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Loch Ness Monster | Mongolian Death Worm | Bigfoot | Mokele-Mbembe | El Chupacabras | Find Out More
Is it any coincidence that sightings of Bigfoot cluster around an area of North America internationally renowned for its bumper crop of marijuana? The Pacific northwest – natural home of the alternative lifestyle. This is where you are most likely to spot this hairy, bipedal primate, over two metres tall. And woe betide those who see only a bear or a man in a monkey suit. Just open your eyes, man.
The Bigfoot business is a cottage industry of feverish, if sometimes questionable research. Given some of Bigfoot's habits, one wonders what the attraction is. Here is an animal which, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), emits a disagreeable smell 'comparable to the odour of smegma', likes to lunch on fresh liver, and produces faeces measuring a metre in length. Its mating habits are best left to the imagination.
The recent discovery of bones from the hominid Homo florensis in New Guinea reminds us that we can still expect the unexpected. But if Bigfoot does exist, what kind of animal could it be? Experts argue that the anatomy, behaviour and sociology of Bigfoot all point towards a distant relationship with modern man. But how distant? Is it, as some have suggested, a relic population of the giant primate gigantopithecus, an ancestor of orang-utans? Perhaps, but gigantopithecus probably walked on four legs rather than two, and its fossilised remains have only ever been found in China.
What of the alternative ideas? Could Bigfoot have an affinity with the australopithecines, an ancient group of early hominids from which Homo sapiens emerged? What about a more recent link with the White House? Or the more radical suggestion that Bigfoot is just a 'plant' put here to confuse us by a bunch of mischief-making aliens.
Provocative hypotheses all. But until someone comes up with an actual body, some bones, or a stretch of DNA, Bigfoot taxonomy will remain no more than mere speculation.
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