Episode Five: Bigfoot

 Episode Summary: In Search Of goes looking for Bigfoot, the best-known cryptid of them all. 

Bike summary: 2.8 miles, 142.4 calories

This episode opens with a bang. Almost literally, as it's a reenaction of the Ape Canyon Incident, where some miners working near Mount St Helens were beseiged by ape-like creatures who threw rocks at their cabin and screamed. 

We get a lot of shots of the Pacific Northwest and some talk about Native American beliefs of sasquatch as gentle, friendly creatures. 

There's an interview of a person in his car who says that he saw a Bigfoot trying to get into the car or something like that and it was scared off, but left a strong odor in the car for days (in the podcast they say it was a sulfur smell, but I don't remember that detail from the show). The different stories and reenactments all make the episode feel like Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (confusingly the third film in the Boggy Creek series), as riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000. There's a scene where auteur Charles B. Pierce confronts the creature with a pistol and a pair of short-shorts and yells something like "I don't see you, but I sure do smell you".

There's also stuff about a very-aristocratic sounding Bigfoot tracker who hunted big game in Nepal investigating Bigfoot sightings throughout the Pacific Northwest, an anthropologist who said that Bigfoot was absolutely gigantopithecus and the Patterson-Gimlin film. They don't do much with the film, other than show the sequence everyone knows, but I find it fascinating -- Patterson was dying of cancer and for some reason settled on cryptozoology as an opportunity to make some quick cash so he could die in some comfort and provide some security for his family, so he decided to make a Bigfoot film and immediately was able to take some footage of one. That has set the alarm bells ringing that it was hoax, as was the fact that they talked to a guy called Ray Wallace who would later be revealed as a hoaxer (I believe he made a bunch of fake tracks). Patterson and Gimlin both maintained it was real until their dying days -- and Gimlin refused to talk about it for something like 40 years. What I find most interesting is that the man who claimed to have worn the suit and the man who claimed to have made it have given completely opposite descriptions of what the suit looked like, was made out of and how it was worn. 

The episode's focus on the Pacific Northwest is interesting, since there have been reports of Bigfoot from across the country. In fact, it's one of the few cryptids I know of where there are enough sightings that it could actually be a real animal, whether unknown or not. In particular, the town I grew up in, Rutland, VT, was at one end of a Bigfoot hot spot that stretch along US Route Four to Whitehall, NY. There are still sightings reported today and Finding Bigfoot filmed an episode there.

When I was in high school I was the biggest and tallest among my friends and two of them actually wanted to rent an ape costume, put me in it and have me dart across the highway when a car was coming around sunset. I refused on the grounds that too many people in rural Vermont are armed. 

Another interesting thing is that sightings of Bigfoot-type phenomena aren't unknown from other cultures in history. The yeti is the best known of these, but Medieval Europe knew several kinds of wild men, green men and wood woses. The archetype was also present in Greek and Roman mythology. In Jewish folklore Cain is sometimes depicted as being accidentally killed by his grandson, who mistook him for a beast. Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh might be the earliest.

One of the books they had the International Cryptozoology Museum was called Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men, which locates St Nick in this mytheme and needs to be the title of a film. 

Podcast summary:

The Ape Canyon events are possibly weirder than anyone thought (I had never heard of them before seeing this episode). In the newspaper accounts researchers have dug up, the miners explicitly deny engaging in spiritualist or theosophical activity over the winter. I'm not sure what was meant to be implied -- that they had accidentally summoned the creatures they said attacked them? 

The anthropologist talking about gigantopithecus was Gordon Krantz, who would eventually grow a Gandalf-esque beard. One interesting thing is that only the fossilized jaws of gigantopithecus have been discovered, which are similar to those of orangutangs, only much bigger. 

Jeb also caught a Boggy Creek vibe from this episode. Great minds, etc. 

They do great with the guy who was interviewed in his car. They say it looks like In Search Of set up a road block to ask people if they had Bigfoot stories. They also get a lot of milage from the Paqcific Northwest setting. "Come for the Bigfoot, stay for the pot."

I was surprised how nice they were about this episode. They obviously know a lot of Bigfoot lore and attribute most of the episode's issues to research limitations of the 1970s -- they didn't have Google or digital archives. 

Peter Byrne, the aristocratic-sounding tracker, worked for a man called Tom Slick looking for Yetis in Nepal. Slick was a millionaire who ran a clandestine airline on behalf of the US government in Southeast Asia -- they said it was a predescor of Air America. Many of Slick's Yeti expedeitions were also covers for spying on China. 

Jeb and Blake also have an interesting convrersation about how Bigfoot replaces "savages" in some stories and how cryptozoology interprets beings like the Sasquatch into unknown animals to fit in with the investigators' bias. I think they were getting at the "wild man" or wood wose idea and they said that the idea of Bigfoot as supernatural was starting to come back. 

Does an unknown giant hominid live and roam in the great forests of North America? Is it an alien, a fearie, or a very lost, very hairy French Canadian? All I know is I submarine lightbulb.