Frequently asked questions

A cryptid is an animal that people report seeing, or that appears in folklore, but whose existence science has never confirmed. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the Mothman are the best-known examples, but every region has its own — lake monsters, swamp apes, giant birds, phantom cats and stranger things.

The word comes from the Greek kryptos, “hidden”. It was coined in 1983 by John E. Wall in a letter to the newsletter of the International Society of Cryptozoology, and it has been the standard term ever since.

Cryptozoology is the search for animals whose existence is unproven. Its founding figures are the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, whose 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals launched the field, and the naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson, whom Heuvelmans credited with the word itself.

Most scientists regard cryptozoology as a pseudoscience: it tends to start from the belief that a creature exists and to rely on eyewitness stories rather than physical specimens. Many cryptozoologists, for their part, see themselves as keeping an open mind about animals mainstream zoology has dismissed. This site sets out both the reports and the explanations so you can weigh them.

None of the famous cryptids has been proven to exist. There is no body, skeleton or verified DNA for Bigfoot, Nessie or the Yeti, and DNA studies of supposed samples have so far identified known animals — bears, dogs, cows, eels and people.

That doesn’t mean the reports are worthless. Witnesses usually see something: a bear standing upright, an otter or a log in a lake, an owl in headlights. And the stories themselves are real history and real culture, worth knowing for their own sake.

Yes — though usually animals that local people already knew well. The okapi of the Congo rainforest was described by European scientists in 1901 after years of rumours. The mountain gorilla was formally described in 1902, and the Komodo dragon in 1912.

The coelacanth, a fish thought to have died out with the dinosaurs, was found alive off South Africa in 1938. The saola, a forest ox, was discovered in Vietnam in 1992. And the giant squid, the likely origin of kraken legends, was photographed alive in the wild for the first time in 2004 and filmed in its deep-sea home in 2012.

Space, stories and tourism. The United States has huge areas of forest, swamp and mountain where large animals can be glimpsed but not easily identified. It inherited centuries of Indigenous oral tradition, European folklore and frontier tall tales. And small towns have long known that a local monster sells newspapers, festivals and souvenirs — from the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, to the Bigfoot statues of the Pacific Northwest.

Every state now has at least one creature of its own. Pick yours from the map of the USA.

The site starts with the United States. Use the map to choose your state, press Use my location to jump to the nearest state or country, or open Choose a region (the pin in the menu) to pick anywhere in the world. Your choice is remembered on your device, so the home page shows your region next time.

Your location is only used inside your own browser to find the nearest place — it is never sent to us.

Write everything down as soon as you can: the date, time, exact place (GPS coordinates if possible), weather, light, distance and how long you watched. Photograph tracks or marks with something for scale, such as a coin or a ruler. Don’t follow or approach an animal you can’t identify.

If you think you saw a dangerous animal — a big cat, a bear near homes — tell your state or local wildlife agency first. Then share your account with a research group you trust, or with local news. Honest, detailed, prompt reports are the only kind that are ever useful.

Treat it like any other backcountry trip: tell someone where you’re going and when you’ll be back, carry water, a light, a map and a charged phone, and check the weather. Learn about the real wildlife where you’re going — bears, moose, snakes and alligators are far more dangerous than any monster.

Never trespass, and respect closures and private land. Many legends are tied to Indigenous lands and sacred places: visit them with permission and respect, and leave no trace.

Ask where it came from and whether the original file and the person who took it can be found. Look for something of known size in the frame — most “blobsquatch” images are too blurry or distant to show anything. Run a reverse image search: many viral pictures are years old, from another place, or from a film set. Be especially wary of perfect, close-up footage that appears with no witness name; AI-generated images and video are now common.

Famous hoaxes are a good education. The 1934 “Surgeon’s Photo” of Nessie was a toy submarine with a model head, as one of the people involved revealed in 1994. In 2008 a “Bigfoot body” from Georgia turned out to be a rubber costume in a freezer.

Popular stops include the International Cryptozoology Museum, now in Bangor, Maine; the Mothman Museum and the Mothman Festival (every September) in Point Pleasant, West Virginia; Willow Creek, California, gateway to Bluff Creek, with its Bigfoot museum collection and Bigfoot Days over Labor Day weekend; Expedition: Bigfoot! in Cherry Log, Georgia; and the Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit, Scotland.

Each cryptid’s page lists places to visit, and every state page lists local hotspots.

Our news desk checks public news indexes every day for headlines about the cryptids on this site, then sorts each story by creature and by place. You’ll see the latest stories on the home page, on each cryptid’s page, on every state and country page, and all together on the news page. Headlines link to the original publisher; we don’t copy their articles.

Many famous cryptids grew out of Indigenous traditions — Sasquatch from the Salish sasq’ets, the Wendigo from Algonquian peoples, the bunyip from Aboriginal Australia. For the communities they come from, these beings are part of living culture, religion and law, not monsters to be hunted.

We describe those traditions with that context, link to sources from the communities where we can, and leave out some beings — such as the Navajo skinwalker — that their own traditions ask outsiders not to discuss.