01 — Methodology, Sourcing and Credibility (cryptids)

Scope

Reported animals that science has not verified, worldwide, from the earliest documented folklore to 2026 — with deliberate non-US weight. The US appears only as a baseline (Bigfoot, Patterson–Gimlin, the chupacabra carcasses), because it already has a very large English-language literature of its own.

Included: cryptids attached to a specific place with a paper trail — sightings registers, government or municipal action, genetic or photographic testing, peer-reviewed comment, court or ombudsman decisions, tourism economics.

Excluded:

• Zooform and folkloric beings with no zoological claim (spirits, devils, shapeshifters). The bunyip and yowie appear because their reports are zoological claims ("a large black animal like a seal"), not because the mythology behind them is treated as evidence.
• Deliberate entertainment hoaxes with no field tradition (jackalope, Drop Bear, hodag).
• Anything where the only "source" is a content farm or an AI-written summary site. This pack found a large amount of both, and they were discarded even where they told the desired story.

Sources used, ranked

Every case below is Tier A/B/C. Where a claim rests on a hobbyist source, it is marked in the case file and never presented as established.

This is a weaker literature than the aerial-sighting pack, and the ratings say so. UFO material contains instrument data (radar, IR, film). Cryptid material mostly does not. The only cryptids here with anything resembling instruments are Loch Ness (sonar scans, eDNA) and the thylacine (camera traps, statistical modelling of reports) — and in both the instruments have been used to narrow, not to confirm.

Credibility rating applied to each case

• A — Tested: the claim has been examined with a method that could have confirmed it (DNA, eDNA, genome sequencing, structured statistical modelling of records) and the test either ruled the specific folk hypothesis out or bounded the answer. Examples: yeti specimens (2017), Loch Ness eDNA (2019), thylacine extinction modelling (2023), Ata genome (2018).
• B — Documented: an official file, government or municipal act, or multiple independent contemporary records — no test result. Examples: Storsjöodjuret 1986 protection, Sakteng sanctuary 2003, the 1985–87 Whitehall exchange, MAFF 1995, Nepal's 1959 permit regime, Sweden's Lagarfljót 2012/2014 process.
• C — Reported: folklore and press only. Most of the Asia and Africa entries, France's Lariosauro, Nahuelito.
• D — Explained or demonstrated false: a specific mundane cause fits better, or the artefact is known to be manufactured. Beast of Bodmin (skull cut from a rug), de Loys's ape (spider monkey), Kasai rex (photomontage), chupacabra carcasses (mange-ridden coyotes), 1934 surgeon's photograph (admitted hoax), Trunko (globster / decomposed carcass).

A case is never listed as "unexplained" here without naming the leading conventional explanation and what it fails to cover.

Biases in this literature (state these on the site — they are honest)

1. Folklore is the dataset, and folklore is not a survey. A cryptid's range on a map is a map of stories and translations, not of animals. The bunyip's "distribution" is the distribution of a word and its regional synonyms.
2. Translation flattens description. "Almas", "yeren", "migoi", "orang pendek" and "yowie" are not one thing each; they are clusters of local categories. Treating a Mongolian almas and an Appalachian Bigfoot as one species is an artefact of English-language writing, not a finding.
3. Media waves contaminate later reports. Loch Ness sightings effectively begin in 1933 after press coverage; yeren expeditions were followed by a surge of Chinese reports; Iceland's 2012 video produced more sightings than the 600 years before it. Each wave weakens witness independence.
4. The tourism incentive now dominates collection. Registered Nessie sightings fell to three in 2024 while cryptid tourism is worth tens of millions a year to the region — the incentives favour the legend's survival, not the animal's discovery. Where a register exists, ask who pays for it.
5. Absence of data is not data. Large parts of the range claimed for mokele-mbembe and the Central Asian almas have no systematic faunal survey at all. "No evidence" from a region nobody has surveyed means nothing; this pack flags those gaps instead of filling them.
6. Extinction cases invert the usual bias. For the thylacine, the claim is survival of a known animal, so the prior is reasonable — which is why it is the one case here where a mainstream journal published a survival-window estimate.

Verdict language used in this pack

• Tested, unreconciled — a method has run and left a residual it cannot account for (e.g. the quantity of eel DNA at Loch Ness).
• Documented, unverified — the paperwork is real; the animal is not.
• Reported only — press/folklore tier, no official record.
• Presentism risk — economic or cultural value keeps the claim alive independent of evidence.
• Explained — a published mundane cause is generally accepted.
• Demonstrated false — a known artefact or admission of fraud.