In our home Thanksgiving always meant giant apes. At least that was the case for me as a child when Thanksgiving usually heralded an all day festival of flicks like King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, Son of Kong and King Kong versus Godzilla. Nowadays I never see classics like that on the holiday but this year that’s all going to change! This year you can bring the biggest ape of them all into your home on DVD with the kick ass release of the original King Kong. If you haven’t already picked up a copy I highly recommend doing so as it looks amazing—very cleaned up and rich with detail you probably never noticed in all the times it’s been rebroadcast on TV. Mad bonus features on the second disk as well.
Speaking of giant apes…a few weeks ago I attended a cryptozoology symposium at Bates College in Lewiston Maine. It was a blast listening to artists and cryptozoology enthusiasts there and talking with other folks that don’t actually think you’re crazy for believing in Bigfoot. There’s a write up about the weekend here and you can always learn more about the subject of cryptozoology here. I went because of my fascination with Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, as he is often called.
Is Sasquatch a North America descendant of Gigantopithecine lineage, a massive ape that migrated from Mongolia and Northern China over the land bridge and down through Alaska, Canada and into North America? The Gigantopithecus americanus, if we can call him that, is bipedal and may have broken into at least one sub-species preferring warmer wetter climes since there have been numerous sightings in the American south as well as the Pacific Northwest which is more commonly thought of as Bigfoot Country.
Hopefully, conclusive proof of the ape man-creature known as Bigfoot will someday come in the form of video or photo evidence, although there is a substantial portion of Bigfoot “enthusiasts” who wish to shoot one dead, in order to prove they exist. I’ll give you a second to try and follow that logic...
Of course science is interested in taxidermy and seeing a North American primate in a museum diorama would be impressive, but at what cost would we cull such a creature? If they really are out there, it’s a species so rare it is on the way to extinction anyway, and killing off even one of the last few individuals would help Sasquatch stride off into oblivion and who could be in support of that? There is no singular fact or finding that proves Bigfoot exists nor is there any singular fact or finding that disproves his existence either. There is a tremendous amount of supporting evidence and a very significant number of very credible sightings. Bigfoot phenomena shouldn't be included in the now trendy classification of Urban Legend because number one, the sightings of Bigfoot have numerous consistent details-urban legends often grow more outlandish with each retelling-Sasquatch sightings are extraordinarily similar. And second, tales of Bigfoot are rarely set in an urban setting at all-most Sasquatch sightings occur in rural to remote areas. Urban Legends are the man with a hook for a hand that harasses kids on lover’s lane or alligators in the sewers. Bigfoot and other cryptozoological critters are different.
Bigfoot is more than folklore. Of the 500, or thereabouts, Native American Nations that were here before white men, almost fifty percent of those tribes told tales of giant men covered in hair that roamed the deep woods. The amount of tracks, feces, hair samples and eyewitness accounts that have been found and documented cannot be wholly dismissed. I'm not saying I'm certain there are apes in America but I'm not so sure I would dismiss it so easily. Science needs evidence so yes, at this point we cannot say they exist but saying they definitely do not exist would be just as foolish. If Bigfoot is gigantopithecus he is a survivor of the Pleistocene epoch, the period when much of our modern species existed; the genus homo first gained its footing, while the extinction of megafauna like the mammoth, sabre-toothed tiger, the giant sloths and the wooly rhinoceros also occurred as the epoch wound down. Bigfoot would have had to survived in small isolated pockets of wilderness; and for the most part that’s exactly where he is usually spotted.
And before you say no way, not a chance, rremember, it was just this past year that the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, a species long thought extinct, was photographed in the US. The mountain gorilla was first identified just after the turn of the twentieth century and the Coelacanth, a fish thought extinct millions of years ago, has been caught first off of South Africa in 1938 and on several occasions in the Indian Ocean. It's not that unrealistic to assume there may be more going on in the North American forests than we suspect. At least I’d like to hope so. When Loren Coleman signed my copy of his book Bigfoot: The true story of Apes in America, he wrote a simple dedication of three words that speak volumes to cryptozoologists, both amateur and professional: Enjoy the Quest.
In the end perhaps that’s all we’ll ever have, and perhaps that’s enough.
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