Eugene Parnell

This story has been floating around the online-news-o-sphere for the past few days, and at least two people have forwarded it to me. Some local hunters in Northern Minnesota have produced a trail cam image that they claim is Bigfoot.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has already debunked it, and they said pretty much what I said at first glance: it’s a guy in a suit. The proportions of the leg length to body height are wrong, the width of the shoulders in proportion to body height are wrong, and the arms are too short. It also walks with a lock-kneed gait, i.e. locks its knees as it walks. Look at the way the rear leg is extended rearward.

If you compare this with the famous Patterson-Gimlin film (the iconic moving image of Bigfoot) you can see the difference right away. If any image of Bigfoot now in the public eye is genuine, it’s the Patterson-Gimlin film. Despite all the attempts to explain it away, it’s still standing. The proportions of that figure impede the possibility that it’s a guy in a suit– unlike this photo above, where he even looks like he’s wearing ski gloves.

I had an interesting chat with a wildlife field biologist at the opening to my show. She works on the Olympic Peninsula, and she doesn’t believe in Bigfoot at all. But she says some of the park rangers disagree with her, as do the indians on the reservations out there. She said she has met the people behind BFRO and thinks they are a bit kooky, overall, except for one primatologist with them that seem pretty grounded.

There are more and better trail cams being strung up all over the place now, so if there is something to be seen, it’s more and more likely we’ll see it. A trail cam, for those of you without deer hunting relatives, is a digital camera hooked up to a motion sensor that is mounted in some outdoor location to capture images of wildlife in the area. Motion sets off the camera. Many of them use “night vision” technology to capture night-time activity as well.  The so-called Jacobs Creature is an alleged image of a juvenile Bigfoot captured with just such a camera by deer hunters in 2007.

There may already be really good images of Bigfoot tucked away on someone’s hard drive. I suspect that a lot of people, even if they had real evidence, would  just keep it quiet because they don’t want to be ridiculed, or don’t want the media attention. All the BFRO people and the “bigfoot hunters” are really doing it wrong, though– they are all out there for the “close encounter” which, even if they have, few people will ever believe, rather than the slow, grueling labor of actual scientific fieldwork.

I recently read a story of a primatologist studying gorillas in Africa. He followed them for months, but never actually saw them. If he had gotten close enough for eye contact they would have either fled or attacked him. Instead, he followed just out of contact range, and each day he found their nesting sites from the night before, and their feeding sites from the previous day; he found their scat and their footprints. And this told him pretty much everything he needed to know about where they went, how many there were, what their sizes were, what they ate, and so forth. But he never actually saw them. It seems that if one really wanted to know about Bigfoot, this is what one ought to do.