The RCABF Today
The Regional Committee for Anomalous Boundary Fauna did not dissolve at the 1978 reconciliation, whatever our older members tell you. It is still there: small, separately incorporated, with correspondents in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and West Virginia, publishing its own methods circular once a year and declining to recognise our chapter structure.
We exchange case material with them on narrow terms. The relationship is professional. It is not warm, and after fifty years nobody involved expects it to become warm.
Where the two organisations actually differ
The Council will keep a case under the Cock Goblin heading when witness language, site behaviour and report patterns make it worth comparing to the rest of the archive, even where nothing has been resolved. The RCABF regards that as contamination at intake. They index first by site type and observed behaviour, and refuse to attach a common name to anything until conventional wildlife, human activity and environment have been worked through and excluded.
Their position is more defensible than ours. It is also why their archive is a quarter the size, and why a report that takes us an afternoon takes them eight months.
| Issue | Council | RCABF |
|---|---|---|
| The common name | An archive heading, not a claim of identity | Excluded from primary classification altogether |
| Object displacement | Retained when documented; weight stated separately | Excluded until human and weather baselines are done |
| Witness terminology | Preserved verbatim alongside standard indexing | Preserved, but cryptid terms masked during first review |
| Public warnings | May issue from a cluster where a site hazard exists | Conventional hazards only |
| Accepting a shared file | With source notation | Only if a methodology packet comes with it |
The Northampton exchange
In April they returned four of our case summaries unread past the first page, because the packets used the term "boundary hold" before any mundane site review had been completed. We resubmitted the same four with raw observation fields only. They accepted three and declined the fourth.
Neither organisation changed anything about its published method. Correspondence remains open, which in this relationship is the good outcome.
Where we do agree
Both bodies signed the 2018 culvert-safety statement, and both use the same preservation standards for original photographs and audio. That is the whole list, but the first item on it is the one that matters.
Case numbers are not interchangeable and never will be. The same report can sit in both archives under different numbers and opposite classifications. A handful of people hold membership in both; that does not entitle anybody to move restricted witness information across, and we have had to remind two of them.
Recent contact
2024 to dateLehigh County cross-check
They asked for timestamps on three of our reports after taking a boundary-fauna submission inside the same forty-minute window. Locations went across; names did not.
Objection to "probable"
Their annual circular criticised our use of "probable" in public status fields, on the grounds that a reader may take it for a taxonomic probability rather than an archival one. The point is fair. We kept the field and issued no guidance, which they noted.
Northampton exchange
Four files, revised conditions. Three now sit in both systems under different classifications. One was declined after their baseline review.
How this started
The RCABF came out of the 1972–1978 Lexical Schism. Our account of that period and their surviving circulars disagree on several procedural details and on at least one date. We have not attempted to reconcile them here, and it would not be our place to.
Descriptive only. The RCABF is not affiliated with this Council and has asked us to say so.