Bigfoot Days, Part 2

 Part Two of Bigfoot Days

I wrote in the first entry about my visit to Bigfoot Days in Estes Park, Colorado, earlier this month. The events included a Friday night barbecue with socializing before that, and then a public festival lasting most of Saturday. Overall, this was a terrifically enjoyable event, without a great deal of science but with a lot of enjoyable discussions and souvenirs and all the other things one expects in a festival. 

As I said, there was not a great deal of scientific discussion here. This was about the legend more than the creature. However, I had several exchanges with Cliff Barackman, a well-known Bigfoot hunter and the only serious one in attendance. So here I’ve written my reactions to his thoughts as provided in discussions and his “Bigfoot 101” presentation.

These are my recollections based on memory and some notes I made at the time. I have not, since then, looked up any of the topics mentioned, looked at the slides Cliff presented, or followed up with questions. I wanted to present my impressions as I had them at the time. That means there are some gaps and maybe even some errors in the text that follows. 

This all started out at the banquet on the evening of March 31st. There was a little reception beforehand, and I only got there in time for the tail end of that. I did introduce myself to Cliff, as we knew each other only from correspondence. I didn’t see a reason to talk to the other headliners, the guys from Mountain Monsters: they’re good performers and probably great fun to have a beer with, but there’s no attempt at science on their show.

Cliff accepted a signed a copy of my book Of Books and Beasts A Cryptozoologist’s Library and we took photographs. He later posted a picture on his social media and recommended the book. So, I appreciated that, but I think I stayed objective. He knew I was a skeptic, and we talked a bit about why. A nice fellow came up and showed him cell phone pictures of a small tree broken off at the base and an indistinct depression he thought was a Bigfoot print. Both of these were from Colorado. Neither one, however, struck Cliff as useful evidence.   

Then it was banquet time. I joked about the “Bigfoot BBQ” and whether there was some law against barbecuing Bigfoot, but the organizers put together several types of BBQ, and I had no complaints except that the dinner wasn’t worth $95. Good thing I have an LLC now for my writing and can at least put it down as a business expense.

I've mentioned that one of the interesting things about the banquet was the diversity of people attending.  There were hunters in flannels, sure, but there were also at least five advanced degrees between the people at my table, including one belonging to a geneticist trying to cure sickle cell. Cliff came by all the tables and spent about half an hour at ours. I asked him about one of my biggest problems, the lack of a fossil record. Thinking back, we actually didn't get to that because we wandered off into the subject of what might be Bigfoot's ancestry. Cliff thought it was definitely not Gigantopithecus, but something in the hominid line. I agree on that. I’m quite sure Nature did not start with a giant quadrupedal bamboo-loving ape in China and end up with a bipedal primate walking around the forests of North America. However, if you assume Bigfoot is real, then obviously it had to come from somewhere. Cliff’s best guess is somewhere close to my own: that it must be some sort of descendant of one of the early branches off the human line, likely Paranthropus, that worked its way northward and across the bridges that came and went as ice and lands changed. After all, we know one large primate made the journey. If I had to write a novel about Bigfoot and make it as realistic as I could, that is the origin I would use. 

Cliff thinks the ancestral species would have gotten larger in accordance with Bergmann’s rule: that mammals increase in size as they get further north.  This is a useful rule but not a universal one. There are two ways for a mammal exposed to cold to develop a lower ratio of surface area to mass.  One is to get bigger, as brown bears have. Humans, though, went the other way. Artic peoples didn’t get taller, or larger overall: they got more compact.

Cliff showed some photographs on his cell phone that that he thought were among the best evidence. Cliff is certain the Patterson-Gimlin film is real. If you believe that, then photographs that look like it are more likely to be genuine. He had a few of these. They did not convince me, but I’ll admit they at least weren’t obvious suits. 

(The situation with the P-G film reminded me just a bit of that involving Bernard Heuvelmans. Heuvelmans got a lot of flak, deservedly, for mangling the history of Neanderthals. It was logical to him, though, because he was sure he’d examined a real one, the Minnesota Iceman, and everything else had to fit.)

Next day was the festival. I went over about 10:30 in the morning to be greeted by a huge inflatable Bigfoot, a couple of rather poorly costumed Bigfoots, and the Bigfoot monster truck.  There was a good live band, and a couple of dozen booths sold T shirts and casts and art of Bigfoot and so forth and then I bought quite a bit. My friend Lija Fisher put out some flyers from my own book, so of course I appreciate that. 

I bought a couple of things at Cliff’s table, notably the most unusual Bigfoot cast I have encountered. It was made when Bigfoot allegedly (while out of sight of any human) stuck its fingers into a bait jar of Nutella and left an impression as it pulled them out. The researcher who collected it still has the Nutella but has not yet tested it because of the expense. The cast is fairly interesting. The fingers in the cast are larger than mine, and I am 6-4 with big hands.  The fingers aren’t big enough to put them out of the human range, though. 

I went to see Cliff’s presentation in the historic village theater, a wonderful place. This was his Bigfoot 101, his basic introduction to the topic for all for all audiences.

Cliff stated his certainty that Bigfoot existed and went through his various lines of evidence. My comments on some of these: 

Footprints. It bears repeating that all the items Cliff discussed reflected his belief the P-G creature is real, so genuine footprints must be reasonably consistent with the ones cast at that site. He believes the much-disputed “mid-tarsal break” is one feature of all valid prints. There are thousands of tracks without that feature, and he believes that they are created by hoaxers or interpreted by enthusiastic witnesses looking at bear tracks or human tracks or whatever. On a related topic, he also thinks the placement of the ankle just ahead of where it is on the human foot is a consistent feature of genuine photographs that show that area. also based on the P-G film. 

Comment: It’s reasonable to think a primate the size of Bigfoot would have some adaptations to its foot, although I lack the expertise to offer a useful analysis. It did strike me that, if the Patterson-Gimlin film was a hoax, something like this would appear, because the impersonator was putting his feet into some sort of oversized shoe or flipper.

Native American lore.  Cliff stated that Native American stories and beliefs show a consistent concept of something resembling Bigfoot. He even said "all" Native cultures have something like this. 

Comment: Here, he certainly overreached. Some Native American cultures do have legends or stories of creatures that could match a modern description of Bigfoot. But others clearly refer to supernatural beings, shapeshifters, or giants that can walk across rivers and mountains, and there are many variations. Kathy Strain’s book on Native American beliefs, even though it's biased in favor of these being connected to Bigfoot, still shows how many of the stories she thought worth including do not support a flesh and blood animal of this type. It is fair to note that flesh-and-blood animals are sometimes given supernatural aspects in the beliefs and storytelling of cultures in many places around the world.  

Sightings and Photographs (I’m lumping them together here). Cliff thought most sightings could be dismissed. He had one sighting himself that he thought was genuine (“98 percent certain”), and that some sightings matching the Patterson-Gimlin type Bigfoot were valid. He showed what he thought were the best available pictures of the creature. (I think all of these have been discussed online before and dismissed by skeptics, although Bigfoot has not been a special interest of mine, so I can’t be sure.)  Cliff thinks that, based on the P-G film, Bigfoot has a conical head shaped by a sloping forehead. He takes this as indicating the creature does not have a human-sized brain, and thus not human-level intelligence. He dismisses the accounts of Sasquatch is talking to each other and talking to humans in a real language.

I asked him to tell us more about his sighting. He described it as an event that occurred while filming the first regular-season episode of Finding Bigfoot. It was not caught on film at the time because the producers and the Bigfoot hunters were physically as well as philosophically apart at that point in the late evening. Cliff reports seeing a figure scrambling over a North Carolina hillside in a way that looked very fluid, as if the creature was at home there and must have good night vision: a human wouldn’t needed a flashlight and would have carefully picked their way across that terrain. He advised that what we see on the Finding Bigfoot show is quite different from reality and that shots of a figure running up the hill were of Matt Moneymaker desperately trying to catch the creature on foot. So, there was no footage and Cliff didn’t see the figure again, but he remains certain that he saw Bigfoot.

Discussion: You've probably grasped by now that Cliff’s arguments did not change me from a skeptic to believer. Some of the individual pieces of evidence have been disproven, and the rest are not definitive to me. The lack of fossil or subfossil remains, and the quality of proof offered for the living animal, keeps me in the skeptical camp, even though I’ve talked to people who are certain they got a good look. I don’t know what they saw.

However, Cliff is a very good presenter, and I understand better now why so many people think he’s on to something. He answers all questions and comes across as a sincere believer who is certain that, sooner or later, he is going to get the proof he wants. We haven’t gotten that evidence, he thinks, merely as a matter of chance, as we’re hunting a few thousand creatures at most in a huge area that still contains a lot of wilderness. It’s true, as Cliff pointed out, that finding a naturally dead bear is a very rare event, and there must be many times more bears than Bigfoots. I understand the argument, although to me it gets less persuasive with every passing decade that fails to yield a Bigfoot. So, we parted in polite disagreement.

Well, that was the end of the Bigfoot events on this particular trip. Bigfoot did not show up, although there are plenty of sightings around the area to spark interest. That’s why the big guy is a local celebrity you can find in all the bookstores and the T-shirt shops, and why this gorgeous location is a perfect place to celebrate. I'll go back next year, and we'll see what's new.