Slate Online Magazine Bashes Bigfoot

Sign on Pikes Peak Highway Photograph by Ashish S. Hareet/Wikimedia Commons

"Bigfoot is not a monster but a meme." -- Brian Switek

Slate is an online magazine first owned by Microsoft and currently by the Washington Post, it is known  as a current affairs and culture magazine. Although if you ask our opinion, it has never found a niche that distinguishes itself with any character. However it is not the opinion of the magazine overall that we want to focus on, it is today's article (11/21/2012) written by Brian Switek. Brian has been critical of Bigfoot before, but seems to especially target Jeff Meldrum. Earlier we covered Mr. Switek's critique of Meldrum.

Mr. Switek is at it again, criticizing Meldrum and Bigfooters in general. While we think skeptics are healthy for the Bigfoot community, we prefer the ones who have a more balanced approach and actually give constructive thought to our endeavor. We prefer the Brian Dunnings and Sharon Hills of the world.

To be honest, we look forward to Bigfoot criticism. We look forward to some insight to ourselves that we may not have the objectivity to see. Unfortunately Mr. Switek delivers the same old arguments, without a single new thought or novel take on the Bigfoot Phenomena. You can read a short excerpt below to get a sense of the direction Mr. Switek is going. You can follow the link below to read more of the same.

Jeff Meldrum wants to search for Bigfoot by using a remote-controlled blimp. Because when you’re looking for a mythical creature famous for eluding all who search for it, a giant, buzzing, looming balloon is clearly the way to go. Meldrum, a tenured Idaho State University anthropologist who established his career studying primate foot anatomy before shifting his focus to monsters, expects he’ll have to raise $300,000 to get the project airborne. He’s trying (and so far failing) to get funding from private sources. (No surprise that his home institution wants nothing to do with the endeavor.) That’s a lot of money and effort for what will undoubtedly turn out to be a collection of blurry photographs that look like Instagram snapshots from a visit to the Pacific Northwest woods.

I loved reading breathless tales of encounters with the Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, Jersey Devil, Bigfoot, and other cryptids as a child, but those stories have never been supported by anything more substantial than an out-of-focus snapshot or embellished campfire story. And in the case of North America’s legendary nonhuman ape, the picture historians and sociologists have pieced together is that Bigfoot and other shaggy humanoids are cultural inventions that we have repeatedly conjured so that there’s always something wild and mysterious in the woods. Stories about Bigfoot began to proliferate after expeditions in the Himalayas in the 1950s reported ambiguous Yeti footprints—none of which have been convincingly attributed to a Gigantopithecus descendant or other prehistoric hominid holdover. Sasquatch fans have since done a bit of retconning [sic] by claiming Native American stories and dubious historical encounters as part of their mythology, but the trail is clear. Bigfoot is not a monster but a meme.

SRC: Slate Magazine