At the moment I'm doing research for the next book.
Rather than a book on the paranormal as planned -I did post a while back stating I was going to look more deeply at ghostly phenomena but the total lack of response made me change my plans!
I'll be dipping back
into my naturalist roots to look at some odd stuff but that's just me.
Although, with my last book,
Pursuing The Strange And Weird: A Naturalist's Viewpoint (up-dated 2013), I thought I had covered "sea monsters", Sasquatch and other such things for one final time I had reckoned without that invisible hand that tugs me toward anything unusual and, sadly, once I'm drawn in then I have to pursue the subject until I can close the file.
Recently, a number of things have been drawing me back onto the subject of mystery hominids -Sasquatch, Yeti, Almasty
et al. There have been documentaries on the subject and some have seemingly deliberately skirted over facts in favour of twisting the truth or, at best, not telling the whole story.
The
Bigfoot Files on the UKs Channel 4 was one such series and the behind-the-scenes controversy exploded and then fizzled away.
Melba Ketchum and the Sasquatch DNA is another matter. When I wrote
Pursuing I was assured by (now red-faced) academics that the evidence was solid. The whole matter needs to be looked into again since this matter also seems to have fizzled out but is there threatening to ignite again.
The mockery of Almasti researchers has also been something that I have found annoying. I first corresponded with Dmitri Bayanov in the 1970s/1980s. He has always been a sincere and competent investigator. The story of Zana may not have involved Almasty -DNA work by Professor
Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford research, revealed that Zana’s ancestry
was 100% Sub-Saharan African and that she was most probably a slave taken to the region by the then ruling Ottomans. But that
does not throw out all the other work carried out over the decades.
And Todd Standing and his Bigfoot footage....
This subject alone deserves a book of its own but I shall try to be concise!
The subject of unidentified sea creatures is something else I feel a need to look at. I thought I had covered the subject at sufficient length in
Pursuing but my thoughts on the subject evolve and I really want to look at the ecology involved as it could very well explain the decreasing number of reports.
Ecology could also explain the old "tall tales" of mega fauna. Looking at Africa in the 1600s and descriptions of wildlife from contemporary accounts and looking at the fauna there in the 21st century shows just why the mega fauna may well have existed but now become extinct.
Having said that I did note in
Some More Things Strange & Sinister how Swiss photographer and anti-bushmeat campaigner Karl Ammann, in 1996, found a crested skull in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This was the first small step to discovering the man-sized chimpanzees known as
Bili ape or
Bondo mystery ape.
Africa may still hold surprises.
And there are a few surprise subjects I am looking into and the results may be as startling as finds published in
The Red Paper: Canids.
In fact, all of my books have featured "lost" or "no longer existing" images and photographs. Each one has also corrected some very -
very- dubious 'facts' pushed by Cryptozoologists and their ilk. I'm not against serious investigators calling themselves "Cryptozoologists" but there are a
lot of sensationalists out there and the truth isn't that important.
Okay, these people do not read my books but they have certainly, uh, "borrowed" from them.
But this book is going to be, I hope, finished by next Summer. Title? Still not sure but when I know you'll know!
Oh, and, no, I'm not out to make friends just put forward the truth and facts -all fully referenced as in all my books.
