Bernard Heuvelmans (1916
of a friend by Loren
Switzerland's Museum of Zoology of Lausanne informed
cryptozoologists worldwide on the morning of 24 August 2001, of the
death of Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, 84, the "Father of
Cryptozoology." Around noon on August 22nd, without suffering,
Heuvelmans, passed away, in his bed at his Le Vesinet, France home,
with his faithful dog nearby.
Heuvelmans, who had become a Buddhist during his lifetime, was
buried in Buddhist monk attire during a private funeral at Le
Vesinet on August 27. His former wife, colleague, artist
collaborator Alika (Monique Watteau) Lindbergh, who cared for him in
his declining years, was in charge of the ceremony, following his last
Heuvelmans' death is sad news. His towering presence in the
field leaves a long shadow. His influence is
great. Heuvelmans' contributions to cryptozoology, zoology, and
anthropology are significant and far-reaching, and his impact on
generations to come will cross decades.
Bernard Heuvelmans was born in Le Havre on October 10, 1916, of a
Dutch mother and a Belgian father in exile, and was raised as a
"native of Belgium." Heuvelmans found he had a love of natural
history from an early age, keeping all kinds of animals, especially
monkeys. At school, he shocked his Jesuit teachers by his unholy
interest in evolution and jazz. His interest in unknown animals was
first piqued as a youngster by his reading of science-fiction
adventures such as Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
the Sea and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. He
never forgot these initial passions.
Heuvelmans obtained his higher education at the University Libre of
Brussels. While at the university, he won the first prize for small
bands at an International Congress of Amateur Jazz. At the age of 23
years, before World War II, he obtained a doctor's title in
zoological sciences. His thesis was dedicated to the classification of
the hitherto unclassifiable teeth of the aardvark (Orycteropus
afer), a unique African mammal. Heuvelmans then spent the next
years writing about the history of science, publishing numerous
scientific works notably in the Bulletin of the Royal Museum of
Natural History of Belgium. His interests continued to extend beyond
the zoological realm. Captured by the Germans after he was called up
for military service from Belgium, he escaped four times before
eking out a living as a professional jazz singer and then as a
science writer. He saw himself as a humanist in the broadest sense,
and he published two works late in the war: The Man Among Stars
(1944) and The Man in the Hollow of the Atom (1943). The
Germans, during the war, arrested him because his writings offended
them, and then the Belgians arrested him afterwards, because he had
written them at all.
Settling in Paris and more particularly in Le Vésinet from
1947, Heuvelmans became a comedian, a jazz musician (From
Bamboula to Be-bop, 1949), and a writer (The Secret of Fates
in three volumes, The Continuation of the Life, The
Abolition of the Death, The Renovation, 1951-1952).
When Heuvelmans read a January 3, 1948 Saturday Evening Post
article ("There Could be Dinosaurs"), in which biologist Ivan T.
Sanderson sympathetically discussed the evidence for relict
dinosaurs, Heuvelmans decided to pursue his vague, unfocussed interest
in hidden animals in a systematic way. At the time, he
was translating numerous scientific works, among which was The
Secret World of the Animals by Dr. Maurice Burton, which was
republished afterward in seven volumes under the title Encyclopedia
of the Animal Kingdom.
Heuvelmans began to gather material about yet-to-be-discovered
animals in what he would later refer as his growing "dossiers" on
them. From 1948 on, Heuvelmans exhaustively sought evidence in
scientific and literary sources. Within five years he had amassed so
much material that he was ready to write a large book. That book turned
out to be Sur la piste des betes ignorees, published
in 1955, and better known in its English translation three years
later as On the Track of Unknown Animals. Almost five
decades later, the book remains in print, with more than one million
copies sold in various translations and editions, including one in
1995, with a large updated introduction.
The book's impact was enormous. As one critic remarked at the time,
"Because his research is based on rigorous dedication to scientific
method and scholarship and his solid background in zoology,
Heuvelmans's findings are respected throughout the scientific
community." Soon Heuvelmans was engaged in massive correspondence
as his library and other researches continued.
In the course of letter-writing, he invented the word
"cryptozoology" (it does not appear in On the Track).
That word saw print for the first time in 1959 when French
wildlife official Lucien Blancou dedicated a book to the "master of
Heuvelmans corresponded with many cryptozoologists worldwide, as he
did with me, over the decades. By the 1960s, most in the field had
elevated Blancou's phrase in honor of Heuvelmans, and Heuvelmans was
being called the "Father of Cryptozoology."
Writing in Cryptozoology in 1984, Heuvelmans said, "I tried
to write about it according to the rules of scientific
documentation." Because of the unorthodox nature of his interests,
however, he had no institutional sponsorship and had to support
himself with his writing. "That is why," he wrote, "I have always
had to make my books fascinating for the largest possible audience."
Heuvelmans and his book influenced the investigative work of
cryptozoology supporter Tom Slick. Sanderson, who influenced
Heuvelmans, in turn was influenced by Heuvelmans. Heuvelmans served
as a confidential consultant, along with such intellectual early
contributors like anthropologist George Agogino and zoologist Ivan
Sanderson, on Slick's secret board of advisors. Heuvelmans was asked
to examine the "Yeti skullcap" brought back by Sir Edumund Hillary's World
Book expedition of 1960. He was also one of the first to declare
it was a ritual object made from the skin of a serow, a small
goatlike animal found in the Himalayas, even before Hillary's
debunking of the yeti took place. Heuvelmans' extensive files on
the Slick expeditions remained mostly unpublished until he
contributed some for inclusion in the 1989 book, Tom Slick and
the Search for the Yeti.
On the Track of Unknown Animals was concerned
land animals. The second of Heuvelmans' landmark works to be
translated into English, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents
(1968), covered the ocean's unknowns, including the recognized but
still in some ways enigmatic giant squid.
In 1968, Heuvelmans (at Sanderson's invitation) examined what was
represented to be the frozen cadaver of a hairy hominoid, the
subject of his L'homme de Neanderthal est toujours vivant
(with Boris Porshnev, 1974). Other books, none yet translated into
English, include works on surviving dinosaurs and relict hominids in
Heuvelmans's Center for Cryptozoology, established in 1975, was
first housed near Le Bugue in the south of France, but in the 1990s,
moved to LeVesinet, closer to Paris. It consisted of his huge
private library and his massive files, his original treasured
dossiers. Heuvelmans was elected president when the International
Society of Cryptozoology was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1982.
He held that position until his death. He also was involved with the
British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club and other efforts for
active cryptid studies globally. The decades saw more and more
honors amassed, as for example, when in 1990, he was named a honorary
member of the Cryptozoology Association of Russia. In a 1984
interview Heuvelmans expressed the desire to write a 20-volume
cryptozoology encyclopedia, but owing to the death of a translator
and other problems with his publisher, no volume appeared before
Down through the years, without fanfare, Heuvelmans journeyed from
the shores of Loch Ness to the jungles of Malaysia, from Africa to
Indonesia, interviewing witnesses and examining the evidence for
cryptids.He produced a few articles along the way, and infrequently
gave news interviews. But beginning in the 1990s, he would avoid media
events. For example, when a television network asked in 1994
and 1995, to tape an interview with Heuvelmans about the Minnesota
Iceman, he refused to come to America to do it, and then denied a
filming in France. Although he had had a French television
program on natural history mysteries some two decades earlier, he
routinely would not grant most mainstream interviews in the last
decade of his life.
He also hardly ever trekked to formal meetings. For many of us
in North America, visiting with him, for example, at an early 1980s
gathering in New York City, will now always be a delightful and rare
memory. When in February 1997, he was awarded the Gabriele
Peters Prize for Fantastic Science at the Zoological Museum of the
University of Hamburg, Germany, he was unable to appear to collect
the prize of 10,000 Marks (about $6000) and sent his friend,
journalist, and cryptozoologist Werner Reichenbach, to accept on his
Heuvelmans's health began to more rapidly fail in the mid-1990s;
still he continued to work on completing his grand plan for his
multi-volume encyclopedia. In 1999, he donated his vast
holdings and archives in cryptozoology to The
Museum of Zoology of Lausanne in Switzerland, following
through on a commitment he had made in 1987. By 2001, many of us
were dismayed to find he was mostly bedridden, refusing visits, and
in very poor health.
In his waning years, his mind was filled with worries that no one
would credit him for what he had done. He need not have troubled
himself. Heuvelmans said he merely wanted to be remembered as "The
Father of Cryptozoology." He will be recalled thusly for his
efforts on behalf of the new science, as well as much more, for his
personality and scholarship. Bernard Heuvelmans, dead at 84, will
hardly be forgotten.
Nevertheless, Heuvelmans' friendship, fresh insights, and frisky
humor will be missed. Goodbye, my friend.
A list of Heuvelmans's books follows:
1955 Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées. Paris:
1958 Dans le sillage des monstres marins - Le Kraken et le
Poulpe Colossal. Paris: Plon.
1958 On the Track of Unknown Animals. London:
1959 On the Track of Unknown Animals. New York: Hill and Wang
1965 Le Grand-Serpent-de-Mer, le problème zoologique et
sa solution. Paris: Plon.
1965 On the Track of Unknown Animals. (Abridged, revised.)
New York: Hill and Wang.
1968 In the Wake of Sea Serpents. New York: Hill and Wang.
1975 Dans le sillage des monstres marins - Le Kraken et le
Poulpe Colossal. Paris: François Beauval : 2nd
édition revue et complétée.
1975 Le Grand-Serpent-de-Mer, le problème zoologique et
sa solution. Paris: Plon, 2nd édition revue et
1978 Les derniers dragons d'Afrique. Paris: Plon.
1980 Les bêtes humaines d'Afrique. Paris: Plon.
1995 On the Track of Unknown Animals. London: Kegan
Heuvelmans, Bernard, and Boris F. Porchnev
1974 L'homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant.
Obituary by Loren Coleman
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