Somehow, this evening’s discussion turned to an argument about Bigfoot as he appeared on the ‘Six Million Dollar Man.’ (Said character, by the way, should still be named as such, because frankly, my ear finds The Bionic Man to be an awkward and awful name.) My wife insisted that Bigfoot was an alien (correctly) while I remembered that the creature was also bionically enhanced. She remembered the character being played by Andre The Giant (correctly) while I remembered the monster bearing the distinctive brow ridge that marked the face of Ted Cassidy, aka Lurch from the Addams Family television show. Between the two of us, though, we Rashomoned the discussion to a point of coherence, at which point the child chimed in to tell me that Bigfoot was close friends with Nessie and the Chupacabra in real life. (While I’m quite proud, I have no idea where that particular bit of brilliance came from.)
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) wants to know how you feel about cryptids in general, asking: Bigfoot: FACT? Or REAL?
7 Comments
When they put Bigfoot in Six Million Dollar Man, that’s when I quit watching the show. It was the equivalent of Fonzie jumping the shark. That’s also why “Flight 714” is my least favorite Tintin story – Herge seemed to have run out of ideas and so he threw flying saucers and mind-controlling aliens into the mix. It was as ridiculous as most of the “Imaginary” Superman and Batman stories from the late 50s and early 60s.
As for cryptids in general, there have been several discoveries of late where legendary creatures have turned out to be real – the celocanth (sorry about the bad spelling) – a prehistoric fish thought to be extinct – has been caught several times since the 1920s. The giant squid was thought to be nothing more than the fever dreams of drunken sailors for centuries in spite of whalers finding giant sucker marks on the sides of whales and other physical evidence until the corpses of several of them have been recovered. So it’s possible that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are real. But I will say that I’ve lived in the area where Bigfoot supposedly hangs out for all of my life and there isn’t much food out in the woods to support a living being the size of a human or larger, which is why there aren’t millions of bears or cougars running around in the woods. The ecosystem can’t support them, so I seriously doubt there is an entire civilization of Bigfoots hiding up in the hills. If you try to live off the land, you’ll end up spending most of every day hunting for food and finding barely enough to keep starvation away – and that’s in summer. In winter, the food is buried under a ton of snow and most animals either hibernate or move down to lower elevations until spring, and I haven’t seen any Bigfoots stomping around in my back yard.
I just want to see Andre the Giant perform a Pedigree on Ted Cassidy. Does that make me a bad person?
I think there’s enough circumstantial evidence to lean toward thinking Bigfoot is real. Too many people have seen them over too long a time period to think they’re all misidentifications of other animals, and the number of footprints with non-human anatomical details suggests that there is either a group of incredibly sophisticated hoaxers operating for decades over hundreds of miles, or a real creature.
No way is Bigfoot real. In our day and age of growing human encroachment in previously pristine environments, many long-lived creatures are now facing extinction. It seems impossible that, even if such a creature as bigfoot ever DID exist, that there would still be habitat for them to survive and remain hidden from our ubiquitous human exposure.
No way.
Is Bigfoot real? I dunno. We like to think we have our eyes on everything in this day and age, but there are new sub-species of many animals discovered all the time and once thought extinct animals re-found and so many places where humans just don’t go.
If i can accept that there may be life out in the rest of the universe, then I can accept there may be life here that we haven’t documented yet. I do believe a lot of the “evidence” is fake (or someone just caught a photo of Gaumer on a really bad hair day) but I’m not against believing that maybe somewhere some of this stuff might have some basis in fact.
SHHHH… I think I heard a squatch,!
Needs more Richard Keil….