4 out of 5 stars
Halloween Bingo 2024
The author describes himself as a “journalist and self-diagnosed skeptic.” He has a decent sense of humour and an entertaining writing style. I was thankful for all of these things. Why, you might ask, would I choose to read a book about a supposed ape-man roaming the North American wilderness? It got its start during the height of Covid, when my massage therapist of the time suddenly started spouting antivax propaganda. We had a history of chatting during my appointments but this became a source of irritation. She was a skilled therapist, so I felt around for less divisive topics to discuss. That was when I learned that she was a Sasquatch true-believer. She talked about them in a gossipy way, as if she had tea with the “local population” regularly. Nor did she limit herself to Bigfoot. We discussed UFOs and the Loch Ness monster, among other odd topics. I had to laugh to myself when she told me that she knew I had a science background and could I give her my opinion of the Loch Ness monster? She didn't believe me about vaccines, but was willing to trust me on cryptozoology!
I learned while reading this book that her intersection of beliefs isn't unusual. If you created a Venn diagram with three circles of paranormal investigators, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists, Bigfoot true-believers would be in the centre overlap. And it's like The X-Files--people want to believe. Perhaps because of the secular society we live in, leaning into unlikely theories may scratch the same itch that religion used to (although some religious sects seem to be getting steadily weirder too). Replace the church congregation with your Bigfooting buddies, and voila, you have found your tribe.
"Here was a creature that...could live without civilization, that was self-reliant and strong," Joshua Blu Buhs has written, and that, to Bigfoot's demographic--largely male, conservative, working-class whites whose lives were shackled to Hobbesian market forces--"was authentic and genuine, a repudiation of the society around them, a society that often did not value them or their opinions."
I think that most people are willing to entertain the idea of Bigfoot being out there, but aren't too motivated to go out hunting for them. I'm attracted to the idea that there's enough wilderness out there to support and conceal them. Just like my rational brain tells me that ghosts are fictional, but my ape brain makes me put down the ghost story as the shadows lengthen and the sun sets. Is it that vestigial fear of being a prey animal from our very early history? Is this why so many of us are afraid of the dark? Or, as someone pointed out, we're scared of not being alone in the dark. What's out there that we can't see?
The idea of unspoiled nature and the monsters it contains is so far-fetched that it's intoxicating to those who choose to believe in it. And there's the nut. We want to believe. So badly do we want to believe in something that we're willing to believe in almost anything, against much evidence to the contrary. Being hardwired for narrative, we ascribe meaning to things when there isn't any, invent mythological systems that render abstractions as concrete realities.
As a lifelong birder, I thought O'Connor's chapter comparing Bigfooting to the search for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker was genius. We know that the Ivory Bill existed and where its range was. But there have been no accepted sightings of the bird since 1944. Claiming to have seen one nowadays ruins academic careers and professional reputations, but people continue to search hopefully, cameras in hand, through the difficult terrain suitable to this woodpecker. If there are birds (fingers crossed) they are few in number, shy, and widely spaced. Still, folks claim to have sighted them fairly regularly. How many of these are Pileated Woodpeckers? Who knows? But it certainly shows the enormous difficulty of finding elusive wildlife.
Read for the Monsters square of my Bingo card.
