After offering a detailed rundown of Bigfoot books, Audre Myers offers up some additional sources—YouTube videos.  Her criteria for selecting these videos is clever, and would seem to avoid the two extremes of Bigfoot belief:  uncritical acceptance and uncritical denial.  What’s left are balanced skeptics or (like myself) those who want to believe, but aren’t going to shut off their critical faculties to do so.

There are a great deal of hoaxes, I have gathered, in the Bigfoot “community,” if that’s the name for it.  These do a disservice to developing a better understanding of this possible creature:  it makes it too easy to write off Bigfoot proponents as cranks or grifters.

One of the videos Audre includes tries to set a “creepy” vibe, and I think the tendency of Bigfoot and cryptozoology content creators to create such an atmosphere also harms the Bigfoot community.  Instead of simply examining or presenting the videos, they’re framing it as some kind of spooky entertainment, a cheap thrill on a Saturday night.  Whether it’s fair or not, this presentation makes me discount the video almost immediately.

Bigfoot is entertaining to study and to speculate about—otherwise, I wouldn’t be running so many Bigfoot posts, and so eagerly—but my word of advice to the Bigfoot believers is to take your subject seriously.  Don’t frame him as some kind of hokey monster, and maybe people will take you more seriously.

Whether we like it or not, optics matter.  Fortunately for us, Audre gets the optics right—and the facts.

With that, here is Audre’s survey of some additional Bigfoot sources:

Once a person has viewed the videos and photographs and has developed that question – is it real? – then the natural tendency is to see if additional information is available. That’s what I did. Over these last four or five years of searching, I’ve come up with a sort of criteria for the information I’ve found. Anything that states definitively that bigfoot is real – oddly enough – I throw out. The same is true of anything that states that bigfoot is more wishful thinking than an actual creature. Using those parameters, I find information that is thoughtful and balanced and has some reasonable science applied to it. This video is a good example of this process:

I don’t think there is anyone over the age of thirty who has not heard of Jane Goodall and her work with apes. She’s a phenomenal woman; here is a link to her Wiki page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall. As you might imagine, I was very excited to find this short interview with her in which she is questioned about bigfoot:

There are many YouTube channels that use supposedly first-hand, eye witness reports of experiences with bigfoot. The content creator reads e-mails submitted to them by folks who claim to have had an encounter, which the channel owner then reads. I suspect it’s a failing on my part but after having listened to about a handful of these tales, I tend not to bother with them. I consider myself a writer and as such, it wouldn’t take long at all for me to write a completely fictional story of ‘my encounter with bigfoot’. Another consideration is the number of these stories that want to tell a tale of having been ‘attacked’ by bigfoot. There is too much ‘video evidence’, if you will allow me to use that phrase, in direct conflict with that ‘attack’ scenario. There are no videos of bigfoot that show anything other than the creature moving away from and not toward a person. They do not desire interaction and I suspect, should a bigfoot ‘attack’, it would be because some idiot interfered with it til the creature reacts adversely. If you consider the sheer bulk of this thing, the size in comparison to the average human, who, in their right mind, would even attempt that sort of thing? But I do believe that bigfoot will throw rocks or twigs or tree branches to induce a human to move away from that particular spot; the woods are their homes and we are the interlopers and it’s quite possible a human has inadvertently put himself between a goal and the bigfoot trying to reach that goal. There is video supporting that scenario, and quite a bit of it.

Now these clips will make you think “drunk!” or “hillbilly stupid” but listen to what is being said:

I apologize that I can’t find the original 911 call but this video has it – as well as a first call I hadn’t heard previously. The content creator is trying to create a ‘creepy’ atmosphere, that’s fine, but listen to the call, listen to what is said and the sound of the speaker’s voice:

This one is the capper – for me, at least. Stay with this video to the end; the police dash cam footage is enhanced so that you get a chance to see what the officers saw:

At this point in my ‘research’, I’ve gone from a 98% believer to a 99% believer. Why? Because of a video titled “Idaho Bigfoot.” It was the most remarkable video ever – crystal clear, relatively close up, and dramatic. So why aren’t I showing it to you here? The video owner has removed it from YouTube. I have no idea why – conspiracy theorists will tell you it’s probably because the ‘government’ knows all about them and doesn’t want us to think they are anything but hoaxes’; I suspect the owner has found a way to monetize the video and we’ll wind up in a situation whereby a person will have to pay some sort of fee to see the video. But it was riveting and I sent it to people close to me who viewed it before it was taken down. They were all impressed.

It can’t possibly be ‘some guy in a suit’ – something real and something substantial walks our woods and forests. It is quite content to live its own way.

So tell me; what do you think now?