Cryptids cases in The Catalog

PLATE Nº 03CRYPTIDSSp. cryptozoologicus

Field guide plate: Bigfoot, Mothman, and the Loch Ness creature at uniform scale, Audubon style

Washington State has never declassified Bigfoot.

Cryptids are the animals that field guides leave out because nobody can produce a specimen to museum standards. Bigfoot, Mothman, the Loch Ness creature, the Jersey Devil, Champ. Reports go back centuries; physical evidence does not. What does exist is institutional: Washington State has a Sasquatch policy on its books, county sheriffs in West Virginia keep Mothman files, and the Loch Ness has been the subject of three serious sonar surveys. Absence of a body is not absence of an investigation.

Recognized

Sasquatch in Skamania County, Washington statute (1969)

Killing one is a Class B felony in the county.

Library of Congress Law Library — Skamania County Sasquatch Ordinanceretrieved 2026-05-24

Open the full plate in the Field Guide ↗

The Patterson-Gimlin Film

On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot about a minute of 16mm film at Bluff Creek, California, appearing to show a large, hairy, bipedal creature — nicknamed 'Patty' — walking away and glancing back over its shoulder. It became the most famous and most contested piece of Bigfoot evidence. Skeptics call it a costumed hoax; a minority of analysts argue the gait is hard to fake. No scientific consensus supports it as genuine.

1967-10-20

Mothman of Point Pleasant

Between November 1966 and December 1967, residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia reported repeated encounters with a roughly seven-foot-tall winged humanoid with glowing red eyes — most often near an abandoned WWII munitions complex. The sightings stopped, by most accounts, on December 15, 1967 — the day the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River collapsed during rush hour, killing 46 people.

1966-11-15

The Loch Ness Monster

Modern Loch Ness sightings begin in 1933 with a road-construction crew's report and a newspaper article that gave the creature its nickname. Hundreds of eyewitness accounts, photographs, and sonar contacts have followed across ninety-plus years. Three exhaustive scientific surveys — Edward Mountain 1934, Operation Deepscan 1987, Neil Gemmell's eDNA study 2018–19 — found no evidence of a large unknown vertebrate, but none could fully account for every sighting or sonar return.

1933-05-02

The Chupacabra

The chupacabra — Spanish for 'goat-sucker' — emerged from a 1995 wave of reports near Canovanas, Puerto Rico, where the original eyewitness described a spiny, red-eyed, alien-like beast. Folklorist Benjamin Radford traced that description to the 1995 sci-fi film Species. The later hairless 'dog' version from Texas and Mexico has been DNA-tested repeatedly: every carcass is a coyote or dog with mange. It is folklore — a real legend, no real monster.

The Jersey Devil

The Jersey Devil is a winged, hooved, horse-headed creature said to haunt New Jersey's Pine Barrens. Folklore says 'Mother Leeds' cursed her thirteenth child around 1735, birthing a monster that flew into the pines. Historians instead trace the 'Leeds Devil' to a colonial smear campaign against the real Leeds family — printers tangled in Quaker feuds and a satirical spat with Benjamin Franklin. A 1909 sighting panic, fueled by newspapers and a fake-winged-kangaroo hoax, sealed the legend.