Field correspondent Dieter Haas has photographs, twenty-one witnesses, and a professional grievance that has aged like a very dry Riesling — which is to say, with considerable sharpness.

I want to begin by saying that I have a great deal of respect for the international cryptozoological press. I have worked alongside its representatives, shared sources with its editors, and on one memorable Tuesday in 2019 directed its fact-checkers toward the county archive here in Brattleboro, where they found exactly what I told them they would find and had the good grace to acknowledge it in a footnote. So when I tell you that what has been done to Dieter Haas and his Wolpertinger documentation is an embarrassment to the field, I am not being theatrical. I am being precise.

Haas, a field correspondent based out of Munich who has spent eleven years documenting cryptid activity across the Bavarian Alps with a rigour that puts most academic departments to shame, submitted his photographic evidence to four separate outlets in late October. The photographs — taken over three consecutive nights in the Allgäu region, across a stretch of alpine meadow he has been monitoring since 2021 — show a creature of unmistakable composite morphology: the body of a small mammal, the rack of a juvenile deer, the wing structure of a large bird folded against the flank, and what Haas has described, with characteristic understatement, as ‘dentition that requires further discussion.’ Twenty-one independent witnesses. Corroborating track casts. A seven-page appendix. And the response from the international press, in aggregate, was to describe the subject of this evidence as a ‘silly little Bavarian rabbit.’

Community Notice

I submitted seven pages of appendices. Seven. The editor’s response was four words long and included an emoji. I will not say which emoji. My lawyer has advised me not to say which emoji.

— Dieter Haas, Field Correspondent, WTC Munich Bureau

What The Evidence Actually Shows

The Wolpertinger is not, for the record, a rabbit. It is not principally a rabbit. It is not rabbit-adjacent in any way that excuses treating it as a novelty. The creature has documented roots in Bavarian folklore going back several centuries, and the consistent elements across those accounts — the combination of mammalian and avian features, the reported bioluminescent eye-shine, the apparent territorial behaviour at elevation — are not the fever dreams of a pre-industrial peasantry with too much time and not enough other fauna. They are field notes. Imprecise ones, yes. Written by people without track casting kits and thermal imaging equipment. But field notes nonetheless. I have read primary sources in worse condition than the Allgäu appendix and seen them treated with considerably more deference by people who should know better.

The open letter itself — which Haas circulated to WTC and several affiliated correspondents on the first of November and which runs to four pages, single-spaced, in the original German — is not, I will grant, a temperate document. There is a passage in the third page that I would describe as incandescent, and another in the fourth that I would describe as personally directed in ways that may yet require mediation. But the core argument is sound. Evidence of this quality, submitted with this level of supporting documentation, from a correspondent with this track record, deserved a substantive editorial response. What it received was a dismissal of the kind usually reserved for blurry garden-camera footage and anonymous tip-line submissions from people who have had a difficult week.

The Patterson-Gimlin footage was called a man in a suit for fifty years. I am not saying this is Patterson-Gimlin. I am saying that if we keep calling everything a man in a suit, eventually something is going to be very offended by the comparison.

— Dieter Haas, Open Letter to the International Cryptid Press, November 1st

I read Haas’s letter on a Tuesday evening, here, at my desk, with Ptolemy on the filing cabinet and the rain coming in off the Connecticut River at the particular angle it takes in November that suggests it is not entirely operating within normal precipitation parameters. I found myself in agreement with more of it than I expected, and I have forwarded a copy to our editorial team with a note recommending that we formally request the full photographic archive for independent assessment. The Wolpertinger documentation is not a joke. Dieter Haas is not a joke. And the next editor who responds to a seven-page appendix with four words and an undisclosed emoji should perhaps consider whether they are, in fact, in the right line of work.