The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster

by John O'Connor

It hardly mattered to the mostly white, mostly male readers of True if its stories were completely bogus. “Truth in these magazines was not about facts or correspondence with reality,” the scholar Joshua Blu Buhs wrote, “but resisting changing values and valorizing an older tradition, when men were men and honored for their skills.” The white male utopia was dying. Sanderson’s stories massaged the psychic fallout.

“Predispositions in human nature can combine with mythological truthiness to make weird beliefs easy to swallow,” wrote Steven Pinker.

flashlights sabering the trees, shadows looming like swollen apparitions, hemming us in.

Wilderness has always provided us with a screen on which to project our romantic fantasies and paranoid neuroses.

Hundred-Mile Wilderness. It’s the longest gauntlet of unbroken forest in the eastern United States, one hundred God’s honest miles without a single Arby’s. A rare thing, even on the AT, where the average distance between paved roads is a scant seven miles and where mountaintop vistas can encompass turnpikes and travel plazas.

“Ontologically, we’re driven to categorize our experiences, to fit them into current knowledge,” McNeill said. “When our institutions lack knowledge to explain our experiences, we turn to folklore.”

Another way of putting it is our brains aren’t great at discerning the truth. They’re good at telling stories, stories that attempt to resolve or give context to our uncertainty, fear, and confusion, stories we want to believe are

Psychologists call this “narrative fallacy”—recasting events as compelling and meaningful anecdotes with logical chains of cause and effect, with us at the center of the action, the star of the show.

3Research suggests that we experience a dopamine rush when processing information that supports our beliefs.

“We excel at noticing the flaws of friends,” Pronin wrote, but have an “inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.” This “bias blind spot,” she says, is more pronounced in people with higher intelligence, attesting to a phenomenon that most of us have encountered at one point or another: smart people aren’t as smart as they think.

His lies were justified, in their minds, as a form of “symbolic protest”—a middle finger extended to the liberal aristocracy.

Bigfoot, in this context, materialized out of California timberland as a great white hope, expressing and repressing titanic disquiet at the unwinding of the white working-class world and fulfilling a desire for magical reassurance that the old regime, despite appearances, would endure.

“As the past slips out of existence behind us, the future, once unknown and mysterious, assumes its banal reality before us as it yields to the ever-hurrying now.”

“To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.”

implication[s]…are disquieting, for they involve the creation of a larger community of belief whose view of the world is at variance with the prevailing norm. And the variance goes beyond mere eccentricity, because it involves a deviant view of authority.”

He wrote that twenty years ago, when magical thinking appeared far more benign than it does today.

“unconscious cognitive bias to draw causal connections between seemingly related phenomena” (i.e., jumping to conclusions based on shoddy evidence),

natural weakness for melodramatic narratives that “provide compelling explanations for otherwise confusing or ambiguous events” (i.e., looking for explanations that justify our fear and uncertainty).

seemingly innocuous paranormal and supernatural beliefs can be gateway drugs to dange...

a surreal alchemy of hokum that may very well usher in another two thousand years of zealotry and superstition.