Earlier this week our senior cryptid correspondent Audre Myers sent me an intriguing video that seems to depict a Bigfoot sauntering along the side of a Canadian lake near Toronto.  If anyone’s going to be hanging out in Canada, it’s Bigfoot!

Audre makes an interesting point:  could every sighting of the hairy lug really be a guy in a gorilla costume?  That does stretch credulity—except that it’s entirely possible, albeit a tad implausible, that everyone filming is in cahoots with a fellow hoaxer.  The Spiritualist Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced more charlatans than ghosts.

Regardless, we simply can’t know.  As with everything with Bigfoot, we’re always talking in possibilities, probabilities, likelihoods, etc.  This footage is intriguing, but it’s so easy to doctor video footage, how can we be sure?  Until we have a Bigfoot in captivity or dead on a lab table, we really can’t.

With that, here is Audre with a little note on perspective:

We often talk about fakes and hoaxes and fat men in hairy suits. And, to a certain extent, there’s always that possibility but that can also be stretched so far it snaps.

The video is a YouTube short which, if you’re not familiar, means it repeats itself over and over until you get out of it. But in this instance, you may decide to let it run a few times and I think that’s wise. What I’d like you to consider, as you watch the video, is what the distance is from the camera to the object being recorded. We learn perspective from a young age and our perception of perspective improves as we get older and have more experience to call upon to make rational decisions. Perspective informs us that the farther away an object is, the smaller it looks. Everyone will agree with that – it’s non-negotiable.

Look at the video again, remembering perspective. How large must that creature be? Even at the distance involved, that’s a very large creature. In the close up, it’s easy to see the creature in relation to the big trees around it. It isn’t dwarfed by those trees – it has a presence that is equally impressive. Not the same height as the trees but certainly closer in height than you or I would be. I cannot be convinced that at every happenstance recording of these large creatures is actually a big guy in a hairy suit just waiting for someone to come along and record him. That’s where the stretch snaps. Additionally, very tall people are small subset of humans.

Here is a handy little chart that explains height distribution: https://theportlypolitico.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/cd877-statistics2b-dimensions2b-2b3-19-182b28129.pdf

Only 1 percent of American men are over 6’4″. I submit that the creature in the video is over 6’4″ and is a great deal heavier than a human at that height. Shaquille O’Neal, everybody’s favorite basketball player is, according to Wik, 7-foot-1-inch (2.16 m) and 325-pound. To me, it appears that the creature in the video is larger – height and weight – than Shaq.

Of course, you will believe what you believe and I can only admit that there’s room for quandary. But I’m also not embarrassed to admit I believe – 98% – that they are ‘real’.