Episode 30 - Sasquatch

Hello, dear listeners. I wanted to let you know that you won’t be seeing new episodes of Through the Veil for the next few weeks.

I’m traveling, and gathering some new stories that I hope to share with you. This unfortunately means I will not have the time nor equipment to make and release new episodes while I am traveling.

The next new episode of Through the Veil will be released on September 16th. Until then, enjoy this episode.

You could hardly imagine a better day for a hike. A better weekend for a trip like this. The weather was beautiful.

The sky was clear, the sun shone merrily down, its heat abated by a low breeze and occasional cloud. But no storms were forecast. You were incredibly pleased. The group you were with, all of you friends, had been planning this trip for a long time. There were six of you making the trek, hiking back into the mountain forest, camping near a lake for several days, and then returning.

The hike was long, but it was generally easy, and without a storm on the horizon to worry about, the whole weekend was looking like it would be a massive success. You were looking forward to a long weekend of relaxing, swimming, and hiking. Being away from the city was going to be great.

Across the diverse expanse of North American folklore, there are stories of wild-men. Each region, and each group, has its own distinct version, but the theme is prevalent enough that it eventually took on a life all its own.

One part folklore, one part hoax, stories of the wild-man became so engrossed in pop-culture that it has become a staple of the North American wilderness. However, it became famous under a different name. A name based on its most distinguishing feature: its massive feet. Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is a hairy, bipedal, ape-like creature that dwells deep in the mountains of North America.

Stories of wild-men, and from them, stories of Bigfoot, have become a full-blown phenomenon with believers, pseudo-science, detractors, and experts.

Bigfoot may have had its roots in the legends of wild-men, but it has taken on a life of its own. Those roots can be darker, even grounded in horror more than anything, but that has not stopped the stories of bigfoot to become far less threatening.

In many ways, Bigfoot has evolved into a benign creature, with a gentle and shy personality. It has been hunted by enthusiasts, hoping to catch a glimpse or perhaps a photograph. It has been studied by scientists, some hoping to prove it could be real, others working to disprove claims of sasquatch’s existence. Sasquatch has even become a feature of bumper-stickers.

Whether you believe or not, whether you think bigfoot is just a silly story or a gentle giant wandering the wilderness, its story, and the roots of that story may reveal certain truths about how people think, and how a story becomes a phenomenon.

I am Andrew Eagle, and I invite you to join me in passing Through the Veil to learn all about the most famous North American cryptid, the Bigfoot.

You made camp near a small stream. You pitched the tents up a small rise from the water, to keep away from the bugs, and avoid any muddy ground.

Once the camp was set up, and you had a small fire going, you all settled into a relaxing evening. You chatted, cooked a simple meal from the camp food you’d packed, and enjoyed the slow fade from day, through to twilit evening, through to the dark of night.

As night fell in full, you and your friends made your way to your various tents. Over the course of a short while, flashlights clicked off, conversations fell quiet, and you all made your way to sleep.

Then you woke with a start. It was still dark. And while it was not immediately clear what had woken you up, you were on edge.

You tilted your head toward the center of camp. You saw no lights, your friends were either still asleep, or lying in the dark like you were. Just as you convinced yourself that it must have been nothing, and you were nearly asleep again; you heard movement in the woods.

Something large was moving nearby. Large enough to shuffle the underbrush, to snap twigs and small branches and rustle leaves as it moved. You thought maybe a bear. And while you weren’t worried about it, you still were decidedly unlikely to sleep while a bear wandered nearby.

Then the animal, whatever it was, made an odd sound. Something like a hooting, deep and bass that echoed through the woods. A sound unlike any you had ever heard. The closest thing you could think of was that it sounded almost like a large ape. As impossible as that was, out in the North Pacific mountains.

Two possible sources have been cited as the possible roots of bigfoot mythos. The first suggestion is that bigfoot comes from folklore of the European wildman. The wildman in Europe has roots in antiquated nature gods, and are representative of chaos, nature, and wildness.

The second suggestion suggests that bigfoot mostly has its origins in the beliefs, mythologies, and stories of a wide-array of Native American and First Nations people.

As is usually true of folk belief, it probably truly has influence from both suggested sources and more. Accounts of sasquatch-like figures, and wild men, were first recorded in the mid 1800s in North America. These records primarily come from colonists, pioneers, and missionaries who would listen to the stories of Native American and First Nations peoples primarily in Washington and British Columbia.

The accounts ranged from fearful stories of cannibalistic wildmen to the less-menacing stories of giants that lived among the mountain peaks and would steal salmon from fishermen’s nets.

The stories grew in wider popularity in the 1920s, when J.W. Burns compiled a number of stories told to him by local tribes of First Nations people. J.W.Burns is the one who introduced the name sasquatch, a term taken from the Halkomelem language and modified. He claimed that the stories probably referred to one type of creature rather than many.

The First Nations people involved maintained that the creatures in the story were real, and they were offended when people published the stories and claimed the figures involved were legendary.

Although it had taken you time, you had eventually found your way back to sleep. In the morning, rested, the strange noise and the events of the night before felt more like a vivid dream than something that had actually happened. And so it wasn’t until you were well into the hike for the day, breaking for a light lunch that it came up. One of your companions asked if anyone had heard anything strange during the night.

Some of the others made jokes, but after the laughter faded, they pressed. They really wanted to know. So you answered. Apparently they’d heard it too. The others mostly brushed it off, poked fun at you for what must be a mis-identified animal. That was all fine and well, they were probably right.

The second day passed without incident. The path’s slope increased sharply in the later half of the day, and so there wasn’t much in the way of conversation happening on the trail. You all arrived at the second campsite exhausted, near the lake, and where you expected to stay the remaining nights of your trip.

You made camp. Preparing the space to be your home for a few days of relaxation, exploration, and swimming. Much in the way the night before had passed, you all made food, chatted until after dark and then made your way to your tents and fell asleep.

The next morning, you began exploring the area, gathering some branches and fallen wood to be fuel for the fire that night. That’s when you found the track. It was massive. Impossibly large. It was nearly two feet long and eight inches wide. In shape, it was very much like a person’s foot but on a gigantic scale. You called your friends over to see. In the end, none of you could offer a good explanation that did not border on the absurd.

Roughly one-third of all bigfoot sightings are reported in the Pacific Northwest, where the story has its roots. The rest are scattered and spread across North America. Since its emergence into popular culture, sightings have occurred around the Great Lakes, throughout the Southeastern United States, and in nearly any wooded mountains throughout North America.

In 1982, Colin and Janet Bord published The Bigfoot Casebook. A chronological collection of Bigfoot sightings in the U.S. ranging from 1818 through to the 1980s. In the end, they collected and documented more than 1000 stories.

Sightings reached a peak in the 1970s, but they continue to this day. A photograph emerged in 2007 that contains an as-of-yet unidentified animal. Several explanations have been offered. A bear, an escaped chimpanzee, and of course, a juvenile sasquatch.

Because of its fame, bigfoot has been the subject of a number of notable hoaxes that have left most people more skeptical than they otherwise may have been.

In spite of the odd track, and the strange sounds. You and your friends decide to stay. You spend the day swimming and hiking, exploring the area. It was as beautiful as you had hoped. More so, even.

If you were lying to yourself, you even managed to forget about the strange events of the past two nights. You think maybe your friends did too.

But that was only if you were lying to yourself. Which is why, as night fell, you felt a discomfort growing. Around the fire, as you cooked, and chatted, there was something wrong. You were all afraid although none of you wanted to admit it.

So you stayed up. Far later than you had the nights before. But even so, you all eventually made your way to your tents. But sleep was elusive. When you heard the noise nearby, you didn’t wait. You had to know, even though you knew… Knew. That it was stupid.

You clambered free from your tent and pulled your flashlight with you. You clicked it on and pointed the beam toward the sound.

Whatever was moving had once been walking slowly but it sped up as you made a racket climbing free of your tent.

You tried to track the sound. That’s when you saw it. The figure moving through the woods. Standing eight feet tall or more, covered in thick, dark fur. It was huge and making that awful hooting sound.

When the light hit it, it paused only for a moment, then with one last hoot, it rushed into the woods away from you and the camp.

Due to its prevalence, and the massive number of bigfoot-centric hoaxes, belief in sasquatch has been regarded as the first popularized example of psuedoscience in America. Its pervasiveness is so wide-spread that according to an Associated Press poll in 2014, more Americans believe in Bigfoot than the Big Bang Theory.

Most scientists attribute big-foot sightings to misidentification of other animals, most commonly black bears.

In 2007 for example, the Bigfoot Field Research Organization published some photos which they claimed were of a juvenile bigfoot. When the photos got attention, the Pennsylvania Game Commission responded saying that the photos were of a black bear with mange. However, an anthropologist, Jeffrey Meldrum claims that the limb proportion of the creature in the photograph is not bear-like. Without claiming whether he believed the photos were of a sasquatch, Meldrum stated they were more like a chimpanzee’s limb structure.

Bigfoot hoaxes pop up now and again, some attracting attention, others are easily disproven and quickly fade away.

Tom Biscardi is the CEO of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. And in 2005, he claimed that he had access to a captured bigfoot. A few days after making the claim, and arranging a pay-per-view event for it, he went back on the air to announce there was no bigfoot, and he blamed a woman, whom he left unnamed, for misleading him and his team.

In 2008, two men posted a video on YouTube claiming they had discovered a dead sasquatch in northern Georgia. They had frozen the body and shipped it to Searching for Bigfoot in exchange for a $50,000 reward. When the body arrived, the hair was not real, the head was hollow, and the feet were rubber. They would later admit to the hoax after being confronted.

In 2012, a man in Montana set about trying to create a bigfoot hoax by dressing in a camoflage, ghillie suit. He was struck by a car and died during his attempt.

These are just some of the more recent hoaxes. Bigfoot hoaxes go all the way back to the beginning of its popularity, with a series of newspaper reports in 1884 that are dubious at best.

Some scientists believe perhaps sasquatch sightings are evidence of a small relict population of otherwise extinct primates such as Gigantopithecus or Paranthropus.

The story of Bigfoot may have started as a hybrid between European wildman folklore and Native American and First Nations folklore of giants and similar creatures, but it has certainly taken on a life of its own.

Sasquatch has found its way onto bumper stickers, into television shows, video games, and movies, and in spite of never being provably seen; it has a formal species name assigned to it by ZooBank, a non-governmental organization generally accepted by the scientific community as the group which assigns species names.

ZooBank received a request to assign the name Homo sapiens cognatus to the hominid more commonly known as Bigfoot in 2013. ZooBank put forward a statement clearly saying they did not accept or refute the existence of such a creature, only that the request met all the necessary requirements for a species assignment.

It is truly a phenomenon, independent of the reality of its existence. And independent of the many hoaxes that have plagued potential research into the topic, bigfoot lives on in the folklore of North America.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore, myth, and magic.

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.

As always, thank you, for listening.