SASQUATCH

 

 

Aliens, the New Jersey Devil, Big Foot, Angels, Satin, Nessie, Gods, Ghost, Monsters, Shape Shifters…

 

A Scottish Prayer

From goulies and ghosties

And long leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night

Good Lord deliver us

 

Human beings are not rational animals.  We are capable of rational thought, applying logic, and accepting beliefs based on facts, but it is much easier to believe that truth is what we wish it to be.

 

The credulity of our nature makes us receptive to accepting beliefs without questioning glaring inconsistencies.    Sometimes we believe implausible premises because we have been indoctrinated by our parents or our community, and sometimes we accept a popular belief simply because the idea appeals to us.

Often the more outlandish the premise of our belief, the more fundamentalist we can become and dogmatically defend the indefensible.

 

In other cases, it is just fun to buy into long leggedy beasties – a wish to believe that there are things beyond our discernable norm.

I have to admit, for years I wanted to believe in sasquatch, the skunk ape, or bigfoot – all the same creature but existing in different areas of North America.  I had no proof of Big Foot, but I wanted to believe that a mystery existed, and my justification was eyewitness accounts of sightings or encounters.

 

In the scientific world, human eyewitness accounts are considered unreliable (I swear I saw a ninety-foot-necked alien woman step out of a UFO that landed in my backyard – and my buddy saw it too!).

The Big Foot craze began in 1958. 

 

 In 1952 the SciFi movie The Abominable Snow Man was released to theaters.  This was followed in 1954 by the movie The Snow Creature.   These sparked an interest in the reported Yeti sightings in the Himalayas.

 

In 1958  Andrew Genzoli, a reporter at The Humbolt Times in Eureka, California printed a story about loggers finding a large footprint.   Genzoli joked that maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snow Man of the Himalayas

 

That set the seed.

 

There is a minuscule possibility that a large, undiscovered, humanoid animal could exist in remote forested areas, but there is no proof.

 

My skepticism is that in 66 years no creature has been found.  No Big Foot has ever been hit by a car.  No corpse has ever been discovered as the result of natural or accidental death, by hunters or hikers.   No Big Foot has been captured.   We have some fuzzy photographs, some dubious plaster cast of footprints, and hundreds of – Me and my buddy saw Big Foot.

 

I will readily accept the existence of Big Foot: when you show me the body.

the Ol’Buzzard