Ask an Amateur Scientist: Bigfoot

By Brian Thompson
I. The Setup

Oh, Bigfoot.  How you toy with my emotions.  I don’t remember much about Harry and the Hendersons—just a scene about defrosting a refrigerator and the sound of John Lithgow’s career crashing to the Earth—but I do remember that the titular sasquatch warmed my sugar-addled heart.  What kid wouldn’t want a giant, bipedal creature with soulful blue eyes as his own personal bouncer?  Until, of course, the reality of that fantasy really sinks in.  The operative word here is “creature”—as in “untamed” and “wild.”  Ask anyone who’s ever tried to capture an orangutan in the jungles of wherever orangutans live, and you’ll learn right quick that sometimes nature refuses to be tamed.  Sure, you’ve seen some great apes checking into hotels, riding shotgun with Clint Eastwood, and upstaging Matt LeBlanc, but those were Hollywood simians.  PETA would shudder to know just how many electric shocks and botched lobotomies it takes to stave off an ape’s killer instincts.  You think Matthew Broderick was the first actor hired for Project X?

No, Bigfoot is a monster.  In fact, he would be even more vicious than a grizzly or a cougar, as he’s so secretive and misanthropic that there’s not any evidence he even exists.  Only the Unabomber balanced the same levels of murderous rage and reclusiveness.  And even he stopped the killing long enough to churn out a manifesto or two.  Instead of modifying the family station wagon and allowing his children to watch TV with the beast, John Lithgow should have shot it square between the soulful blue eyes.  After all, it’s far better to have some mysterious evolutionary anomaly’s entrails splattered on your living room wall than the greasy remains of whatever pieces of your children Bigfoot didn’t care to swallow.

But how likely is it that Bigfoot will murder you in your sleep when you’re hiking through the Oregon forest?  Let’s find out.

II. The Findings

Bigfoot got its name from the size of its supposed tracks.  And oddly enough, those tracks are a  large part of what cryptozoologists (they’re like zoologists, only they don’t know anything about real animals) cling to as “evidence” of the beast’s existence.  The only problem here is that the tracks aren’t really evidence at all.  For one thing, very few of the hundreds if not thousands of plaster casts of supposed Bigfoot tracks have ever matched up in shape and size.  Assuming Bigfoot has children (that he knows of), there should be smaller and larger versions of the tracks.  But the shape should more or less be the same.  However, when you compare casts of tracks taken in Oregon, Washington, Florida, or anywhere else Bigfoot is supposed to call home, you find that some are long and narrow while others are squat and wide.

Michael Wallace claims that his father, Ray L. Wallace, actually invented the Bigfoot myth by making fake tracks with giant feet carved by a friend of his.  Ray ran a construction company that built logging roads in the Pacific Northwest.  According to logger John Auman, Ray used the tracks to scare off anyone who would come to steal his equipment from the woods.  His son Michael says that Ray was so amused by the effectiveness of the tracks that he set about purposefully hoaxing Bigfoot in 1958.  Ray turned Bigfoot into his own cottage industry—putting out tapes of Bigfoot’s voice, photographs, posters, and anything else he could peddlel to the willing public.  Pretty soon, the sightings started rolling in.  Really, this is the same pattern that many modern myths have followed.  After the first reports of flying saucers, suddenly everyone was seeing them.

Biologically speaking, the existence of Bigfoot is highly unlikely.  It’s true that history is lousy with newly discovered species, but it’s very rare that such a large animal in such a populated area would go undocumented for so long.  No one has ever found any fur, droppings, or other evidence of Bigfoot that can’t be traced back to another animal.

Of course, there’s the film.  You know the one.  To those in the know, it’s called the Patterson film, but you know it as the “grainy furry guy walking near a stream” footage.  It’s probably one of the most widely seen bits of home movie making ever seen—aside from the Kennedy assassination footage and (fairly soon, I’d imagine) the R. Kelly sex tape.  Fortunately, there’s no grassy knoll or golden showers to muck up the presentation here.  It’s simple, straightforward, and fairly convincing to the undiscerning eye.  Taken as a piece of evidence, it’s pretty flimsy.  The supposed Bigfoot it too far away, and the footage is too blurry to tell whether it’s just a man in an ape suit.  And even if it is a real Bigfoot, there’s no way to prove it.  Still, the North American Science Institute has spend over $100,000 trying to figure out if the footage is genuine.  No luck so far.  However, director John Landis (who you should never take a helicopter ride with, by the way) says that makeup artist John Chambers created the suit used in the Patterson film.  This is backed up by several other Hollywood horror artists, who claim that it’s a well-known industry fact that that’s Chamber’s work on screen.  Chambers created the suits for Planet of the Apes, so he would know a thing or two about making a man into a monster.  (I’m still not entirely convinced that Roddy McDowall wasn’t at least half chimp.)

Others have also claimed to be the gorilla-suited man in the film—including a retired Pepsi bottler—but stories are conflicting.

III. The Conclusion

Those on the farthest fringes of woo have tried to come up with all sorts of excuses as to why there hasn’t been more (or any) concrete verification of Bigfoot.  Some say he’s an ancient forest spirit with the power to disappear into his surroundings.  Others say he’s an inter-dimensional being or some kind of extraterrestrial pet.  Some even go so far as to say that it’s not even R. Kelly in the video.  The real R. Kelly has a mole on his back, you know.  Do you see a mole on that man’s back?  And who’s to say the girl wasn’t a paid prostitute?  And even if it does look like R. Kelly, that could easily just be special effects.  Have you seen Little Man?  Didn’t that look real?

Sorry.  Got a little confused there.  Anyway, my point is this: Bigfoot doesn’t exist, so you don’t have to worry about him peeing on you.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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