Loren Coleman and El Mono Grande

 

Yet claiming that Montandon and de Loys exaggerated the find is one thing, and a “sinister hoax” is something else.  What I hope to show here is that Coleman has been guilty of at least the same degree of uncritical thinking for which he chides those who “wish to believe” in de Loys’ photograph.  In the cryptozoological debate between Coleman and Shoemaker, Shoemaker wins.

 

Coleman and Raynal’s article in The Anomalist begins with the standard background story on de Loys’ crew’s encounter in the jungles between Columbia and Venezuela and the original publication of the photo in 1929.  They then move to Ivan T. Sanderson’s skepticism of the photo and cite authorities in support of the position that Montandon’s “Ameranthropoides loysi” is similar to the Ateles belzebuth spider monkey.  The most enlightening part of the piece is the announcement of Montandon’s vicious racism.  He was a polygenist who believed that human races evolved from different species of primates.  As Coleman and Raynal write, “It was important to his view of the world that he understood the ‘white’ issued from archaic Homo sapiens (cro-magnon), the ‘yellow’ from the orang-utan, the ‘black’ from the gorilla or the chimpanzee, and the discovery of the Ameranthropoid ‘explained’ the origin of the American Indian (the so-called ‘red’ race).”  It is noted that Montandon operated as an antisemitic “expert” on race in Vichy France, at one point recommending “cutting off the nose of the Jewish females” to reduce Jewish populations.  Although their documentation of Montandon’s racist views was provided only after critique, Coleman and Raynal should be applauded for contributing this vital information to the general discussion about the de Loys photograph.

 

Michael T. Shoemaker, having previously written on the Mono Grande mystery, offered a reply in the following year’s edition of The Anomalist.  He agreed, as he had earlier, that the creature in the photograph resembles a spider monkey.  Yet according to Shoemaker it contains anomalous characteristics which Coleman and Raynal did not address, including its purported height of approximately four or five feet.  This range comes from Montandon’s original estimations and Shoemaker’s measurement based on a crate board visible in the picture. (Montandon derived his by obtaining a crate from the original manufacturer.)  As fellow critic Hax notes, “If de Loys’ creature was, in fact, an abnormally large spider monkey, then it was abnormal on a scale of 2x, which would make it more a freak of nature (like a human being 12 feet tall).  However, in de Loys’ account, there were at least two of the beasties—one female, one supposedly male.  A double freak of nature?”

 

In the same issue, Coleman and Raynal shot back:

 

"With regards to the size of the animal, de Loys himself gave two different measurements, 1.35 meters (48.6 inches) and then 1.57 meters (56.52 inches).  The size of the crate, the size of the boards in the crate, the fact that the crate may have been cut down can be debated for years.  …No physical evidence of the crate exists and, of course, no physical evidence of this ‘ape’ exists.  The reliability of this photograph must be viewed in the same context as an analysis of an eyewitness account.  Due to the lack of clear scale and the angle of the photograph, the merits of the photograph must be weighed on the virtue of its circumstances.  And to analyze this photograph in its proper context, we must examine the motives of its greatest promoter, George Montandon."