00003 · Sasquatch Chronicles, Episode 761
Invariably, the question that comes up when discussing anything to do with Sasquatch and other cryptids is, “Do you believe?”
Do you believe in Bigfoot? Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster? Chupacabra? Mokele-mbembe?
And the only answer we accept is either a simple yes or no.
I love thinking about Sasquatch because I get to think yes and no at the same time. Between those two poles of dualistic thought, I get to hang out in a porous hammock of conflicting thoughts.
On the no side of Bigfoot belief: the overwhelming evidence of no evidence. In an age of ever-present surveillance technology, we have no body, no clear photo or video or audio or game cam, no DNA sample.
On the yes side: the thousands of encounters extending back centuries, all eerily similar, with different names and understandings for the creature based on the beliefs of the culture. Throughout time across North America, a giant hairy primate has been appearing to Native Americans and folks new to the continent, and the encounters are chronicled in the legends and stories and songs and newspapers of the era.
In the in-between: marinating in the Sasquatch Chronicles has helped me deeply think about the fallibility of human thought and perception in a world too strange for us to fathom. We use language as a mental shortcut for understanding, and if we don’t have a word for something, we are unaware of that thing’s existence, even if that thing is swaying back and forth in front of us, grunting and huffing.
“It was a bear,” is the most common dismissal for a Bigfoot sighting, easily replacing scary and strange noun of “Bigfoot” with the safe and known noun of “bear.”
But what if this noun and concept of “Bigfoot”—coined in the late 1950s—is also misleading and incorrect? It would certainly not be the first time that humans have fundamentally misunderstood some phenomenon with their limited cultural and linguistic worldview. I believe interactions with bigger and more wild versions of ourselves are happening outside the boundaries of our towns and minds, and we are too small to comprehend the experience.
· · ·
I was a kid during the 1970s, the era when Bigfoot really started to enter the popular culture. I devoured every book about the paranormal in the school and town library. I convinced my parents to subscribe to the Time/Life Mysteries of the World books, religiously watched Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of…, and saw all the Bigfoot movies.
As an adult I remained curious, continued dipping into paranormal media, and had a few unexplainable experiences myself.
It was during the pandemic that I started my deep listening to the Sasquatch Chronicles podcast. There are over 1,000 episodes, and I’ve listened to hundreds of them. Each episode is primarily a one-hour uninterrupted first-person account of encounters with a Bigfoot-type creature, with the occasional Dog-Man thrown in.
Sasquatch Chronicles is the reason that Bigfoot has become my “Roman Empire,” the thing I wonder about two or three times a day. Sasquatch Chronicles is my AM radio, the thing I listen to on long drives or while doing housework or yard work. People are interviewed from every state of the union, and to listen to the Sasquatch Chronicles is to hear every voice that the United States has to offer. It is truly an authentic smorgasbord of American language.
Episodes with hunters are my favorite. They have the full language for the wildlife and wild lands of America. Hunters tend to be the most skeptical folk about Bigfoot, so their experiences tend to be quite personally shocking and life-changing. Some give up hunting forever.
I chose Sasquatch Chronicles episode 761 as a good introduction of what the podcast has to offer. Wes, the host, interviews a hunter from Mississippi who—while hunting deer from a tree-stand along the clear-cut of a power line—has a run-in with a creature he at first thinks is a bear, until he lifts his rifle scope and zooms in. Bigfoot!
The episode has all the hallmarks of a good Sasquatch Chronicles episode: highly specific knowledge of terrain; amazement that Sasquatch exists in their neck of the woods (if they’re not from the Pacific Northwest); increased nervousness and rambling as the guest gets closer to talking about the initial moment of the actual encounter; struggles to describe the unreality of what they saw or heard or smelled; classic intimidatory behaviors of Bigfoot; and the pacing out of intruding people as the creatures “escort” folks from their territory, matching them step for step and always just hidden from view.
Enjoy, and keep your mind and senses open.
