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”:

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