Have They Really Found Bigfoot?

The other day I was watching a show, I believe on the History Channel, about these people who are hunting for Bigfoot. The show seemed to focus on two main groups of people. One was a group trying to prove that the old movie footage we're all familiar with that allegedly shows Bigfoot walking away and looking at the camera is actually real. They contest that a human could never assume the posture of the creature in the film so it can't just be a person in a suit. The even used an athlete, supposedly because of his body control, in a motion capture suit to prove this.

The other group the show featured was a collection of women who were out hunting evidence of Bigfoot. The women are shown mounting motion sensitive cameras and placing bait (pile of apples) to lure the Bigfoots. I'm not sure why we assume they like apples but I guess it is just the lure of an easy meal.

Now, I've commented on this topic before in my previous blog but I think the comments bear repeating. When I was a tween and early teen, I was fascinated by all manner of extraordinary creatures. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, aliens, ghosts, you name it and I read about it. I read all the Hans Holtzer books about ghosts. I read books about UFOs and alien abductions. I studied everything I could find about Bigfoot. I even visited a touring exhibition at my local mall that purported to have a Bigfoot-like creature frozen in ice. It later turned out to be a hoax. I was such a geek for this stuff that I mapped out some of the sightings and I was convinced that someday, as an adult, I'd find Bigfoot or Nessie. Then one day a curious thing happened. I grew up.

I would have loved for these stories to be true. How amazing would it be if some prehistoric animal survived in a Scottish lake? Wouldn't it be cool if some sort of missing link was living in the Pacific Northwest or if the dead really "survived" somehow and could interact with us as ghosts? And aliens would be the best of all. Actual creatures from another planet, certainly far more advanced than us. How fabulous would it be to actually be onboard their spaceship?

It's a shame in many ways that we have to grow up. Small children have this amazing capacity to believe in everything yet believe in nothing all at the same time. I think we all regret some of the loss of wonder and awe that we once had as children. I keep some of that via other interests that I've developed as an adult but I don't think it's ever quite the same. Still, the benefit of being an adult is that you learn to become a bit more discerning about what is reality and what is fantasy. Well, some adults do anyway.

When I watch these specials about people seeking Bigfoot(or aliens or ghosts), I wonder what their lives are like? If you spend all your time doing this, then you must be independently wealthy or have someone taking care of you. I suppose that ghost hunters can probably find innocent, naive people to pay them a few bucks to detect ghosts in their homes but I don't think there's much money in Bigfoot. So, if these people do this as a "job," I often wonder what their source of income is? And if they have regular, full-time jobs then they must do this as a hobby. And then I wonder if they have spouses and families and I think about how neglected those people must be. Even if you only go on one or two Bigfoot hunts a year, it probably chews up some of the family vacation money. And you know these people are always online chatting with other Bigfoot "researchers" and pouring over the latest vague plaster footprints. I think their spouses must be pretty lonely.

And I think that the hunters are lonely too. Lonely people who desperately want to be special. I think this is why sightings of all these various beings most often happen to average, everyday people. It's precisely because these people are average. But no one likes being average. We all want to be special. It's why some of us blog, or play a musical instrument, or drive a fancy car. In the end, maybe it's not harmful to have that desire. It probably fuels us to wake up every morning. Still, there's something disconcerting about adults spending so much time involved with fantasy. Like adults who spend all their free time in role playing games or online, it seems like you miss out on the chance to experience the real things about the world that can inspire awe or wonder.

I think I can say definitively that there's no Bigfoot. That's going out on a bit of a limb because there is a lot of pretty remote country in the U.S. Still, any species needs a breeding population to survive. A breeding population of something as big as Bigfoot would certainly have been found by now. But to date, despite all the misguided searches, we haven't found a Bigfoot skeleton, or clump of hair, or pile of poop, or evidence of a den or any sort of regular feeding pattern. There are probably lots of undiscovered animals in America but I would bet most are no larger than birds at this point. These Bigfoot hunters are an inquisitive and resourceful lot. It's too bad we can't get them to focus on something that actually exists. We might all gain from what they find and who knows? They might even end up feeling special.