The Pursuit of Legends

You may think that there are people conducting weird researches out there, calling themselves scientists. I know scientists are often characterized by their, shall we say, eccentricities, so everything about them is weird. But this is not the point I am making. The point here is that we live in a world full of scientists and technologies designed to think, dig, question, uncover and answer on our behalf. So we take it for granted that “we” have scrutinized every single corner of the planet. Most of us don’t even question if there is still anything unknown breathing on our planet. But the reality is that more and more animals are discovered every year, at a rate that has already inflated 25% of the known species’ catalogues in the last 25 years!

Most of these newfound creatures are plankton, small fish, amphibians or insects, but at least one new species of mammals is discovered every year. Brazil, alone, added 13 new primates to this list in the last 10 years. Another small primate was found by excited anthropologists just recently (at the end of 2008) in Indonesia. It’s a pygmy tarsier, a spooky gremlin-like primate, the size of a mouse. It was rediscovered for, although it was known, the creature had not been spotted since 1921 and was thought to be lost forever.

Therefore, that brings us to the main focus of this article: Cryptozoologists. These are the guys that many in the science world are reluctant to recognize as scientists. They are usually downgraded to the status of ghostbusters or legend hunters. In fact, Cryptozoologists find themselves in a somewhat uncomfortable position because they are committed to searching for creatures whose reported existence is unproved, such as the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness monster.

How crazy are these guys? This question rings inside the scientific community as well, but we ought to give them some credit. Why? Simply because we never know what belongs to the realm of human imagination and what belongs to our real world until it’s existence is proved and accepted by the scientific community itself. So, at the end of the day, these are the guys who are out there separating true from false or at least true from yet-to-be-proved.

At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, the Mountain Gorilla and the Platypus were thought to be only legendary or imaginative creatures. In another example, the tales from Indonesia told about huge prehistoric-like creatures on a remote island. Incredible story? Impossible? Well, those monsters are real and were named Komodo dragons, after their existence was proven and accepted.

What motivates Cryptozoologists in their quest rests precisely on this question: “If such animals were so hard to find, what about a few human-like creatures that have been reported for as long as we can recall through our history?” Remember, the gorillas, Komodo dragons and others were not trying to hide; they just are living their lives. Could legends such as Bigfoot or the Orang Pendek (a human-like being described by generations of indigenous people in Sumatra) really exist? Could they be roaming our forests without being proved to exist just because they are hiding from us, the dominant race? Well, be it a pursuit of legends or just science, Cryptozoologists are out there – just trying to find the truth.