Good old Audre Myers has been sending me little e-mails each morning for the past few weeks, usually containing sweet little sentiments about the power of music and the like.  These are always a welcome start to my day, and I’m sure she sends similar e-mails to a number of fortunate souls every day.

She’s also been sending me more Bigfoot videos, I suspect because I a.) find them interesting and b.) am sympathetic to the existence of the big lug, even if I remain a bit of a skeptic.

After sending me the draft of last week’s Bigfoot post, Audre sent along a video of thirteen unexplained, alleged Bigfoot encounters.  Included in her e-mail was a rundown of the videos, sometimes with her reflections, sometimes referencing the relative quality of the videos in the compilation to the originals.

This cataloging and breakdown impressed me, and I asked Audre if I could reproduce the e-mail here in full.  She agreed, but offered me a sage warning:  people might start to think I’m a kook for running so many Bigfoot-related pieces.  She pointed out that belief in Bigfoot is still very much outside the mainstream (true), and that the blog could suffer from too much Bigfootiana.

I appreciated her looking out for me and the blog, but here’s thing thing:  I don’t care if people think it’s ridiculous.  As I’ve frequently stated, while I’d like to believe that Bigfoot exists, I’m undecided.

In my mind, the point of this blog—or at least of these Bigfoot posts—is to explore Creation with an open mind and a sense of intellectual curiosity and adventure.  Conventional wisdom is usually quite flawed—at worst, even dangerous—and, at best, boring.  Often boring is good—it’s safe and stable and productive.  Better to be boring and reliable than flamboyant and a flake.

But doesn’t anyone else feel like we’re becoming intellectually ossified?  Maybe cryptozoology isn’t the answer to that ossification, but at least it’s interesting and different and unorthodox.  Life is too short for banality.

Here’s what I wrote in response to Audre’s kind-hearted warning:

Thanks for the warning.  I’m not worried about being ridiculed.  Seriously, I don’t care.  I want to present the interesting, the unusual, the weird, the unorthodox.

There’s too much boring content out there, and too many conventional takes.  I want my blog to be spicy, unusual, and intriguing.  Your Bigfoot posts achieve that.

Like Kierkegaard, I want to embrace the absurd passionately.  Bigfoot may or may not be absurd, but he’s interesting!

We live in a time when the official wisdom is dishonest, debased, and demonic.  It’s time to embrace the absurdity of Reality.  Maybe Bigfoot is a part of that.  It takes a great deal of intellectual humility even to be open to the fact that there are many things we can’t know or understand or comprehend.

With that, here is what I am dubbing the first installment of “Project Bigfoot”:

This is for your ‘enjoyment’ later today or over the weekend. It’s a good compilation video.

Because we can’t be in the same room when you watch the video, here are my thoughts:

1. (#13) I sent this one to you already – you’ll recognize it.
2. (#12) I’ve not seen the original.
3. (#11) When you’ve got time to play around on the computer, go to YT and search Robert Dobson – bigfoot. He’s got quite a body of work. He is missed.
4. (#10) They are also believed to eat the ‘cabbage(s)’ at the top of cabbage palm trees.
5. (#9) I’ve not seen the original.
6. (#8) I’ve not seen this one at all.
7. (#7) They can hide in plain sight because of that ability to stand or squat stock still; they even seem to have that ‘slow blink’ that cats do (that extended period of time between blinks). Because of this, they are often mistaken as a ‘dark area’ in a video and get missed.
8. (#6) Notice the long strides.
9. (#5) The original is much clearer.
10. (#4) He’s talking to his son (“get in the house!”) – what impresses me is how brave this guy is because he gets relatively close.
11. (#3) It’s carrying a deer in ONE ARM. How many grocery bags can you bring in on one arm??? That’s not a Florida deer, either (known to be much smaller than the average).
12. (#2) When I first saw the original video, the two things I was struck with were a. the lead creature is limping (pretty unique for a guy in a suit) and b. perspective tells us that the further away something is, the smaller it looks. As we take that as true, how huge must these creatures be???
13. (#1) The original is much clearer.

I was going to complain to you how difficult it is to find the original videos if they were posted several years ago but Sir Spooks did an awesome job of listing the originals in the expanded Show Notes.

TMI? Lol. Just ‘on account a because’, Sir Spooks is the premier paranormal channel. His milieu is ghost videos (I send them to my cleaning lady because she gets a bang out of them). He’s got some of the very best! Many will make you sit back and scratch your head.

Ok. Now I’ve bored you to the point of coma … my work here is done. LOL!