A possible reconstruction of Gigantopithecus.

As Daniel Loxton and I finished our upcoming book on cryptozoology, I needed an image of the famous huge ape fossils from Asia known as Gigantopithecus for the chapter on the Yeti. I emailed my colleague Russ Ciochon at the University of Iowa, who has found many new specimens, and got a rather surprising reply on why he would not share his images with anyone: “Gigantopithecus is not part of cryptozoology. Yet that is the only way anyone hears about Gigantopithecus.” I was rather surprised at his brusque attitude toward a scientific colleague who is on his side, but I can see where he must be fed up with non-stop requests from cryptozoologists who are only interested in his work to support their completely unscientific notions.

The original Gigantopithecus blacki specimens were found in some Chinese cave deposits, first discovered in the 1920s. They include teeth and a complete lower jaw. Unfortunately, there are no other skeletal parts known from this mysterious gigantic ape, despite decades of searching by the large number of Chinese paleontologists who now work on the deposits. More recently, Ciochon has revisited this region, and found more specimens of Gigantopithecus. He did so by shifting his focus to cave deposits in North Vietnam, which are unspoiled by the fossil poachers who robbed the Chinese caves to supply “dragon bones” for apothecaries to grind up into Chinese “medicine”. Still, even after more than 75 years since the first tooth was found, we still have only three lower jaws and about 1300 isolated teeth of this mysterious primate. There is also a second species, Gigantopithecus giganteus, from India, which (despite its name) is about half the size of Gigantopithecus blacki. A third species, Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis, comes from much older beds (6 to 9 million years old) in India, suggesting that the Gigantopithecus line goes back to at least 9 million years ago and the evolutionary radiation of early apes such as the dryopithecines (Ciochon, 1991).

Because we have only the lower jaws to go on, it’s hard to reliably estimate the size of the entire creature. Ciochon et al. (1990a) estimated that it was about 10 feet (3 m) tall and weighed about 1200 pounds. Simons and Ettel (1970) suggest it was proportioned like more like a gorilla, standing about 9 feet tall and weighing about 900 pounds. Either way, it was the largest primate that ever lived, immensely larger than a gorilla (the largest living primate), or even the biggest human giants.

Comparison of an old male jaw (bottom) and a female jaw, showing the extreme robustness and the large thick-enameled molars

What we do have of Gigantopithecus are the heavily built jaws with huge teeth, especially the molars, which have very thick enamel. Both the molars and the cheek teeth in front of them (the premolars) are very broad and low-crowned, often with their entire occlusal surface ground down flat, suggesting that these creatures ate a very tough, gritty diet. Ciochon et al. (1990b) used microscopic analysis of wear facets on the tooth enamel, and the presence of phytolith fossils from plants, showed that the Chinese apes ate mostly bamboo, as does the living giant panda.

Gigantopithecus had lived in Asia since at least the middle Miocene, about 9 million years ago, and were found mostly in eastern Asia during the Ice Ages. Careful dating of cave deposits in Vietnam which yield both Gigantopithecus and Homo erectus showed that early humans invaded China about 800,000 years ago, and that Gigantopithecus died out about half a million years later, around 300,000 years ago (Ciochon et al., 1996). Although this certainly disproves the idea that Homo erectus immediately killed off its distant cousin, there are also other possible factors, including competition with giant pandas which competed for bamboo, and also the fact that bamboo suffers from huge die-offs every 20-60 years, which may have stressed the ape population and made them more vulnerable to competition from pandas or people.

Or did they die out? As Brian Regal points out (Regal, 2011), back in the 1950s and 1960s some anthropologists like Carleton Coon made the inference that the Yeti was a relict population of Gigantopithecus. At that time, many anthropologists embraced the “multi-regional hypothesis,” which argued that Homo sapiens had evolved separately over a million years ago from different stocks of primates in different regions. Asians were descendants of Peking Man, Neanderthals descendants of some early European Homo fossils, Africans were descendants of African Homo erectus, and so on. Although there are still a few holdouts who still support a version of the multiregional model (like Milford Wolpoff at University of Michigan), genetic evidence that amassed since the 1980s has overwhelmingly demonstrated that it is false. Instead, the human genome shows that modern Homo sapiens are all descended from African ancestors that spread across the Old World about 60,000 years ago, displacing any older populations of Homo (such as “Peking man” or “Java man”) that might still have been living there. And the fossils plus the dating showed that this “out of Africa” model occurred more than once, since Homo erectus appears to have originated in Africa and then spread around the Old World (China, Java, and many other places) about 1.85 million years ago. However, even more recent work in genetics (Wells, 2002) shows that some populations (like Neanderthals) interbred with Homo sapiens, so when the invaders from Africa arrived, they did interbreed with the locals and incorporated the regional genome into theirs. Nonetheless, the archaic idea of multi-regionalism and independent, isolated parallel evolution of humans from local Homo erectus populations as advocated by Coon in the 1950s (with its racist overtones) has long been discredited by anthropologists. So Gigantopithecus is no longer viewed as connected to the Yeti, or in any way relevant to this debate.

Not surprisingly, cryptozoologists like Heuvelmans in 1952 and later many others also made suggestions that the Yeti (and later, Bigfoot) were surviving descendants of Gigantopithecus. If you read the cryptozoological literature, it is full of bizarre unsupported speculations about how these immense apes spread all over Asia and North America from different primate stocks, and Bigfoot and Yeti are their relicts. None of this amateur speculation bears any relation to what anthropologists know about the real history of hominid fossils and human evolution. This demonstrates once again that amateurs are out of their depth and use outdated concepts of human evolution when they propose their wild ideas. Nevertheless, there are many strong lines of argument against the idea that either the Yeti or Bigfoot is a surviving Gigantopithecus:

For one thing, Gigantopithecus was a giant relative of the orangutan, not a close relative of humans. Although we don’t have much evidence of its skeleton, it is reasonable to assume that its feet would be arranged like that of an orangutan or other great ape, not like that of a human with its reduced big toe and inability to grasp with its foot. Thus, its footprints should resemble ape footprints, not the human-like footprints allegedly produced by the Yeti or Bigfoot. And it should show the same stooped knuckle-walking gait of the orangutan, gorilla, and all other great apes, not the human-like bipedal walking posture allegedly shown by the Yeti and Bigfoot. (Indeed, one of the biggest problems with the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film is that the walking posture is almost completely human, not ape-like in the least). Any time you read about cryptozoologists trying to connect Gigantopithecusto Yeti or Bigfoot, it shows they know almost nothing about fossil and living primates.

Second, although Gigantopithecus fossils are rare, something that large would still be expected to be fossilized at least a few times if they had survived anywhere in the world after 300,000 years ago. For example, one Bigfoot website claims that ”No research group has ever made an attempt to look for Giganto bones in North America, so no one should be surprised that Giganto remains have never been identified in North America. Ironically, the most vocal skeptics and scientists who rhetorically ask why no bones have been located and identified on this continent are the last people who would ever make an effort to look for them.” This claim is patently false, and shows how completely ignorant this writer is about paleontology and the fossil record. Paleontologists do not go out specifically to look for a particular fossil, but they collect any and all deposits that yield decent fossils. For deposits of the last 300,000 years (middle and late Pleistocene), we have an extraordinarily good fossil record in both China (where hundreds of Chinese paleontologists have been working for many decades) and especially North America, where we have excellent fossil records (especially of larger mammals, and especially from cave deposits) in every state in the United States and most Canadian provinces (Kurten and Anderson, 1980). Hundreds of paleontologists have collected these fossils for over a century and documented them in excruciating detail. Many extremely rare species are known, including an American cheetah and a camel that is built like a mountain goat, among others. Yet not once has anything resembling Gigantopithecus ever been found—not even the smallest tooth fragment (which could be easily recognized by its thick enamel and distinct low-crowned cusps). Contrary to the conspiratorial thinking of cryptozoologists, paleontologists would be overjoyed to find such a fossil and announce it with great fanfare if they had one, because such a discovery could make your reputation. They have no reason to hide such a fossil in hopes that it won’t give comfort to cryptozoologists. In fact, most paleontologists don’t even know or care about cryptozoology at all, so they are not worried about whether cryptozoologists might be affected. Instead, this statement shows that cryptozoologists such as this writer have no clue about fossils, and are using their ignorance to support their fantasies about fossils.

Finally, the best reason of all to dismiss the idea that Gigantopithecus survives today: all the evidence (and lack of evidence) that shows that neither the Yeti or Bigfoot is likely to exist, but the product of bad observations and bad science and lots of wishful thinking. Our upcoming book will discuss this evidence in detail.

To me, it seems like it should be hard to authoritatively answer questions about a cryptid that is only hypothesized to exist (and then only by the fringe of the fringe), and of which there are no specimens; indeed no proof that it exists at all. But The Erickson Project found it quite easy. Here are their FAQs and the answers they offer:

Q: Why have there not been sasquatch bodies or bones discovered?

A: For the same reason no one discovers the body or bones of most predators that have died of natural causes. When ill or nearing death they hole up in very secluded areas, and die there. Their carcass is eaten by other predators and the remaining bones are consumed by porcupines and other rodents.

This is not true. There is no example, that I know of, of an extant animal whose remains have not been discovered in the wild. Corpses of all large land animals in North America are found frequently. Carcasses of all North American bears, mountain lions, and wild canids are found all the time, and who met their ends without humans present. Their ancestors are also known by extensive examples in the fossil record. The true expectation is that if the animal did exist, its remains would have been found many times by humans.

Q: How many sasquatch exist in North America?

A: Extremely difficult to quantify, sightings indicate sporadic populations in nearly all heavily wooded areas of Canada and the U.S. The sasquatch is known to occupy a range larger than that of the black bear. Our estimate is a minimum of 4000, and likely many more.

I do not buy that this estimate was arrived at by actually counting sasquatch, or by any other method that might give us a good count. Instead, I believe it is the result of backwards reasoning. There are science-based estimates of how many individuals you’d need for a viable breeding population. Dr. Jeff Meldrum, the closest we have to a science-based sasquatch researcher, estimates 500-750 individuals; and according to famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, other researchers and groups put the number somewhere in four figures. 4000 is a pretty good median of these estimates. The Erickson Project is not answering the question that was asked — how many sasquatch are there — they are answering how many they think there would have to be if it did exist. This is like me saying I would have to weigh 1 ounce in order to fly holding two eagle feathers. It doesn’t make it so.

Q: Do they have their own language?

A: Yes, we believe they do. Our own experiences and those of others suggest they have language.

Certainly not unprecedented in nature. A number of species use forms of communication. Whales vocalize, insects use scents, other animals use precocious displays of colors or feathers. We know this because it’s been observed, documented, studied, reproduced, to such a degree that it is widely considered a fact of zoology.

Sasquatch language, on the other hand, has only the “belief” of believers. What few recordings exist are poorly documented anecdotes. They are inconsistent with one another, and better represent the variances expected among unrelated recordings than they do the complexities of language.

Q: Why has no sasquatch been trapped or shot?

A: The sasquatch is an extremely cunning and elusive creature.

If the lack of evidence equals evidence that it is cunning and elusive, then Sauron is similarly cunning, elusive, and extant. Unfortunately, the scientific method does not permit us to go from “We haven’t found a sasquatch” to “Therefore they exist, and have the property of elusiveness.”

…Their senses are beyond human, especially their incredible night vision.

How was this established without a specimen to examine? This cannot be logically asserted, unless they are simply designing an imaginary creature based on their own creativity. This trait is not an observation, it is merely what seems consistent with the believers’ impression of sasquatch.

…In human populated areas they operate almost strictly nocturnally.

They do? Not a single more creature has been documented to exist at night than has been documented during the day. I do not know these researchers’ opinion on the Patterson-Gimlin film, widely considered by many Bigfoot enthusiasts to be the best evidence, but it was shot during the day. This is a poorly supported supposition.

…We know of two sasquatch that were mistakenly shot by hunters decades ago. In both cases, upon discovery, the men ran off, afraid to tell anyone until many years later.

These researchers should know better than to accept such stories as if they constitute evidence. I can only repeat the old axiom “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

Q: How tall are they?

A: Our experience and those of other reports indicate a mature male ranges from seven to over nine feet tall. Females average from six to seven and a half feet tall, however it is the muscle bulk of the sasquatch that is so impressive.

I am left to wonder what method was used to sex and measure these specimens that were neither captured nor photographed. How many specimens were needed to establish these averages? These numbers may well represent good averages of anecdotal reports, but anecdotes are not data, and responsible researchers should not present them as such.

Q: Why have they never officially been studied by scientists?

A: Scientists in general are not risk-takers. Because a sasquatch is so much like a human they can be hoaxed. Scientists are afraid to make a mistake. As a result it has been safer for most of them to steer clear of the phenomenon.

It is hardly possible to be more wrong about scientists than this. Every professional researcher I know would want nothing more than to find something new and exciting. “Steering clear” of new discoveries is a good way for a scientist to lose his job; not to keep it. Scientists are not employed in the hope that they will discover nothing. A better reason that so few scientists have dedicated time to sasquatch research is that there is no good evidence that the creature exists; thus it would be a waste of resources that could be better applied to fields more likely to produce results.

There is a lot of poor evidence that sasquatch exists; but lots of poor evidence does not aggregate into good evidence. Instead, mounds of bad evidence aggregate into a pretty strong indicator that the null hypothesis is true. As I often say: You can stack cowpies as high as you want; they won’t turn into a bar of gold.

So I say, strike 6 out of 6. I’m not hostile to sasquatch research, but I am hostile toward the use of bad science to beguile the innocent into accepting your point of view. I invite the members of The Erickson Project to take another pass at answering these questions, and this time, tell us what we actually know; or if they prefer to tell us what they believe or what their hunch is, within the context of no supporting evidence, to make that clear.

While immersing himself in the museum’s pitch, Ruse wrote,

Just for one moment about half way through the exhibit…I got that Kuhnian flash that it could all be true — it was only a flash (rather like thinking that Freudianism is true or that the Republicans are right on anything whatsoever) but it was interesting nevertheless to get a sense of how much sense this whole display and paradigm can make to people.

This comment was severely criticized, but it’s profoundly relevant to skepticism. Continuing from the theme of my previous post (on “The Reasonableness of Weird Things”) I’d like to argue that the experience Ruse describes — the fleeting sense of “Could it be true?” vertigo — is one of the most important experiences skeptics can have.

Ruse

Michael Ruse’s disappearing-down-the-rabbit-hole feeling may seem surprising. After all, he’s been down in the trenches fighting Answers in Genesis-style Young Earth creationism for a very long time. For example, Ruse was a key witness in the pivotal 1981 case of McLean v. Arkansas. Nicknamed “Scopes II,” McLean v. Arkansas challenged and overturned an Arkansas law that required “balanced treatment for creation science and evolution science.” Judge Overton’s ruling effectively crippled the legal strategy of demanding “equal time” for so-called “scientific creationism.” (The final blow came in 1987, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that it is unconstitutional to teach creationism in public schools.)

But Ruse’s moment of vertigo is not as surprising as it may appear. Indeed, he put effort into achieving this immersion: “I am atypical, I took about three hours to go through [the creation museum] but judging from my students most people don’t read the material as obsessively as I and take about an hour.” Why make this meticulous effort, when he could have dismissed creationism’s well-known scientific problems from the parking lot, or from his easy chair at home?

According to Ruse, the vertiginous “what if?” feeling has a practical value. After all, it’s easy to find problems with a pseudoscientific belief; what’s harder is understanding how and why other people believe. “It is silly just to dismiss this stuff as false,” Ruse argues (although it is false, and although Ruse has fought against “this stuff” for decades). “A lot of people believe Creationism so we on the other side need to get a feeling not just for the ideas but for the psychology too.”

The Goblin Universe

I agree with this sentiment, and I would take it a step further. Ruse is describing an access point, a matter of practical utility: when we can put ourselves in another person’s shoes, we are better able to find ways to communicate. This is no doubt true, but the feeling of vertigo also tells us some important things about ourselves.

The Junior Skeptic format (each issue being a detailed primer on a single topic) calls for the sort of intense, full-immersion research that can lead to this off-balance feeling. A given topic may require me to read a dozen or more pro-paranormal books, one after another — each of them designed to persuade readers that a mysterious phenomenon is real. Sometimes, this immersion triggers a hall-of-mirrors feeling, a feeling of double-exposure, and I find myself standing (ever so briefly) in what John Napier called “the Goblin Universe.”

In his classic book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, Napier (then Director of Primate Biology at the Smithsonian) wrote that the sheer myth-laden wooliness of paranormal topics make it

intellectually necessary from time to time to abandon the real world and, like Persephone, enter the dark regions of another world which I like to call the Goblin Universe. It is simple enough to apply reason to what is reasonable, but it is much more difficult to argue logically about the illogical. …  If you see me disappearing down a mental rabbit hole from time to time you will know where I am headed. I will be traveling unwillingly into the Goblin Universe.

Napier got lost in his Goblin Universe, concluding on poor evidence that sasquatches are real. But he was right to stress the value of trying to see these myths from the inside. Riffing on Napier’s notion, anthropologist Margerie Halpin wrote,

Most of us, however, have not personally experienced Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster, U.F.O. beings, God, or the Devil, and we accept reigning social consensus that they do not exist…. How different are we, we wonder, from most of the other human beings on the planet, whom we have reason to believe still accept the Goblin Universe as real?

Why This Matters

The skeptic’s task is not to score rhetorical points, but to seek genuine understanding of fringe claims. We want to learn what is true, what is fake, what the difference between these may be — and (if I may borrow a phrase) learn why people believe weird things.

Late at night, hands cramping from note-taking, eyes bleary with research, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of the Goblin Universe: ”Holy shit, what if there really is a Bigfoot? What if ghosts actually do exist? What if 9/11 was an inside job? What if….”

Sometimes this feeling is uncomfortable, sometimes it is thrilling — but always it comes to me as something of a relief. Here’s why:

1. If it doesn’t even occur to us that the claim we’re examining could just possibly be true, we’re not honest investigators;
2. If we can’t feel the persuasiveness of a claim, we don’t really understand it.

To my mind, this is where the rubber meets the road: are we really willing to look fairly at weird claims? And, is understanding something we’re psychologically capable of achieving?

Prior Plausibility

Now, I hasten to clarify what I’m not saying. I’m not suggesting that all claims have an equal chance of being true (they don’t) or that we can’t find out which claims are true and which aren’t (usually we can, and with great confidence). Science-based thinking gives considerable weight to the prior plausibility of claims, which is the basis of the maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” As Steven Novella has observed, “The principle is based upon two premises: that we know stuff and that not all evidence is created equal.”

Evolution by natural selection, for example, is both intrinsically logical and confirmed in practice by 150 years of scientific research. The “who knows what’s true, let’s teach the controversy” posturing by Intelligent Design proponents is pure sleight of hand. (“Presto! The burden of proof has vanished!”) In fact, creationists would have to offer stupendous amounts of jaw-droppingly extraordinary evidence to even begin to balance the mass and power of the evidence for evolution — which they don’t have. I know that (I wrote a book about evolution), and veteran evolution defender Michael Ruse was an expert back when I was flipping hockey cards against the back wall of my elementary school.

What if…?

What I’m talking about is an internal exercise, a way of testing our own understanding and fairness. This is the exercise of asking ourselves, “Seriously — what if they’re on to something? Do I really know that they’re not?”

In some cases it’s not too difficult to see a paranormal belief from the inside. I can say with informed confidence that the case for Bigfoot is horrible, but the universe wouldn’t have to be altered very much for the Bigfoot hypothesis to be true — and, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. I find it relatively easy to watch the Patterson-Gimlin film and see some part of what Bigfoot proponents see.

Other chasms are harder to cross. I was a theist in my early life, so I find it natural enough to imagine myself in theistic shoes. And yet, not even as a Christian did Young Earth creationism seem remotely plausible to me. It’s just too at odds with the natural world we see every day. I don’t know how to go down that rabbit hole, but I admire Michael Ruse for finding a way — if only for an instant.

The video was made and sent to me back in January by John Rael of SkepticallyPwnd.com, and he asked me to write up something that looked like a critical review of it. He said it would be easy, since it’s such a lame video, and I suppose it was. It would have been easier if it had been more compelling. When a video is so dumb, it’s kind of hard to say anything intelligent about it.

I’m not exactly sure what role I played in his gag, but what the heck, it was a fun little lark. His reveal video is here.

But Google Alerts made this a little more fun. Turns out some Bigfoot site, the Bigfoot Lunch Club, picked up on my SkepticBlog analysis and found it lacking. The author’s comments are well worth a read:

Today SkepticBlog wrote a post about a video they received a link to. They thought they would make fun of it and call themselves skeptics.

I always wanted a Bigfoot video to make fun of, so I could finally award myself the badge of Skeptic.

And then, to support his statement, he quoted the last two paragraphs of my original post about the video. These two paragraphs followed what was, I think, at least a half decent discussion of what was actually known about the video: its time, place, equipment used, and stuff that’s actually testable. There was none, so I wrapped up with a laissez-faire rumination:

Maybe it is a Bigfoot. Maybe it’s a guy in a suit, one that flares out bellbottom style, like my own cheap-ass gorilla suit does. Maybe it’s an autonomous robot in a suit. Maybe it’s a Bigfoot in a Bigfoot suit. Maybe it’s an example of high-end composite work combined with low-end 3D modeling, all rendered on Renderman.

The fact is that we can’t really know or conclude much of anything about this video, and the million others like it. We can’t prove it’s a fake any more than we can prove it’s a real Bigfoot. What it is is crappy evidence. It’s not testable. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but its value as evidence is zero. Its value as an anecdote is that it suggests a direction for research. So to all who feel motivated: Grab your 3CCD cameras and head on up to Greenhorn, Oregon. A bellbottomed Bigfoot might be waiting for you.

And then he brought out the big guns, to show by comparison how lame those self-described “skeptics” really are. He quoted from someone named Autumn Williams, evidently a much more serious Bigfoot enthusiast, who had “dug a little bit deeper” into the video in her own analysis:

I’m not sure what to say here. No offense intended if you’re trying to be serious (it sure sounded that way?), but the hair is obviously synthetic, the face appears to be a poor reconstruction of a “planet of the apes” theme, the makeup pitiful, the movements awkward, the staging is obvious, subtle references to the Patterson film are rather amusing… and I’d have to say, if it’s not an attempt at a hoax on your part, you’ve been hoaxed. Somehow, though, I find it difficult to believe that you could follow something for that long and NOT know it was someone in a stovepipe-legged, poorly-made suit. I didn’t even need to pause the footage to tell that…

…Finally, asking people for “offers” and having “james randi” in your tags in your youtube account is a dead giveaway that you’re looking for money. I’m sorry, but ol’ Jim won’t buy it, and I doubt anyone else will either.

“Kudos to Autumn Williams,” he went on to conclude. Well, I take issue. This analysis by Autumn is guilty of exactly the kind of useless commentary I panned in my Skeptoid episode about Bigfoot research. She makes no attempt to address anything in the video that’s testable. She basically says only that it’s a really stupid looking suit. That’s a terrible analysis. The first person who ever saw an okapi probably thought it was a really stupid looking suit too.

To Autumn, and to your Bigfoot Lunch Club associate, I suggest you work on improving your analytical skills. You have to have testable evidence if you want anyone to take your claims seriously. You omitted the part of my blog where I discussed what was testable (which was almost nothing), so it was of course very easy to make my analysis look weak. But if what you quoted here was the strongest part of your analysis, the rest of it must have been strongly wanting. Red herrings, like mentioning the James Randi reference in the YouTube description, are not testable data. The assertion “The movements are awkward” is not testable data, and since some animals are awkward as hell, it’s not even a useful observation. “The hair is obviously synthetic” is laughable. If you can truly discern synthetic hair from real hair by a YouTube video shot from a distance, you’re a freaking wizard.

So, Mr. bravely-anonymous Bigfoot Lunch Club, you’ve not succeeded in impressing me, and if this is the level of analysis that passes for science with you, you’ve got a long way to go before you’re going to impress anyone. Oh, and it appears that you’ve been SkepticallyPwnd by Mr. Rael.

A frame from the video in question.

I am in receipt of a new alleged Bigfoot video, the YouTube version of which is hereinafter appended. A fellow emailed it to me with the request that I help him “get it into the right hands”, because, you know, routing Bigfoot videos to the appropriate cryptozoologist is what I’m all about.

These are actually kind of fun to get. At a first glance, there’s nothing in there that’s inconsistent with a guy in a suit. If a guy had a suit like this and his homey filmed him in it, this is exactly what you’d expect the video to look like. By Occam’s Razor, this is a guy in a suit; because the other possibility requires the introduction of the assumption that an unknown species of great ape roams about. But I hate to stop there; that’s too easy.

First let’s see where and when the video was made: Just north of Greenhorn, Oregon in October of 2009. That appears consistent with the foliage seen in the video, about the right season judging by the leaves, and I probably wouldn’t expect to see any snow on the ground. John E Walker is what’s on the YouTube page, but that’s not the name he emailed me with; and though the Scotch Whiskey reference calls attention to itself, there are people with that name. He says is that it was shot on a JVC Everio GZ-HD7 3CCD camcorder, which is a real model of camera. The picture looks pretty good, so probably a 3CCD, but that’s about all I can guess. I didn’t find anything in the mechanical details of the video to prove or disprove its authenticity.

So that doesn’t leave us much to go on. Maybe it is a Bigfoot. Maybe it’s a guy in a suit, one that flares out bellbottom style, like my own cheap-ass gorilla suit does. Maybe it’s an autonomous robot in a suit. Maybe it’s a Bigfoot in a Bigfoot suit. Maybe it’s an example of high-end composite work combined with low-end 3D modeling, all rendered on Renderman.

The fact is that we can’t really know or conclude much of anything about this video, and the million others like it. We can’t prove it’s a fake any more than we can prove it’s a real Bigfoot. What it is is crappy evidence. It’s not testable. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but its value as evidence is zero. Its value as an anecdote is that it suggests a direction for research. So to all who feel motivated: Grab your 3CCD cameras and head on up to Greenhorn, Oregon. A bellbottomed Bigfoot might be waiting for you.

It pisses me off because it’s the perfect microcosm of what’s wrong with television science reporting. They’re not interested in reporting good science or in educating their viewers; they’re only interested in tabloid stories. And they affix a “science” label to them. Send some horseback kooks into the woods with a megaphone and an infrared camera to look for Bigfoot, show it on the Science Channel, and that’s what passes for science programming in the United States. The obvious result? We have a population who believes that communication with ghosts represents the leading edge of brain research, that multilevel marketing schemes are a way to get rich, and that a mail order gadget (suppressed by the oil companies) will make your car run for free.

I grew up obsessed with cryptozoology. I knew all the Bigfoot stories, I fully believed Nessie was a relic plesiosaur, I was convinced that Neanderthals survive in Russia. Having seen, as a young boy, the skeleton of the Megatherium that died falling into the Grand Canyon Caverns millennia ago, I was thrilled to learn that a “scientist” had discovered that they may still exist in the Amazon, based on local superstitions. I had no doubt. It seemed perfectly plausible and scientific.

That’s because I, at ten years old, had an understanding of the scientific method comparable to that of the cream of today’s cryptozoologists. My reading had taught me that you start with a conclusion (“Bigfoot exists”), support it with a logical fallacy (“Either it’s true or it’s a hoax of impossible proportions”), and you’re automatically right because nobody’s disproven it. This was absolutely convincing to a ten year old boy, and that’s good enough for the TV networks. What an easy sell! If your “science” broadcasting is effective, it must be good.

Cryptozoologists are the perfect marriage for this type of reporting. They sell a seductive message – monsters are real – and they’re not hampered by the need to restrict their comments to what’s supported by facts. They’re free to say the establishment suppresses them. They’re free to draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence. They’re free to turn correlation into causation, and to present the results of confirmation bias as evidence for their monster du jour.

Cryptozoologists are not hampered by the boundaries learned in formal education. You can drop out of school and flip burgers for a living, yet the attachment of “-ologist” to the name of your hobby turns you into exactly the kind of expert the networks want to promote. Someone whose conclusion is easy to understand, exciting, and game changing. Someone who’s absolutely convincing because they’re free to employ every logical fallacy in the book to support their position, to the detriment of a public largely unprepared to recognize poor arguments and bad information.

Cryptozoology is not just a joke that can be laughed off. It’s an active threat to human intellect. But the real culprits are not the ordinary cryptozoologists themselves; they’re just well-meaning guys who grew up reading the same books I did, but who never took the opportunity to learn the scientific method. The real culprits are much bigger and more numerous. They are the networks who promote bad information; the viewers hungry for exciting information indistinguishable from fact; and everyone who works to support that dangerously co-dependent relationship.

No conscientious person should knowingly condone any part of that process.

Tucked in the back corner of a woodworking shop in Portland, Oregon, Bill managed his database with great care and hunted for patterns in his database of reported sightings. One of his nuances (and I’ve since gathered that this is endemic in the Bigfoot community) was a virulent hatred of competing Bigfoot researchers. Of the best known Bigfoot organization, Bill said:

Organizations like BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization) list anything and everything, no matter what joker reports it. So it’s impossible to glean anything statistically useful out of their databases.

Bill used a clever relational structure in his database that, rather than going for full data normalization, broke up different data types into different tables, permitting some innovative views. In plain English, he took all the Bigfoot characteristics like size, color, and weight, and cross referenced them with sighting information like the time of year, altitude, time of day, latitude and longitude, weather conditions, speed of movement, apparent demeanor, type of activity observed, a whole long list that I can’t begin to list. Bill’s passion was to arrange this data in myriad different ways, hoping to eventually find some conclusive prediction that could be testable: Something like “In a dry June, you can always find a Bigfoot on the shady side of a mountain eating blackberries.” It was a clever approach.

Now, my article was in no way critical of Bigfoot research, it was only about Bill’s use of the database. The only statement that could be called a jab at anyone or anything was Bill’s remark about the BFRO, which I merely quoted. The article sat for a couple of years, until one day, apparently, someone in the Bigfoot community came across it, reposted it, forwarded it around, and I fell under the microscope (not Bill, me).

First I received a couple of emails from Bigfoot aficionados, of the obscene and anonymous hotmail variety. Surprised, I went back to the old article, checked it over, and verified that it didn’t say anything inflammatory. It did not.

And then I got another email. This time it came from a little too close to home — about two miles away from my house, to be precise — and it said “I’m Matt Moneymaker, head of the BFRO.”

Somehow he interpreted my database article as a deliberate libelous attack against the BFRO. He told me to retract it and publish an apology (I did neither, of course). Simultaneously, and this was kind of entertaining, he kept me posted over the space of two or three days as my article was being discussed in committee. Evidently he and some of his BFRO associates were reviewing evidence in the jury room and passing judgement over me personally; whether I was an instigator, an obsessed anti-Bigfoot nut, just a crank, or what. The option of “merely a disinterested reporter in a database publication” never seemed to be on the table. It was like Scientologists debating what to do with a captured member of Anonymous. I inferred that I was meant to feel like I was in the holding cell waiting to learn my fate. Would it be the noose or the firing squad?

When the verdict came, it was — well, interesting. Moneymaker informed me that they had concluded I made the whole thing up, and was just a harmless prankster. And then — hold onto your socks — he invited me to meet him for a drink! In a move that will probably shock you, I politely declined.

So the next time you find yourself out in the murky woods of the northwest on a dark night with only a flickering flashlight, worry not so much about giant hairy monsters. Worry a little more about those who pursue them.

Am I preaching to the choir? Am I wasting my breath? Am I repeating old information to an audience that’s already tired of hearing about it? If I were, that would probably be a waste of time. Maybe skeptical outreach should avoid the old subjects.

I also do a lot of speaking at schools. When I do, I try to ask a couple of questions. Do you ever listen to podcasts? Few do. Have you ever heard of James Randi? Rarely has anyone heard of him. Do you know anything about the Loch Ness Monster? A few hands go up. Have you heard of Sylvia Browne? No one ever has.

You see, what to you & I is an old subject, is brand new to nearly all young people, and to most people outside of the tiny critical thinking community.

Why do you think Discovery Channel, History Channel, and all the other paranormal TV channels keep giving us shows about Bigfoot? Isn’t Bigfoot over? Isn’t it a tired enough topic yet? It may be, to some people; but not to the masses. Discovery Channel needs a hook, they need a subject that will catch their viewer’s ear when they see a commercial; so they go for a subject (like Bigfoot) that most people have heard only enough about to be curious. You and I may groan and say “Oh no, not another Bigfoot show,” but we’re not the meat of the bell curve.

When a religious missionary comes to your door, do they open with a question about Michael Behe and irreducible complexity? No, they don’t, because nobody’s ever heard of that. They open with some generic question about how you think you’re getting to heaven when you die, or some other such subject that everyone knows. They understand what the Discovery Channel understands. You need the familiar subjects to gain a toehold with your audience.

If you are a speaker at The Amazing Meeting, you will indeed be uselessly preaching to the choir if you give a talk about how there’s this thing called Bigfoot and we think it’s bogus. But if you’re doing outreach to the general population, Bigfoot is a perfect topic.  Such topics are perfect because they are familiar enough to command attention, and once you have their attention you can employ these topics to educate about the scientific method and the critical thinking process. Engage your audience first.

Preaching to the choir has no value, but skeptical outreach has huge value. Effective outreach requires the approachability offered by familiar topics. So the next time I appear to be preaching to the choir, know that it is by design, and also know that there’s a good chance it might be really valuable to someone with less experience than you.