Chris Schillig: Bigfoot is the monster for our time
Bigfoot is having a moment in northeast Ohio.
Last month, the Small Town Monsters production company announced Monster Fest in downtown Canton for June 2023. While Bigfoot may share the billing with UFOs and ghosts, everybody knows the big, hairy guy is the real star.
Small Town Monsters has been making bank with Bigfoot since 2015 when company owner Seth Breedlove released “Minerva Monster.” The film explored a branch of the creature’s family tree that sprouted in Paris Township.
Since then, Breedlove has continued to document Bigfoot and other cryptids with several more films. Another will debut next June 3 during Monster Fest, according to a Canton Repository story.
Look, I love me a good Bigfoot yarn, something regular readers of this column know. If you grew up semi-rural in the 1970s, like I did, with a few trees somewhere on your property that an overactive imagination could stretch into a bonafide forest, then Bigfoot was as much a part of your formative years as corduroy pants and transistor radios.
Back then, I lapped up pseudo-scientific junk about giant man-apes like it was manna from hirsute heaven. I still have my dog-eared copy of “The Mysterious Monsters,” a tie-in to a corny movie that made the drive-in circuit in the mid-1970s.
Written by Robert and Frances Guenette, the book covers the holy trinity – Yeti, Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot him/itself. The first two intrigued me, but let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to the Himalayas or Scotland anytime soon (still haven’t). However, I did romp around in the woods, and it was just possible that a rogue Bigfoot was cagey enough to elude the razor-sharp senses and infallible tracking skills of my eight-year-old self.
As a kid, I played on a swing set that abutted a track of trees no self-respecting monster would have bothered to haunt, but I was certain a Bigfoot lived there, or at least visited on weekends. So powerful was this daydream that I used to practice drills, leaping off the swing and running for the house to see if I was fast enough to elude any Bigfoot that might lumber my way, looking for a scrawny kid to use as a combination Slim Jim and toothpick.
(I don’t know how fast was “fast enough,” but I must have convinced myself that I had a decent chance of survival because I kept going back to the swings.)
My Bigfoot obsession reached its apex with a two-part episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” where bionic Steve Austin (Lee Majors) met the creature, played by Andre the Giant. Another encounter later in the series crossed over with “The Bionic Woman” so that Lindsay Wagner could get in on the fun. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has nothing on this epic story of a robotic Bigfoot protecting an underground colony of space aliens while an earthquake looms. (Can you hear my eyes rolling?)
Anyway, over the years I left my obsession with Bigfoot behind, even when others didn’t. An area operation in the ’90s put a new wrinkle on the Bigfoot legend by trying to convince people that many Bigfoot encounters were traumatizing enough to spark amnesia, meaning it was possible to see Bigfoot but suppress the memory. So maybe we’ve all encountered one!
It’s this kind of wonkiness that has Bigfoot perfectly positioned for a contemporary comeback. Today, folks believe all sorts of bogus conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence. Large hominids living undetected in North America and elsewhere – despite infrared technology, an absence of bodies and scat, and every camper and hunter carrying a cellphone with a camera – seem quaint compared to PizzaGate, replacement theory and Italian satellites that change votes for Joe Biden. (Where’s Steve Austin when we need him?)
Some people just want to believe in something – anything! – so badly that they’ll do it despite (or maybe because of) a lack of evidence. Not for nothing is “confirmation bias” the psychological phenomenon of the 21st century.
None of which should keep anybody from enjoying next year’s Monster Fest. Maybe Bigfoot himself will even make a guest appearance. And if you spot a zipper running up his back — well, just chalk it up to evolution. It’s as plausible an explanation as anything else.
Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.
This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Chris Schillig: Bigfoot is the monster for our time
