BAGGING A BIGFOOT

Michael Newton. Sasquatch Down. CFZ Press, 2015.

Sceptics argue that if Bigfoot are actual real life flesh and blood, paws and pelt animals, why are no bodies ever found? Michael Newton here assembles accounts of people shooting at Bigfoot, in some cases apparently wounding it, finding Bigfoot bodies, finding anomalous skeletons, even having had live specimens, and claims of cover up.

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The problem that Newton recognises is that there is not one case of a publicly accessible, scientifically studied Bigfoot carcass. Those who report shooting at the beast either say that despite some pretty heavy ammunition, the thing just gets up and walks away, or that it crawls away wounded but no body is ever found. If there is a report of a body, it and any photographs allegedly taken have both disappeared or are lost. Magonia readers will know how often this is the case with alleged UFO evidence.

It is hard to know how many of these stories are the result of misperception, virtual experiences, hunters tales of the one that got away or just urban legends or newspaper hoaxes/jokes. I assume that the story of the Bigfoot taken down by a train, narrated by a someone who got it from his brother-in-law who got it in turn from an engineer, whose name wasn’t known, falls well into the ‘urban legend’ category.

Tales of mysterious giant skeletons come from old, mainly nineteenth century but some from the early twentieth, newspapers and are almost certainly mainly press hoaxes, though a small number may have come from wannabe Barnums.

The reason advanced for the lack of bodies is that there is a conspiracy to prevent any evidence coming out. This is either because such evidence would give huge ammunition to conservationists, or would upset the religious right, or simply because governments conspire just for the sake of it. Presumably there are whole units of the US military, who when not collecting crashed flying saucers or mutilating cows, spend their time picking up dead Bigfoot.

Or more likely, the absence of bodies is due to the fact that Bigfoot inhabits the human imagination rather than the spaces of physics and geography. 

• Peter Rogerson