Sunday, August 24, 2008
News, In this Issue...
Con artists and cryptomorphs
A case for believing in Bigfoot, Nessie, and all their weird kin
Streetwise:
Do you think it’s possible that Bigfoot exists?
Danny Umali
AGE: 32
Senior manager, Perimeter
“I want to think that he’s out there somewhere.”
Kevin Schinelli
AGE: 18
Student, Dunwoody
“With all the stuff they’re discovering now, I’m sure he’s out there.”
Candi Kelley
AGE: 27
General manager, Bremen
“No, I don’t think it could have lived for so long or reproduced without [someone discovering] proof.”
—Reporting by Carly Felton
By Stephanie Ramage
Clayton County Police Chief Jeffrey Turner didn’t mince words last week when asked about the employment status of Matt Whitton.
“As of today he is a former police officer. He has been terminated,” Turner told The Sunday Paper on Aug. 19.
Whitton and his friend Rick Dyer had appeared on national television just days before, claiming to have the corpse of a “Bigfoot” they’d found in the North Georgia mountains. On the evening of Aug. 18, however, under pressure from the scientific community to produce the body for inspection, the two admitted that what they really had was a Halloween costume they’d waterlogged in a faulty freezer and then photographed. It was all a hoax.
Whitton had been on medical leave following an injury he sustained in the line of duty. When Turner saw the initial television reports in which Whitton claimed to have a specimen of the legendary creature, the chief did not immediately jump to conclusions.
“I kept an open mind. I said, ‘Let’s wait and see if it’s real.’ But the minute it turned out to be a hoax, he lost his credibility and integrity,” Turner said. “To be a police officer, you have to have both. How can you arrest someone and go into court before a judge if you do not have credibility amd integrity? Therefore he is useless and an embarrassment to this police department.”
A national embarrassment, at that. As if Clayton County didn’t have enough to deal with, hundreds of e-mails poured into the sheriff’s department from all over the country, nearly all asking how Whitton could still be a sworn peace officer and what Clayton County planned to do about an employee who had willfully lied to the world.
When Turner spoke with SP, he was audibly disgusted with his former employee.
“He swore on national television that he had Bigfoot,” he said, and added, “If it had been real, it wouldn’t have been an issue.”
Wait a minute. “If it had been real”?
How could it be real? This is Bigfoot—prom date of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster, drinking buddy of the Yeti, fraternity brother of the Chupacabra and cousin to a whole pantheon of mysterious, never-really-verified entities collectively known as cryptomorphs.
“Crypto” comes from the Greek word “kryptos,” which means “secret or hidden.” The second part of the word, “morph,” refers to “form.” When these hidden forms are said to be part of the animal kingdom, they become fodder for cryptozoologists—folks who study mysterious or mythical animals.
But why is anyone studying them? Why was Whitton and Dyer’s tale an item worthy of international news coverage? Why are blogs devoted to the topic chock full of postings? Why have there been at least 22 reports of just “Bigfoots”—never mind reports of Mothmen and Swamp Monsters—in Georgia alone? Why, in short, do seemingly normal folks persist in believing in the existence of this bizarre menagerie of beings?
Scientists and hairy people
To a certain extent, we believe in such things because science is always turning up something new, so Bigfoot might not be as crazy a concept as one might think.
Jeff Meldrum, an associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, thinks it’s important not to rule out anything prematurely, especially when it comes to how primates—whether apes or hominids (human-like life-forms)—might have evolved.
“I was hopeful that they had found something,” Meldrum says of Dyer and Whitton’s fake Bigfoot. “As a student of the evolution of how bipedalism [two-footed locomotion] came to be, for me the prospect of a non-human biped is an important one. I am interested in knowing what selection pressures gave rise to bipedalism. Was it that we needed to be able to look over our shoulders? Was it for defense?”
His interest, however, has put him at odds with creationists.
“They think I am looking for the missing link,” he says. “But I don’t think the Sasquatch is a hominid. I believe that, if it does exist, it is an ape. Even if it were a hominid—and that would be fascinating, but all of this rests on the question of whether it exists—why should this idea strike people with such contempt? Why is there such rejection of even a possibility? Finding something like that shouldn’t threaten human beings’ place in any kind of divine order.”
Meldrum’s interest has also put him at odds with his fellow faculty members. In the summer of 2006, a petition signed by 30 of his colleagues criticized Idaho State’s administration for hosting a Bigfoot conference at which Meldrum was the keynote speaker. One of the petitioners, Martin Hackworth, a senior lecturer in the physics department, told Fox News in November of that year, “Do I cringe when I see the Discovery Channel and I see 'Idaho State University, Jeff Meldrum?’ Yes, I do. He believes he's taken up the cause of people who have been shut out by the scientific community. He's lionized there. He's worshipped. He walks on water. It's embarrassing.”
But Meldrum’s boss, John Kijinski, dean of arts and sciences, defended Meldrum to the news channel, saying, “He provides a form of open discussion and dissenting viewpoints that may not be popular with the scientific community, but that's what academics are all about.”
Meldrum, of course, agrees. “The spirit of exploration is what science is all about,” he says. “There’s an unanswered question, and as a scientist, my job is to find an answer.”
In searching for that answer, he’s come to believe that perhaps humans evolved less linearly than we previously thought. He thinks that rather than one group of hominids giving way to another in an orderly fashion—starting with the very apelike Australopithecus ramidis, leading to Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus robustus, then on to Homo habilis and then homo erectus and homo sapiens neanderthalensis (the slope-browed Neanderthal that looked a bit like some modern-day athletes) and so forth—there may have been much more simultaneous existence.
And he thinks that what was true for hominids could certainly be true for early apes. Maybe Bigfoot is a leftover from a very diverse period in primate history. Who says that we’re the only creatures who get to walk upright in any given era? More and more scientists are in agreement with Meldrum. Take the mysterious case of the Flores hominid, Homo floresiensis, for example.
In 2003, a group of scientists found some skeletal remains of what appeared to be a tiny full-grown human on the remote Indonesian island of Flores. The skeleton was about three feet tall, with a grapefruit-sized skull. Tiny, crude stone tools were found nearby. Almost immediately, science geeks started bickering over the creature they fondly referred to as “the hobbit.” Later, other similar skeletons were found in the area. Some said they were humans who suffered from microencephaly—the condition of having a disproportionately small skull—while others argued that the “hobbits” were a previously undiscovered hominid species.
In September 2007, the prestigious journal Science published a paper stating that the skeletons were those of a distinct and formerly unknown species of something human-ish, not just deformed members of our own species.
The British newspaper the Guardian, in reporting on the journal article under the headline “Yes, it’s a Hobbit,” quoted Matthew Tocheri of the Smithsonian Institution, lead author of the Science paper, as saying, “What we are beginning to realize is that our recent evolutionary history is much more diverse than we realized. It's a little shot to our over-inflated modern human egos.”
Indonesians, Meldrum points out, had talked about hairy little people living in the forests for centuries, but no one took them seriously. In the early 1800s, chronicler William Marsden wrote in his “History of Sumatra” about a tribe of hairy people who lived deep in the interior, but no one took him seriously, either. The problem with hairy, ape-like people is that wherever there have been apes and people, the line between them has become blurred in legend.
In virtually every culture, cryptomorphs—and not just the hairy kind—romp in rural imaginations to this day. Bigfoot and Nessie, Scotland’s Loch Ness monster, have similar kin throughout the world. Some descriptions of Bigfoot fit the Algonquin monster the Wendigo, a creature who was supposed to have been human until it resorted to cannibalism, which changed it into something half-animal and all evil.
The ethnographer Wayne Suttles, who studied Native American lore from the '50s until his death in 2005, wrote that Sasquatch is only one of a whole class of monsters the natives of British Columbia call slalakums, “which are said to be everywhere, haunting every nook and cranny of the world.” Nessie has a cousin here in Georgia: The Cherokee believed in a huge, antlered and venomous water serpent called the uctena, which might have been an imaginatively amplified version of the deadly water moccasin, a creature with which they were intimately familiar.
Fantasy and hucksters
When Joe Nigg ran an Internet search on “Bigfoot,” Google returned more than 743,000 matches. That’s a startling number, but Nigg, author of the wildly successful book “How to Raise and Keep a Dragon” (under the nom de plume of John Topsell), was not shocked.
“We want to believe. Even very rational people want to believe,” says Nigg, whose dragon manual was intended to be a spoof on various pet books that would appeal to adults, but has instead become a children’s favorite. “About a year ago, a friend of mine who had retired after 30-some years of teaching geology called me on the phone and, he was very excited, said ‘Joe, they’ve found fossilized remains of a dragon in an ice cave in Romania.’ I think it was on a show on Animal Planet. Then he called back a few minutes later and said ‘Joe, it’s a hoax. It’s just fantasy.’”
His friend, says Nigg, was sincerely disappointed, although one would think that a geologist, of all people, would have known better.
“We need fantasy. It’s a great distraction from politics, wars, high gas prices, the economy,” says Nigg. “We must have needed it or we would not have created it. It’s interesting that fantastic animals were believed in up until the rise of science. Then, people started asking, ‘Have you ever actually seen a gryphon? A dragon? A manticore?’ Now, we want them back.”
And sometimes we want them back so much that we become easy prey for unscrupulous characters like Whitton and Dyer. Such hucksters are nothing new. In the mid-1800s legendary circus pimp P.T. Barnum huckersterized mermaids in the form of the “Fiji mermaid,” a taxidermy job that slapped orangutan remains onto a fish tail.
But the biggest hoax of them all was one that changed the course of science for 40 years. We still don’t know who to blame for the famous “Piltdown Man,” but most experts suspect the guy who reported the find, a collector named Charles Dawson. Dawson claimed that a workman at a gravel pit gave him parts of a prehistoric skull around 1912. Shortly thereafter, Dawson passed the fossils off to Smith Woodward, who was keeper of the geological department at the British Museum and a fan of Charles Darwin. Woodward apparently believed that Dawson had turned up Darwin’s evolutionary “missing link.” That link turned out to be modified parts of a modern human skull stuck to parts of an orangutan skull with chimpanzee teeth. But the hoax wasn’t revealed until 1953.
Georgia’s own Whitton and Dyer took to the airwaves once again on Aug. 21, this time telling local television station WSB that their Bigfoot adventure was only a joke and no reason to fire anybody.
“I don’t think it does affect my credibility at all,” Whitton said, explaining that the gag had all started as some YouTube videos and a Web site. “This is Bigfoot. It would be different if I came out and said I had something that was tangible and real, but right now, as far as I’m concerned, there is no real Bigfoot.”
Dyer chimed in, “We told 10 different stories. Everyone knew we were lying.”
SP