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October 7, 2007 8:10 AM

When you talk about bigfoot, you are always talking from a certain philosophical position. Since these positions are unstated, it is sometimes difficult to have conversations with others when they are coming from a different point of view. Letʼs have a look at some of them.

Categories of belief re: bigfoot:

Extreme Skepticism – It doesnʼt exist. No evidence that it does exist is powerful enough to persuade the extreme skeptic. They wonʼt even look at it. It all amounts to hoaxes and mistakes. The underpinning of this theory is scientific materialism. Holders of this belief-set think that only that which is demonstrably physical is real. There is nothing beyond the physical. The Great Randi serves as an example of this kind of skeptic.

Qualified Skepticism – This is a broad category of belief. Holders of this belief simply believe there isnʼt enough proof of the existence of bigfoot. They may spring from various philosophical bases. These people could be convinced by good physical evidence. Most skeptics spring from this fount.

Bigfoot is an Ape – These folks follow from the earliest investigators, notably John Green and Grover Krantz. They hold that bigfoot is a real creature somehow related to modern apes. They have almost universally held to scientific materialism in their writing. The difference between them and Extreme Skeptics is their exposure to and openness to evidence. Note that this viewpoint doesnʼt spring from physical evidence. This is the crowd that supports the idea of bigfoot descending from Gigantopithecus, without any real physical evidence to support this theory (beyond the size of bigfoot).

Bigfoot is a person – These folks think bigfoot is a flesh and blood creature, but that it has near human mental abilities. They cite certain encounters that bolster their view. This viewpoint also has no physical evidence to show. They do rely on recordings purported to be sasquatches speaking to one another. The distinction between this view and the following view is that holders of the “bigfoot is a person” view do not rule out his having descended from apes rather than being a true hominid. These folks generally agree with the “bigfoot is an ape” hypothesis, supporting the idea that it springs from Gigantopithecus.

Bigfoot is human – this viewpoint is a more recent outgrowth of the “bigfoot is a person” crowd. Adherents of this belief point to physical evidence, namely, that hairs believed to come from bigfoot show human traits, and come back as human when tested for DNA, while also showing consistent differences from human hair. This has happened more than once, with different researchers and different labs.

The main candidates for bigfoot’s ancestor here is one of mankind’s “cousins” such as Neanderthal, or Robustes. Probably most “bigfoot is a person” believers will migrate to this view as they learn of it,  provided the physical evidence continues to hold up.

Bigfoot is a multi-dimensional creature – This view springs from the ideas of folks like John Keel and Ingo Swann. Keel has developed an understanding of the world that includes a strange dimension that only sometimes interacts with physical reality. This other dimension is connected to, and dependent on, the physical world, but it is not always present. This is taken to explain why bigfoot cannot be found. Rob Riggʼs book In the Big Thicket is an outgrowth of this viewpoint. Here we have left the world of scientific materialism. There is no direct physical evidence for this idea, but there are certain anomalies in evidence that such a thing would help to explain. The best known is probably a trackway found going through snow that suddenly stopped, with no obvious way for the maker of the tracks to have left the area. The idea is that a dimensional door opened up and bigfoot stepped into another world, leaving ours. Idonʼt think that case was well documented enough to be persuasive, but Iʼve seen such a case myself. An associate found three footprints, which we photographed and cast. The trouble was, there was no trackway leading to the prints nor away from them that we could find. We thought the nearby trees were sturdy enough for a creature to grab them and leap from trunk to trunk and hypothesized that this is how the creature arrived at and left the scene, but I suppose a conveniently placed dimensional door would do the trick too.

Bigfoot is a paranormal creature – This view, which leaves scientific materialism completely, posits that bigfoot is a paranormal creature akin to vampires,werewolves, the Jersey Devil, chupacabras, and others. Believers of this view hold that bigfoot cannot be harmed by our material world, and that it has advanced mental powers akin to sorcery. You canʼt see them because they become invisible. Jon Erik Beckjord is the main proponent of this line. This view can be combined with the last one without penalty. All you need is a bigfoot with magical abilities and a dimension door. My tone may sound scoffing, and I am scoffing a bit. But the truth is, we have no idea whether these things can or cannot be true. What we do know is that we are creating further mysteries in an attempt to explain a mystery, and that is a no no in science. Before I can believe that bigfoot has magical powers, Iʼm going to have to see it for myself, and if I ever do, I certainly canʼt expect anyone to believe me until they have seen it. (More about my “naive materialism” at the end of this post.)

Bigfoot comes from UFOs – This theory takes off from a very few encounters where a witness saw both a sasquatch and a UFO. Most of the folks who hold this view are UFO afficionados first. There is no physical evidence linking bigfoot to UFOs that I know of, but there are a very few sighting reports that put the two together. And why not? You have here two of the best attested mysteries of our time. Why not throw them together and explain them both in a twofer? The problem with that is weʼve invoked another mystery to solve our first one again. Science frowns on this. One wonders how you can ever discover that bigfoot and UFOs are linked, if in fact they are, and still hold chaste to the scientific principle of Occamʼs razor? I suppose you just have to see it with your own eyes again. And thatʼs the trouble with all of these last categories. Even if they are true, and you find out, nobody is ever going to believe you without really good physical evidence.

And thatʼs the case even if a body is found (that is, if there isnʼt some indication of these remarkable abilities on the body for all to see). But here we have the final grand-unified bigfoot conspiracy theory — you canʼt find bigfoot because it isnʼt always there, either being spirited away by his UFO cohorts, or jumping into another dimension (which is where UFOs come from too, naturally), and you canʼt find bigfoot even when heʼs right next to you because, although he looks and behaves like a primitive or an animal, he is really of a very advanced race and possesses the technology that can render him invisible to anything you might want to look at him with. Except that sometimes people do see bigfoot. Not invisible even, or de-cloaked if you will. It may sound like Iʼm making fun of these ideas, but itʼs not the ideas that Iʼm laughing at, itʼs the absurdity of the world if this turns out to be the case. People do see bigfoot, and they do see UFOs, but they havenʼt yet seen the two together enough to really justify this category of belief in my opinion.

This breaks down to three general kinds of believers –

• Skeptics

• Flesh and Blood advocates

• Paranormal/UFO advocates

The vast majority of folks interested in bigfoot research fall into the Flesh and Blood camp. It is from this camp that all physical evidence has come. Neither the skeptics nor the Paranormal/UFO folks have made any real advances in the field, so if you want to be an investigator, itʼs the middle ground for you.

But before we leave this topic, we need to have a word about a viewpoint that affects both believers and non-believers alike. This is a point of view that has been discredited by modern science, but it is still prevalent in our culture because it is supported by our apparent everyday experience. For this reason, it is called naive materialism. I took a discussion of this term from here for you to read:

Materialists make the error of assuming that because most science supports a materialistic view and the immediately sensed suggests a materialistic interpretation,all science supports this view and all reality is material. This hardly follows.Developments in quantum physics raise questions about fundamentally physical interpretations of nature, and the existence of action at a distance through little understood magnetic and gravitational fields at least should cast suspicion on a reality wholly made up of matter in motion and physically transmitted causes. . . . an attempt to paint the universe completely in terms of matter, space, time, and motion is[called] naive materialism . . .Believers who wave off the paranormal aspect of some bigfoot reports without investigating them with an open mind are as guilty of naive materialism as any skeptic who claims such things (which would include bigfoot) cannot exist before looking into the evidence. It’s a reflex, really, and it’s difficult to overcome. I am as affected by it as anyone else, as some of my comments above show.

And by pointing out that naive materialism is now discredited, I am not saying that I believe that bigfoot has paranormal powers or descends from UFOs. The evidence for such is still pretty weak, even considering that we are talking about bigfoot here.The vast majority of bigfoot sighting reports contain nothing more remarkable in them than that there was a very large manlike hairy thing walking or running nearby. Since we already know of more than a few different sorts of manlike hairy things walking and running in our world both past and present, it is not a tremendous leap to suppose that there could be one here and now. But if you are going to look at this objectively at all, you have to look at everything, even the paranormal reports. So far,I have but scant personal evidence that there is anything paranormal about bigfoot,but I do have some. If it ever gets to a point where it rises above the trivial I will certainly let you in on it. But others have experienced very strange things. We will do our best work when we do not ignore them out of hand. Modern science is teaching us everyday that we live in a very strange world, after all.

So, there you are. These categories of belief exist, and the conversations among researchers, witnesses, and skeptics, are affected by them. Or, I should say, dominated by them. It is wise to keep this in mind as we proceed.

(BTW, if you needed a definition of epistemology, here’s a good one here.)

 

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