On the trail of the New York bigfoot, The End

Image by Thomas Roche via Flickr

I wasn’t keen to leave the Adirondacks. It was such a beautiful place. I wondered if I should have blocked out some time to go do some serious hiking.

Driving home, I realized I’d wracked up 70 hours in the forest, over three nights. I hadn’t been cold-weather camping in a long time.

The team said our good-byes around the campfire, those of us who hadn’t left earlier. By this point we were all getting along like old college friends. E-mails were exchanged. As of this writing, expedition members are still posting reactions on our secure website. 

Over the next several days I thought about the effort I and others on the expedition team had made. I thought that what we had done was surely worth it, a good deal enjoyable, and certainly interesting. It gave me a good deal more to think about beyond my continual reading of sighting reports. Also having learned of the construction, done some years ago, of an actual bigfoot trap (above, left) in the forests of Oregon, I saw where I fell on the scale of willing physical effort to help push the envelope, so to speak. Some people were willing to do some actual building, be that in real-life or on-line. 

Funny thing is, the more I read bigfoot forums as research for this multi-part posting, the more I learned that there are people who go on such investigatory expeditions and don’t bring a camera because they don’t even care about it on that level any more. To paraphrase one woman I read on the BFRO forum, “Everyone will say a photo is a fake, and I’ll damn well know if I saw what I saw.”

That is true – the negative skeptic or total detractor will say any photo or audio recording is a complete fake. And nothing will ever really be settled until an intact carcass is found, if that could happen or is going to happen. Even then, in that seemingly impossible, incredible instance, some people would still say, It’s a fake.

As for the reports, my favorite part? They might be the most interesting data of all, because of the human element. Consider this confession from the most recent BFRO posting: “I’d like to begin by saying that with the discovery of this web site I have found what could be the first confidence I have ever felt in reporting to you what I’m about to relate. Thank you for founding this site and giving real legitimacy to bring this subject to the light of day.”

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Why do people see something if it isn’t there?

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that there truly is no bigfoot, absolutely none – utterly no possibility that there is a North American ape of any kind. The largest mammals on this continent are all known.

What, then, does this catalog of evidence mean? Three-hundred some years of oral and written reports in this country; possibly just two authentic films/videos (the Patterson-Gimlin film, with its famous still #352; and the Freeman Footage); numerous audio recordings; hair samples; and hundreds of casts of tracks are supposed to amount to zero? This data in the true absence of any unknown species would amount to one of the most original, extensive, and maddeningly consistent but haphazardly assembled collections of the fabulous that humans have amassed in recent times.

In other words, we are actively hoaxing ourselves in highly sophisticated ways, through highly specialized devices of hoaxing (someone must have invented the “howl” and “whoop” of a sasquatch, no?) or through collective subconscious projections? Is there a hairy-hominid-center in the brain that is so consistent person to person, from peoples in Nepal to peoples in the Pacific Northwest, and across American history to us Americans now, that when your brain tells you you’ve seen a bigfoot (even though you haven’t), you see it as clearly and with as much species-consistent detail as the last person who saw it, or the person back in 1700 who saw it, too?

Why, too, would this specific animal be our collective hallucination? Why not a walrus, or a moose? Do we “see” bigfoot out of some fear of our own evolutionary reversion? “Oh, my god, I hope I’m not acting like I’m hairy, smelly, and eight feet tall”?

Even with the press of such questions, I think most sighting reports are written or spoken with total conviction. Beyond that, I think we would be close-minded to reject entirely the possibility of what all this data suggests, if even, at the very least, all it ever tells us is something about ourselves. 

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Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.