I've written about this project before. But from now, once a week, the essays which are written will be posted here and, as soon as I have a suitable space worked out, I'll be recording the essays.
Anyone who has any input on the essays, either corrections or additional information, add a note and I'll look to include it.
Please, enjoy.
The average high end smart phone, in twenty-twenty-two, has a camera with a resolution upwards of twelve mega-pixels, and can record moving images at a resolution between High-Definition, and 4K. They weigh as much as six double-a batteries, and have good moisture resistance and durability. At full charge most will last all day, especially with light usage, and solar-chargers to extend that usability are about the same weight and size as the phone.
Beyond these physical aspects the modern camera phone is incredibly simple to use. As little as two presses on a button or screen will allow you to turn on and focus, meaning that from seeing something you wish to capture, through removing the phone from a closed pocket, to snapping - or videoing - can be achieved in four or five seconds.
The other thing about camera phones, even if not the highest of high end ones, is their ubiquity. Estimates place US smartphone usage at three-hundred-and-one million by end of twenty-twenty-two, that’s ninety-one percent of the population.
The first photograph was taken in eighteen-twenty-six, or seven. The first telephone dates to eighteen-seventy-six. The first combined camera phone is only twenty-two years old - the Sharp J-SH04 for those interested.
From one camera phone with one-hundred-and-ten-thousand pixels in the year two-thousand, to a majority of phones having cameras and twelve-million pixels being a popular option today is a massive jump in technology, in mobile photography.
Which makes it a little confusing to understand why there are so few quality pictures of unexplained phenomena. While we could talk about UFO’s, and may do at a later date, let’s focus, pun not intended, on a cryptid: one which goes back to pre-colonization days and exists in rock art estimated to be two thousand years old - Bigfoot.
The image most of us will carry of Bigfoot, or Sasquatch for those who prefer, probably relates to the nineteen-sixty-seven footage captured by Roger Patterson. In a clip of just under a minute a creature with large torso, humanoid arrangement of arms and legs, and squat head with little discernible neck is seen to walk up the side of a creek, turn at the sound of the cameraman stumbling in the attempt to get closer, and then carry on out of view in an unconcerned manner.
Patty, for the creature in the image was proclaimed female and named such, remains probably the most famous, and studied, pieces of Bigfoot film in existence. Debate has raged, or burbled, in the years since it was released as to the film’s veracity. Experts on the type of camera used, the film, film effects and costumes from the time, agree and disagree on what is seen. People have admitted to being involved in creating the film, but disagree on the nature of the costume involved to the extent that at least one party involved must be lying. And if one is lying, why not both?
That is not the last film of a Bigfoot. Steadily they trickle in over the years. YouTubers collect them into thirty minute films with slowed down and highlighted sections. None of them improve on the jerky, poorly focused, film from nineteen-sixty-seven.
With this being said it would be easy to dismiss Bigfoot as a hoax played on the unsuspecting public, especially when we discover Roger Patterson was trying to convince a local millionaire to fund a documentary and search for, Bigfoot.
But the Bigfoot legend goes back further than nineteen-sixty-seven. Well before Europeans began laying claim to land in North America the people who lived there had stories of humanoid hairy creatures who lived in the woods. Some were thought to be spirits, which have become conflated with corporeal creatures by poor translation, sometimes deliberate, sometimes not. Others were definitely thought to be real.
One of the earliest representations to be seen is at Painted Rock in the Carrizo Plain National Monument. The monument is a huge natural enclosed grassland bound by the Temblor and Callente mountain ranges. About half way up the grassland is one of the many Soda Lakes to be found in North America and, a short way from here, a horseshoe of sandstone projects above the rising valley floor.
On the interior of the horseshoe the sandstone has worn away to provide a cavern which, for up to four thousand years, was used by peoples in the area as a permanent canvas, somewhere to record things in pictoral form. It is traditional where there are artefacts without written records or firm oral historical link for the general assumption to be the items or, as in this case, pictures form part of some rite with strictly spiritual purposes. In relation to Painted Rock the general assumption made is that the pictures were related to shamanistic activity, or possibly rites of passage. Whether these suppositions are accurate or not is impossible to say.
But either way there are pictographs recorded here from many hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years ago. Key among these, for us, is a family group of Bigfoot. These creatures are normally shown as single creatures imposing a blurry image on film. Here on Tule River Indian Reservation in the foothills of Sierra Nevada we find a unique pectoral representation of a larger Bigfoot with arms spread wide as if attacking or, more likely, warding off a threat, this is assumed to represent a male; and when we say larger, the image is eight-and-a-half tall, and six-feet-two-inches at its widest.
Next to this larger image is one about six feet in height and 4 feet at it’s widest, this is thought to be a female and mother as next to it, and under the right hand, is what is thought to be a child. It stands about 4 feet high, and 3 feet at its widest.
The existence of these is first described in literature in eighteen-eighty-nine, though of course the people who lived there knew of it’s existence for many years before any European-American explorer or settler moved through the area.
And it’s important to note the concept of a family grouping for, without such, there could be no on-going population of these creatures and there have been accounts of seeing, meeting, and even being kidnapped by Bigfoot or Sasquatch from as far back as histories have been taken. In European-American tales they date right back to Daniel Boone, who is reported to have told several people in his later years that he killed a ten-foot tall hairy creature he called a ‘yahoo’, differentiating it from the bears he was well aware of as a hunter of some reknown.
If we set aside Hawaii - which has it’s own hairy hominid cryptid - and accept Alaskan sightings to be part of a wider North American population, then we are left with the distribution around the contiguous United States. Flowing up the west coast we see sightings grow in to a thick cluster in the Pacific North West, and through the Rocky Mountain Range.
In the east sightings are thick from north to south and remain so up until the Mississippi and then begin to fade down, though east Texas seems to have a fair number of sightings. Sightings are sparse in a line which covers the eastern part of Montana and Wyoming, North Dakota down through South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and the western half of Texas.
This zone follows, in main, the Great Plains, that vast swathe of land where winds blow most of the year, the temperature soars over a hundred, and sinks below zero, and where herds of bison numbering in the millions used to roam.
That such a void would exist makes sense. There is both a lack of tree coverage and unknown generations of Bigfoot with knowledge of the huge mobile path-blockers the bison provided. Still, there are occasional sightings across this zone.
And sightings of Bigfoot continue to flow in. In the first ten weeks of twenty-twenty-two, there were ten reported sightings. Still, none of them manage to appear in the high quality film or picture that the average smart phone can capture. None are captured in the remote cameras which have been so successful in capturing elusive big cats, or even previously unknown fauna.
There are some aspects of the elusiveness of Bigfoot which are easy to explain away. A population of even a few thousand could easily hide in the hills and hollers, among the forests and mountains, the swamps and bayous which cover the land. Any number of creatures are adept at sliding through a landscape as if but a shadow and Bigfoot could easily be amongst these. And, on its death, the carcass or bones of a dead Bigfoot would not remain in the environment long. Scavengers soon deal with apex predators such as bears or wolves, disappearing the remains to leave no shadow of there existence.
But where Bigfoot lives, what it eats, how family groups live and interact, what mating habits it has, all these things remain mysteries remaining to be uncovered. And there is plenty opportunity to take part in their unravelling. In twenty-twenty-two one Bigfoot research network ran thirteen expeditions to hotspots in hope of finally securing incontrovertible evidence.
There is a query to ponder on what would happen if Bigfoot was to be tracked down.
Although there are disputes about exactly when and how humans came to the North American continent no such arguments exist about the sympathetic way indigenous peoples lived in the environment. Then, the colonisers came.
The bison herds were slaughtered, other animals were also driven to the brink of extinction. Indigenous people were hunted and herded on to reservations, as late as St Louis’ nineteen-oh-four world fair humans were exhibited in zoos as examples of ‘un-civilized peoples’.
Beyond wiping animals out, or using humans as exhibits, animal and human experimentation has been part of the culture of US governments for a long time. Ethics were not a part of the process when the Tuskegee syphilis ‘experiment’ lied to its subjects for forty-three years, or when Dr. Alan Kligman tested a range of chemicals, including dioxin, on unwitting prisoners for twenty-three years from the fifties through to the seventies.
What would happen to a species which moved from cryptid to confirmed?
There would certainly be a strong call to provide protection, at the same time there would be people who wanted to become a modern Daniel Boone and ‘Bagging a Bigfoot’ would become a source of pride for the types who fly off to Africa for a chance to kill lions, elephants, giraffes, and other wild creatures.
If found would it be possible to provide the protections Bigfoot would require?
The technology exists, laws can be enacted, but there has to be doubt about any ability to curb the desires to capture, quantify, or kill a species which has spent unknown millennia living in the forests, swamps, hills, and hollers, of the United States.
That has to be a sad state of affairs.
Whether Bigfoot exists or not will continue to be debated until proof of its existence is found. Why? Because proving something doesn’t exist is almost impossible. It’s easy to prove something isn’t in a place, but to prove it has never been, or never will be, is more tricky. It becomes more complicated when there are a constant trickle of sightings, footprints, recordings alleged to be Bigfoot vocalisations.
There is a TikTok user called TimeTraveller2743 who claimed May second twenty-twenty-two would bring a major Bigfoot sighting. They did not elucidate as to whether this sighting will captured by high definition cameras as owned by so many of us. Part of me hoped the prediction, or the pre-reported future event, would be borne out.
Overall I’m glad it failed to come to pass because it means Bigfoot remains at the edges of culture, outside the various sciences that would want to investigate it, and far from the malevolent beasts who would set out to hunt it down as a trophy of their inhumanity.
words by stuartcturnbull. Picture licenced from Kirsten Alana and worked in Canva