Bigfoot

Posted on July 19, 2006 in Reading Thinking

From Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend by David Daegling.

John Green, a journalist who has investigated the phenomenon of Bigfoot from the outset, once uttered “If you establish at any point that even one report is accurate, then you have an animal. And if you have an animal, you have literally thousands of animals.”

Green is right on the mark. It is irrelevant how much chicanery and deception has occured in the search for Bigfoot because the true testimony of a single eyewitness, the legitimacy of a single footprint, or the authenticity of any piece of grainy film would prove the reality of the creature….Bigfoot cannot be a singular thing if we are to consider it in the zoological sense; if this is an earth creature, then we must have populations of these hairy giants roaming the wilderness of North America. There can’t just be one.

….there is a rub: establishing truth, legitimacy, or authenticity is not a straight forward endeavor. This is the essence of the mystery of Bigfoot. There is not a single piece of Bigfoot evidence that is unequivocal. Despite the weekly proclamations on cable television, there is no smoking gun that establishes that Sasquatch is out there. It’s all over the place, in every corner of the lower forty eight states, it’s 8 feet tall and smells like a bad clam on a hot August day, and we still can’t drag one of them out of the woods.