Editorial: Bigfoot fake flyers point to real problems
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If you want a measure of how far off the beaten path we have gotten when it comes to facts, look no further than Pennsylvania.
Is that bar about the 2020 election? Is it the endless parade of ads for next month’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections that are stretching the truth like taffy? Is it the fact some people still have faith in the Pittsburgh Pirates?
No. It’s that the state has had to take a position on Bigfoot.
Yes, Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The elusive creature that has launched so many campfire tales and pseudo-documentary shows on infotainment cable stations.
Bigfoot is a cryptid — a word used to describe creatures that people believe exist and yet have not been proven. While reports in Pennsylvania stretch back over a century, there’s a big difference between an anecdotal account and evidence of a 9-foot-tall hairy humanoid.
And those reports aren’t just from the backwoods where the Sasquatch could melt into the shadows of trees. In the vast amount of internet resources devoted to the creature, there are more recent tales from more populated areas, like a 2017 account from Export where a man said he was woken up by them at 3 a.m. or the fishermen in Harmar who were pelted with boulders while night fishing. Thanks for keeping track of that for us, Google.
In recent months, flyers have popped up in state parks and forests with dire warnings about the beasts. “Due to encounters in the area of a creature resembling ‘Bigfoot,’ we are instructing all park visitors to observe elevated park etiquette, be cautious of your surroundings, and to keep the location of any small children/pets within a tighter scope of awareness.”
Despite the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources letterhead, the state agency is issuing no such warning, and not, as the flyer also urges, pushing people to report sightings to the non-existent DCNR Office of Missing Persons.
Yet it has had to issue statements about the fakery.
“When you see flyers of this nature that set off an alarm and that don’t appear real, there should be serious scrutiny,” said DCNR press secretary Wesley Robinson.
Have people lost the ability to give that kind of measured and rational response? Has the skill to identify an obvious fraud been eroded by a million Nigerian prince emails and sales letters carefully calculated to look like lottery checks?
Or is it more like our politics? Have we become completely oblivious to what is fake if it tells us a story we want to hear?
Bigfoot is a great story. It’s fun. It’s scary. It plays into the instincts we have about finding what’s lost and discovering something unknown. We want to find the shipwreck, uncover dinosaur bones, dig up buried treasure.
But we should not need a state agency to debunk this. People should be able to look at a flyer about Bigfoot-based disappearances and not have a second thought about it being fake.
If we have reached the point where that is too much to ask, we may have bigger problems than hairy giants in the woods.