Boycotting Bigfoot

I don't usually do this sort of thing, but I'm going to make a request to my readers: boycott The History Channel and Discovery.

They used to be good.  I remember when The History Channel actually had shows about history and Discovery actually had shows about science.  I remember seeing War and Remembrance on The History Channel, and science historian James Burke's awesome series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed on Discovery.

But both channels have devolved over the last few years into the lowest form of sensationalist garbage, the television version of clickbait websites.  Ancient Aliens.  Pawn Stars.  God vs. Satan.  Haunted History.  Swamp People.  Naked and Afraid.  Mermaids: The Body Found.  Amish Mafia.  Bar Hunters.  The only good show on both networks put together was Mythbusters, and hell, I just found out a couple of weeks ago that that is going off the air.

The History Channel definitely hit a new low a couple of days ago with the show Bigfoot Captured.  You'd think a cryptozoology buff like myself would have been psyched, wouldn't you?  Even though I must add, at the risk of protesting too much, that I still don't have enough evidence to say that Bigfoot, or any other cryptid, actually exists.

But I'd love it if it did, you know?  If we found out that we shared the planet with another intelligent hominid, how cool would that be?

Any serious attempts to decide if such creatures do exist, however, are not assisted by such steaming mounds of bullshit as Bigfoot Captured.  And the problem is, this show and others like it don't even play fair.  They're billed as documentaries -- even though the story's not real, the majority of the characters are actors playing the roles of fictitious people, and none of the events depicted actually happened.  It's like someone took a cryptozoologist's wet dream and somehow turned it into a television show.

This show was so bad it wasn't even good for the humor value, which I have to admit programs like Ghost Hunters occasionally were.  This show was so bad even Jeff Meldrum, a Bigfoot researcher who was interviewed on the show and who has been known to throw himself behind some fairly sketchy stuff, disavowed any support for it:

To head off the flood of emails and phone calls, let me reiterate that as a guest interviewee, I had nothing to do with the overall plot or creative content of this production.  I do my best assess the intentions of a production company when I am approached, an encourage them to build upon credible information, but occasionally their enthusiasm is feigned and assurances are worthless.  It's always a bit of a crap shoot in this business.

Now, you might be saying, "Okay, Gordon, calm down.  So what if they make these shows for entertainment purposes?  Everyone who watches it knows it's not real."

It'd be nice if that were true, wouldn't it?  But Jim Vorel, of Paste Magazine, did a scan of Twitter while and immediately after Bigfoot Captured aired, and found the following tweets from watchers:

• Idk if thats a legit #bigfoot or not, but if it is…Holy shit!!! #BigfootCaptured
• So im watching this show where they actually caught a bigfoot but like i still cant decide if this is real or not
• So apparently Bigfoot has been captured. Is this real? @HistoryChannelX
• If you don't think Bigfoot is real, you're an idiot
• I have no doubt in my mind that Bigfoot is real
• #BigfootCaptured puts an end to all doubt! Bigfoot is REAL. A species of gigantopithecus.

Look, it's not that I'm against speculation.  Sometimes people doggedly pursuing ideas that everyone has thought ridiculous has paid off in the end.  But there is nothing to be gained by formerly reputable channels airing fiction passed off as truth, and fantasy passed off as documentary.  In the end, it makes everyone's job harder, from lowly science teachers like myself who are trying to get kids to learn how to sort fact from bullshit, to the honest researchers who would like to investigate fringe claims and do so in a rational, evidence-based manner.

So it's time to turn off The History Channel and Discovery.  They've been veering off course for a while, but it's getting worse, and it's time to send a message.  Stop watching this garbage, and better yet, send a letter or an email to them telling them you're doing so.  It's time to get some good science and history programming back on the air.

Hell, when we have to wait for a network owned by Rupert Murdoch to air shows like Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, there's something seriously fucked up.

Squatch of the day

In yesterday's post, we took a look at the latest from the world of extraterrestrial enthusiasts; today, we'll do the same for another topic we haven't visited in a while:

Bigfoot.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup, Skeptophilia has been quiet for a while on the subject of our giant hairy cousins.  Which is a shame, because cryptozoology was kind of how I got into all of this skepticism stuff.  I've had a thing for creepy cryptids since I was a kid.  All I can say is, however cheesy Finding Bigfoot is, if that show had been on when I was a teenager, I would not have missed an episode.

Of course, the same would have been true for Ghost Hunters and Scariest Places on Earth and Most Haunted and The Unexplained and probably even Destination: Truth.

Let's just say that I have learned some discernment as I have matured.

Be that as it may, we've had a busy couple of weeks in the field of Yetiology.  So let's take a look at what we've missed while we were focusing on such trivia as educational policy and the role of religion in the public sphere.

First, from British Columbia, we have a story about a hiker who took a video of an alleged Sasquatch.  The video, which is available from YouTube, I append here:

The hiker, who narrates the video, comments, "This is the middle of absolutely nowhere...  If that's human why would you walk up that ridge or that snow line?  Why would he not just go straight down?...  Good thing we brought beers.  Maybe we can lure him over here. I don't know how high we are, but we're probably close to 7,000 feet and this guy's just scampering up snow lines like it's no big deal."

He goes to significant lengths to point out that it is absolutely, totally remote, the middle of nowhere, but doesn't seem to recognize that it can't be all that remote, because after all, they're there.  And brought along beer.  I used to backcountry camp -- and I know from experience that if you are heading to a really remote place, that requires a long, arduous hike, you don't bring along unnecessary weight.  If they brought beer, then they were clearly close enough to civilization there could have been other hikers out there.

Or bears.  Or whatever.  Because the biggest problem is, this image is so tiny that there's no way to tell what it is.  It's not even a Blobsquatch.  It's a Dotsquatch.  Maybe this is the fabled wild hominid of the Northwest, but you certainly couldn't be sure from this video.


Even further out in left field is something from the Discovery channel, which has joined the History channel and Animal Planet in devoting themselves almost entirely to pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But they outdid themselves last week with a press release announcing an upcoming two-hour special about the infamous Dyatlov Pass Incident.

Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may remember that I did a post about this about two years ago, to which I direct you if you're curious about details.  But for our purposes here, it suffices to say that it centers around the mysterious deaths of nine experienced backcountry skiers in the Ural Mountains of Russia back in 1959.

It's an odd set of circumstances, and in my mind has never been adequately explained, although there are some compelling hypotheses about what may have caused their deaths.  But Discovery has added a hypothesis of their own to the list, although instead of "compelling" it is more "ridiculous:"

The Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by wild Yetis.

I'm not making this up.  Here's the relevant paragraph of the press release:

RUSSIAN YETI: THE KILLER LIVES, a 2-hour special airing Sunday, June 1 at 9 PM ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, follows Mike [Libecki] as he traces the clues and gathers compelling evidence that suggests the students’ deaths could be the work of a creature thought only to exist in folklore.

Oh, hell, if you're going to make shit up, why not go all the way?  I think they should make a two-hour special about how the Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by the Lovecraftian Elder Gods because some Russian necromancer wannabe opened up a gateway to Yog Sothoth.  The one hiker with the major chest injuries had had his heart sucked out by a Shoggoth.

Makes about as much sense.


Speaking of "not making sense," just last week we had a new proposal out there to explain why Bigfoot photos are all blurry.  It's not because they're fakes, or vague images of something sort-of-Bigfoot-like (i.e. an example of cryptozoological pareidolia).

It's because Bigfoot himself is blurry.

You probably think I'm making this up, but over at Occult View, this has been thrown out there as a serious suggestion in a post called "Bigfoot as a Blurry Vibration That Lives in the Forest."  A short passage should suffice to give you the flavor:

These sightings are not hominids, but something all together different. These Bigfoot are vibrations that live in the forest. Call them blurry beings. 

When these blurry vibrations are spotted, we see something that really doesn’t make sense. Our brains then fill in the blanks; our minds complete the details. We see a creature that looks natural, but if we took a picture of it at the same time it would appear only as a blur or a fuzzy image. 

There really hasn’t been a clear photo of Bigfoot (that I assume wasn’t a hoax). But there have been photos of these blurs, these dark shapes. If I am correct, we’ll never get a clear picture of the semi-rural Bigfoot. Yet it might be worth studying these images of dark shapes and see if we can learn something from them. These blurry images might provide clues to the true nature of the vibrations that live in the forest.

What does it even mean to say that something is a "living vibration?"  I'm assuming that the author is using the term in the usual hand-waving way that woo-woos do -- like the mystics saying that humans are "energy field vibrations," even though I doubt they could define the words "energy" and "field" if I held them at gunpoint.  So we won't press any further with this, except to say that anyone who thinks this is a rational explanation is a little blurry around the edges himself.

To end on an entertaining note, we have another video clip, this one from a gentleman named Larry Surface, that he claims is a recording of Bigfoot vocalizations from Ohio.  Take a listen:

My favorite part of this is the way Surface tries to transliterate what they're saying into English spelling, thusly:  "Hamit mahamit whoop whoop hamit wa wa wa wahit mahamit hondabay hondabay hondabay kaoo mahamit whoh hamit fusayo oa getmuh whoop ma oh."

Okay, I know that there's a possibility (slim, in my opinion) that these are really Bigfoot sounds.  But human perception being what it is, if someone tells you what you're hearing -- subtitles it, even -- you are way more likely to hear "hondabay hondabay hondabay" than you are to hear random animal vocalizations.  Consider how the whole "backmasking" thing works -- the conspiracy guys always tell you ahead of time what message has been inserted backwards into the song or speech you're listening to.  Then, when you listen to it backwards... lo and behold... there it is.

So me, I'm not convinced.  I've heard enough bizarre vocalizations from perfectly ordinary non-cryptids -- animals like foxes and raccoons and skunks and barred owls can make some really peculiar, unearthly noises.  (So if you really want to find out what the fox says, you can listen to hundreds of examples on YouTube.  You will not, for the record, find one recording of a fox saying "gering-a-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.")

Anyway, that's the news from the cryptozoology world.  Dotsquatch, Blursquatch, Russian Skier-Killers, and the strange language of the Ohio Bigfoot.  All in all, about what we'd expect, given the level of evidence that has been heretofore amassed.  So until next time, I'll sign off with a cheerful "Hamit mahamit whoop ma oh," and I hope you feel likewise.

Hark, hark, the shark

I guess it was bound to happen.

It started decades ago, with Jaws.  Then you had the hyped-up "documentaries" of the 80s and 90s featuring lines like, "Let's put the bikini-clad Baywatch wannabee in the giant metal cage, lower it into the water, and throw around bleeding fish parts, and see what happens."  But things ramped up considerably when the Discovery channel started "Shark Week."  Then we had the following, which made a lot of us science types shake our heads and say, "Um... really?":

Oh, if only it were "enough said."  Because you know it's not.  It is never enough said, once the ball gets rolling, especially if the ball has teeth and fins.  Because just a few days ago we had a new "documentary" on Discovery, one that upped the ante even further, by claiming that one of the largest seagoing predators that has ever lived... is still alive.

 Called Carcharodon megalodon, or just "Megalodon" for short, this thing was, to put it bluntly, freakin' huge.  Fossils have been found that indicate that the biggest ones could reach 18 meters in length (for reference, the largest great white sharks get to be about 6 meters long).  So, this was one scary-ass beast, the likes of which would make me hesitant to set foot in the ocean again.

If it still existed.  Which it doesn't.  Scientists are in agreement that Megalodon went extinct about 1.5 million years ago.  But of course, given the foolishness that has appeared on Discovery (remember Finding Bigfoot?  and The Haunted?  and, most germane to our discussion here, Mermaids: The Body Found?), I shouldn't really be surprised.

Oh, but there's a poll!  Because scientific truth is determined by public consensus, evidently.  You can vote that "YES! The evidence for Megalodon can't be ignored! The monster shark lives!" or "Maybe.  95% of our oceans remain unexplored, so it's possible that Megalodon is still out there."  Or (and I imagine this choice accompanied by a sad shake of the head), "No.  The scientists are right."  So, anyway, I voted (guess which way?), mostly so I could see what the results were, and was unsurprised that 32% of the respondents voted "yes," and 48% "maybe," leaving the poor scientists in the dust with a paltry 20% of the vote.

Of course, given that a common attitude is that public school biology curricula should eliminate the teaching of evolution "because lots of people don't believe in it," I shouldn't be surprised that (1) the public is easy to hoodwink into believing nonsense, and (2) there's a sense that science is a democracy.

Now, don't misunderstand me.  I love the ocean, and I think sharks are really cool.  And there's no doubt that charismatic megafauna are big sellers, explaining why you see lots of calendars and framed prints and greeting cards and tattoos with images of wolves, lions, and jaguars, and far fewer with wombats, possums, and naked mole rats.  I get why there's never been a film called Rabbitnado, although I have to admit I would watch it, especially if the bunnies turned out to be like the Beast of Caer Bannog:

But that's just me.  And since these media outlets exist to make money, not to promote good science, it's no wonder they jump on the bandwagon.

Sharon Hill, in her wonderful blog Doubtful News, did a piece on Megalodon recently, and expressed hope that "Shark Week" and other dubious attempts at nature documentary would raise awareness of shark conservation.  Me, I'm less sanguine.  When the movie Jaws came out in 1975, there followed a senseless slaughter of sharks of all sorts, including the completely harmless gray nurse shark.  Just as people don't get that science is done based on evidence, not on voting in a poll, they also don't tend to respond rationally when an irresponsible media outlet has ramped up the fear.

Anyhow, that's today's exercise in futility.  Given that Megalodon got "record ratings," I'm doubtful that anything I say is going to have an effect.  Maybe I should make my own documentary, you think?  You can't beat 'em, join 'em.  How about Hopping Mad: Is Australia's Carnivorous Kangaroo Still Alive in the Outback?  Start with some photographs of fossil skeletons:

Follow up with some scary drawings:

Hire a scientist or two to weigh in on how we can never be sure that an animal is extinct, because the Coelacanth, you know, and so on.  Then have a poll.   Sure fire winner, right?

Of course, right.