Skeptic Blog Runs Hit Piece On Bigfooters

When Leon W. comes on this blog and starts calling non-believers "libtards", is he alluding to the fact that most skeptics of Bigfoot see "believers" as conservatives? As annoying as it is to hear Leon W. go on and on about "libtards" (liberal retards?), there may be a bit of resentment brewing deep within his vocabulary.

In the skeptic circle, it's pretty obvious what they think about Bigfooters. To them, Bigfooters are the macho-type and generally white people with conservative values. They are seen as a bunch of middle-class weirdos running around the woods calling themselves "Bigfoot researchers". Skeptics have a huge problem with amateurs who call themselves "researchers".

We used the quotes around “researchers” here because they don’t really do true scientific research in the sense of lab experiments, testing hypotheses, or scientific publication; their “research” consists mostly of reading the Bigfoot literature and tramping through the woods - Donald Prothero, skepticblog.org

The blog, skepticblog.org, recently published an article entitled, "Bigfoot On The Brain". The piece talks about an upcoming book on cryptozoology by the author of the article, Donald Prothero, and a person named Daniel Loxton. In the book, they "tried to analyze and dissect  the psychology of cryptozoology, and the followers of cryptids like Bigfoot". Their focus is to try to understand the following:  What motivates these people? Why do they think this way?

Prothero points out a "portrait" of the Bigfoot community by a writer named Joshua Blu Buhs. This is what Buhs thinks about the typical "amateur cryptozoologist" in Bigfootery:

Studying the Bigfoot fans in the Pacific Northwest, Buhs documents a group of mostly white working-class men who are Bigfoot’s biggest boosters. To them, Bigfoot is an icon of untamed masculinity, a populist rebel against scientific elites, the last champion of authenticity against a plastic, image-conscious, effeminate consumer society. (Yet as a supreme irony, Bigfoot has a career as advertising mascot and tabloid fodder, making him a major purveyor of consumerism.) Buhs shows that many Bigfoot stalkers follow the subculture because it has the same attractions as other types of hunting: getting back to nature, tramping through the woods in search of elusive prey, testing their manhood against the wilderness, and play at being “real men”.

Buhs believes there is a deep rooted resentment between Bigfooters and professional scientists who ridicule them:

The amateurs usually have a big chip on their shoulder over their treatment by academic scholars. They feel that if they can find the elusive creature that science rejects, they will be able to triumph over people who have ignored, ridiculed, and disrespected them for decades.

The article goes on to talk about the oddness of how Bigfooters carry themselves when it comes to doing serious research on the subject:

Even more striking was the lack of obvious crazies or even colorful characters, like one might find at a typical sci-fi conference like ComiCon or DragonCon. Reporter Mike Leggett of the Austin American-Statesmen attended the 2009 TBRC and wrote an article entitled, “Texas Conference more boring than you might think.”

Bigfoot is boring.

Correction. Bigfoot conferences are boring.

Bigfoot would not be boring if the conference speakers weren’t so dull. Heck, most of them were barely breathing.

I went to the 2009 Texas Bigfoot Conference expecting people in gorilla suits milling about among semi-crazed gangs of gonzo, tattooed, barrel-chested beandips. I found instead only a polite, older crowd of mildly sleepy true believers who only came alive at the mention of the TV show “MonsterQuest” or the movie “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” I thought surely someone would be selling BLT—Bigfoot, lettuce and tomato—sandwiches and Abominable Snowman cones during the lunch break, but there were only Cokes and Subway sandwiches.

Trying not to sound breathlessly moronic and relentlessly off kilter must be hard work. The stream of people calling themselves Bigfoot researchers … droned on all day, talking about satellite imagery, global rainfall patterns, Bigfoot territorial behaviors and specialty field work searching for Bigfoot signs. Even the crowd of believers was nodding off by the afternoon. I was asleep and drooling down the front of my shirt.

The discussion was arcane, jargon-laden and focused often on something they call cryptozoology—basically, the study of animals not yet proven to exist.

And I guess that’s what the conference was all about, attempts to prove that Bigfoot, or Sasquatch if you prefer, does live some place other than in legend. Actually, what they’re trying to do is get mainstream science to admit that all the misshapen plaster casts, bad photographs and over-dramatic TV shows are evidence that the creature lives in Texas and other states.

In summary, Prothero's article basically draws the conclusion that people who research Bigfoot are more like a cult. "To most Americans, all these paranormal ideas [UFOs, Atlantis, psychics, ghosts, and other paranormal beliefs] are more or less equal, and there is no real distinction between cryptozoology and the UFO cults," Prothero wrote.

[via www.skepticblog.org]