Perceiving Bigfoot

I welcome Nick Smith’s counterpoint [ FT413:70] to my Arthur C Clarke article [ FT410:32-39];

I am indeed a bit of a sceptic on the Patterson-Gimlin footage, so it is good to get a healthy balance back into FT. I was hopeful that the necessarily brief treatments in the feature might prompt a response, and Mr Smith provides lots of sources for readers to delve into.

However, I’m not convinced that arguing for four different types of Bigfoot strengthens the case for a biological reality underpinning the sightings – rather we are multiplying entities and pulling a little on Occam’s beard. But nor do I suggest that inconsistency in the descriptions means that everyone is lying or hoaxing or deluded – far from it.

As with much in forteana, I look broadly towards a psychosocial solution, in which Bigfoot sightings are unlocked by some kind of underlying anomalous experience, which might go some way to explaining his frequent association with other ‘high strangeness’ elements – and indeed with UFOs. This puts me somewhere on the Jenny Randles to Merrily Harpur spectrum, although unlike them I tend to think the anomalous experience might be internally generated.

In a sense I suspect we are fundamentally flawed as humans at experiencing the physical and electromagnetic world, and have evolved lots of mental shortcuts that are good at keeping us alive, but poor at representing what is really out there. There are lots of reasons why seeing something terrifying when presented with incomplete or conflicting information would make good evolutionary sense – our genes prospering from the default position that whatever on earth is going on, we should get the hell out of there! And in credit to the Bigfoot hunters, the image of a hulking dark figure with glowing red eyes would certainly do the trick for me.

Ryan Shirlow

Leeds, West Yorkshire