CFZ Press.