Writer Explains Why They Look For Bigfoot

What drives us to look for creatures that most people believe don't even exist? Here's one person's perspective of why they do it.

Cryptids expanded my childhood world. Researching them was a way to escape the daily humdrum of living in an insular Connecticut city. I was a child obsessed with imaginary worlds and the mysteries that unfolded in them. My inner Nancy Drew was drawn not necessarily to solving the mystery—aka proving the existence of cryptids—but to the quest itself. Unlike mythical beasts (think: Pegasus and dragons), most cryptids seemed just real enough, given their obvious counterparts in the natural animal kingdom. There was a chance my investigations would lead somewhere, but that wasn’t the goal.

Soon after A Goofy Movie, when I was in elementary school, I maxed out my library card with books about unusual beasts. Bigfoot led to Yeti, Yeti to the Loch Ness monster, the Loch Ness monster to the Mothman, and so on. I’d jot down interesting facts about them in my Lisa Frank notebooks. Like how the Wolpertinger, a rabbitlike creature, hangs out in the forests of Bavaria, or that the earliest report of Nessie’s existence dates back to the seventh century. My Bigfoot obsession grew so large that on one Girl Scout camping trip, I wandered off in search of the strange bipedal creature. I’m sorry to say I found no footprints.

Reading eyewitness accounts and collecting blurry photographs was a way to disassociate from reality, at least a little bit. But back then, the process was cumbersome. Stacks of books littered library tables. Chicken scratch filled my notebooks, as did photos I scanned for “research purposes.” Today, my cryptid fascination has taken on a slightly more tech-savvy form. It isn’t nearly as obsessive as it was then, but it’s definitely more efficient thanks to search engines, bookmarking apps like Pocket, and Google Docs.

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