I’ve discovered the best way to watch Finding Bigfoot. Rainy day, cat in lap, lightning flashing, hail rattling on the roof, episodes streaming one after another. They blur together after a while, but that’s part of the experience.
I imagine that’s what it’s like to be a Bigfoot hunter. Twenty-five years, one of the cast had spent searching for the Sasquatch, as of 2011. As far as I know, he’s still at it.
Four investigators, says the intro to each episode. Hundreds of sightings. “Shocking eyewitness accounts.” “Unforgiving wilderness.” “Revolutionary new techniques.” “What’s that? That’s a Squatch!” “I think there’s a Squatch in these woods!”
Breathless narration segues into a more or less standard format. Blurry video. Excited commentary. Location of the week: somewhere in North America, though from Season 3 onward, the team occasionally travels to big-hairy-cryptid locales around the world, starting with the Australian Yowie.
Most of the episodes focus on the US and Canada, with repeated visits to some places. The Pacific Northwest, which is regarded as ground zero for Bigfoot sightings, doesn’t get the bulk of the attention. The first season begins in Georgia and moves to Florida and North Carolina before it heads west.
The heavily populated Northeast has an amazing number of sightings. There’s more wilderness there than you might think, as the team observes. Even tiny Rhode Island has its surprisingly substantial share of woods and eyewitness accounts of big hairy bipeds.
The team examines the video of the week, if possible interviews the person who shot it, and analyzes it. They’ll try to reproduce it to see what it looks like when it’s a human doing whatever the creature in the video did, and to determine the distance and the perspective and thereby the size of the creature. For this exercise, the team has its own rule-for-scale, a very large human named Bobo. Bobo is the Scooby-Doo of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Association.
The team’s Velma, a field biologist named Ranae, is their resident skeptic. She weighs in on what other animal it might be—or whether it’s a human in a monkey suit. My favorite was the shadow on the ridge that she debunked as a hiker in a backpack, though I also liked the Bigfoot booty that was pretty clearly a gorilla suit.
And yet, even if the video turns out to be a hoax or a misidentification, the investigation continues. The team often calls a town meeting and polls the attendees for sightings. People see Bigfoot everywhere, not just in the woods. Out jogging, driving on a back road at night, even—and this is not especially uncommon—in or next to a backyard.
For further bona fides, the team may get in touch with Native Americans or First Nations in the area. Unlike John O’Connor, they have a fair amount of success. They’ll interview eyewitnesses as well as hear the stories of that region’s version of Bigfoot. Sometimes they’ll be invited to participate in a ritual. They make sure to tell the audience that they’re respecting the traditions.
No matter what they find, no matter where they go, the team never questions the existence of their quarry. The fact that they have never found one alive or dead is immaterial. It’s out there. It’s a real animal.
The whole series, all 100 episodes, is an exercise in confirmation bias. Hundreds of people have seen Bigfoot! They’ve seen him everywhere!
And if they haven’t seen him, they’ve heard him or smelled him. The team has a range of calls, mostly howls, that they maintain is based on actual Bigfoot vocalizations. They have tapes! There’s evidence!
They consult experts in various known animal species. These experts, like the Native American elders and eyewitnesses, seem happy enough to be on TV, and nod and agree and allow as how, well, this evidence might be real. If they aren’t quite so willing to commit, there’s still that glimmer of, OK, it might. Possibly. Those howls? Wolves. “But one track sounds different! That could be Bigfoot!”
Same applies to the visual evidence. “That can’t be a bear, it’s walking too much like a human.” “It’s not all that big, Bobo’s version is much taller, must be a juvenile.” “It’s too blurry to make anything out, but we can still see features that tell us this is indisputably a giant unknown primate.”
The lack of actual live Sasquatch is no obstacle to the team’s analysis. They know what sounds it makes. How it hunts. Where and how it sleeps and eats.
Much of this is based on general primate behavior—cue interview with primate expert. Sometimes there’s an eyewitness account. “It had a rabbit trapped up in a tree.” So they put in a rabbit in a cage and put it up a tree and try to bait Bigfoot with it.
That poor rabbit.
Anything and everything is proof that the Squatch (as they affectionately refer to it) is out there. Noises in the woods at night? It’s hunting! It’s watching us! Large warm splotch on the infrared camera screen? It’s there! We see it! It’s not a bear or an elk! It’s Bigfoot!
As with the rest of paranormal television, after a few episodes I gave way to my native skepticism. Big scratches high up on a tree? Bear. Otherworldly screeches afar off? Coyotes, or if they’re truly blood-curdling, foxes (a vixen’s scream can freeze your blood). Piles of branches in the woods? Plain old deadfall. Knocks and pounding in the distance? Echoes, or, hey, ghosts. Ghosts like to knock on things.
The worldbuilding is pretty good in fantasy terms. We learn the size, shape, and habits of the animal, and experts helpfully inform us about the kind of habitat that would support a primate of that presumed size and omnivorous diet. Essentially, if an area will support wolves and bears, it can support Sasquatch.
The will to believe is so strong and so prevalent that it feeds sightings all over the continent. Those sightings, according to the team, constitute proof. Would that many people in that many places see something that doesn’t exist?
There’s the question. The show gives us a hundred episodes’ worth of not-quite-answer.
