I happened to catch the History Channel Show MonsterQuest this week. A film crew and a couple scientists were at Snelgrove Lake up in wilds of northwest Ontario to investigate the possibility that a Sasquatch-like creature inhabits the area during the summer. A fishing cabin on the lake has been ransacked, and a few fishermen reported that something in the woods was throwing rocks at them. The owner of the cabin put out a "screw board" (sort of a small bed of nails on plywood, only with screws) to keep bears out of the cabin, and something with a large foot stepped on it, leaving a good sized puddle of blood. On the crew's last night there, something threw two rocks and a large piece of wood at the cabin.
Now, I don't know whether all of this really means that Sasquatch or Bigfoot exists in the forests of North America. The "scientists" along for the ride claimed to get DNA evidence from the screw board, but at least one of them (according to Google) is a pretty big celebrity in the Bigfoot believer community. He has real academic bonafides, but his status as a legitimate scientist is under scrutiny for his work on Bigfoot... and so I think any data they obtain must meet a high critical standard.
All that aside, I know that this episode of MonsterQuest would have kept me from sleeping for a week as a child. I was afraid of the dark, and I was always worried that something might be lurking outside my bedroom window... even though I had a second floor bedroom. I was even afraid of Bigfoot for a while, after seeing The Mysterious Monsters. The dark of night can be an emotional siege of sorts, in the same way that light fades to shadow and then to dark. And the idea of a creature out there in the dark, beyond the edge of the light, and beyond the edge of reason is out there ready to throw stones and sticks... well, that would terrify me as a child.
Yet I have to look at the flip side: there is also the possibility for magic lurking out there in the darkness. So maybe there's a large human-like ape creature lurking out there in woods... or maybe our search for that creature is just some greater manifestation of our greater collective unconscious. But light is reason, and there's no rational reason to think that Sasquatch is out there, until a skeleton shows up. I want to be it is out there... as long as the fear doesn't get me into a panic too often.
said drgeek
on 2008-02-09 at 10:43 p.m.
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