Doug’s Darkworld

Bigfoot on Long Island? Credit: Cameron Gainer

We are in the middle of a Bigfoot flap, or a Sasquatch Season as some would say. Yes, Bigfoot sightings are coming in from all over. You would think Nostradamus would have predicted something like this, but no, our mad Frenchmen is silent on the topic. Still, predicted or not, Bigfoot is in the news. A tenured professor claims Bigfoot is real. There have been sightings in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Canada. Old sightings from Illinois and Michigan are back in the news. What the hell does this all mean?

Does it mean that big hairy ape men are running through the woods in large numbers, some antediluvian primate plot unfolding before our eyes? Could be I suppose. I used to subscribe to the theory that Bigfoot was a relict population of Gigantopithecus, a huge ape that lived in Asia until about 100,000 years ago. And that Alma, Asia’s “Bigfoot,” was a surviving population of Neanderthals. Alma is back in the news these days as well, or will be as a National Geographic TV special is airing on November 20th. Nonetheless the proliferation of trap cameras and video cameras is making it increasingly hard to believe that these creatures actually exist.

Speaking of video cameras, yes, there have a been any number of Bigfoot videos shot in recent years. Whoop-De-Doo unfortunately. Here’s a quick primer on how to spot a fake Bigfoot video:

The creature is too far away from (or too close to!) the camera for details to be made out clearly.

The creature wanders around aimlessly, apparently almost trying to stay in camera view.

There are a few exceptions, though none that show any real detail. The ones that do (see pic above) have all been proven fakes. To be fair, the picture above was never portrayed as a “real” Bigfoot, it was an artist having some fun. Faking Bigfoot photos is a cottage industry in the US it seems. At this point until a Bigfoot gets run over by a truck and the carcass hauled into a town, I’m with the skeptics.

So why the flurry of sightings? Simple escapism is one theory. Bigfoot flaps and UFO flaps do seem to occur at times when tensions are high, the run-up to the US election and the war in Iraq definitely qualify as tense times. It’s interesting how cultural events reflect the psychology of a time. For example the plethora of Japanese monster movies after world war two was probably related to the destruction of Japanese cities during the war. In another example, dead baby jokes became all the rage after Roe vs Wade decriminalised abortion.

Do stories about a big ape in the woods symbolize anything more than escapism? I would suggest along the lines of the “800 pound gorilla in the room” that maybe Bigfoot sightings represent some huge terrible issue Americans are willfully ignoring. The difficulty with that theory is, which one?

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit and it is central to the subject of the post.)