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Bigfoot… a mysterious forest ape reported primarily in the Pacific Northwest of the
United States, the footprints of this legend reach around the world: thousands of minds
countless websites, podcasts, and youtube channels dedicated to searching for and examining
the evidence for Bigfoot.
Bigfoot is one of many so-called “cryptids”, creatures whose existence has been suggested
by folklore, but remain, as the Ancient Greeks would say, “kryptos”…. hidden.
Tales of monsters, ogres, and wildmen are as old as stories, but the line between legend
and science hasn’t always been crystal clear. The bestiaries of ancient naturalists described
men with the heads of dogs, and hairy, mouthless beasts who only smelled flowers.
But that was then…
Why do people STILL search for these mysterious creatures? Well, Earth is a big place, and
the possibility of finding a new animal species, while small, IS real.
In 2013, scientists discovered the olinguito, a raccoon-sized creature, living in the forests
of South America.The okapi, giant panda, the komodo dragon, even the mountain gorilla were
all discovered, at least in part, thanks to folklore.
Even fossil bones, like those of Gigantopithecus, tell us that as recently as 100,000 years
ago, 9-foot tall apes walked alongside our human ancestors.
The footprints of Bigfoot lead to British Columbia, where legends of Sasquatch had long
circulated among the native peoples.
The three pillars that helped build the Bigfoot legend started in 1957 when the town of Harrison
Hot Springs announced a Sasquatch hunt. A man named WIlliam Roe came forward with an
account, two years earlier, of an encounter with a 6-foot tall human-like ape.
During the next year, newspapers reported numerous footprints at construction sites
run by a man named Raymond Wallace. Sasquatch became… Bigfoot and a consistent image took
shape.
The third pillar, when Bigfoot hit its stride, was starring in a 1967 film…
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Of course, there are three tiny problems with these. It seems no one actually remembers
meeting William Roe.
And when Ray Wallace died in 2002, his family admitted that the footprints had all been
a hoax.
The famous film shows… something, although when it's stabilized I’m definitely feeling
more of a “guy in an ape suit” vibe.
Based on this, you’d think the story would end here. But it doesn’t. And that’s what
makes Bigfoot so interesting. It continues to be a global myth, eyewitness accounts,
tours, television programs continue to roll on.
Frank J. Sulloway once said “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better
than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”
One of the first rules of science is that “Because I said so” doesn’t make very
good proof. Our brains are easy to fool, eyewitness accounts
simply aren’t enough to determine if Bigfoot visited the library before track practice,
or called Jay from the Best Buy parking lot and somehow ended up in these woods.
Let’s cut into this with Occam’s razor: When presented with multiple hypotheses, pick
the one with the fewest assumptions. If a pair of underwear goes missing in the
laundry, it IS possible that laundry gnomes swiped it as part of some fairy tale profit-making
scheme, but a much simpler answer, one with far fewer assumptions, is that it’s just
hiding in the bottom of the clothes hamper. Indeed, when we model the ecological range
of Bigfoot based on reported sightings and behavior, we get a map that looks like this,
disturbingly similar to the American black bear.
The hypothesis with fewer assumptions… looks a lot like this.
"That is a bipedal bear."
What about physical evidence? Many people have claimed to have such evidence for Bigfoot,
I’m talking about hair. Enhance. Enhance.
When scientists recently analyzed 30 supposed Bigfoot and Yeti hair samples, every single
DNA sequence matched that of a known mammal.
So does all of this prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bigfoot doesn’t exist? Unfortunately…
that may be impossible to prove. The absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of
absence.
Let’s say you claim that you’ve got a pink dragon living in your garage. This is
easily verifiable. Just take me out to the garage, I would like to see this dragon. But
you forgot to tell me that your dragon is shy and invisible. That’s fine… let’s
just sprinkle some flour on the floor and catch its footprints. Ah, it turns out, that
your shy pink invisible dragon can also float. Ohhhkay, well let me just put on these infrared
goggles… to which you say the dragon is actually capable of interdimensional teleportation,
at which point I am leaving because this is kind of getting ridiculous.
This example was famously used by Carl Sagan in his book the Demon Haunted World to make
the point that claims which can not be tested are just bad claims. Philosopher of science
Karl Popper went even further, if a claim can't be proven false it's not science, it's
pseudoscience.
In science we go looking for things that can falsify our claims.
The tricky part of this is that scientific claims are never completely proven true, they
only continue to NOT be proven false. This doesn’t make science weak, if anything it
makes it stronger.
This is why we can never completely disprove the claim that Bigfoot is real.
It’s just not the right question for science.
A good scientific theory would be that there is NOT a huge, hairy primate roaming the forests
of North America, that there’s NOT an aquatic beast in a Scottish lake that’s been completely
land-locked since the end of the last Ice Age.
Because all it would take to prove that idea false… is to find one.
Stay curious.