Messin' with Sasquatch Again?

After over a year, my post about Bigfoot  still garners more views than almost anything else I have written.  It seems the time is right to produce another ground-breaking intellectual piece on the subject.  Why? Have you seen it?  The new Spike TV reality show, 10 MILLION DOLLAR BIGFOOT BOUNTY?  I have to say I was both excited and nervous about this new reality show which I saw for the first time last night.  I also must say, unfortunately, that it failed to meet even my lowest expectations.

The show is kind of a cross between the long-running CBS show Survivor and Animal Planet’s popular show Finding Bigfoot.  In Spike’s 10 MILLION DOLLAR BIGFOOT BOUNTY, pairs of contestants search an area of Washington State known for Bigfoot sightings gathering evidence for Bigfoot.  In each episode, the teams search for Bigfoot evidence, present it to the judges, and have it evaluated in a high-tech mobile DNA lab for validity.  One pair of contestants gets thrown out by the judges each episode.  If contestants can find definitive proof of Bigfoot, they will get the $10,000,000 award.  I am not sure what the last contestants get if no one finds Bigfoot, but I will be shocked if they have not planned for this possibility.

The contestants on this show make one think that the search for Bigfoot is nothing but ignorance and buffoonery.  Can you believe that?  Maybe it’s just hard to get a group of “respectable” Bigfoot searchers to go on TV and admit what they do.  I think about what I would do if I had been given the chance to go on the show.  I have spent many hours of my last 40+ years outdoors, and I have considerable experience tracking animals.  It sounds as if it would be a hoot to go on the show and “search” for Bigfoot.  Yet would I risk the ridicule and embarrassment that might come from participation?  Probably not.  I can’t imagine having the conversation with my peers and upper management at work – “Uh yeah…uh, I wanted to talk to you guys about covering my responsibilities the next six or seven weeks so I can participate in a Bigfoot reality show.”  Career over.

The contestants are so bad – I mean really, really bad.  Probably the “superstar” is Justin Smeja.  If you have never heard of him (real Bigfooters will have), he is the self-admitted California poacher who claims to have shot an adult Bigfoot and its child in the Sierra mountains a couple of years ago.  In a very unfortunate chain of events, the dead creatures supposedly got buried in snow before he could get them out, and Smeja was unable to retrieve their bodies.  He did, however, manage to get tissue samples which formed a significant part of the Melba Ketchum genetics study I referenced in my original post a year ago.  He also sent samples to a world-class human genetic researcher at Oxford University in England, Dr. Brian Sykes who actually had a show on his study air on the National Geographic channel last fall.  Apparently, these samples were from a bear.  It seems Smeja got mixed up getting samples from the right critter in all that snow.  Dang!  Bad break.

So it continues – a very popular topic rife with more bad shows, charlatans and unengaging personalities. Smeja is far more unconvincing than I had imagined. Maybe that’s just the nature of this beast (Ha! I said beast – get it?). I’m still hopeful and still waiting to find him – Mr. Bigfoot that is. I hope someone gets that ten million dollar prize, although I can only imagine how quickly these particular contestants would blow ten million dollars. (By the way, I’ll bet the insurance company that underwrote the prize didn’t charge much for the policy.) In spite of all this, I’m still engaged and waiting. I know I am not alone. Maybe 2014 will be the year we find the Bigfoot! And maybe it won’t. Until then, I will quietly go back into my Sasquatch closet and wait.