12 Facts About Roy Mackal

Roy P Mackal was a University of Chicago biologist best known to the general public for his interest in cryptozoology.

Roy Mackal spent the rest of his academic career with Chicago as an educator and researcher.

Roy Mackal was a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Roy Mackal is widely considered to be one of the seminal figures in the subculture of cryptozoology.

Roy Mackal was the ISC's vice-president for the entirety of its existence, although the organization gradually folded in the early 21st century owing to lack of funding and the deaths of Heuvelmans and Greenwell.

Roy Mackal began investigation into the Loch Ness Monster phenomenon during the 1960s.

Roy Mackal designed a "biopsy harpoon", a dart-like contraption he attached to a submarine in order to collect tissue samples.

However, Roy Mackal himself was convinced that something lived beneath the waters after recording his own sighting of the creature in 1970, and in his 1976 book The Monsters of Loch Ness, he suggested that a population of large, previously unknown amphibians were living in the loch.

Roy Mackal later changed his mind and proposed that the creatures were zeuglodons, serpentine whales believed to have gone extinct several million years ago.

Roy Mackal himself did not actually see the creature, but he and his colleagues did collect multiple firsthand reports from Congo natives, who, according to Roy Mackal, consistently described a creature similar to a long-necked sauropod.

Roy Mackal had tried to obtain funds for a third expedition to the region, but his plans were never realized.

Roy Mackal died at the age of 88 in Chicago, Illinois, on September 14,2013, of heart failure.