I believe in Bigfoot. Or rather, insofar as I think that Bigfoot is an undiscovered ape which still lives in the immensity of North America’s forests, rather than a deity, I think that he exists. I do hope for his own sake, however, that he is never found:
I believe that Bigfoot is just one relict population of several around the world. The North American species is one of a number of very large ape-like humans (or human-like apes) that, at one time, lived in all of the forests and wild places of the northern hemisphere. He has been called by many names…I found quite quickly the alma, the almasti, the menk, the omah, the sasquatch, the yeren, the yeti and the yowie, an inhabitant of the forests of Australia. All of them are very similar creatures, although they have been reported by different people in different isolated places in the world, separated by thousands of miles. One thing for definite is that the people could not possibly have collaborated with each other, particularly before around 1850:
Just try reading the old reports from the 19th century. The oldest I have found so far dates from 1818 in New York State. One of my favourite Bigfoot books carries a large number of similar reports for the whole of North America. They portray many details about Bigfoot which are still witnessed today, such as Bigfoot’s whistling. How could these people have possibly got together so long ago to invent tales which are so similar to each other? The Native Americans often depict Bigfoot as a creature who whistles. That is probably their most frequently encountered evidence of his existence. Look at this totem pole:
In my personal opinion, what has happened is that the people of many different parts of the world have lived calmly and quietly together in small numbers, either hunting or farming their land, for hundreds and hundreds of years. During that time, as fairly harmless inhabitants of a largely virgin landscape, they have come into regular contact with creatures which were very much like the Bigfoot of today. These beings were big, hairy and quite often, smelly. Sometimes they were fierce but usually they did relatively little damage. Here’s a Menk, out in the unexplored woods of the eastern Urals in Russia:
It’s my belief that the literature of the distant past reflects the existence of these denizens of the forest. Hundreds of years have elapsed between these different works of literature and because of that, and the geographical separation between them, they will not all have the same details, but they will have some of them. These details might include the creatures’ enormous size, their hairiness and their fierceness. Being thought fierce goes with the territory, though, when you’re ten feet tall:
Next time we’ll take the Bigfoot trailcams into ancient literature.
John Knifton 