Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero

(Columbia, $30)

Lack of evidence rarely kills any story that people wish to believe, said Daniel Cressey in Nature. The legends of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Abominable Snowman never seem to die even though all relevant photos and footprints keep turning out to be fakes. Given that Daniel Loxton of Skeptic magazine and paleontologist Donald Prothero seem to be devout rationalists, their book about various hunts for mythical creatures “could justifiably have been a compilation of mockery and humor.” Yet the two authors chose to treat the earnest efforts of various cryptid hunters seriously. Bigfoot believers, alas, should not rejoice: Ultimately, Abominable Science! is “a sensitive but devastating takedown of an entire subculture.”

“To call it a debunking is accurate only up to a point,” said Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education. This book “teems with facts and images that are captivating no matter what biological realities may lie behind them.” The Yeti, for example, got its Abominable Snowman nickname not from general monstrousness but because the Tibetan word for “filthy” was upgraded in translation. And Nessie, first “sighted” in 1933, may have originated not in Scottish Highland lore but in the movie King Kong, which debuted that year and included a strikingly similar sea monster. Today, the authors say that no member of their bestiary ever existed, but no pair of men could have accumulated this much trivia about such legends “without having been, at some point, bitten by the bug.”

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Loxton and Prothero eventually break character, said Margaret Wertheim in The Wall Street Journal. In the book’s final pages, they argue strenuously that the pseudo-science that perpetuates belief in cryptids undermines the authority of credible-science. But is Bigfoot really to blame, as they suggest, for America’s lack of scientific literacy? It seems highly unlikely. But at least these two myth busters grasp what others have not: “For many people, these things are simply cool.”