By now you should have heard of Lucas Rosa. Not only an undefeated MMA fighter, but also a lover of all things Cryptid. This month's Crate featured his and his brother's TWO POUND, Full Color book, Cryptidpedia. Check out our logo on his trunks while you watch him continue his Undefeated career. As one of our fans said... "As seen on Punchy Man's butt!!!"
Here is a little something Lucas and Francis Rosa wrote about their interests in Cryptids:
The Story of Cryptidpedia
Intro
Writing to you all in collaboration are the authors of Cryptidpedia, Francis Rosa and Lucas Rosa. One of us is a professional fiction writer, while also spending much of his time over the past few years doing outdoor conservation work and even wildland firefighting. The other one of us is a philosopher, adept writer, but more than any of this, he’s a highly skilled professional MMA fighter who goes by the fight name Lucas “King of Monsters” Rosa. As teenagers we did a strange, odd, maybe reckless thing: we wrote a 300-page book on cryptids, mainly by accident. It’s called Cryptidpedia and you may have found it in your Cryptid Crate recently.
I know what you’re thinking: How do you accidentally write a book on cryptids? Well, anyone who has ever been truly obsessed with a subject knows all it takes is sheer enthusiasm and an inability to care what anyone else thinks in order to stumble into something great. So, here’s how…
A Passion for Cryptids
First came an unrelenting passion. We grew up in coastal New England and from the start monsters, myths, and folklore inhabited every corner of our imagination. In one of my first memories I recall looking into a thin colorful monster book, flipping endlessly through the same dozen pages, each filled with a different holographic image: the maw of a dragon breathing fire off the page, Medusa’s snakes seeming to move about as I turned my head, the eyes of a yeti staring back at me from an icy cave, leaving me absolutely terrified and yet strangely drawn, perhaps for life, to its aura of infinite mystery.
Kaiju monsters battled on the television screen as often as not. Godzilla, Gamera, and other prehistoric radioactive beasts roared and breathed atomic rays, fighting alien creatures as Tokyo was saved or destroyed for the hundredth time. We watched Martians invade and zap whole hillsides clean in the War of the Worlds. We were captivated by Rod Sterling’s mind-bending stories where gremlins tinkered on the wings of planes and flying saucers descended from the skies. We were drawn, on instinct, to the odd, monstrous, supernatural, and bizarre. R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps was a way of life.
Lucas would tell ghost stories on the bus ride to school drawing friends in until a dozen or more kids were gathered around listening to paranormal tales. We would tumble off frost-covered dunes in the dead of winter, wind whipping up from the Cape, pretending we were being chased by a yeti. We would adventure and hunt dragons, or sea monsters on the beach, or wild folkloric creatures in the woods naming and categorizing them like little taxonomists, not yet able to even do proper division and already arguing over the scientific names and classifications of made-up beasts.
On quiet autumn nights, when the tourists of our sleepy town had all taken flight, nights in which you could see the stars bobbing wonderfully over the Atlantic Ocean, we would look up and think about aliens and see UFOs in every abnormal light fitting in the sky. Trips to Vermont were excuses to hunt for Bigfoot or to worry over falling victim to the likes of the legendary Pigman, like every day was its own fresh episode of the X-Files.
Soon enough we were in libraries and browsing online, searching articles and more books endlessly. We were peering down every aisle of the bookstore until we found the ones filled with tales of plesiosaurs in Scotland, 60-foot dinosaurs roaming Africa, giant bats swooping through a chain of islands in Indonesia, furred humanoids terrorizing the American countryside, ghosts and spirits haunting each rural roadside; every page was a new universe of fantastic possibilities to explore.
We learned what cryptozoology was and what cryptids were, the strange terms were like magic. We were hooked. We would grab a camcorder (yes, a camcorder), check the battery, and go about directing our own homemade MonsterQuest episodes, chasing our Boston Terrier around the house, secretly on the trail of a hodag or a giant rat. We’d shut the lights off in the basement, switching to the green-shadowy world of our camcorder’s night mode, waiting for spirits to creak or breathe into the recorder while holding our own breath.
I’m sure someone somewhere reading this can relate in some small way to these childish, fantastical experiences. When all this is taken into consideration, a book of cryptids starts to feel far less accidental, and perhaps even inevitable. But why bother with such a love for monsters, for mysteries, for the dark corners of the unknown, for things one can’t be certain even exist? Well, anyone who loves cryptids enough to be reading this, to be willing to subscribe to whole crates dedicated to the subject, must have some inkling.
There is an answer involving the need, almost primal in us all, to explore and revere the unknown, the peculiar story, the sudden apparition, the thing that goes bump in the night. It also involves chasing that kernel of truth behind every cryptid, believing in the possibility that there is something new and fresh out there and that some of the greatest elements of nature and our lovely planet can’t and won’t be explained unless we are willing to keep an open mind and search for answers instead of racing and reaching for predetermined assumptions. This is all important, however the simplest answer we give here to the question “why bother?” is more simple and childish in the best kind of way:
Because what could possibly be cooler than the idea of monsters? We can think of nothing.
What It’s Like Writing a Book on Cryptids as a Kid
The creation of Cryptidpedia was rough. Simply put, we were young and had zero idea what we were doing. I remember taking a big piece of construction paper and drawing up the long, curved back of the Mokele-Mbembe, filling in a description and all sorts of stats like I was designing a baseball card. Soon I was listing out cryptid after cryptid after cryptid, every single one I could think of, until I needed a bigger piece of paper, then more paper. Lucas quickly joined in. We were cramming every description of a cryptid we could onto our family computer downstairs. Soon it wasn’t a fun list but an actual document hundreds of entries long. We didn’t realize we were writing a book until it was too late, by then we were too deep into the project to stop.
Many mistakes were made, computers were still newer mystical things to us. Our first piece of advice is don’t write your entire book on a Microsoft PowerPoint document because you just learned about this nifty little piece of tech in your middle school computer class and think it looks fun. This decision will cause some real formatting headaches down the line. We weren’t even 12 when we started. We had no sense of copyright laws or photo compression. We copied and pasted blurry images of Bigfoot and lake monsters and the Chupacabra from random Google searches. Our next piece of advice (one we all are still learning the world over in this social media age) don’t believe everything you read on the internet. This is especially tricky when researching folkloric creatures that may or may not exist. Telling what was a “real” fact about a possibly imaginary creature, from a fake made-up one back in the mid-2000s was difficult. Needless to say, if we were to go back in time, there is much we would change. Cryptidpedia is far from perfect, but it was written with care and passion.
So far, we’ve described technical difficulties. However, the real blood, sweat, and tears came with the contents of the book itself; the yearslong deep dive into cryptids and the world of cryptozoology was extraordinary. We read every book, searched every website. We drove to the Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. Back then it was still just a small, overstuffed room crammed behind another shop. We stood there with a massive three-ringed binder and handed a draft of our first few pages to the legendary cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, just for the heck of it. While other kids were likely finishing math homework, we were having arguments about what to include on our page about the Mongolian Death Worm, flipping through sighting databases, and reading up on the latest hoaxes alongside the latest scientific discoveries.
It took nearly five years of editing, re-editing, and changing every aspect a dozen times over before the children’s book went to a publisher for even more editing and changes. At one point I recall Lucas asking me to lock him in a room, and not allow him out until he’d reviewed all 300 pages, making notes on each page regarding the layout and editorial changes from the publisher. I spent weekends reading up on Sasquatch, the Jersey Devil, and thylacines, these became the mascots of our imagination.
In the end, we wound up with an incredible book we could actually hold in our hands. It was given a front-page story in our local newspaper on December 21st, 2012. The presumed doomsday of the Mayan calendar, which we had ironically included a blurb about in the “strange phenomenon” section of the book, never realizing at the start that this fun list of ours might in the future be finished, bound, and published. The book was one day old and already it felt as though the encyclopedia needed new edits and content. The work of a cryptid enthusiast is never done it seems.
Further Thoughts on Cryptids and Cryptidpedia
After publishing Cryptidpedia, we soon had the fun experience of getting to visit schools and talk to students about the writing process, what it was like to create a book before the age of 17, and most fantastically, to introduce students to the world of cryptids. As time went on we attended college, returning home to give the occasional presentation. But something quite interesting started happening, a cultural shift had taken place it seemed.
Suddenly, everywhere all at once, people knew what cryptids were. We were getting detailed questions on which cryptids to put in our “next volume” as kids rattled off fun facts of their own about their favorite one. We’d once had to explain in excruciating detail what the book was all about and what a cryptid was while adults, students, and friends alike stared at us like we each had three heads. Now cryptids like Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster were being discussed like they were common knowledge. References to them were appearing all over the media, there was an explosion of podcasts, and festivals, cryptids appearing like 21st century logos on T-shirts. They were being referenced in cartoons, commercials, and our favorite Godzilla films.
What a surreal thrill it was to see this small niche passion emerge from obscurity and gain such new and prominent significance within popular culture! It is something that impresses us to this day, even as our lives have headed in new directions far from stacks of lake monster articles and UFO printouts.
These days I (Francis) am a fiction writer. I’ve also spent the last few years traversing the country as a member of AmeriCorps acting as a disaster volunteer, wildland firefighter, and doing conservation work along the way. While on these journeys I’ve often had a bit of that childhood pull for monsters and cryptids, for the odd and strange phenomenon, return in sudden crisp moments. I walk down a winding dirt trail deep in the Ozarks at dusk wondering if I’ll hear a howl or spot the hulking silhouette of the Missouri Monster in the fading light. I stare out at the Gulf and try not to imagine tentacles rising from the froth. It has happened while paddling in a canoe to install a duck shelter in some hideaway bank shore; I imagine a hump and a craning prehistoric neck rising from the glassy lake surface. It has happened in the quiet snow drifts of Montana as I trek through a forest waiting to see a flash of Sasquatch amongst the enormous trees. It has happened in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas when looking up at the night sky, greeted by the chandelier of stars above, wondering if we truly are alone out in the cosmos as, what I can only hope are coyotes, wail hauntingly in the distance.
Meanwhile Lucas has traveled the world over from ancient temple ruins of Cambodia to the cobblestone streets of the Netherlands studying martial arts, often from a philosophical perspective. He has taken this knowledge into the cage with him, training ceaselessly, fighting opponent upon opponent, honing his skills as a pro fighter and working his way up the ranks.
These are decidedly not careers in cryptozoology, so why then did we spend so much of our youth spontaneously writing a book on cryptids? Well, because no one told us we shouldn’t. And when people did start to tell us we shouldn’t and were being crazy, we didn’t listen or care. I suppose it’s the same thinking that allows Lucas Rosa, the self-declared “King of Monsters” to hop into that cage and engage in an MMA fight, month after month, to follow his lifelong dream as an athlete. There’s a corny but very true thread there: We must follow our weird, wonderful passions and pipe dreams wherever they lead, it’s all we have. They are what make life so interesting.
Cryptidpedia is simply a childhood dream splayed over the pages of a colorful book, cobbled together by teenage cryptid enthusiasts. It’s not near perfect or anywhere near a complete compilation of cryptids, but we’re glad to have been able to play our small part in spreading a passion for the subject to others. The explosion of cryptid culture has been epic to watch. To now be handed the ability, through Cryptid Crate, to share this book with people who care about cryptids and the mysterious world surrounding us, in the same magical way we do, gives us great pleasure. We hope you read it with the same joy and wonder we felt in writing it.