DALE DRINN0N: interviewed by Mark Antony Raines

Number 1: WHAT INSPIRED YOU,WHAT ARE YOUR AIMS,WHAT PLANS DO YOU HAVE FOR THE FUTURE 

Actually I was one of the lucky ones, while I was still in elementary school the local library had both Ivan Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life and Tim Dinsdale's Loch Ness Monster both on the shelf and close to one another. My High school library had Heuvelmans' On the track of Unknown Animals as well as several of the source books that Heuvelmans had used and which I could check back on. I grew up in an atmosphere both of accepting such matters and treating them seriously. While I was still in High School I started writing letters to Ivan T Sanderson and he invited me to join the SITU. That was just before he died, and I made several trips to the original SITU Headquarters just after he had died.I basically never had any aims in Cryptozoology beyond letting my voice be heard and my opinions known. I have not had any published books, everything is on the blog still, and it is completely non profit. I have never made a dime out of Cryptozoology and I never intend to. I would advise young people to find some alternate means of income and pursue Cryptozoology as a sideline rather than as a way to make a lot of money, because nobody is ever going to be making a lot of money out of it and continue to remain honest and with a good reputation. For the future, that is rather uncertain because I am finding other more pressing matters are taking up more of my time: animal rights, conservative measures, Environmental activism and political campaigning to have the current destructive system removed. The world is at a perilous point in time and people are going to have to act decisively if they want to keep on living on it. I like Cryptozoology but its not going to save the world.Number 

2: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE MEDIA'S WAY OF DEALING WITH CRYPTOZOOLOGY SUBJECTS? 

In a very real sense Cryptozoology is an outgrowth of the media and the media shapes not only the publi's perception but also the field of Cryptozoology itself, the definitions and categories it uses, and governs how the public thinks of them. Virtually every Cryptid category exists as it was defined by journalists and named by names given by Journalists. They are largely arbitrary and largely misleading. A term such as "Yeti" as used in Cryptozoology has a certain specific meaning which was given to it by Journalists and this does not reflect the Native use of the term at all. Virtually all major Cryptid categories are composites and contain many subcategories of sightings and many equivalent subcategories of sightings from other locations. This can cover many thousands of individual original traditions in the case of something like the Bigfoot, but the categories themselves are prone to collect data which describes different things and which does not belong together. The goal should be to define the categories in terms of Biological species (species specifically and no other category really counts) but the Cryptid categories are not equivalent to actual Linnean species in mant cases. You have different Cryptid categories which contain the same species and then again the larger categories which contain multiple unrelated species in reports that are grouped together. Journalists are largely responsible for the situation. This also makes the entire field awkward in a Scientific sense because when you are confronted with such things they cannot be either wholly confirmed nor wholly denied Scientifically. You cannot say any one category is ever proven or disproven because all of them contain information that is partly real and partly unreal. So the end result is that you have to re-evaluate absolutely everything and pick everything to pieces in pursuit of your real goal, which always should be to determine if you are dealing with any new species unknown to science.For the most part most Cryptozoologists are NOT dealing in Cryptozoology: they are dealing with individuals of species already known to science. And then the new uncatalogued forms included can be only a little different from known species or they can be more different to greater or lesser degrees. It is difficult making any blanket statements about Cryptid categories because the people that generally deal with such matters most often overlook such things. Most Journalists are not Biologists and they tend to make a bigger deal out of more sensationalistic matters. A "Black Panther" sighting might be sensationalistic, but it is of little difference in the Biological sense and none at all in the Cryptozoological sense, because it is an individual out of a known species.