Often referred to as the Father of Cryptozoology, Bernard Heuvelmans was born on October 10, 1916, in Le Havre, France, to a Dutch mother and a Belgian father in exile. His interest in unknown animals was initially sparked as a young child after reading several science fiction adventures such as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The latter has influenced the lives of many well-known cryptozoologists.

At age 23, Bernard Heuvelmans obtained a zoological sciences doctorate from the University Libre of Brussels. His thesis was dedicated to classifying the hitherto unclassifiable teeth of the aardvark, Orycteropus afer, a unique African mammal. Over the next few years, Heuvelmans spent his time writing about the history of science, publishing many scientific works in the Bulletin of the Royal Museum of Natural History of Belgium until he was called up for military service and captured by the Germans in World War II. Bernard Heuvelmans escaped the German prison camp and made a living as a professional jazz singer and science writer.

In 1947 Heuvelmans settled in Le Vesinet, Paris, where he made a living as a comedian, jazz musician, and writer. On January 3, 1948, he read a Saturday Evening Post article by biologist Ivan T. Sanderson, entitled There Could Be Dinosaurs, which sympathetically discussed the evidence for relict populations of dinosaurs. This article brought Heuvelmans’ long-standing interest in the unknown to the forefront of his thoughts. He had amassed so much information that he felt ready to write a large book on the topic in five years.

The book which came from this wealth of information was entitled Sur la piste des betes ignores, published in 1955; this book was republished in English three years later as On the Track of Unknown Animals, 1958. Considered by some to be the most influential work on cryptozoology in the twentieth century, On the Track of Unknown Animals remains in print almost five decades later, with more than one million copies sold in various translations and editions, including one in 1995 which was reprinted with an extensive updated introduction.

Unlike many books on cryptozoology today, Heuvelmans book was relatively well-received by the scientific community. One critic explained that because Heuvelmans research was based on rigorous dedication to the scientific method and his solid background in zoology, his findings were respected throughout the scientific community. During the massive correspondence with fellow scientists that followed his book’s success, Heuvelmans coined cryptozoology. This term does not appear in the first printing of On the Track of Unknown Animals because it had not yet been invented. By the 1960s, most in the field began to use the term in honor of Heuvelmans, who was labeled the Father of Cryptozoology.

Heuvelmans books influenced the likes of Ivan T. Sanderson, who initially influenced Heuvelmans, Loren Coleman, and oil tycoon Tom Slick, who appointed him a confidential consultant on his secret board of advisors. Heuvelmans was asked to examine the so-called Yeti Skullcap brought back by Sir Edmund Hillary’s World Book expedition in 1960. After careful examination, Heuvelmans determined that it was a ritual object made from the skin of a serow, a small goat-like animal found in the Himalayas.

In 1968, Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson examined what was claimed to be the frozen body of an unknown hairy hominoid, which came to be called the Minnesota Iceman. After reviewing the large block of ice containing the iceman, Heuvelmans thought that the creature could be genuine but was not positive. He published a formal description of it, giving it the scientific name of Homo pongoides, which would later become the subject of his book entitled L’homme de Neanderthal est Toujours vivant.

Heuvelmans established the Center for Cryptozoology in 1975 near Le Bugue in the south of France, but in the 1990s, he moved its location to LeVesinet, close to Paris. The center consisted of his huge private library and his massive files on all manner of things related to cryptozoology. Heuvelmans has traveled the globe interviewing witnesses and examining evidence of living animals that remain unknown to science throughout the years.

Sadly his health began to decline in the early 1990s. Still, the intrepid Heuvelmans continued to gather information in an attempt to complete what would be one of his greatest works of literature, a 20 volume cryptozoology encyclopedia. In February of 1997, he was awarded the Gabriele Peters Prize for Fantastic Science at the Zoological Museum of the University of Hamburg, Germany.