The search for Bigfoot continues

by Karl J. Paloucek

Animal Planet announced today that its series Finding Bigfoot will be picked up for a second season, coming in early 2012. In addition, a two-hour Finding Bigfoot special, “The Squatchiest Place on Earth,” airing this Halloween, will tide viewers over until the new season begins, taking them to the forests of Northern California, where the presence of “the creature” seems particularly strong.

I have to admit that I’m fascinated. Not so much by the whole Sasquatch thing, but at the fact that this is such an interesting case of a show being more “about the journey” than the endgame. For the skeptics among us, it’s a forgone conclusion: There is no Bigfoot, so the search for the mythical creature is like an ongoing snipe hunt. You can look for clues and find things that suggest that the beast is out there, and you’re certain to find plenty of readily interpretable data out there in the wilderness, so you keep looking. But even for the believers, the series presents a problem. What if they actually found the crazy, hairy thing out there? First of all, it would be such a big story, they’d be fools to keep it for an episode of their Animal Planet show, when they’d certainly be offered a much more princely sum for their footage from a major news outlet. Furthermore, what would it look like if they came up with the big discovery in, say, Episode 3? What are you going to do until Episode 10? My guess would be to hop a plane to Scotland and go looking for the Loch Ness monster, but that runs into a lot more scratch than just running around in the woods, so we’d have to see if Animal Planet would be up for it.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, look forward to more endless seeking and not finding from the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. It may be fruitless, even pointless, but it’s still fun.