Imagine the 1993 film Cool Runnings, about the first Jamaican bobsled team, but instead of feisty Jamaican underdogs, it’s a family of Bigfoots. That is not what is happening in this edition of Myersvision.
But my title is not totally misleading! There is some sledding. And there are—possibly—some Bigfoots (Bigfeet?).
I don’t have much more by way of introduction today, so I’m going to turn it over to our resident cryptozoologist, Audre Myers:
It’s hard to believe that June is nearly over! The summer is interesting, in that it seems to start slow, but it always passes quickly. Yours portly has to squeeze the most of out of this summer while he still can!
Fortunately, my wonderful readers and contributors are making it a lively one. Good ol’ Audre Myers contributed an excellent piece on Friday to build upon a piece I wrote Wednesday. Together, I think of them as a “mini-series” on the topic of what I call “Cryptid Epistemology,” which is not so much a “way of knowing” about cryptids—which, by definition, are not known—but rather using the idea of probing the unknown as a way to sharpen our analytical skills:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
On Wednesday I posted a piece entitled “Cryptid Epistemology,” which was more about academics’ desperate attempt to monopolize “truth” through a campaign against “disinformation” more than it was about searching for Bigfoot. That said, the two topics are intertwined, and the piece is an exploration of why access to information, and the ability to parse and analyze that information, is so important.
What I admire about the more humble and intellectually honest side of the cryptid community is that they are open to the possibility that we don’t know everything. Indeed, they carefully sift through thousands of hours of footage, interviews, blog posts, books, etc., in search of gold. That they often come away with pyrite does not discourage them; instead, they keep looking, gently setting aside the few nuggets they find for further evaluation.
Maybe Bigfoot exists—maybe he doesn’t. What’s important is that these folks, so often dismissed as kooks, are sharpening their minds and engaging in intense analysis of thousands of data points. They are making healthy skeptics of themselves, even as they search for something at which most skeptics would scoff.
Who, I ask, is the real kook? So many self-proclaimed “skeptics” are merely parroting the very same narrative that was spoon-fed to them in a high school history class, or in their freshman philosophy course at college. They often do so with an air of condescension and derision, the sort of know-it-all-ism that derives from an excess of education but a dearth of wisdom.
The older I get, the more I realize how precious little any of us know. Things that were taught to me as inerrant “truth” have turned out to be a vast panoply of lies and half-truths, assembled into a shambolic, Frankensteinian mess for the benefit of the government and corporations.
To give one rather benign but illustrative example, before I turn it over to Audre Myers: as a kid, my elementary school teachers would, it seemed to me, forcefully and a bit angrily insist that the United States was moving to the metric system, and we’d all need to learn it so we could cope in a post-Imperial units world. It was all nonsense, and even as little kids we all kind of knew it was a bit overblown. Had our teachers said, “the metric system is important to learn because it is the standard in scientific research,” it would have been a.) truthful and b.) productive. Instead, they tried to terrify us into thinking we’d all be European, holding our cigarettes like gay men and speaking Esperanto (yes, another lie they told us in elementary school).
To be fair, things that I have taught have turned out to be inaccurate. The more I study history, for example, the more I realize that the narratives I teach—often derived from what my history teachers taught me—are often incomplete or even incorrect. When teachers talk about creating lifelong learners, it is for a reason: we can only get a small fraction of the Truth in our lives, and we should constantly undergo a refining process to purify our knowledge.
But I have overstayed my welcome in this overly long introduction. Audre offers up an excellent continuation of “Cryptid Epistemology,” her own further refinement on the journey towards Truth:
Ever since The Age of The Virus and the 2020 usurpation, there has been an increased focus in academia on supposed “mis- and disinformation.” Anytime a small guild of academics champions a cause that runs cover for government and corporate propaganda, we should all activate our skeptical antennae, regardless of our political leanings; there is a good chance someone is lying to us.
The mis/disinformation racket is a lucrative one. The federal government is shelling out big money to experts in this field to speak at conferences. Without violating anyone’s privacy, I have direct knowledge of some of the amounts involved for academics giving presentations on the topic. If I could pull in a cool six grand (and change) for talking about how everyone who disagrees with my positions is suffering from an advanced case of disinformation, I might do it, too.
William Briggs at his Substack Science is Not the Answer hosts a very good guest post by Jaap Hanekamp entitled “The Misinformation Dis(mis)course Revisited: The Losing Battle of The Academic Expertocracy“; it offers a very good treatment of the danger of this mis/disinformation regime. In essence, it is simply a form of censorship.
The title of today’s piece is misleading—we call it “clickbait” in the blogging biz. Joe Rogan doesn’t actually meet Bigfoot, which would surely be the media event of the century, but he does listen to an alleged recording of our big, hairy friend.
Audio is pretty easy to manipulate, and with the rise of AI-generated sounds, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to discern actual recordings of anyone—much less Bigfoot—from AI ones. The difference here is that the audio Rogan listens to was recorded in the early 1970s, and is—as far as we know—undoctored.
Our senior correspondent and resident cryptid expert Audre Myers offers up several videos of alleged Bigfoot recordings, one of which is at an Interstate rest stop. I’m willing to believe that any thing is possible at an Interstate rest stop at 10:48 PM, and not just calling Seabass for a good time.
With that, here’s Audre with some intriguing possible recordings of Bigfoot:
Our senior correspondent and resident cryptozoologist Audre Myers is back with a veritable buffet of Bigfoot footage—some plausible, most of it garbage, much like eating at a Golden Corral. There are some surprisingly toothsome morsels surrounded by a great deal of flabby, fattening fluff.
Audre shares a video here with thirteen different alleged Bigfoot sightings. She breaks each one down with her distinct brand of cryptozoological analysis.
With that, here’s Audre’s Bigfoot Buffet:
Audre’s convalescence has coincided with a revival in her bigfoot scribblings, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m chiefly pleased because Audre is doing better, but I’m also thrilled she’s sending along Bigfoot content (“Footent?”) again.
This week’s submission involves a very lifelike—but, I would argue, clearly manipulated—image that purports to be a close-up photo of the big lug. The picture looks very much like a person—indeed, I have worked with and seen people who look like the creature in the photo (no offense intended).
Audre has more to say on the matter, and dips into the often discouraging world of online Bigfoot investigating.
With that, here is Audre on the face of Bigfoot:
Our dear Audre Myers is back after a medical hiatus. I won’t go into details—that’s for Audre to do, if she decides to do so—but she’s endured some harrowing experiences with those parts of the medical system that operate outside of the good hospitals and doctors. It’s a shame that there are so many incompetent fools given charge over our elderly. There’s a special place in Hell for them.
Regardless, she made it out alive, as did the young man in this video. The title of this post is my own sensationalist invention—gotta get those clicks!—but I’m sure it felt like an attack to the man recording it.
I’m always skeptical of Bigfoot talk. As I’ve written many times before, I want Bigfoot to be real, but the alleged “evidence” is frequently suspect, and I think there’s a high degree of seeing what we want to see in Bigfoot footage. It doesn’t help that the “field” of cryptozoology is full of charlatans and conmen.
I trust and respect Audre, however. She’s not trying to con anyone. That said, her language in this post suggests the strong desire for Bigfoot to be real. I don’t doubt that we can “know [things] in a special kind of way,” as Audre writes, but that doesn’t necessarily hold up to scientific scrutiny.
For what it’s worth, I think the footage is intriguing. I also think it’s a bear.
Watch for yourself and let me know what you think.
With that, here’s Audre:
Senior correspondent and cryptid expert Audre Myers sends me a lot of Bigfoot footage, almost all of which I can find some hole to poke my skeptic’s waggling finger through with good-natured vigor. I suspect that as eagle-eyed as she is, Audre sees with the eyes of a true believer, and sometimes sees what she wants to see. Thus it is for all of us, for different things.
But this time, I think she might be onto something. I think she vastly underestimates how good (and cheap) practical effects work is these days, and how a truly committed hoaxster could put together a pretty convincing Bigfoot outfit if he wanted to do so.
But, again, something about this video really is compelling. Naturally, it has all the shortcomings of the typical Bigfoot footage—blurry, for example—but it makes sense in this context.
I’ll let you decide for yourself. With that, here’s Audre, encouraging you to “Open Your Eyes”:
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Last Saturday I attended the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival in Westminster, South Carolina. The festival is in its fourth year, and it was a bustling, fun event—a good model for how small town festivals should be.
There were some hiccups over the summer, with vendor packets (my own included) getting lost in the mail and the festival’s website disappearing for a couple of weeks. The event organizers weren’t responding to e-mails, and I thought for awhile that maybe the whole thing had been shuttered.
Fortunately, that was not the case, and the festival organizers got everything working again. I paid my vendor fee using some Discover Card cashback, and went up to Westminster after school on Friday, 13 October 2023 (spooky!).
My neighbors went up ahead of me, on Thursday, 12 October 2023, and picked up my vendor packet for me during the day Friday. We stayed in adjacent campsites at Chau-Ram County Park, a beautiful park near waterfalls—and just $25 a night!
I made a critical error, however: I should have taken off last Friday. Because I was unable to attend the festival Friday, the vendor organizer put me down a little side street. I was super close to the main strip, but just far enough away that most folks didn’t even realize my tent was there.
Needless to say, it was not a strong sale’s day. Indeed, I only sold one painting, to a sweet little girl who loves the Loch Ness monster. She purchased a painting I’d done of a strange aquatic animal, which she liked because it resembled Nessie.
I shared my vendor spot with the wife my neighbor’s family, and she was selling really cool crochet hats. I figured she’d do a killing, as the hats were really well done, but she did not make a single sale.
In that regard, the festival was a disappointment. As for the festival itself, though, it was an absolute blast.
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The Portly Politico 