Monkey Suit
Aug. 20th, 2008 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo I'm sorry the Bigfoot in the freezer turned out to be a gorilla suit. The hoaxers- who to judge by their videos are a couple of the dumbest bubbas going- have made monkeys of us all. According to today's reports they sold the freezer and its contents to a bunch of scientists for good hard cash before hightailing it back to the woods of Georgia. So, maybe not so dumb after all.
I can't be angry. Not really. We need our tricksters. They stir the pot. They keep things interesting.
But here we are- back where we started- Bigfoot is a cryptid again. And how likely was it really that something that big and lungeous would be wandering around the Southern United States without someone shooting it or trapping it or coming up with incontrovertible proof of its existence? The Pacific Northwest, maybe, the Himalayas, even more likely- but Georgia? Or is Georgia a lot wilder and craggier than I think it is?
Even so, lots of people- not tricksters but solid citizens- keep on seeing and hearing these things. They're like lake monsters. Just as every large body of water in the northern hemisphere harbours a cousin of Nessie, so every sizeable wilderness has its scary man-apes. There's always just enough evidence - sightings, stray hairs, footprints- to keep the files open, but never enough to close the case.
It's like some cosmic trickster is teasing us, leading us on, playing silly-bugger games.
I read a book once by Loren Coleman and somebody else which took the Jungian line. Cryptids are archetypes, emerging so forcibly from the collective unconscious we think we're actually seeing them. I'm half-persuaded, but it's not science, is it? All it does is replace one mystery with another.
Maybe what they really are is ghosts.
I can't be angry. Not really. We need our tricksters. They stir the pot. They keep things interesting.
But here we are- back where we started- Bigfoot is a cryptid again. And how likely was it really that something that big and lungeous would be wandering around the Southern United States without someone shooting it or trapping it or coming up with incontrovertible proof of its existence? The Pacific Northwest, maybe, the Himalayas, even more likely- but Georgia? Or is Georgia a lot wilder and craggier than I think it is?
Even so, lots of people- not tricksters but solid citizens- keep on seeing and hearing these things. They're like lake monsters. Just as every large body of water in the northern hemisphere harbours a cousin of Nessie, so every sizeable wilderness has its scary man-apes. There's always just enough evidence - sightings, stray hairs, footprints- to keep the files open, but never enough to close the case.
It's like some cosmic trickster is teasing us, leading us on, playing silly-bugger games.
I read a book once by Loren Coleman and somebody else which took the Jungian line. Cryptids are archetypes, emerging so forcibly from the collective unconscious we think we're actually seeing them. I'm half-persuaded, but it's not science, is it? All it does is replace one mystery with another.
Maybe what they really are is ghosts.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 04:15 pm (UTC)The PNW is very craggy and has more than a lot of backwoods (until we cut them down) as well as a lot of unusual species --- but also a lot of hunters in some areas, and a lot of loggers and salal harvesters and mushroom hunters and other people who make a living of sorts off of the backwoods. If there's any chance that bigfoot is real and actually exists in remote mountain hideaways, I'd think the North Cascades would be the most likely region; that or somewhere around here, in the maze of mountain rangelets that collide and split and collide again along the Oregon/California border.
On the other hand, "ghost" seems as likely as anything.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-20 07:07 pm (UTC)And yet I've not given up hope of something "real" turning up. I understand scientists are even now testing some very curious hairs that were retrieved from a forest in south East Asia.