We love monsters, and the most
popular monsters are entirely imaginary. The ones that receive
all the media attention are (1) apemen, who inhabit the woods of
North America but strangely leave no actual physical evidence of
their existence, just hundreds of completely vague descriptions
of "encounters," and sometimes footprints in soft ground, no two
of which look even vaguely alike. These are usually called
Bigfoots or Sasquatches. (2) Apemen who inhabit the
snow-covered, sparsely populated Himalayas, and are known only
by footprints, no two of which look even vaguely alike. Usually
called abominable snowmen, or yetis. (3) Lake monsters, the most
overwhelmingly popular being the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland.
But in fact such lake monsters are reported in hundreds of
different lakes, some of them shockingly small, all over the
world. No "evidence" for such lake monsters exists, other than
photos, or movies or videos, no two of which look even vaguely
alike. Almost totally forgotten today are the sea monsters, the
so-called
Great Sea Serpents, frequently reported in every ocean and sea
during the age of sail, but essentially never since.
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Why is the existence of such
creatures 100% pseudoscience? Well, consider the case of a real,
incredibly rare animal, the giant panda. When New York socialite
and world traveler Ruth Harkness heard about the giant panda in
1936, she flew to China, traveled to the small region of forest
where the pandas lived, picked up the first baby panda she saw,
and carried it back to the USA! It was a three-month-old cub,
which was named Su
Lin. She eventually sold it to a zoo. Naturally, the
Chinese government now carefully protects and tracks all living
pandas in their natural habitat, and infant pandas are
removed to a large zoological park where they are taken
extremely good care of until they reach adulthood.
Real animals are real... they live some place, there are a significant number of them, they eat and sleep, they have babies, they die of old age or disease or accident, they are real, living, actual, existing animals. The North American apemen, the apemen of Asia, the lake and river monsters, cannot be considered in any sense to be real. That is why they are of zero interest to zoologists. The world is full of real animals which desperately need our protection, and any zoologist who goes into any difficult-to-explore region expects to and does find many new animals... if only new varieties of butterflies and bats.... New animals are still being discovered, but it is getting harder and harder to find them, as most of the world's wilderness becomes regularly populated by humans.
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German-born science writer Willy Ley did much to popularize the concept of hidden monsters, such as dinosaurs surviving in remote parts of Africa, or the Great Sea Serpents hiding at the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean. Most of his many books promoted manned space travel, but a constant secondary topic of his books was "exotic zoology," as he called it. He ignored the monsters most beloved of pseudoscience.