Bigfoot has been just big tall tale so far

By Thomas Taschinger

He's large, he's hairy and he roams the Big Thicket scaring small children.

We are not talking about your Uncle Leonard. We are talking about Bigfoot — a.k.a. Sasquatch, or the critter called the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas.

Most Southeast Texans have heard of Sasquatch sightings in the Pacific Northwest and Yeti encounters in Asia. To the surprise of many, no doubt, a story we ran last weekend suggested that the apelike creature could be skulking around these parts.

The article by Roy Bragg of the San Antonio Express-News told about the Texas Bigfoot Research Center and its efforts to find the big guy. With tape recorders and infrared cameras, the group's members occasionally roam the Thicket after dark, trying to make one of the world's greatest scientific discoveries. So far, they have come up with the same results as other Bigfoot researchers — lots of suspicion but little fact.

Locals may be disappointed, but there's virtually no chance Bigfoot is tromping about the Thicket or other parts of the Eastern or Southern United States where it has variously been reported. The wilderness in these places is not vast enough and the human presence is too pervasive to support a breeding population. If the creature were in the South or East, it would have been shot/trapped/photographed sometime during the past two centuries.

In the Pacific Northwest and Canada, the Bigfoot legend is a tad more believable. That corner of the continent has thousands of square miles of uninhabited or lightly populated territory. In theory, a small band of intelligent and elusive mammals could be hanging on.

The best evidence supporters have produced so far is the infamous 16 mm clip filmed in 1967 by Roger Patterson in northern California of a big ol' thing striding into the woods. Its 953 frames have been scrutinized in a way that makes the treatment of the Zapruder film seem almost casual.

Some anthropologists have said the beast could not possibly be phony, showing fluid movement and an apelike stride. Some makeup artists have said it's an obvious fake, "a man in a monkey suit." The discussion gets down to fine points like whether the creature has a water bag under the stomach fur, a trick used to make a costume ripple like real flesh. One debunker claimed to have spotted a few frames with a bell-shaped zipper fastener on the fur. Supporters call it a drop of water or a film flaw.

The cold reality is that it is extremely hard to believe that Bigfoot is real. Despite the ratio of wilderness to people — whether in the Pacific Northwest or the Himalayas ̬ you have to wonder why no one has been able come up with conclusive proof after all these years — either a corpse or skeleton or good photos. Heck, I'd settle for droppings or hair samples that the FBI lab agrees do not come from any known animal.

It's true that strange beasts have occasionally been found in the ocean (such as coelacanths, thought to be extinct for millions of years) or some remote jungle. But huge swaths of the sea are unexplored, so finding the unexpected down there is almost expected. On land, virtually all "new" animals are small or variants of known species.

So why doesn't this thing just go away like Elvis sightings? How do we explain the persistence — and similarity — of the phenomenon through the years?

Who knows. Bigfoot is to land what UFOs are to the sky — floating somewhere in the netherworld of something that doesn't seem to be real ... but maybe, against all odds, just might be. Even if you dismiss 99 percent of the "evidence" — and you should — there's always that nagging 1 percent. Your head tells you one thing, your heart perhaps another.

Keep looking, Bigfooters, and good luck. The truth is out there.

From: The Beaumont Enterprise, 5 February 2006.