Saturday, May 24, 2014

Bigfoot's Not Real (and Other Myths) (Or Not)

“I hate Indians.” -Ayn Rand

I was raised on the stories of bigfoot, or that something that makes those weird howls in the woods, breaks trees in half and all those other things bigfoot supposedly do. I’ve never seen one.
I’m divided on how I assess the Bigfoot videos though. On the one hand, pretty much every single one of them is grainy or shaky and you barely see anything except a large, hairy figure trouncing through the woods. On the other, unless you’re an experienced cameraman, what exactly should people expect? Even if we had a video of a plain as day bigfoot playing pool and smoking cigarettes, someone would still find fault with it and then say that video isn’t evidence and can easily be faked. The latter is certainly true, but so is some major scientific research. There is no strong evidence, outside of faked carcasses that get big news coverage for some odd reason.
You have those overnight primatologist who know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there cannot be a large, unknown species of nocturnal ape that primarily live in remote, mountainous areas, because the expert they sided with said so. There’s no solid proof. At all. Kind of like those big cats that didn’t exist in Kentucky until someone shot one. I know what you’re thinking, that big cats actually exist elsewhere, so it’s not that shocking they wind up that far north, and it’s not really, but everyone who claimed photos and videos were feral cats were obviously wrong and made a poor assumption. Bears shit in the woods. We actually have a little bit of evidence to support this. Or do we? For all I know, the scat samples were found in someone’s yard and placed in the woods, or just claimed to be found in the woods. I’m not saying they’re real, but I’m also not going to dismiss the possibility.

The United States isn’t over-flooded with technology and urbanization and is still a third forested, so it’s a bit ridiculous to pretend we’ve discovered every creature there. While it’s just as ridiculous to automatically believe every photo, video, or soundbyte, we find new species all the time, including large ones, like the Saola, which we didn’t even believe still alive until 2010, despite a bunch of Vietnamese rednecks claiming it was. 

Hated other non-whites as well. Died.