The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained by Colin Dickey

 

 Reviewed by Jeanne

People love a mystery.  Not just crime stories, but anything that seems inexplicable: ghosts, UFOs, Moth Man, and so forth.  Dickey examines some of these beliefs but with less intent on disproving (or proving!) than wondering why we are so eager to believe.  He traces the upswing in part back to the Enlightenment, when people began to examine the world around them for explanations for phenomena, explanations that didn’t involve supernatural forces.  Another factor, he believes, was that exploration brought one group of people into contact with others who didn’t share the same cultural norms and who lived in strange places with bizarre creatures who didn’t fit in with anything Europeans knew.  Just read some of the tales spun by early explorers of the “New World” for examples as to how exaggeration and misunderstanding gave rise to any number of fantastical creatures and landscapes.

It seems people are hardwired to want to believe in something, whether it is gods, trolls, or Big Foot.  There’s a need for a sense of wonder.  It’s also a way of handling angst and anxiety:  to feel there is something out there, something just beyond our senses. He points out that these unknown things, these cryptids, tend to occupy “marginal locations on the edge of the known world.”  Forests, deserts, high mountains, all these places that are outside of civilization, all frontiers, transitions, and crossing places.

With this in mind, Dickey tells the stories of some of our better known creatures and describes how the culture deals with them.  Many involve beings from the mythology of other cultures, but changed to fit the needs of a different society. In one culture, for example, this “monster” may serve to maintain social order, but is seen as an unpredictable, primitive force for another—something unnatural and fearsome.

I picked this up because of all the positive reviews and discovered they are well deserved. It’s not just the dispassionate contemplation of these stories but the way Dickey makes his case.  Dickey makes interesting arguments for the way that humans process information, always anxious to form pattern, to find reasons for things, which sometimes manifests itself in becoming convinced of conspiracy theories or unproven and unprovable concepts.  He also addresses why people cling to these beliefs. There have been many groups who believed in something, such as the end of the world on a precise date, who still believe after the event fails to happen.  In fact, some become even more entrenched.

It's not that Dickey believes that scientists are always triumphant; they can be led astray as well as anyone and refuse to give up pet theories.

I found myself marking (with post-it notes, not ink!) passage after passage that I wanted to share. He writes well and persuasively, but doesn’t try to force conclusions on the reader.  There is room for doubt on both sides.  It is an amazing universe, too amazing to wrap up neatly in any sort of box, be it total science or total belief. He asks that we keep open minds, which includes being flexible when faced with new information.  Instead of trying to force new facts to fit old theories, we should see where these new facts lead us.

For me, this is a very readable, very entertaining book with a lot to say about human nature.  It’s thought-provoking in the best sense of the term.

 

The book also inspired our "Creatures and Cryptids" display.