The day Kennedy was shot. Or Princess Diana died. Or when you first consciously heard Silence is Golden by the Tremeloes. These are the occasions where you remember very clearly where you were and what you were doing. One such day was the morning after the disaster in which the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up not long after launch.
The Challenger was notable in that among its crew of seven was a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe. That morning I came down to breakfast in the main hall of my Cambridge college (I was a graduate student at the time) and heard a rash of very sick jokes. My muse not being constrained by such things as taste, I shall report them here:
A new cocktail, the Challenger – Seven-Up with a dash of Teacher’s.
N.A.S.A – Need Another Seven Astronauts.
Last thing heard from the cockpit before the explosion – ‘if she wants to drive, let her.’
Most notable about these jokes was how quickly they came into general currency. Remember – this was before the Web, before Twitter, before Facebook. Many years later I was discussing the speed at which such jokes spread with a colleague who happened to be familiar with a serial called Contemporary Legend – he passed me a scholarly paper on that very thing. Up to that point I scarcely knew that there is an entire sub-discipline of folklore studies devoted to tracking the formation of contemporary mythology.
Contemporary mythology is the field ably mined by investigative journalist Joshua Blu Buhs in his book Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, which I’ve just read by way of preparation for chairing a meeting on cryptozoology later this month at the Zoological Society of London (for more details please see my earlier post).
Buhs doesn’t care whether Bigfoot, Sasquatch or the Abominable SnowEntity actually exist. What interests him is how people maintain such dogged beliefs in the existence of such creatures, based on evidence which is at best circumstantial to beyond the point of exiguity, and at worst, entirely fabricated. More telling is that people seem to believe in such things even when they know the evidence has been fabricated, and, even more, would prefer to stay in a state of mythological unknowing rather than have anyone discover whether these creatures actually exist or not.
The story is traced back to that huckster par excellence, P. T. Barnum, who exhibited ‘Wild Men’ in his freak shows that were quite transparently actors dressed in gorilla suits. The interesting thing was that the public flocked to see such sideshows, even though they knew that the exhibits were frauds, and Barnum knew that they knew they were frauds, and they knew that Barnum knew that they knew … well, you get the idea. Buhs takes us up the Himalayas to show us relics of the Yeti kept in remote lamaseries, or presented to mountaineers by sherpas, which were obviously faked. It wasn’t that the indigenes were trying to gull the naive westerners – they really, actually believed in the apparitions themselves, and would continue to do so even when confronted with the fakery.
But the main focus of the book is the Pacific Northwest, home of Big Foot (sic) in Washington State, Oregon and northern California, and Sasquatch in British Columbia. Nobody really knows how tales of wild men in the woods got started, but by the mid-twentieth century true believers tended to be cut from the same stripe – working class, white and male. Men who didn’t set much store by what Beatrix Potter called ‘company manners’, but who throve on manly, outdoorsy pursuits such as hunting, fishing, woodcraft and being able to look after themselves. Men who still liked to think they kept the pioneer spirit alive in an age of creeping consumerism, civil rights and such feminized pursuits as shopping. Bigfoot and Sasquatch were projections of a desire for a group of people, beset and boxed in, to imagine that somewhere, Out There, it was still possible to roam free in the woods.
Buhs tells the tragicomic stories of the Bigfoot hunters – hucksters almost to a man (and they were invariably men); skeptical of the skeptics (scientists, even those sympathetic to the idea of undiscovered wildmen, were seen as effete members of the urban middle classes come along lately to steal their glory); and suspicious of consumerism, even as their ideas and tales were bilked, lampooned, commodified and marketed, wrapped up in cheap films, in stories in old-fashioned Men’s Adventure magazines such as True, Fate and Argosy and lurid tabloid tales. But as the science-fiction B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s became the blockbuster mainstream of the 1980s, the mantle passed from the rednecks to the environmentally conscious, back-to-nature middle classes, for whom the idea of the ‘wild man’ was not that of a manly, honorable and woodcrafty adversary, but a feminized ‘nature spirit’ in tune with the environment, an ideal to which we all aspire, especially when we spend $$$ on the hi-tech camping gear we are told we need to enjoy the wilderness properly. Modern-day Bigfoot hunters are as likely to be women as men, inspired, perhaps by rose-tinted views of the Jane Goodalls and Dian Fosseys of this world, at one with nature and the apes they studied.
What concerns me, however, in the immediate future, is that the whole idea of cryptozoology is something that no respectable person (me, for instance) should touch with a ten foot pole, given that it’s riven with fraud, pseudoscience, untrammeled expectation and general chicanery. However, the fact is that unusual creatures really do turn up from time to time, so that the existence of more of the same cannot be dismissed out of hand foot hand.
As I finished Bigfoot, though, it dawned on me that the distinction between fakery and real science as it applies to unknown creatures is as follows: if, despite decades of searching, your mythical creature (Bigfoot, the Yeti, Nessie) still fails to turn up, the likelihood is that it really is mythical and never existed in the first place. If, however, it just arrives, unannounced, out of nowhere (Homo floresiensis, several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a Pict antelope, whales and other creatures) then the myths become real and you have a legitimate object for study.
As an editor with Your Favourite Weekly Etcetera Etcetera, my attitude is this – I have a completely open mind as to the existence of the Yeti, Bigfoot, the Sasquatch and even Eight-Foot Tall Invisible Rabbits Called Harvey. But if you want me to sign up, you have to show me good, irrefutable evidence. A corpse, at the very least. So, yes, I will come up to your lab … but only if there’s something on the slab.
I was too young for the Challenger jokes, but I remember that the Diana jokes also seemed to spread incredibly quickly… interesting phenomenon!
We actually watched a “documentary” about Sasquatch last night, on the Discovery Channel. It was very repetitive, and the format was… unorthodox. Quite interesting, though, as one who believes it’s not entirely impossible that Sasquatch is out there. (Mind you, the CBC British Columbia News page had two stories about black bear attacks today and one about a grizzly attack, so if you go down to the woods today,
you’d better go in disguiseyou’ve got enough to worry about).Anyway… they started getting into the “Sasquatch is a primitive human” theory, and I said “I bet they’re going to mention Homo floresiensis and say it’s evidence of Sasquatch being possible”. Which they promptly did. So I told Mr E Man, channeling the feathered dinosaur anecdote you told us both in London, “Henry punished this in Nature“. And then I woke up the next morning to find that, in a very cool coincidence, you’d written this blog post.
Oh! And all this was just a couple of days after I listened to a podcast in which the host was asking people the following question:
“You’re the editor of the New York Times. One day, a team of Scottish scientists discovers indisputable proof of the Loch Ness Monster, a team of North American scientists discovers indisputable proof of Sasquatch, and the President of the USA is diagnosed with cancer. Which story do you lead with?”
This is getting spooky.
Thanks for this, Cath – I sorta expected you, as our Correspondent in the Pacific Northwest, to pen the first comment. Morphic resonance, that’s what I call it!
An interesting aspect of the phenomenon that Buhs touched on in his book was how people in the Pacific NW have adopted Bigfoot/Sasquatch as a local mascot, much as people in Nottinghamshire cleave to Robin Hood. It matters not that the subject is mythical, provided it can confer some shared sense of identity and collective pride. This, as Buhs says, inevitably leads to the mythical creature being used as a brand. So I’ll bet that within a reasonable radius of your house you’ll find a Sasquatch Bar’n'Grill, a Sasquatch Tires and Exhaust and so on and so forth in like fashion.
Yup – I’ve been to the famous Sasquatch music festival in Washington State, and one of our local breweries (Kokanee) has used an ongoing story about park rangers trying to protect their beer from Sasquatches for years!
Buh’s book looks at the Kokanee commercial which has gone viral to such an extent that young children look at images of sasquatch and say things like ‘wow, it looks like something straight out of the Kokanee commercial’. Canadian Club has also used sasquatch in their commercials, too. The psychology of these commercials is interesting, and Buhs goes into it in some depth – the commercials pretend that sasquatch is real, even when we know it isn’t, and the advertisers know we know, and we know that the advertisers know we know they know – it goes straight back to Barnum’s freakshows. The shared knowingness forges a bond between viewer and viewed, and presumably helps the viewer ‘bond’ with the product.
I very rarely drink Kokanee, but I did once go to a Halloween party dressed as the “Sasquatch dressed as the Kokanee ranger” from one of the better commercials. I’ll try and find a photo for you tonight.
If you’re interested I see that there will be a lecture on the life of Grover Krantz–the American scientist who belived Bigfoot was real–on Tuesday 18 July at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford. here is the url:
http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/EccentricityProgrammes1.pdf
Thanks for mentioning that, Tarbo. Buhs devotes most of a chapter to the complex and conflicted character of Grover Krantz. I expect it’ll be an interesting lecture.
When I was a kid, I very much wanted to see a Bigfoot, but they didn’t show up around my digs very often. Which, if you think about it, is a strange sort of evidence to the possibility that they actually exist. Because if Bigfoot were pure myth, people would be seeing them everywhere. They don’t. This myth actually has a pretty well-defined habitat. I find that rather odd.
Also, the Ivory-billed Giraffe.
Ah, the Fabled Ivory-Billed Giraffe. But seriously, myths often seem to be regional. There are ‘wildman’ myths all over the place (there’s much interest in the Orang Pendek of Sumatra, for example), as there are myths about the ‘little people’ (the ebu gogo of Flores, much discussed after the discovery of Homo floresiensis, is both at once). Here in Norfolk we have the Black Shuck, a fearsome nightstalking cat. Possibly. We think it lives in our street.
America does have its local cryptids – the Jersey Devil, for example. I think Bigfoot doesn’t really qualify as a local myth. He’s too universal.
I wish I could remember this website URL – it has a map of Bigfoot sighting reports. If you look at the southern US – roughly the area encompassing the Confederate States (just as an example), you see that Bigfoot really does have a distinct habitat consisting of a few localized areas. However, Bigfoot himself is not a local myth.
If Bigfoot were truly a myth, then he should be seen everywhere in which he is mythologized, in roughly equal numbers. But he’s not. Take North Mississippi, where I live – there are almost no reports of Bigfoot sightings, though there are lovely areas of swamp and forest where he could conceivably live. We support a large population of hunters, campers, boaters, and hikers – the people who usually see Bigfoot. But nobody sees Bigfoot around here. Bigfoot is most often sighted in Florida (home of the skunk ape), or western Arkansas/eastern Oklahoma. The Cache River, home of the legendary Ivory-Billed Giraffe, is prime swamp ape habitat, but alas no swamp ape sightings there that I’m aware of. No, if you want to hunt Bigfoot in Arkansas, you go to Fouke.
So, Bigfoot sightings seem to occur in geographical clusters, despite the fact that knowledge of/belief in Bigfoot is relatively uniform across large geographical areas encompassing those clusters. If we were talking about Ivory-billed Giraffes rather than Bigfoot, the number of reports alone would taken as evidence of its existence. But then, the IBG was known to exist at one time, while Bigfoot isn’t supposed to exist at all.
If Buhs’ book is any guide, the clustering of Bigfoot sightings rather depends on the addresses of the people who are doing the hoaxing…
Ooo-arrr.
Excellent recap of Buhs’s book. In 2009, when there was a sighting in San Antonio, Buhs took the opportunity to write an article for the Washington Post. I had the fortune of finding one of the True magazines (Nov 1961) with an article by Ivan Sanderson this last weekend. Every page, from the ads to the single-panel cartoons shout virility and manhood. After actually reading one of these Men’s Digests, I can see how this would color Buhs’s theory on what drives these original Bigfoot researchers.
I would argue today, most modern researchers (male and female) are attracted to Bigfoot for the same reasons kids innately love dinosaurs. If you ask most of the prominent researchers today, they were exposed to the idea of Bigfoot at a young age and the mystery never left them. Please visit BigfootLunchClub.com for the latest Bigfoot News.
Thanks for that, Guy – I shall certainly pop along to the Bigfoot Lunch Club. When reading Buhs’ book I did wonder whether he was laying it on a bit thick about the whole virility thing, but of course I was in no position to know otherwise. (It’s a sign of the times that the whole genre of the Men’s Magazine has degenerated into porn). Your thesis is just as plausible – the allure of the mysterious other that can never quite be grasped.
Just an observation – have you noticed that there isn’t a field of cryptobotany? That should tell you something about legendary animals. Of course should you find a living glossopterid in some remote corner of Tierra del Fuego, it would be a big deal.
I hadn’t thought of that … but relic plants do turn up from time to time. Wasn’t there that pine tree that turned up in Australia that represented some long-lost lineage?
After graduating in Biology, I’ve finalizing a strange study of fantastic passerine birds endemic to Chile, very similar at the dinosaurs theropods in their behaviours, but I’m sure they exist. Please read this “The family Rhinocryptidae”: https://www.morebooks.de/store/gb/book/biological-similarities-between-chilean-tapaculos/isbn/978-3-639-18137-1
Buhs’ book is very interesting. There is another new one, ‘Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology’–provacative title. It looks more at the way some scientists came to believe Bigfoot was real, and less on the pop culture interpretations.
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