Skook Reviews …

Sasquatch – Legend Meets Science.

Originally I’d read that the Discovery channel planned to air this documentary in November. The month came and went. Ray Wallace died, his family told the media that he’d invented Bigfoot and so he became far more famous in death than he’d managed in life. A few more people came forward to admit to hoaxing Bigfoot. Other people stepped out to say that they’d encountered sasquatch and, dammit, they hadn’t seen a bear or a man in an ape suit. Jane Goodall said that she considered sasquatch to be a reality. And finally, last night, the documentary aired.

Skook and I watched on the little downstairs set in Nizzabet’s and my bedroom. I took the bed, Skook took the floor. Nizzabet had a meeting upstairs with Jaydogg and 2M. Art co-op stuff. The show came on at nine, pacific standard time. One hour later the twelve experts employed for the documentary resoundingly declared – Yes! Maybe.

The fingerprint expert, the statistician and the team that examined the Skookum Cast all said that the evidence pointed to a big North American ape. The voice expert, the DNA tester and the Memorial Day Film team all declared that their evidence was inconclusive. No definite negative answers on any of the evidence examined.

My furry expert says the evidence points to sasquatch playing a joke on someone. A sasquatch wandering around in broad daylight is either stoned or wants to be seen. Possibly both. Skook says the Memorial Day film (a brief clip of a possible sasquatch running up a hillside) and the ranger’s film (brief clip of a possible sasquatch walking through the woods) are both too fuzzy for him recognize as any individual. The creature in the Patterson Film would be 35 years older now and thus was unrecognizable to Skook. He reminds me that he’s rarely been to California. Sasquatch are generally nomads and can range over thousands of miles but Skook is one of the exceptions. He hasn’t been farther south than Portland in four years.

Overall I was satisfied with the show. More of the experts fell on the yes side than I expected. The tone of the narration was calm and generally low on poor logic statements. There was a tendency to describe their experts as “renowned”, “highly respected” and “elite” that I found funny. The Patterson film got analyzed from a fresh angle – a 3D modeling expert did a skeletal reconstruction based on his study of the creature. .

My complaint with all the other documentaries I’ve seen concerning sasquatch is they’ve used poor investigative technique. One piece of evidence is used to support or to damn unrelated events. I saw one (I believe it was The X Creatures) that spent a good chunk of time “proving” that the Patterson film was “most likely” a hoax and since most people who see bigfoot have also seen the Patterson film then they are predisposed to seeing something that doesn’t exist. That one was especially annoying because the amount of study put into the film seemed pretty valuable – probably height, stride and speed were determined. Then they had a special effects team do a bad remake of the Patterson film. Sigh.

Apparently Ray Wallace had his wife put on an ape suit and pose for pictures and films. I’d love to see what they looked like. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one and I’ve got most of the books on sasquatch published since the sixties.

Ah well, it’s not as if I need evidence. The complaints I have about the sasquatch documentary are the same complaints I have about news reporting in general. It’s rarely “just the facts”. Humans love stories. Truth is secondary.

And Skook? What did he think of the documentary?

He shrugged and headed out into the night. It was television. Who can trust something without a scent?