In a world in which everything seems to have been explored, they’re among the last people to believe that our planet still holds big, unrevealed secrets. But as a general rule, we retain a soft spot for cryptozoologists like Warner, who so earnestly wear all the trappings of science while chasing the impossible. Our editors are supposed to scrape the site of anything that exudes a whiff of the paranormal or supernatural, unless it somehow tells us something legitimately interesting about the world we live in. On the Atlas Obscura, which bills itself as a user-generated compendium of “curiosities and esoterica,” we regularly receive postings of haunted houses, “spook lights,” UFO sightings, and countless other products of overheated imaginations. It’s a fine line between the curious and the kooky. He returned with an aerial photograph that shows what is either the head of a 120-foot-long serpent or a mudbank. Recently, Mike Warner, a 74-year-old retired lithographer from Lisburn, Northern Ireland, poured his life’s savings into a search for the giant anaconda, first commissioning satellite imagery and then organizing a two-week expedition to the confluence of the Napo and Amazon rivers, east of Iquitos.
More commonly, though, cryptohunters are lone enthusiasts with a genuine mission to prove the world and science wrong. In some cases, cryptotourism can be quite cushy: One company offers a fully outfitted 18-day Yeti-hunting trek across the Bhutanese Himalayas for a mere $5,450 per person. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, for example, coordinates regular Sasquatch hunts not only in the Pacific Northwest, where you might expect the elusive beast to hang out, but also in places like Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Their expeditions sometimes seem to be as much about finding undiscovered animals as about creating an excuse to get out into some of the wildest places left on earth, to play-act as real explorers. Most cryptotourists are truer believers than we. We had made our way from Gocta to Iquitos, the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by road, to engage in what Loren Coleman, founder of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, has dubbed “cryptotourism,” a form of adventure travel driven by the hunt for creatures that have eluded science.
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