Cryptozoology covers a lot of ground (some of it very shaky), but having read everything significant in the field for 40 years, I find myself speculating on two of its poster animals - sasquatch and Nessie - and what their reality may be.
Idon't think we've missed a large unclassified American ape, and I am quite sure we haven't missed a massive animal in a Scottish lake. If they were real, though, what might they be?
The best argument for Bigfoot is that pranksters creating
hundreds and hundreds of fake footprint events, some made where they might not
be discovered at all, seems illogical.
It is illogical, but the best argument against Bigfoot is that we don't
have much better evidence by now.
Some tracks are impressive, like the famous Bossburg
"Cripplefoot" prints. If hoaxer Ivan Marx was really behind those, he
put a lot of effort into making elaborate fake feet and leaving over a thousand
prints with them. Some prints are more easily be explained. The "London trackway" - humanlike 14" prints with a 47"
stride - got some early endorsements from major Bigfooters. However, I did an experiment on muddy ground like
that mentioned in the report. I am 6-3” (I was 6-4" before my back screwed up)
with long legs (inseam 36). I was able, barefoot, to make 13" tracks 47"
apart heel to heel. Now that's on level ground, and I had to stretch as far as
I could, but this indicates to me that a human just a fraction taller and
larger-footed could have done it. This is just
one data point, but it puts the tracks within the human range in my mind.
Bigfooters have told me that "human" is now the generally accepted
explanation.
If Bigfoot proved real.. hmmm. The footprint evidence to me is ambiguous on
the "man vs. ape" question because the feet wouldn’t look like the
feet of any primate species we know anyway: they’d have to evolve somewhat to carry
such a huge body around bipedally. Also, there are countless variations within the Bigfoot track database even if
you throw out the ones with other than five toes and the ones that don't look like a primate at all: no one can say definitively that "this is a real track and we can throw out all the ones that don't look like this." A lot of researchers like Asia's
Gigantopithecus blacki as either Bigfoot itself or an ancestor, which has some
logic to it as this is the only ape known from the fossil record big enough to
fit almost every report and idea of sasquatch. But we have only teeth and jaws and thus no idea what the feet looked
like. Giganto is generally presumed to be an
orangutan-like quadruped, but we can't say definitively it never walked on two
legs, or that it could not have spun off a habitually bipedal descendant.
The most famous piece of evidence put forth for Bigfoot remains, after all these years, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film. I go with Dr. John Napier, the eminent
primatologist who thought it likely sasquatch was a real animal, but that the
filmed subject showed a mix of human and ape characteristics that wasn't
believable.
If it was a man in a suit, though, I'd still like to know
who made the damned thing.
I don't think it's a mail-order theatrical costume
and I don't think it's a horsehide home-made job (the two theories Greg Long
tried and failed to mesh into something believable in his book The Making of
Bigfoot.) There's no detail that
screams "fake" unless you count my general impression that the back
of the lower legs look pantlike. Someone put skill, effort, and money into
this. While the film rights were
valuable, I wonder if the hoaxer went to the trouble because he thought the
effort would bring in a lot more value than it ended up doing.
I never met Roger Patterson and haven't met
Bob Gimlin, but I can't help thinking that Patterson was in on the hoax. I
considered the idea that the hoaxer was a third party working through a local
contact (like Al Hodgson, the store owner who told them of a nearby track find,
or Bob Heironimus, who loaned Gimlin his horse) who knew P and G were looking for Bigfoot and tipped them off to a likely location, but
I can't really make that work in my head. The guy in the suit would have needed to be a reckless idiot, as he
stood a fair chance of being shot if the two men - or someone else coming
across the location which was remote but not unvisited - had decided they
needed the specimen. Indeed, both Patterson
and Gimlin said, years later, they wished they had shot it. While Patterson was a very interested
Bigfoot-hunter (I have a copy somewhere of this self-published 1966 book),
Gimlin was a less-interested companion who might have been innocent of the
whole thing. But the bottom line is I write the whole affair off as a hoax.
Patterson-Gimlin frame 352 (public domain)
Back to the question of what Bigfoot is, assuming it’s real:
I used to like Giganto, too, based on the size factor: we don’t have any other
apes nearly that size as suspects, and none of our human ancestors, despite some
speculative interpretations of creatures like Paranthropus (aka Australopithecus)
robustus, its cousin P. boiesi, or the invalid Homo gardarensis, comes close to
being 7 feet or more in height.
That leads to to an interesting side discussion: how big does Bigfoot have to be to match the sighting reports? I think
it’s safe to lop off the top end of Bigfoot height estimates based on the uncertainty
of a startled eyewitness’ getting the height just right, but even if you assume
the biggest estimates are in error, I think you need at least a 7-footer. Dr. Matthew Johnson claimed a clear sighting of an animal that was taller than himself, and Johnson is 6'8." Also, it’s definitely broad-shouldered and large in the frame. It may not weigh 800 pounds or more as some researchers think. but 400+ is, I think, a minimum.
Despite the unsuitability of human ancestors,
though, I’ve come to think they are perhaps preferable to Giganto. We have no evidence Giganto (or any large ape) ever made
it north of the bamboo forests in what is now China, whereas we do have direct
evidence of one human species making itself at home in cold climates and then
making the trip all the way to North America. (See this article for a good anti-Giganto argument.) Plus, as humans evolved, we became more habitually
bipedal, while the apes produced knuckle-walking or fist-walking large species. What offshoot of the human branch produced a tall, hairy, and apparently rather dim (no good evidence of fire-making, sophisticated tools, etc.) species? Again, I think the answer is “none:” I just find it slightly
less incredible than a giant ape.
Nessie evidence is a little like Bigfoot minus the tracks.
There are some odd sonar traces, and I still haven't completely filed away Tim
Dinsdale's film: it might be a boat, but it looks like it submerges at one
point. The rest of the filmed evidence
doesn't grab me the way it used to.
This came to mind due to a FaceBook thread on the
"giant eel" idea. While this occasioned Steve Alten's best
'creature" novel, it's never been proven that 20-30-foot conger eels exist anywhere. Still, if we assume
for a moment there's a large unidentified animal species which inhabits Loch
Ness for part or all of its lifecycle, the eel idea has its charms. Nessies are
not airbreathers: we'd have more and better pictures. Invertebrates are out
based on size. That leaves fish. I can imagine a giant conger, with its
relatively thin forebody, lumpy midsection, and observed unusual behavior (as Maurice
Burton wrote, it can zoom around with head and forebody out of water or
(seemingly pointlessly) undulate on its side at the surface) a decent
candidate. Ness expert Dick Raynor points out an eel doesn't match most of the known photos, but, as I said earlier, I don't think much of any of the still-photo evidence these days. A giant conger could look at times like a swimming lump or a raised head/neck
(even if that "neck" was sometimes the tail). I think eels could look
a little more Nessie-ish than the other main fish candidates, the sturgeon or
the wels catfish. It's not so much a
great solution as the only one I can sort of imagine.
As I said in the title, these are random notes. They don’t really
lead anywhere, except to my usual comment when I doubt cryptozoological
creatures’ existence: I hope I’m wrong.
