Cryptozoology (ISC)

History

The International Society of Cryptozoology published its journal from PO Box 43070, Tucson, Arizona 85733, with J. Richard Greenwell serving as both Secretary-Treasurer of the Society and Editor of the journal. Bernard Heuvelmans held the presidency from the Society's founding, with Roy P. Mackal (Department of Biology, University of Chicago) as Vice-President. The journal carried ISSN 0736-7023 and ran for twelve volumes, one per year, from 1982 through a combined final volume covering 1993 to 1996.

Heuvelmans opened Volume 1 with a programmatic essay, "What Is Cryptozoology?", translated from the French by Ron Westrum of Eastern Michigan University. He positioned the discipline as a sister science to paleontology: where paleontology reconstructs animals lost in a time dimension from fossil fragments, cryptozoology reconstructs animals hidden in a space dimension from testimonial evidence, traces, and fragmentary physical remains. He argued that the distinction between the two was epistemologically indefensible, since paleontology routinely named taxa from less evidence than existed for creatures like the Himalayan Yeti. The essay established the journal's intellectual framework: rigorous, philosophically grounded, and unapologetic about treating unknown animals as legitimate objects of scientific inquiry.

Contributors held academic appointments. George R. Zug, Chairman of the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, reviewed books. Grover S. Krantz (Department of Anthropology, Washington State University) published anatomical analyses of Sasquatch footprints and handprints. Papers came from researchers at the University of Calgary, Eastern Michigan University, the University of British Columbia, Brown University, and the University of Leicester. The journal maintained standard academic formatting: abstracts, literature reviews, citations, and peer review.

The content ranged across geographical regions and species groups. Volume 5 carried first photographs of a Yeti encounter in North India (Anthony B. Wooldridge), Sasquatch evidence investigations in the Pacific Northwest (James A. Hewkin), and results from the New World Explorers Society Himalayan Yeti Expedition. Volume 12, the final issue, included a critical response to the formal description of Cadborosaurus willsi, reviews of literature on unidentified African forest hominids, and commentary from Mackal, Krantz, and Henry H. Bauer. The "Comments and Responses" section maintained the journal's commitment to open scientific debate, with named researchers challenging and defending published claims.

The Society disbanded around 1998. Greenwell died in 2005. No comparable peer-reviewed journal replaced it. The twelve volumes represent the only sustained attempt to publish cryptozoological research within a fully academic framework, complete with institutional affiliations, formal peer review, and the apparatus of professional science.