What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Bigfoot Sighting in Colorado
This week, most people are wrong about Bigfoot – both those who believe in Bigfoot and those who are sure there is no such thing. The coin is still hanging in the air and has not yet landed on heads or tails.
The hairy cryptid is back in the news after Facebook user Shannon Parker posted a video of a humanoid figure sneaking around Colorado. On October 8, Parker was riding a train from Durango to Silverton when she noticed a mysterious figure among the bushes and rocks. She pulled out her camera and took a short video of… whatever it was. Check it out .
This is not a Bigfoot video. Probably.
Even where there is evidence in the form of photos and videos, “is it Bigfoot?” this is an unanswered question. Like all existing photographic evidence of Sasquatch (including the iconic Patterson-Gimlin film ), Parker’s video does not provide enough information to answer the question. He looks like Bigfoot, but the guy in the gorilla suit looks like Bigfoot too.
Common sense says it’s a guy in a gorilla suit. A local prankster dressed as Bigfoot and trolling a train full of tourists is a more reasonable explanation for this footage than the discovery of a new species of primate. And if bigfoots are real but have remained hidden in the wilds of Colorado all these years despite the number of people with smartphones searching for them, they’re probably avoiding the railroad tracks. However, if someone wants to act out a Bigfoot hoax, then a location along the tourist railway is ideal: people look out the windows, cameras at the ready, but can’t stop, take a closer look and possibly spot the hoax. .
There is also the case of tourists from the Sasquatch expedition . This Silverton, Colorado-based company sells off-road campers for outdoor enthusiasts, and they’re located next to the railroad tracks. After the Bigfoot post went viral, they posted a message on Facebook that said, “We’d like to debunk some recent rumors…” accompanied by a photo of someone with huge artificial legs. It’s not quite a confession, but it’s close enough to close the case on this particular observation with reasonable certainty.
But: the existence of hoaxes and fake videos doesn’t actually say anything about whether Bigfoot is real or not.
Why Bigfoot might actually exist
About 13% of Americans say they believe in Bigfoot , and 70% of us believe in angels . But Bigfoot, unlike angels, vampires or ghosts, does not require the supernatural to exist. Bigfoot, if he exists, simply hasn’t been discovered yet, but we’re still discovering new animals all the time.
Until the mid-1880s, gorillas were mythical creatures, at least to Westerners. Before the first gorilla remains were identified, they might as well have been Bigfoot. There were occasional reports of sightings of hairy humanoid creatures in Africa dating back to the 5th century BC, when the Greek explorer Hanno wrote about “gorillas” he encountered, but there was no conclusive evidence that the creature was anything more than that. than a myth. until the bones were discovered in 1847. And it would be another ten years before any Westerners actually saw a live gorilla.
The Komodo dragon was not “real” until 1910. Sailors’ tales of sea monsters were often considered myths until 1857, when giant squid were first described in detail, and we didn’t have an actual specimen to study until one ended up in a fisherman’s net in 2004 . This species of sloth was only discovered last year.
All these creatures were hiding in parts of the world hostile to humans – mountains, jungles, on the seabed, etc. There may be fewer such places left in 2023, but there are still places where a secret colony of primates could be hidden.
Maybe the real Bigfoot lives in our hearts or in Siberia?
An undiscovered colony of great apes in Colorado, Northern California, or any other state in the continental US (sightings of sasquatch span the entire country) seems like an exaggeration—there are too many people with cameras out there looking for them. But the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia can hide Bigfoot. The frozen area of 104,248 square miles has not yet been fully explored. Bigfoot may be located just across the Bering Strait from Kamchatka, on one of Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands. Perhaps the hundreds of reports of “rock monkeys” from Vietnam War troops are on par. The soldiers even called the hill there “Monkey Mountain” because they saw so many of these creatures, and there were reports of the existence of these creatures among Viet Cong soldiers. The Yeti may have been hanging out near the border of Bhutan and Tibet – perhaps on Gangkhar Puensum, the highest mountain in the world that has never been climbed. This is where stories of the Abominable Snowman originated, and it is far from fully explored.
Ultimately, we don’t know if Bigfoot is real, but there have been enough anecdotal reports of creatures that roughly match the description of Bigfoot that we don’t want to dismiss the idea outright—we need to keep an open mind.
And also: We need Bigfoot. There is something so cute about a silly creature playing an endless game of hide and seek with us that it must exist. So until all the places where he could be hiding are fully explored, I will say: “Bigfoot is real, at least in my heart.”