Can you legally shoot Bigfoot right in his Bigfoot-y face while in the Lone Start State? One Oregon Sasquatch seeker thought to ask an expert at the Texas Parks and Wildlife department for a clarification on the rules.

He received a very dry and clear cut email basically stating that if the hunter could prove that Bigfoot was indigenous to Texas, it’s fair game. But now, that is under dispute…

But Sinclair told FoxNews.com his response has been taken wildly out of context.

“This guy never really alluded to Bigfoot, though it seems maybe he said something about Sasquatch,” Sinclair told FoxNews.com. “He took my statement and said that it was safe to hunt an ‘indigenous cryptid,’ whatever that is. He misquoted me.”

Meanwhile, this has sparked a mini-firestorm in the Bigfoot community that wonders if the announcement of Open Season on the big guy will mean the as-yet-unfound cryptid could go extinct. That is, if they could prove he’s real first. Which would probably require the scientific study of a corpse. Which would call for killing.

My head hurts.

[Fox News] via Ken Cowan

[Bigfoot Evidence]

Oregon is home to what is believed to the be the first and only Bigfoot trap in existence. Built in 1974 with a Forest Service special use permit , it was constantly baited with carcasses but it only ever caught bears before being closed down in 1980.

Sadly, they only caught bears and no Bigfoot was ever found in the trap. In 1980 the Forest Service permanently bolted open the welded steel door due to safety hazards. Since then, the Forest Service has made some repairs to it now that it’s become a popular hiking destination.

[Bigfoot Evidence]

Georgia-Bigfoot-body-in-a-freezer hoaxer and the “best Bigfoot tracker in the world”, Rick Dyer claims he received permission from the Canadian government to kill a Bigfoot and bring it back to America. Dyer says his team has permission to hunt for anything that has not been discovered yet in the Great White North. “In redneck terms, it’s basically saying we have permission to bring firearms into Canada to hunt for Bigfoot,” said Dyer.

I am 100% sure this will end well and won’t cause any problems at all.

[Bigfoot Evidence]

Animal Planet series Finding Sasquatch gives us this web exclusive comparing various Bigfoot Calls. Our favorite it the one that might actually have been a real woman being murdered in the woods only it was incorrectly classified as a Sasquatch squeak.

[Cryptomundo]

Is the crypto creature known as Bigfoot really a religious icon doomed to walk the Earth for his sins? What could possibly doom one man to such a hell?

What if I told you that man was Cain. He who killed Able. Son to Adam and Eve. Maybe you’ve heard of him?

This theory comes according to a 2008 paper by then-Mormon Mentality blogger Matt Bowman. He bases his theory on a 1835 letter describing a meeting between David Patten and Cain.

Patten described the encounter thusly:

“He said he was a very miserable creature, that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth, but that he could not die, and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

This is further corroborated by a 1919 manuscript which included a reference to an attack by a hairy, talking humanoid described as Cain.

As far as Bigfoot lore goes, this theory provides an out for at least one major hole. Bigfoot would be an immortal creature and not a new species which would explain why he’s so elusive. It’s far more of a challenge to catch one man than a thriving, natural animal bloodline.

Thanks to Tijuana Taxi on Twitter for this tip.

[Syracuse.com]

Bill Munns has made a name for himself in the Bigfoot research community as someone who was granted rare access to the original Patterson-Gimlin Film Roll. The former Hollywood make-up effects supervisor has studied the iconic footage more so than any other crypto researcher. Here he explains why he feels the footage indeed shows a bipedal animal and not a costumed prankster. Also, for the first time 202 rarely seen “lost” frames from the original reel are revealed.

[Cryptomundo]

The market price for a 1 lb Bigfoot steak skyrocketed yesterday when a $50,000 offer was made on a $10,000 item. You may remember the man worried about Sasquatch murder charges from earlier this year. Well, apparently, he has a souvenir from the occasion.

“On Wednesday evening, Richard Stubstad and Robert Lindsay were guests on the Tom Biscardi radio show talking about the Sierra Kills. As reported by Lindsay earlier, Justin Smeja was selling his Bigfoot steak for $10,000. Biscardi thinks Smeja deserves a lot more than what he’s currently selling it for and he is offering $50,000 for the steak.

We got Justin on the phone and told him about Biscardi’s offer. He said that it is a really good offer and he’s considering accepting Biscardi’s dough in exchange for the 1lb Bigfoot steak he found in the Sierra Buttes location after shooting an adult Bigfoot and it’s child.”

With this kind of market volatility, Sasquatch better watch his back even more than usual.

[Bigfoot Evidence]

In the comments on our post yesterday about the Creston Flats Bigfoot footage, and the resulting controversy over it’s legitimacy, we got a very interesting comment. A person claiming to be Troy Hunter, the creator of the video, gives us a full explanation on the video including how old it is (three years), if he believes it’s Bigfoot (he doesn’t) and if he used any kind of digital editing to create the clip (he didn’t).

The email used to create the comment is associated elsewhere on the net with Troy and the IP address used is from the appropriate Western Canadian region. So, we’re taking this one as legit but feel free to apply all due skepticism.

I believe this is not a Bigfoot but the footage is in fact real. There has been controversy about whether or not I created this scene using cuts from another scene; it certainly is not a cut, its all real.

What happened after I shot the video, I immediately drove my
car to where the thing would emerge; I cut it off at the pass. First off, there was an empty car sitting beside the track. When it came out, at the very moment it came out, another vehicle pulled out of the parking lot at the Creston Valley Wildlife Centre, which was just behind me and that third vehicle drove past the empty car, my car and the thing that emerged. I believe that the other person driving the vehicle also saw the thing that emerged, it would have been very difficult not to.

What was actually wading through those bushes? Find out AFTER THE JUMP where the rest of the story continues!

What I saw that day was a human being wearing some sort of
bug screen on his head and what looked like a complete bug suit of some
sort. He was walking with two dogs. I believe I had my 35mm camera ready to capture the best photos of a real sasquatch but man was I disappointed to see a man and a car. The look on the guys’ face was almost pure fright and I was so embarrassed for him, I couldn’t even take a picture of him.

I left to continue my journey to drive to Cranbrook thinking
that I was a victim of a hoaxer. All I could think about was that the beer brewery company in Creston was using the image of the sasquatch in their marketing efforts and that somehow this guy might have had something to do with it. What I didn’t think so much about was the other vehicle that sped off, maybe somebody was in the process of creating a video and I just happened to come along at the exact time and then I shot my own video.

When I shot that video, I imagined I was really shooting a
video of a sasquatch. I was as disappointed as many of you who read this will be as well and to you I apologize. Maybe that guy was just out for a walk with his dogs and he liked to go where the mosquitoes roam; I don’t know the full story only he does. Maybe the
footage I shot was really a Bigfoot and this guy in a bugsuit just came out of nowhere out for an early stroll but based on a balance of probabilities, that guy was the same in the footage I shot.

The weekend before I posted my video clip, I went to Cranbrook and retrieved all my videotapes. On Thursday night I found the three-year-old footage of what really, really does look like Bigfoot and without giving it much thought, I shared it to YouTube under Creative Commons – Attribution. If I recall, I didn’t do anything with this footage because I believed it was not Bigfoot and that it would only serve
to help sell more beer for a beer brewing company, “It’s the beer out here”.

The day after I posted the video, there were people who said
I made this footage by mixing the Patterson-Gimley footage into a different scene; it is all real, 100%. It is exactly as I saw it that day as I was passing by. Now that I have been asked about why I waited three years to reveal this footage, you have the answer. I am not a hoaxer, I just posted what I saw and then I defended the fact it is an intact footage.

Before this gets carried away, I felt it was important to share the rest of the story with you and I thank all the skeptics who were very
skeptical, you know who you are and I thank you and please accept my apology for not explaining everything I knew about this footage right from the start.

As a result of posting, I had the opportunity this past weekend to do some research. As for Bigfoot, yes, I am a believer and yes, we have stories, and I may have seen one in 1985 as well as evidence in the 1970s in the Creston Flats. I was able to do some learning through
various online blogs and videos, etc. I have a very strong theory about a particular Bigfoot story and I wish to shed light on in the future. Just remember that all I did was present original footage and respond to questions and comments that came out, since you have asked; now you have the full story.

Crypto folks were abuzz this weekend with a new video entitled Creston Flats Bigfoot. Without further comment, here is that video:

More details on the area where it was shot including local pictures and Google Maps can be found here at Bigfoot Evidence.

Meanwhile, The Crypto Hunters have called shenanigans on the clip and explain their grievance in a short video clip of their own, as found on their Facebook page.

So what say you weirdlings and weirdos? Real deal or digital trickery?

A California hunter is fearing for his livelihood after killing a mother Sasquatch and one of her children on a desolate road. According to web rumors culled by BigfootSightings.com, the man is worried that the killing violates his California hunting license which strictly regulates what can and cannot be killed. Bigfoot is nowhere to be found on the list of animals appropriate to kill. Furthermore, new DNA evidence about the elusive Bigfoot could prove the animals to be partially human which could open him up to murder charges.

The story is that a hunter in Plumas County, CA was threatened by a female Bigfoot, old enough to have gray hair. She was, according to him, blocking the road and making gestures that made him feel threatened, so he got out of his vehicle and shot her.

Then he says there were two young Sasquatches in the forest nearby, obviously upset by the female’s death. The hunter is reported to have shot and killed one of them.

The story continues that there were two other hunters with him. One became hysterical and they took away the rifle and wouldn’t let him shoot the third Bigfoot.

Trial of the century?

[Bigfoot Sightings]

As reported by KXLY in Spokane, WA. A woman going by the name Samantha caught the visual on her iPhone camera in Downriver Park.

On a scale from 1-10 with one being Total Fraud and 10 being Proof Positive, where do you rank the video above?

A hulking figure in the woods lunches toward you and your hunting party. In the woods, instinct and a steady hand are your only weapons and this is no different. In the split second before you pull the trigger, time slows down. You wonder if you’ll regret this, what this creature is and why he became so enraged.

Time’s up. Trigger pulled. The hairy creature slumps to the ground, drawing last breath in the form of desperate, sputtering heaves.

You just killed Bigfoot. The good news is, you aren’t alone. According to a compilation of press reports by RobertLindsay.com beginning in 1829 at least 36 people have reportedly shot and killed Sasquatch. The bigger question is what people do with the body?

Some folks buried the noble creature. Some stuffed the corpse so it could be secretly displayed to the upper crust at a member’s only country club. Some turned over the remains to shadowy government officials.

Great research.

[RobertLindsay.com via Cryptomundo]

Residents of Binh Dong Commune of Binh Son District in Quang Ngai, Vietnam have been overrun. Strange, gigantic footprints in the snow. An otherworldly howl piercing the still of night.

The beast, whatever it is, left a grisly calling card for one dog owner.

However, no one has seen the strange creature that could have caused such large footprints measuring almost 12-15cm. Over 20 dogs have also been killed in the area and now around 280 households of the commune are living in panic.

Nguyen Thi Bich Ngoc, a 70-year-old woman was the first to find her dead pet dog on the night of May 7. She said that her dog was found without its head and some body organs.

Meanwhile, a few villages over, a pack of wild dog-like animals are taking their liberties with a local neighborhood. Biting anyone who attempts to interrupt their meals of chickens, pigs, goats or horses.

Here is how they are described:

…in the border districts of Si Ma Cai and Muong Khuong in the northwestern province of Lao Cai, people have repeatedly seen strange species of dog like animals.

The strange creatures have bitten about 15 people in Ban Me, Thao Chu Phin, Quang Than San and Si Ma Cai communes in the two districts.

According to local residents, the strange doglike creatures have slender, long bodies, slanting red eyes and their fur coat is marked with white spots, black and white spots or yellow stripes.

What is happening to Vietnam? Did someone open a hellmouth?

[VietnamNet]

A very careful analysis from Loren Coleman says that Sasquatch and Osama Bin Laden were most likely around the same height. Spoiler Alert: they were both a littler shorter than we thought.

Also, Bigfoot survived Osama Bin Laden. That makes me really, really excited.

[Cryptomundo]

The publisher of this site, Andrew Mayne, once told me his take on the early films of action director John Woo. Sure, the fighting is insane and the plot is pretty hard nosed but since the film is subtitled, how does any English speaker know if the acting is any good?

Which is exactly how I feel about this Bigfoot video from the Ukraine. It’s almost note perfect as a horror film, which the heavy breathing and the fog drenched forrest. In fact, if this were shot in Gary, Indiana and not amongst the foothills of Eastern Europe the way we’d call shenanigans is the unnatural tone and content of the man behind the camera’s speech.

Since the speaker in this video is not conversing the King English (or if he is, he’s having a stroke) our natural BS detecter is blurred.

Is there anyone who can decipher what the man is saying? Does anyone buy this?

[Phantoms & Monsters]

“My husband and I took our kids target shooting. A helicopter was over our heads the entire time annoying us. We thought at first they were curious of why and what we were shooting. Later when we watched the video we noticed something that looked like bigfoot running in the trees. We assume now the helicopter was hunting the bigfoot. Scary!”

[GhostTheory]

Back in September of 2009, Jonathan Doyle ran around Monadnock State Park dressed as Bigfoot scaring and amusing hikers while his friends filmed the encounters. He then returned to human form and interviewed the bystanders. The park rangers did not appreciate this stunt and when Doyle returned later that month for a follow up, he was barred from filming. And now Doyle is suing:

Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Jonathan Doyle is suing the state, arguing that the requirement to pay $100 for a special use permit 30 days in advance and get a $2 million insurance bond violates his free speech rights.

Doyle’s attorneys say no one complained to the state park service after Doyle first dressed as Bigfoot, ran around the rocky top of Mount Monadnock, returned to human form and interviewed bystanders about what they saw Sept. 6, 2009.

[Yahoo! News]

The greatest minds in Sasquatch research will gather in British Columbia this April to best asses where we are in the long hunt for the crypto creature and to honor those who have done significant work in the field to track down and identify the elusive beast.

The event will be a gathering of Bigfoot researchers, authors and enthusiasts brought together to celebrate the life and contributions of John Green. Friday, April 8th will start with registration opening at 4 pm, and continue into the evening with light snacks and a no-host bar at an informal ‘Meet & Greet’ reception. Later there will be Round Table Discussions with well-known authors and investigators, a chance to catch up with friends, and time to browse amongst the vendors tables.

Tickets are running at $80 for the conference at Harrison Hot Springs, BC.

We very much wonder what kind of information can be gathered when so many who have searched so long of Sasquatch are put in the same room. At the very least there has to be some awesome stories about creative living in the forrest during stake outs. And possibly a great recipe for baked beans cooked over a campfire.

What would you hope to get out of the Sasquatch Summit?

[Cryptomundo]

Got a hankering to hunt down a Chinese Bigfoot? Your ship has come in, sailor!

The Hubei Wild Man Research Association (HWMRA) in China’s Hubei province announced they are recruiting researchers from around the world to join its team in relaunching the search for the Bigfoot creature in the Shennongjia forest region. Luo Baosheng, vice president of HWMRA, told Xinhua, China’s state run news agency, that team members must be in good physical health and it is preferred they are between the age of 25 and 45 years old. “Most importantly, we want the team members to be devoted, as there will be a lot of hard work in the process”, he said.

No word on how to submit your application.

[Seer Press]

William Allen Barnes is a man on a mission. His journey to find and track the creature known as Bigfoot (although he is loathe to use that particular term) began on a fateful night camping in California.

But his story, begins with the best lede we’ve ever read while editing this site:

On a warm summer night in 1997, local Bigfoot researcher and part-time gold-mining enthusiast William Allen Barnes was plunged headlong into the world of cryptozoology.

His story is well worth reading. Including this incredible line:

“After it left, the adrenaline hit me and I just sat there and shook,” Barnes said. “I got up the next morning and left. It took me four years to go back out there into the canyon by myself, and my gun got bigger every year.”

A part-time gold-mining enthusiast rolling through the Cali campgrounds strapped like Duke Nukem? Hail to the king.

[The Union]

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…

Dyer and Whiton are harder to pin down. It takes very specific sort of f***-all enthusiasm to dash out into the world claiming to have found the bloating corpse of a monster. Still, a century before, Eugene Shepard ran into Rhinelander, Wisconsin with not only the faked corpse of a monster, but also an epic tale detailing how he and a lumberjack posse had killed the beast with dynamite. In both cases a false cadaver was created, and advertised as the genuine artifact. I haven’t found anything to indicate that Shepard charged anyone to take a look-see at the immolated Hodag, but neither is it clear what sort of monetary designs Dyer and Whiton did or didn’t have before Biscardi joined up (though the ease with which the Vegas promoter convinced them that their bizarre animal was, in actuality, a cash cow doesn’t speak well of their intentions). “But,” you point out, “Shepard did charge people a dime to see the supposed live Hodag at the County Fair.” And here, again, we are walking the high wire between hoax and scam.

Even disregarding the fact that’s Shepard’s Hodag wasn’t presented in a cultural vacuum – patrons were almost certainly familiar with sideshows and similar humbugs that offered creative, entertaining, but generally obvious, deceptions for a minimal fee – the lurching automaton voiced by Shepard’s son and accompanied by Shepard’s own manic, silver-tongued narration provided enough of a spectacle to justify the minimal price of admission. And it’s hard to tell whether or not Dyer and Whiton possess whatever unnamable compulsion drives people to rig up robot monsters or add a set of blue ears to a painted, pulley-rigged stick. They certainly aren’t like Biscardi, who uses big talk and empty promises to pocket fat stacks of money for nothing. At the same time, they seemed to lack the joyfulness and enthusiasm that both Shepard and Watrous felt for their respective creations. Despite their commitment to creating an ad hoc monster body, they seemed more obsessed with the publicity and cultural caché than with the actual source of attention – Bigfoot remains. Seriously low rent Bigfoot remains.
And for me, that was what ultimately made the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco seem so disingenuous. Initially, the whole business had me really excited – not because I believed the body was real, but because I wanted to see how far they would take it. How much effort they would put into the spectacle. Whether or not, like Shepard and Watrous, they would show us something that, while false according to its supposed identity, was real in its creativity and craftsmanship. I was hoping for a fully autopsy-ready body, with layers of correctly placed viscera, a stomach rife with clues pointing to the identity of its last meal, and maybe even a couple ridiculous, but no less entertaining, physiological revelations (Bigfoot has two hearts! Bigfoot has an artificial hip, indicating that Sasquatches have surprisingly advanced medical capabilities!) So when word came out that it was just an ape suit stuffed with hotdog ingredients, I was more than a little chagrined.

I don’t know where this leaves us. It’s seems reductive to blame Dyer and Whiton’s misguided bottom-shelf prankery on new media and a reality show culture that promise fame to the commoner and increasingly value the frenzied swapping of digital information over a tangible engagement with a physical product, though I’m sure once Biscardi was involved he convinced the boys that, these days, a ridiculously low investment often yields high temporary returns. After all, the hoax was never meant to go undetected forever… just long enough for the three yeti coroners to fill their coffers through the exploitation of Bigfoot enthusiasts and cryptid research groups. Then again, in this day and age, even a well-intentioned prankster with boundless integrity would be remiss to entirely forego a Web presence in favor of some falsely idealized “old fashioned” route.

No, I think the problem with all of this – the thing that made Dyer and Whiton’s Bigfoot prank feel dire and witless – was the pranksters seeming lack of fun. Imagine a grinning Eugene Shepard storming out of the woods with his carbonized Hodag, or a giggling Harry Watrous hiding in some shrubs, waiting to loose his hippogriff upon a hapless boater. These locally performed stunts were just that – performed, with the jerry-rigged monsters taking center stage as their creators MC’d or crouched behind an azalea bush. A snarling Hodag. A blue-eared hippogriff. A hypothetical surgically enhanced dual-hearted Bigfoot. These pranks are attractive because they seek to knit our dreams and nightmares from the mundane yarn of the everyday – to bring us as close as we’ll ever come to actual monsters. What the Dyer and Whiton did was mug for the camera, all the while taunting us with a shi**y cat’s cradle strung between 10 middle fingers.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast. Wednesday, we investigated claims that it is the missing link.

Fear Liath and Science.

After writing that tantalizing gem of a teaser for today’s column, I looked at it for a moment and considered whether I should maybe put some qualifying quotation marks around the word science. And I decided not to. The concepts to be discussed herein are definitive scientific realities… it just happens that we’re going to talk about them as they relate to a 7-foot-tall man-ape descended from the wood spirits of ancient Europe.

Plenty of yella-bellied hikers and goose-pimpled mountaineers have attributed Mount Ben Macdui’s pervasive atmosphere of dread to the mystical aura of the mysterious Greyman; lots of Cryptozoologists blame Fear Liath, too. But not because it has magical fright-throwing abilities. It turns out that, apparently, all Sasquatches, from Bigfoot to Wampas, use powerful pheromones to elude capture by preemptively instilling panic in their would-be pursuers. That’s right. Fear Liath squats down and blows out a mess of chemical fear that drifts through the mist and infects human trespassers.
I can follow this line of thought. Sure, it’s scribbled and erratic and leads off the paper and onto the nice tablecloth, but I can follow it. A threatened aphid, for instance, will blast out a haze of alarm pheromones, thereby, warning any nearby companions to flee the scene. Frightened termites and bees can also pinch off a cloud of fear, though, in their case, it usually psyches up the chest-bumping former half of the fight-or-flight instinct. Likewise, dogs, bears, et al, have all been shown to deploy and perceive an intraspecies “scent of fear” – “intra” being the key prefix here. Based on all existing scientific evidence, the pheromones of any given species are detectable only to members of that species, meaning that even if all the mist clinging to Ben Macdui were one massive pheromone cloud squirted out by cowardly Fear Liath, it wouldn’t elicit even the slightest of pant pees in area humans. Furthermore, considering the termites and bees, if humans were affected, it’s just as likely that they’d pick up a giant rock and charge hulk style toward the jelly-spined source of the panic fog. (Although, if the pheromone did work correctly, Scarecrow would be poaching the hell out of these things.)

Much more scientific justification for the Fear Liath AFTER THE JUMP…Somewhere, a cryptozoologist just threw up his hands in frustration and said, “Duh! He’s the missing link… his pheromones have some shared human biological stuff. Idiot.” – a rejoinder that, I admit, would present the most sensible zany retort if studies hadn’t already demonstrated that the human ability to perceive or otherwise act on another human’s wafting panic stink is nil. If people can’t sense pure human fear, it’s ridiculous to think that they might respond to some horrific, ape-tainted knockoff.
Another theory? Infrasound.

Infrasound refers to any sound below 20 Hz, which, in terms of the low-end of the auditory spectrum, is considered the cutoff for normal human hearing. The reason excited cryptozoologists have pointed to this particular phenomenon as a possible candidate for Sasquatch’s scare-sharing mechanism is that various experiments have shown that almost a quarter of all human beings, when exposed to infrasound or near-infrasonic frequencies (17 Hz was the frequency used by a 700-subject UK study), have displayed peculiar physical reactions, such as feelings of fear, anxiety and revulsion. Additionally, Vic Tandy, a researcher at Coventry University, has suggested that sounds at around 19 Hz may be responsible for a butt load of ghost sightings. Morrow made this discovery while working in a supposedly haunted lab, where he and other researchers experienced strange sensations of dread, and where Morrow himself witnessed a gray blob drifting through his periphery. Turns out, an extraction fan vibrating at 18.98 Hz was not only inspiring his feelings of anxiety, but also generating an optical hallucination by vibrating his eyes (the natural resonant frequency of the human eye is about 18 Hz).

So far, it’s a pretty thin case: Travelers of regions known to be inhabited by sasquatches are often plagued by strange, unaccountable feelings of dread. Infrasound has been known to cause such feelings. Sasquatches, therefore, must be terrifying people away by generating some sort of infrasound.

Still, writers on Bigfoot-manic message boards and crypto-crazed blogs love to point out that African elephants have been proven to communicate using nasally generated infrasound vocalizations, a zoological revelation that wasn’t even theorized until 1984. The low frequency calls, which are probably used to, among other things, deliver herd movement updates and initiate mating rituals, range between 15 and 35 Hz – well within the limits that can, in some instances, cause less than pleasant sensations within the human body. Some suggest that sasquatches, like elephants, have the capacity to generate these types of ether-rattling ululations. (To be fair, one of the message boarders did pragmatically point out that, “Even if sasquatches use infrasound, we need a video of the species making these sounds as solid evidence.”) Elephants are big animals. It’s not difficult to look at an elephant’s head and understand how a sound beyond the realm of human perception could bellow out of it. Now, I’m not a scientist or anything, but wouldn’t Bigfoot essentially need nasal cavities with the anomalous spatial properties of the Tardis in order to raise such a (inaudible) ruckus?

Look, I know that this isn’t a debunking site, where stories are hunted and vivisected for inaccuracies. I’m way more interested in chasing down the legends, tagging their ears and sending them back to frolic through the collective imagination. If folks want to say that Fear Liath, beautifully monstrous fiction that it is, can, from a distance, raise hackles and roil up visceral fear, I’m totally on board. But pheromones? Infrasound? Maybe Bigfoot, contemporary American icon that he is, might need to resort to the modern narrative contrivance of overwrought, unnecessary, straw-grasping explanation (why bigfoot needs any sort of emotion-finagling superpower is beyond me), in the same way that every modern Hollywood villain gets a tired tragic past to justify his ultimate treachery and every good-hearted hero gets a backlog of clichéd vestigial guilt to explain his eventual honor, but Fear Liath comes readymade with a back story of primitive thaumaturgy and ancient races. Of Wodewoses and of Pagan nightmares. Of the high shrieks, the bite marks on flesh, the cold water shaken from course fur, the electric smell of blood on the wind and all the other things that would one day clatter together into a human being. Save your science for the urban legends and the contemporary myths. The “are they really extinct?” case studies and desperate EVP analyses.

Sometimes it’s better if a villain is just bad. Sometimes it’s better if a hero is just good. And sometimes it’s better if a sasquatch is just magic.

We have more footage of what can only be described as a tense stand off between one mountain man and a predatory Sasquatch. We talked about Tim Peeler in the most recent WeirdThingsTV but another local news station covered the battle and even advanced the story, revealing the technology Peeler plans on using to snap a picture of the beast.

Come back to WeirdThings for continued coverage of Tar Heel Bigfoot Watch…

Beautiful hair…

[CNN]

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast.

Wudewas. Wodwos. Wodewoses. Woodwoses. Variants of the word are as numerous as the trees in the forests inhabited by the feral possessors of these ancient names. The wild men. The tidiest accounts of Scotland’s Fear Liath would have you believe that the giant grey creature’s closest relative is Bigfoot – that noble missing link who hides deep within America’s dwindling native woods, and in whom hides lost vestiges of man… scattered dust from genetic corners that were sanded down into curves during the civilizing renovation of the primal human spirit, the process itself an exciting necessity of the social evolution that created both the modern world and the most basic, aching nostalgia found therein. This nostalgia takes the form of a chromosomal muscle memory, a scuffed shoebox, brimming with relics, tucked beneath the bed of the collective id.

It’s more than just the bare carnal reasoning of the reptilian brain – the eat, kill or screw impulse that any cynical 16-year-old can tell you is as alive today in the forests of laminate boardroom furnishings as it was millennia ago amid the dark tangles of forgotten jungles. No. This is about an understanding of place, an unselfconscious symbiosis between man and topography, man and biology. The unvoiceable knowledge that, if dropped in the woods – any woods – one could navigate the soil, elude danger, secure shelter, procure food and still find time to gaze up in wonderment at the twinkling panorama of space.

It’s also probably an illusion. After all, humans still have these senses and abilities. Modern man has just repurposed them for urban environs, so that if dropped in a city – any city – one could navigate pavement, listen for sirens, and recognize chain hotel logos and the trademark color schemes of a half-dozen burger chains.

Get the rest of the story… AFTER THE JUMP

Put simply, missing links represent, among other things, a false notion that it was only post fire and after the wheel that man’s trip from ape to commuter lapsed into a bumbling process of trial and error. That people were born with knowledge to efficiently take down an elk, to strip the meat off its bones and, when preparing the side dish, to use non-poisonous mushrooms. It’s this misplaced (a less generous person might say, “B.S.”) sentimentality that makes a brief glimpse of Bigfoot so magical; it’s as if we’ve been afforded a peek at an organized era before flatware and firearms came along and mucked everything up. It’s why a fog-shrouded encounter with the Fear Liath is so terrifying (besides, of course, the monster’s mystical fear conjuring ability) – we are on his turf now, and he is living a life we abandoned. A life that, try is we might, by camping, hiking, etc., we can never fully reclaim – a sad fact that finds us physically and mentally vulnerable to that bygone lifestyle’s dangers and obstacles, among them the hulking Greyman.

Wodewoses – mythic wild men of ancient Europe – represented something similar to the modern Bigfoot. They possessed the same sort of preternatural, pre-civilized bond with nature (some of them could even see years into the future, evincing a sense that, in giving up its primal beginnings, mankind likewise sacrificed some broad and mysterious link to the larger universe), and represented a similar understanding of man’s anti-domestic roots… but they also had a bit more personality. Whereas Sasquatch represents an iconic image of a missing link as recalibrated by modern science to include overwhelmingly ape-like features, Wodewoses had human physiques (swathed though they were in a carpet of fur) and demonstrably human faces. Most of them measured in well below the slam dunk-ready height of most modern man-apes. Many boasted leonine hair and wild beards. Some were part goat. Some, part elf. Some descended from elementals or dark spirits. Others carried clubs. Some even had hairless, feminine chins and tig ol’ bitties.
Essentially, Wodewoses hopelessly blurred the lines between fairy tale creatures, missing links and hirsute madmen. The parenthetically aforementioned prophetic wild men, for example, were generally portrayed as contemporary humans driven mad by ancient and powerful forces. Even outside the bounds of the mythic and supernatural, rumors of feral tribes prowling the landscapes of unexplored continents ran rampant. Early Christians believed that Wodewoses had supernatural powers of seduction, and feared their ability to coerce virtuous women into debased and vile sex acts (which at the time, probably constituted, like, gentle reverse cowgirl). The church no doubt viewed the mischievous perverts, drunk as they were on animal lusts and the howling winds that stir the leaves, as horny, impish mascots of Paganism.

Meanwhile, French monarch King Charles VI saw the Wodewoses as a limitless source of amusement. During a 1393 masquerade ball held in the honor of the Queen Mother, Chuck and five of his courtiers donned hemp wild man costumes, chained themselves together and trudged out into the ballroom, where the amusement quickly assumed a very real limit – embers from a torch ignited the flammable costumes, resulting in the horrible, fiery deaths of at least three of the King’s companions.

In Germany, club wielding wild men, buxom wild women and even whole wild clans were fixtures of family seals and coats of arms, offering the suggestion that each family’s roots were both deep-set and brawny. This usage highlights the sense of primitive strength and wild power evoked by Wodewoses. In short, even before humans had any coherent sense of the mechanisms of evolution, there existed inside people an understanding that man had fought his way out of the wooded darkness and into the light of civilization, but that that emergence was bittersweet, held as it was in the receding presence of things left behind.

Misleading notions that earlier times were simpler, truer, better, etc. are attractive shadows under which to toil through this modern life. Our ancestors dreamt up the wild men to keep an imagined ideal alive, even if it sometimes led to irrational fear or catching on fire. Sure, modern science has re-shaped the wild men – grown them and aped out their faces and robbed them of supernatural powers – but the ideal remains. We retain that strange nostalgia.

Ancient Scotland was host to an uncountable number of feral elves, dark spirits, vengeful ghosts and hirsute wild men. There’s no doubt that today’s simian Fear Liath is a direct descendent of the Wodewoses of yesteryear. The proof is in the supernatural power that the creature displays – its ability to covertly project feelings of panic and fear into the hearts of hikers and mountaineers.

Crypytozoologists, however, have a different theory about this “magic” power.

Friday: Fear Liath and Science

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

In 1895, while hiking near Ben Macdui’s peak, Collie sensed that he was not alone. After listening for several moments, he discerned a distinct and frightening crunching sound trailing him up the mountain: “For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.” Collie desperately struggled to identify his stalker through the thick curtains of mist that shrouded the rock formations, but perceived nothing but drifting fog and the slow, crunching persistence of the phantom interloper’s progress. Eventually, consumed by fear, Collie took off running, scrambling up and around an estimated five miles of boulders and out-cropping rocks.

Other hikers and adventurers have descended Ben Macdui with similarly eerie tales. Some report finding giant footprints stamped into the mountainside. Many claim to have seen a giant grey figure, plowing through the fog or, sometimes, looming behind them as their strange sense of terror reached a crescendo. In the ‘90s, one guy even called out Fear Liath for chasing his car through a nearby forest.

From a logical standpoint, it’s fairly easy to explain away all the varied symptoms of a standard Fear Liath encounter. For example, scientists have suggested an easy explanation for the towering silhouette sighted skulking up the mountain – the same blankets of fog that make the mountain look like the set of gothic melodrama on closing night, when all the leftover dry ice gets poured into the bucket, create perfect conditions for the Broken Spectre effect; angled sunlight casts a trail-weary hiker’s shadow onto a nearby fog bank and ACH! Giant grey figure. That combined with the standard cast of cryptid rationalization factors – the natural anxiety provoked by lonely, fog-draped surroundings; exhaustion; cultural memory of the entire gamut of cryptid encounters as dutifully recounted in books, by television and on this website, etc. – make the Greyman shrug-offable as any other hirsute missing link.

From a folkloric standpoint though, there’s a lot more here than just a tam-topped, haggis-devouring Sasquatch. There’s a reason that the Fear Liath seems to share traits of both classically simple ape-men (like Yetis and Skunk Apes) and creepy, sense-meddling phantasms (like maybe a magic ghost or something). It turns out that “Scotland’s Bigfoot” has a history that pre-dates all Bigfoots, dating back to a time when men were men, and furry ape-men were, like, feral elf spirit monster things.

Wednesday: Fear Liath, Wudewas and other words guaranteed to be useless in Scrabble

It seemed like the perfect way spend a summer day in Silverton, Colorado.

For a mere $250 registration fee, Silverton-businessman Rick Lewis offered 400 people the chance to win a cool million bucks if they could only get one snapshot of Bigfoot. For your money, you also get to stay at the beautiful Kendall Mountain Resort for the weekend.

The website even boasts sponsorship from companies like Nikon and Kodak as well as government agencies including the U.S. Department of the Interior and Fish & Wildlife Service.

It was also fake.

Silverton town administrator Jason Wells says the Kendall Mountain Resort, which is owned by the town, has never been scheduled to host the $1,000,000 Hunt For Bigfoot. Wells says the resort is booked with a different event that weekend.

“I just want to make sure that we’re not somehow tied into this whole affair,” Wells said. “I don’t want a bunch of people showing up here who have paid $250 for there to be a lack of an event that’s got the town’s name in any way attached to it.”

Wells says Silverton is known for colorful characters, but he said this “dubious” hunt was “bizarre even for here.”

After being confronted by town officials over the false booking claim, Lewis says he was moving the contest to a town in Northern California but refused to say where, according to Wells.

The site is still up for now although registration is closed.

[Cryptomundo]

Cryptomundo is rightly ticked off by the name dropping of Sasquatch on the new “Adventure’s of Bobby Bigfoot” website designed to teach kids about sustainability and green living. See, we leave a carbon footprint, Bigfoot has a big footprint, so you shouldn’t be a Bigfoot when it comes to carbon emissions. Blah, blah, blah.

But Sasquatch isn’t some tip-toeing green poster boy. Hell no! He’s mean mother loving devotee to the Earth.

When will Earth Day organizers look to the family bands of Sasquatch out there trying to survive in the environment for the logical icon? Actually, damn, Sasquatch are protectors of the environment, aren’t they?

The Earth needs warriors, as well as educators, but certainly not neurotic kids!!

It is time for the Sasquatch to be promoted as the ultimate Earth Day symbol.

There is a cause we can get behind!

[Cryptomundo]

[Adventures of Bobby Bigfoot]

Bob Saget is shooting a new show for A&E entitled Strange Days where he hunts down the strangest elements of our society, including Bigfoot, which was the episode he was shooting last week.

“Bob Saget’s Strange Days” delves into weird, wild stuff: biker gangs, partying Amish teenagers, mail-order brides, a survivalist cult — and, of course, Bigfoot.

So out Saget came to the North Olympic Peninsula to peek at the West End woods and interview John Bindernagel, author of two books about the hairy creature supposedly living in the deep forest.

And since Saget wanted a nice spot to meet Bindernagel — who came down from Courtenay, British Columbia — he and his entourage found the George Washington Inn, a replica of the first U.S. president’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va.

[Peninsula Daily News]

This New Year’s, rather than sitting around scratching your head, tugging your beard and slapping your mustache trying to think of great big resolutions and corresponding little, tiny loopholes to accompany them, consider using one or more of these pre-made resolutions, complete with not-quite-pathetic instant bail-outs for those times when self betterment and personal integrity just sort of make you feel like a showoff.

Resolution: Hunt down Bigfoot and turn him in for tax evasion.

Loophole: The weather. “I mean, seriously. You expect me to hunt Bigfoot in a (insert weather condition, e.g., cold snap, heat wave, downpour, breeze storm, moon happenstance, etc.)?!”

Resolution: Learn to read minds, use the ability to read the minds of psychics, and then use some of the acquired visions to convince the psychics that you’re a person from the future who’s willing to confirm psychic predictions at a price.

Loophole: The billing. “I don’t know how to format and print professional-quality invoices.”

Resolution: Attack middle school slumber parties while naked and making an “OHH-REE-ROE-ROO” sound in order to create a new urban legend about a naked ghost that makes a sound like “OOH-REE-ROE-ROO” and attacks middle school slumber parties.

Loophole: Fear of the sophomore slump. “I dunno. I’m starting to feel like it lacks the raw pizzazz of the public urination boogeyman urban legend I started in 2009.”

Resolution: Set world record for Most Times Abducted by Aliens in a Single Year.

Loophole: Alien fickleness. “I don’t know how to get them down here. The old peanut-butter-on-the-junk trick isn’t working anymore.”

Resolution: Reanimate a whole bunch of skeletons, train them to play their ribcages like xylophones, and take them out on tour under the name Dob Socket and his Rock-A-Bone Carnivale.

Loophole: Piousness. “Historically, anything that’s gotten as big in Japan as Dob Socket inevitably will has ultimately broken, like, four commandments.”

Resolution: Stop relying on gypsy curses to lose weight.

Loophole: Portion sizes. “Look, as long as this is what Applebee’s is calling a single chicken Caeser salad, I’m going to have to keep spitting on gypsies. And swearing at them.”

Resolution: Build a perpetual motion machine.

Loophole: Ingrained misogyny. “I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t shake the feeling that women are too ugly and stupid to appreciate perpetual motion. Alas, but would my parents have raised me with an open mind!”

Mike from the Bigfoot Discovery Project explains on his latest YouTube video an investigation into a recent sighting. Did Bigfoot make the nest they found? Or was it a homeless person?

Today’s playlist pays tribute to all the elusive, lumbering missing links that have blurred and plaster casted their way into our hearts. Without these mysterious gentle giants, who knows what sort of dead bodies we’d be pretending to find.

• Dan Freyer – “I Still Believe in Bigfoot”

Written in 2002, Freyer’s patriotic paean to both the existence (and proud American citizenship) of Bigfoot has been embraced by fringe media outlets such as Coast to Coast AM and Cryptomundo.com, and remains a well-worn jukebox favorite among Bigfoot acolytes. A note to amateur cryptozoologists: While the song rallies against lumping Bigfoot in with the likes of Sasquatch and the abominable snowman, it also compares him to Dolly Parton and Osama Bin Laden, so, taxonomically speaking, it’s not exactly a peer-reviewed primary source document.

• Tenacious D – “Sasquatch”
In this song from Tenacious D’s beloved HBO series, Sasquatch inspires more than just a hilarious anthem – he inspires a dream. After being jeeringly informed that their belief in The D’s rock star potential is tantamount to belief in the existence of Sasquatch, Kyle Gass and Jack Black find their frowns inverted when the legendary creature shows up to audition for the band.

• Radiorama – “Yeti”

Though not quite a household name, if you like a musical genre called “Italo-Disco,” Radiorama is apparently the cat’s PJs. In this 1987 European club hit from their album “The 2nd Album” (which also features a song called “Aliens”), Radiorama sing a winsome serenade to the majestic monster, pining, “I want your soul and I really like listening to your heart.” Catchy and factual.

• Barry Gray – “The Abominable Snowman”

A British composer best known for writing aurally compelling theme music for all of Britain’s visually unsettling “Supermarionation” shows, including “Thunderbirds,” “Stingray” and “Supercar,” Gray penned this fittingly strange tune for a yeti-centric 33 rpm “Thunderbirds” mini album.

• The Weakerthans – “Bigfoot”

This standout track from The Weakerthan’s uniformly wonderful album “Reunion Tour” is sung from the perspective of a downhearted Canadian Bigfoot enthusiast who, being met with the mocking “doubtful smiles” of skeptic peers, has resigned himself to lonely, silent, but no less fervent, belief. A perfect addition to any Bigfoot hunter’s “rainy day” playlist.

Brett “Amtrekker” Rounsaville is an adventurous man who recently completed a journey whereby he had to tackle 50 life goals before returning home. Read more at Amtrekker.com. He is a special reporter for Weird Things.

After nearly two years wandering America as a homeless vagrant I’m no stranger to the weird. Like a supercolony of Argentine ants poised to take over the world it stretches from one coast to another lurking just beneath the surface. Sometimes you have to dig down a few inches but make no mistake, weird is everywhere, it’s all part of the same colony and sometimes… it comes up for air.

Willow Creek, CA

Willow Creek is only one small town in the vast area of Northwestern California known by locals and those looking to cash in on poor innocent cryptids as “Bigfoot Country.” Despite the fact that the only memorable thing to come out of Bigfoot Country in the last several millennia is 953 frames of grainy, questionable Cine-Kodak footage there is no shortage of speculation about Bigfoot in the area.

I would even venture to say a trip into Bigfoot Country is more likely to end in a sad death at the hands of a Bigfoot memorabilia avalanche than in an actual Bigfoot sighting, yet speculation runs wild and no one is afraid to show you their own representation of Mr. Henderson’s dear friend. So what is it that makes Willow Creek so interesting? Is it the Bigfoot Motel, Bigfoot Bookstore, Bigfoot Rafting Co., Bigfoot Contractor Supply, Bigfoot Dollar Store or (no joke) Bigfoot Podiatry?

Well, yeah, actually, it kinda is…

BUT, in an effort to stay on topic, I want to talk about the Early Bird restaurant. In a world where everyone is out to make a buck off of cryptozoology’s finest creation only the Early Bird is willing to step up and tell it like it is. Sure, they sell a two-patty, foot shaped hamburger…but look at these wall paintings!

Do you see anyone else willing to admit that it was the Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) who INVENTED fire roasted bagels and goose-stepping. (Which, by the way, has some very interesting “missing link” implications for Germany.) And check out that coffee percolator. You think Harry over there just walked into Wal-Mart and picked that bad boy up? Don’t be ridiculous. These are obviously VERY advanced creatures we’re talking about here.

Once my eyes were opened wide by the hallowed halls of the Early Bird I began to see all of the other establishments for what they truly were! Bastions of hate who would stop at nothing to keep the Bigfeet down; spurning what they don’t understand and spreading their message of species-ial inferiority! All the while, the Early Bird stands tall, convention be damned, ever fighting to bring Bigfooted civil liberties to the forefront of society. Starting a conversation, starting a movement!

Or…

Those are some effing weird murals in an already effing weird town.

I bought a milkshake and headed toward Oregon.

I’m done.

Click AFTER THE JUMP for a look at some of the Willow Creek’s finest Bigfoot collectables from shot glasses to children’s puzzles…

Interim Editor Justin Robert Young interviews the elusive Sasquatch in this short clip. Head to LivingSasquatch.com to make your own video.

Thanks to John Houdi for the tip.

Previously, this week, on Weird Things.

• A few tips for the novice Bigfoot hunter.

• Could the Son of Sam, a UFO investigating Air Force base and the birth of popular science fiction have helped create the Dover Demon?

• Michael Jackson may be dead, but his ghost is on a world tour.

• What happens, when myriad ghosts, have chosen to haunt a house, stop beings polite and start getting real? They say some really kooky stuff, that’s what.

• Rhode Island has never had a Bigfoot sighting, but that might be about to change.

Enjoy the weekend, as always, send weird photos, stories, sounds and happenings to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail.

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Sam Malone on Cheers and Al Swearengen on Deadwood both manipulated the politics of an entire town from behind the counter of a bar. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
“Bigfoot is blurry.”

South Park, Episode 1×03, “Volcano”

The Six Million Dollar Man, Episodes 3×16 and 3×17, “The Secret of Bigfoot”

Bigfoot has always occupied a unique place in the pantheon of American cryptids. And I use “American” very deliberately here to suggest that, while sasquatches and yetis and abominable snowmen are found (and feared) the world over, Bigfoot is a specifically American cultural institution. Even the name “Bigfoot,” a simple, almost cute, descriptive moniker, suggests what ultimately seems to be the larger mystery that Americans wrestle with when they ponder the elusive, hirsute giant. It isn’t “Is he fact or fiction?,” but rather “Is he friend or foe?”

Both South Park and The Six Million Dollar man mused upon this question. One employed the query in revealing larger truths about pop culture’s grip on folklore. The other simply provided an answer… a weird, ridiculous answer.

In the first-season episode “Volcano,” Stan’s uncle takes the boys on a hunting trip while, simultaneously, the titular volcano threatens to destroy South Park. Cartman is mocked for telling the legend of Scuzzlebutt, a terrifying basket-weaving creature with a celery arm and a Patrick Duffy leg, and Stan’s masculinity is questioned when he refuses to kill any animals. In the end, the volcano erupts, and, though the town manages to save itself, Stan, Kyle and Cartman are rescued by the real Scuzzlebutt, who weaves a basket to carry them safely over the lava. Upon reaching safety, Stan immediately attempts to prove his manliness by shooting Scuzzlebutt in the head, which only ends up making everyone mad.

Meanwhile, back in the ‘70s, in the epic two-part episode “The Secret of Bigfoot,” Steve Austin links the disappearance of two scientists to Bigfoot. After tracking the creature down and trying to communicate with him, only to be violently rebuffed, The Six Million Dollar Man fights the creature, which takes flight after Austin tears off its arm. Austin then pursues the monster to a cave, where Bigfoot is revealed to be an intelligent android built by aliens to guard their mountain base.

Though created more than two decades apart, both of these storylines engage with the uniquely American consideration (maybe even hope) that Bigfoot is a benign, gentle creature, perhaps more human than animal. Scuzzlebutt (an obvious Bigfoot analog) is revealed to be a magnanimous craftsman who puts himself in danger to save the children. During Steve Austin’s initial encounter with the beast, Austin tries repeatedly to talk not just at the creature, but with it. How can we use these distinctly American narratives to uncover how Bigfoot has been sculpted into a national icon?

The Six Million Dollar Man two-part episode is interesting as an artifact from the beginning of America’s pop cultural fixation on Bigfoot. From the discovery of a giant footprint to the first sighting of the creature ambling through the woods (a clear homage to the infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage), the show’s portrayal of Bigfoot (up until the sensationalist, ratings-hungry robot reveal) hinges on his starkly uneven elusiveness-to-size ratio and the taxonomical theory that he is a missing evolutionary link between primates and man. While it seems obvious to regard the latter point, evolutionary kinship, as the root of the country’s fixation, it’s important to consider that Bigfoot-like creatures are a globally reported phenomenon, but few others are afforded the same national affection (or adorable nickname) as Bigfoot. Even the alien robot version of Bigfoot was portrayed as a misunderstood, intelligent alien robot. While it’s true that his bipedal posture and supposedly humanoid face lend Bigfoot a bit more hugability than, say, the horse-headed, bat-winged Jersey Devil, there’s a huge leap being made from possible threat to anonymous creature to probable friend.

So, what’s aiding Americans’ minds in making this jump? Well, on television, the Jersey Devil is going to be an anonymous puppet or special effect. Bigfoot, on the other hand, because of this supposed evolutionary kinship, can be played by a human. Everyone who watched The Six Million Dollar Man, for example, saw the creature as portrayed by a Muhammad Ali, and that image was branded into the cultural consciousness. To oversimplify: America sees Muhammad Ali as Bigfoot, America loves Muhammad Ali, ergo, etc. And that’s just one portrayal on one show. Bigfoot was a fixture of narrative TV in the ‘70s; the more people see a monster personified, the less they see the monster.

Here’s where South Park comes into it – while Scuzzlebutt’s Patrick Duffy leg seems like a silly pop cultural non sequitur, it manages to perfectly articulate this precise point: folklore is no less susceptible to pop culture than music or film. In his story, Cartman characterizes the creature as a bloodthirsty beast that kills people in order to “add pieces to its deformed body.” This quote almost reads like hyperbolized meta-commentary on pop culture itself, and the way it’s constantly assembling and re-assembling its own amorphous form and the form of all of it components, Bigfoot included.

The underlying non-threatening folksiness hinted at by Scuzzlebutt’s celery arm and penchant for basket weaving reveal another constructed trait that Americans have projected onto Bigfoot; If it’s assumed that Bigfoot is, in fact, more human than primate, his humanity is an older version, untouched by technology and the social complexities of the modern world. Given America’s obsession with idealizing an unobtainable past, it makes sense that people would find something attractive and mysterious about this kind of basic humanity, and the way Bigfoot supposedly carries it around inside of him, like he’s the last fluent speaker of some ancient, forgotten language.

The real Bigfoot remains a mystery. In the meantime, the country has stitched together the Bigfoot it loves. It has a Muhammad Ali leg, an idealized past arm and a wealth of the other disparate pieces of our national identity that have been offered up and subsumed in the name of creating a truly American monster.

Matt Finley is a regular Weird Things researcher currently based in Cleveland. His blog can be found here and you can follow him on Twitter at @Finfizzler.

Bart Cutino works with the Bigfoot Field Researcher Organization as well as the Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers. He made headlines with his claim that he came face to face with the creature during one hunt.

He offers you, the amateur hunter, a few hints on how to make your Bigfoot observation expeditions more fruitful.

• Know The Land Bart suggests learning the topography of the area you want to stake out in the light, before darkness falls. This not is not only a safety precaution but also allows you to mark the most likely traffic areas so you can focus your attention better.

• Don’t Chase Sightings Find the spots where a predator of Bigfoot’s size would feed instead of place where it may have been spotted.

• Tummy Rumbling It’s probably a good idea to eat a big meal before you leave so hunger doesn’t distract you. Just in case, Bart likes to bring along protein bars from Trader Joe’s and Muscle Milk.

• Call Of The Wild No matter what anyone tells you, Bart reinforces, there is no recorded sound file of a Bigfoot call. However, there are clips of unidentified animals that many researches use to provoke a response. Among them, the 1994 “Ohio Howl,” and the “Tahoe Scream.” Even regular deer and doe grunts have gotten responses for Bart.

• The Scent Of Fear Masking your scent is crucial. Elevating yourself helps, so do sprays or if you want to give yourself a natural musk simply forgo showering for a few days before heading out.

• Don’t Stop The Party Bigfoot are curious creatures, so part of your expetition wants to set up camp and light a fire, let them. Seperate yourself from the group and “be in the range of where the most likely curious entry would be.”

• Find The Highway Most apex predators hunt on the ridge lines and walk the same paths over and over again. If you can find these trails, you are getting closer.

photo credit: Josh Lowe | Thrash Magazine

Along with the islands of Hawaii, Rhode Island is the only American state to never officially recorded a Bigfoot sighting. Ever.

Ken DeCosta , founder and director of Rhode Island Society for the Examination of Unusual Phenomena, chalks it up to geography. Non-existant are the dense forests of Pennsylvania or Oregon that seem to breed sightings. If you’re looking for the King of Cryptids in the Biggest Little State in the Union, you might want to get comfortable.

“Catch up on some of your reading,” adds DeCosta.

But past experiences don’t alway portend future results, which is why Ken is excited about a new lead. A story from a middle-aged housewife that could very well break Rhode Island’s streak of futility. DeCosta recalls speaking with the woman, who was reluctant to tell her tale to even her husband for fear she’d look crazy.

In September of 2003, the then 44-year-old mother of two drove up Tower Hill Road when a bipedal, hairy, 6-foot beast walked in front of her car. After locking eyes with the creature and getting a good look at it’s ape-like facial features, the massive beast slammed it’s hands into the hood of her vehicle, leaving a few dents.

So this summer, DeCosta and his gang are going to head out to Tower Hill Road and stake out the scene. It most likely will be fruitless so RISE UP also plans to investigate a few other Tower Hill phenomenon including phantom hitchhikers and an intensely creepy specter of a dead little boy’s bicycle reported by passing motorists.

But maybe, just maybe, that woman was right. And maybe, just maybe, Ken and his team can catch a glimpse.

Hear that Hawaii?

Bart Cutino found big foot.

For a fleeting 2007 moment in Naches, WA he and the one of the legendary wood apes locked eyes. He describes the encounter to The Monterey Herald…

“About 20 to 25 seconds later, it stepped out from behind the tree and dropped on all fours, knees on the ground, arms extended and did this little head rotation in my direction,” Cutino says. “At that point I knew what it was, and it was surreal. It wasn’t scary. I just couldn’t believe it was happening.”

He says the Sasquatch propped itself momentarily onto its right shoulder and inched itself forward, at which point Cutino began snapping his fingers, trying to get the attention of a colleague who was 30 yards away, near a truck containing recording equipment.

Read the rest of the encounter AFTER THE JUMP!

“Every time I snapped my fingers, this thing would make a full-body, convulsive-type movement — very agile, very animalistic — and it would pause-freeze every time I stopped snapping my fingers,” Cutino says. “Then it rotated back onto its right shoulder, put a hand up next to its face, and splayed out the hand so I could clearly see all five digits on the hand.”

The creature stood up, went down again, then stood again before Cutino made a decision to run in the opposite direction, toward his friend with the recording equipment. By the time his colleague got the complicated recording equipment set up and directed, the Sasquatch was gone, Cutino says.

According to measurements after the fact, Cutino believes he saw a creature that was 7 feet tall and weighed up to 575 pounds. Based on the curious hand gesture, we’re assuming this particular Bigfoot was also well versed in the number of championships won by the Dallas Cowboys.

Cutino embraces the skeptic community vetting his and other Bigfoot hunters research. This way hoaxes and scam artists can be weeded out of the evidence pile in favor of documented and verifiable encounters. He’s also confident that with the rise in handheld recording technology, we’ll likely see more visual evidence within the next few years.

Bobby Clarke, a ferry boat driver from Manitoba, took this Bigfoot footage in 2005. The short film, taken with an out of focus camcorder created lots of media buzz and lead to a Bigfoot investigation by now defunct news program “A Current Affair”. Cryptomundo recounts the incident and reviews the tape. Do you think it’s really worth a second look?

Since the dawn of civilization man has been asking the big questions: Why are we here? How did we come to be here? Is there a god? Is Bigfoot an alien?

Chris Noel, Bigfoot enthusiast, author and investigator may not be able to shed much light on the first three, but in an interview with the Tampa Examiner he tackles the big question of Bigfoot’s origins.

-For more great drawings and caricatures by Nick Worthey, check out his website.

The origins of this video are confusing, apparently it has been making the rounds in Russia as a real sighting of Bigfoot somewhere in the English speaking world. Experts have determined this video to be a hoax. What do you make of it?

The classic dead Bigfoot photo above first appeared on Cryptomundo in 2006. Now artist David Lowe has created a series of photoshopped images depicting how the image was created. Needless to say, the featured cryptid never did exist. Check out this great piece of critical thinking at Cryptomundo.com.

photo credit: iwantamonkey

The Bigfoot Enthusiast Group: Elusive Primates of North America (EPNA) claims that they have found a primate like Handprint on Sand Mountain in Alabama. The discovering group from the Alabama Chapter of the EPNA came across the apparent handprint on an expedition in the Sand Mountain area, where they also heard strange animal noises:

“We heard something that sounded like a really mad cow vocal and then what sounded like a bear vocal,” Spearman said.

When the bear vocal drew closer, Spearman said, “All of a sudden we heard this vocal, like six deep, long, guttural growls. We know we upset what was there. We didn’t physically see anything.

“We did get vocalizations from that area in January as well, but we were unable to identify them. Lo and behold, we were watching Animal Planet and heard a similar vocal. An expert from Texas A&M University said it was an unknown primate with human texture vocalization.”

If Animal Planet confirmations and primate handprints don’t convince you, then maybe some of the other evidence on the EPNA’s website will win you over. We at weirdthings.com are still reluctantly skeptical until more compelling evidence can be found.