If Bigfoot Were Real...

We have the Bigfoot vocalizations, we have the Bigfoot tracks, we have the Bigfoot DNA, right? Well…

By Darren Naish from The Scientific American:

You will, I’m sure, have heard of the unconfirmed North American primate vernacularly termed Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

I have a long-term, unshakable interest in Bigfoot, and I’ve thought about the subject quite a lot, at least some of these thoughts having appeared here at Tet Zoo over the years. I do not think that the data we have at the moment – this includes tracks, hairs, vocalizations, photos, and the innumerable eyewitness accounts – provides support for the contention that Bigfoot is real, and have come to the conclusion that it is a sociocultural phenomenon: that people are seeing all manner of different things, combining it with ideas, memes and preconceptions they hold in their minds, and interpreting them as encounters with a monstrous, human-like biped. This contention is explored further in my recently-published book, Hunting Monsters (Naish 2016) (and, to prove that I have history, there’s also Naish (2012)).

And let me say, by the way, that I would love to be wrong… I still do hope that Bigfoot is real; that the version of the creature endorsed by Krantz (1999), Bindernagel (1998) and Meldrum (2006) is accurate and valid. But, alas.

Regular readers of Tet Zoo – and of certain of the things I’ve published (Conway et al. 2013, Naish 2014) – will be familiar with the idea that cryptozoology overlaps extensively with speculative zoology. Bigfoot might not be a genuine undiscovered primate species (so far as we can tell, right now)… but what if it was? In this article, and perhaps in one or two others that might appear in future, I’d like to play a game and ponder things pertaining to the Bigfoot evidence, such as it is. It is, after all, great fun to wonder what the existence of Bigfoot would mean for field biology and ecology in North America, for conservation and wildlife management, for our understanding of primate evolution and diversity, and for the relationship we have with the rest of the natural world. I’m not about to write about all of those hypotheticals right now, but, yes, they’re entertaining things to think about. In fact, I’d love to see some speculative fiction written along those lines… oh, to be fair, there is some stuff out there like that already: I’m only familiar with Lee Murphy’s books.

Incidentally, an interesting thing I’ve learnt about Bigfoot while writing this article (and others) is that there’s scarcely any Bigfoot imagery online which is marked for re-use: everything is protected by copyright and unavailable for free use by others. Make of that what you will. In the interests of making the world a better place, the pictures I created for this article are all released for use via a CC license....

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