Bigfoot is the monster for our time

Bigfoot is having a moment in northeast Ohio.

Last month, the Small Town Monsters production company announced Monster Fest in downtown Canton for June 2023. While Bigfoot may share the billing with UFOs and ghosts, everybody knows the big, hairy guy is the real star.

Small Town Monsters has been making bank with Bigfoot since 2015 when company owner Seth Breedlove released “Minerva Monster.” The film explored a branch of the creature’s family tree that sprouted in Paris Township.

Since then, Breedlove has continued to document Bigfoot and other cryptids with several more films. Another will debut next June 3 during Monster Fest, according to a Canton Repository story.

Look, I love me a good Bigfoot yarn, something regular readers of this column know. If you grew up semi-rural in the 1970s, like I did, with a few trees somewhere on your property that an overactive imagination could stretch into a bonafide forest, then Bigfoot was as much a part of your formative years as corduroy pants and transistor radios.

Back then, I lapped up pseudo-scientific junk about giant man-apes like it was manna from hirsute heaven. I still have my dog-eared copy of “The Mysterious Monsters,” a tie-in to a corny movie that made the drive-in circuit in the mid-1970s.

Written by Robert and Frances Guenette, the book covers the holy trinity – Yeti, Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot him/itself. The first two intrigued me, but let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to the Himalayas or Scotland anytime soon (still haven’t). However, I did romp around in the woods, and it was just possible that a rogue Bigfoot was cagey enough to elude the razor-sharp senses and infallible tracking skills of my eight-year-old self.

As a kid, I played on a swing set that abutted a track of trees no self-respecting monster would have bothered to haunt, but I was certain a Bigfoot lived there, or at least visited on weekends. So powerful was this daydream that I used to practice drills, leaping off the swing and running for the house to see if I was fast enough to elude any Bigfoot that might lumber my way, looking for a scrawny kid to use as a combination Slim Jim and toothpick.

(I don’t know how fast was “fast enough,” but I must have convinced myself that I had a decent chance of survival because I kept going back to the swings.)

My Bigfoot obsession reached its apex with a two-part episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” where bionic Steve Austin (Lee Majors) met the creature, played by Andre the Giant. Another encounter later in the series crossed over with “The Bionic Woman” so that Lindsay Wagner could get in on the fun. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has nothing on this epic story of a robotic Bigfoot protecting an underground colony of space aliens while an earthquake looms. (Can you hear my eyes rolling?)

Anyway, over the years I left my obsession with Bigfoot behind, even when others didn’t. An area operation in the ’90s put a new wrinkle on the Bigfoot legend by trying to convince people that many Bigfoot encounters were traumatizing enough to spark amnesia, meaning it was possible to see Bigfoot but suppress the memory. So maybe we’ve all encountered one!

It’s this kind of wonkiness that has Bigfoot perfectly positioned for a contemporary comeback. Today, folks believe all sorts of bogus conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence. Large hominids living undetected in North America and elsewhere – despite infrared technology, an absence of bodies and scat, and every camper and hunter carrying a cellphone with a camera – seem quaint compared to PizzaGate, replacement theory and Italian satellites that change votes for Joe Biden. (Where’s Steve Austin when we need him?)

Some people just want to believe in something – anything! – so badly that they’ll do it despite (or maybe because of) a lack of evidence. Not for nothing is “confirmation bias” the psychological phenomenon of the 21st century.

None of which should keep anybody from enjoying next year’s Monster Fest. Maybe Bigfoot himself will even make a guest appearance. And if you spot a zipper running up his back — well, just chalk it up to evolution. It’s as plausible an explanation as anything else.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig

In search of the Yeti

This column originally ran on Oct. 24, 2013, but has new relevance with the announcement of Monster Fest in downtown Canton in 2023.

Lots of folks consider the end of the Congressional stalemate the biggest news story of last week, but I know better.

The really important news was the announcement that a British geneticist has matched alleged "Abominable Snowman" DNA to a polar-bear species that lived 40,000 years ago. Bryan Sykes of Oxford University is advancing a theory that modern Yeti sightings in the Himalayas may actually be unknown polar- and brown-bear hybrids.

This is where, if I had something worthwhile to add to Yeti/Bigfoot/Sasquatch lore, I'd say, "I don't know what it was I saw in the mountains that day back in 1987, but it sure as heck wasn't a polar bear."

Except that's never happened. I've never been to the Himalayas. Heck, I've barely been outside. I'm one of the lazy tourists that Edward Abbey wrote about in "Desert Solitaire" who experiences the outdoors from the air-conditioned comfort of a car. Any large, shaggy beasts would have to be visible from the road or the lodge, or they'd escape my notice.

Maybe that's because, as a child, I was traumatized by two books about Bigfoot. I still have "The Mysterious Monsters" by Robert and Frances Guenette, its orangish-yellow cover showing a drawing of a large hominid silhouetted in the light of a full moon. "Proof!" the cover intones. "There are giant creatures living at the edge of our civilization. Astounding new evidence and facts!"

Lost to time, however, is "Sasquatch" by John Napier.

Its cover had been thoroughly gummed by my baby sister, depositing her own DNA into the argument. "STARTLING EVIDENCE OF ANOTHER FORM OF LIFE ON EARTH NOW" it offered, along with the promise of eight pages of "revealing" photographs. (My memory isn't that good, but Google's is.)


The mind of a third-grader being extremely gullible, I accepted Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Yeti as fact, ignoring how most of the cited "experts" were good old boys whose cryptozoological encounters were accompanied by liberal applications of alcohol. The books made it seem like all these creatures were part of a big, extended family, lurking in woods, lakes and snow-capped mountain ranges around the world, getting together once a year — maybe on Christmas or Hanukkah — to swap fruitcakes and stories.

Frighteningly, the swingset in our backyard was located about 50 yards away from an immense woods. In retrospect, it was no more than a few dozen trees that abutted against the neighbors' properties, but at the time, it felt vast. Whenever I went out to play, I kept an eye on that woods, lest some hairy creature lumber out, searching for little boys for a between-meal snack.

The best offense being a good defense (or something like that), I practiced swinging as high as I could and then jumping off in the direction of the house, figuring those few seconds of air time would provide the advantage I needed to outrun a Bigfoot if he chose to attack.

At night, I lay in bed, my copy of "The Mysterious Monsters" opened to the pertinent section ("Exhibit A: The Long History of Bigfoot in America," pages 51-62), listening for the creatures' distinctive cries, wondering if they were smart enough to stand on one another's shoulders and peek through my bedroom window. Or maybe they were in cahoots with the vampires and werewolves I was convinced lurked out there, too.

Growing older, I relegated Bigfoot and his ilk to the Urban -- or, in this case, Rural -- Myth file, thinking about it only when I went into the woods (seldom) or played on a swingset (also rare).

But I'm still curious about the creatures and will click on any link that promises new evidence, even though it's all the same half-baked, rum-soaked conjectures dressed up for a new year.

Sykes' theory sounds more plausible, however. If it does turn out that something really has been terrorizing Himalayan climbers all these years, that would cool. But if it ends up being just a bear, even one as significant as a previously unknown breed, that would be too bad.

Without a little mystery, all we'd have left in the daily news is Congress, and they're a far less interesting breed of Mysterious Monsters.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

cschillig at Twitter