Posted by: Loren Coleman on October 31st, 2010
Whew. October is almost over. As the end of the month nears, the media requests and interviews kept mounting. On Thursday, during a moment before the next tour, The Portland Daily Sun caught me at the entrance to the museum, waiting for the folks in the next group.
Leading up to that, it certainly had been quite a week of visitors.
Lots of secretive celebrities of one kind or another found their way to the International Cryptozoology Museum during the days before Halloween. If you were a visitor, and happened to be there at the right time, you might have bumped into some of these folks.
Here’s a quick overview.
Last Tuesday, the power-pop-punk group Goo Goo Dolls appeared in Portland, Maine, at the State Theater. Bob Keyes’ review the next day in the Portland Press Herald noted a stop the guys had made in town:
“It was hard to determine who had more fun at the State Theatre on Tuesday night: the band or the crowd….Bass player and vocalist Robby Takac also created the image that he wanted to be nowhere else. He told stories about his day off in Portland on Monday. He ate lobster, got a haircut and visited the cryptozoology museum just up the street from the theater, posing for a photo with the stuffed Bigfoot.”
Then a conspiracy author dropped by. Adam Gorightly, covert author from northern California, stopped to say hi, and discuss matters mysterious. Adam is the hidden talent behind some interesting books.
One of my favorite’s is his insightful work James Shelby Downard’s Mystical War, which was released by Virtual Bookworm Publishing, in November 2008. Adam, who authored the underground classic, The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture (with its foreword by Robert Anton Wilson), is a great person to have penned the biography of Downard.
Charles Hall, former rising rock star of the Maine music scene (Gargoyles, Talismen), visited from Manhattan, with his wife, Kasia, who is a graduate student in museum anthropology at Columbia University.
In the realm of grrrr, various people came to talk of beasts and lions.
For example, there was Mark LaFlamme, infamous as the original crime reporter behind the Terror of Turner, er, the Maine Mutant! He was at the Green Hand Books, along with his wife, promoting his latest work, Box of Lies, and told me that his new novel about the Turner cryptid is finished. It is entitled The Beast, and I bet it will be out in 2011!
Here’s Mark with the foot of the Turner beast that is in the museum.
Another great couple of people at the museum on Friday were a delight to talk to. Also, I actually went to visit their special friends on Saturday.
As it turns out, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is in town and who should show up for a tour at the museum? None other than the lion man, David Polke, and his wife, a high wire artist, Lynn. The celebrity lion of the circus is a rare white individual.
David and Lynn Polke, great circus people.
One of their lions is a white one.
On Saturday, I took a break from the museum, while docent Sarah McCann covered and ran down to the Civic Center parking lot to see David with his six female lions and one young white male. David let the cats out to exercise in the warmth of the October sunshine, during my visit.
All and all, it was great end to a busy week. Were you there too? You are a celebrity in my mind. So send in your photos.
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.