>>37516
I saw a really strange worm/snail when I was around 7-8 years old. It was bright green and kinda slimy and it was twisting itself around a small branch. Whatever it was, it must have been pretty rare, because I've never seen anything like it again.
When I was 15 I went to a winter retreat up in the mountains with some other kids from my church, we stayed there for a week playing board games, hiking and socialising (well, I didn't socialise much, I was alone most of the time). One day we were walking near the retreat and we noticed some footprints in the snow, just a few metres away from the house (which was near the road and close to the woods). They looked like they had been left by a wolf or perhaps a big dog. They were huge and quite deep. The strange thing is that they appeared out of nowhere on the ground, seemed to go towards the house, then turned back toward the forest, and disappeared again. I don't know if anybody else found this weird, we didn't really talk about it.
I like the theory that some cryptids (unknown animals) come from underground, it fits nicely with the hollow earth theory. On the other hand, there is some evidence that cryptozoology shouldn't be looked at through a zoological perspective but rather through a parapsychological one. Remember the Mothman for example: it wasn't just a big man-bird thing. It predicted the future and was a shapeshifter. The Loch Ness monster has been linked to Aleister Crowley, the famous magician, who lived in a house by the lake for a while, and supposedly performed a ritual that opened a portal there. It has been theorised that Bigfoot is a ghost (whatever a ghost is!). http://weekinweird.com/2016/12/08/bigfoot-is-a-ghost-interdimensional-sasquatch-tulpas-green-flash/
The issue of whether we're dealing with physical entities or something more ethereal also applies to UFOs, with some researchers (most notably Jacques Vallee and John Keel, and more recently Graham Hancock) suggesting that we ought to move past the extraterrestrial hypothesis and consider the possibility that the phenomenon is native to our planet (but interdimensional in nature). And intriguingly, there have been stories where Bigfoot was sighted soon after the appearance of strange lights in the sky.
In my opinion, the study of cryptozoology requires a flexibility of mind that most modern scientists don't possess. I was a member of a cryptozoological forum for many years and eventually it became obvious to me that, despite their impressive encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, the moderators were making no progress in their research and couldn't make any progress, because they insisted on viewing cryptozoology through a strictly 'scientific' lens. They never discussed things like werewolves and giants for example, because mainstream science has ruled that certain creatures are taboo and anyone who took them seriously should be ridiculed. In other words, they were little better than the professional debunkers who claim to be sceptics while defending the status quo (and failing to see the irony in this).
Of course, if we're just talking about animals that are unusually big in relation to the average for their species, this doesn't require any kind of paradigm shift on our part.