Fun fact: the guy who first came up with the “running man” hypothesis (the idea that ancient pre-humans hunted game by casually jogging after their prey until it dropped from exhaustion) was even more well-known for being an avid believer in the existence of Sasquatch.
Personally, I just can’t believe people still believe in Bigfoot. It’s so obviously just a Yeti in a gorilla suit.
I really don’t understand the people who say a human can’t walk like Bigfoot. To be fair, I come from a pretty flexible family who can walk even weirder than that.
I’m not sure if we actually have Ehlers-Danlos but it’s a common joke in my family that we all might. (I personally think it’s because autism runs hard in the family and autistic people have higher rates of hypermobility than the rest of the population)
Which is to say that my weird flexible autistic family could all probably impersonate Bigfoot pretty easily.
It’s entirely possible that Bigfoot can walk like other people but whenever they notice someone filming them they try to act natural and it all goes to shit.
I love the legend of Bigfoot, and I’ve spent enough time among the vast wilderness of the western and northwestern continent of North America to respect how such a concept can be entertained. These forests are unfathomably large, and navigating through them across BC, the Yukon and Alaska is akin to taking a canoe across the Pacific. It’s humbling. However, I wholly accept the criticisms of the legend as well, though it has never stopped my imagination from hoping there’s more to it, nor has it stifled my fascination with hearing first-hand accounts told by locals and indigenous peoples.
That said… have you checked in on the Bigfoot community lately? Half of those guys have gone fucking nuts and are now inventing entirely new superpowers to explain the mythos. Cloaking devices, interdimensional shifting, time travel, telepathy, and an undeniable link with UFOs and other cryptids. Now that old photos are so easy to replicate with AI, the waters have been even further muddied, and most of these groups just circulate the same obvious fakes. Old sepia photographs of mountaineers standing among groups of them, in miraculously high-definition. Photos that somehow circumvented the public for close to a century and have now appeared with exceptional clarity. Bigfoot fan groups have almost become a social club for schizophrenics. It’s wild.