Regular Episode
#105 – BIGFOOT SKEPTICISM
The episode opens with Blake’s editorial response to a controversy that erupted at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS), where author John Horgan delivered a talk — later posted to his Scientific American Crosscheck blog — arguing that skeptics should spend less time on “soft targets” like homeopathy and Bigfoot and more time on harder problems like war and cancer screening. Responses from Dr. Stephen Novella, Dr. Steven Pinker, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, Dr. Michael Shermer, and Dr. Jerry Coyne followed quickly. Blake’s take: skepticism is a toolkit, and Bigfoot is as good a whetstone as any for sharpening it.
🦶 A Physical Anthropologist Looks at Bigfoot
Eugenie traces her interest in hairy hominids to an undergraduate conversation at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with primate specialist Neil Tappan, who remarked, drily, that he’d be happy to go on the second Yeti expedition — once someone came back from the first with an actual specimen. That gentle skepticism crystallized her professional thinking about what counts as evidence for a large undiscovered primate.
She uses Bigfoot as a convenient umbrella term for the whole family of giant-primate legends: the North American Sasquatch, the Himalayan Yeti, and their relatives worldwide. She notes that while scattered accounts exist from the 1700s onward, serious Bigfoot enthusiasm in the United States really picks up steam in the 1950s — a decade she’d also expect a folklorist to find interesting.
🔬 Tier One vs. Tier Two Questions
One of the episode’s most useful analytical moves: Blake’s distinction between tier-one questions (“Does Bigfoot exist?”) and tier-two questions (“What does Bigfoot eat in western Texas versus eastern Texas?”). Eugenie agrees the tiers are closely linked — tier-two ecological reasoning can sharply constrain the plausibility of tier one.
Her case study: a creature reportedly sighted across both the humid, swampy forests of east Texas and the arid scrublands of west Texas. A primate larger than a gorilla — requiring upward of 9,000 calories a day — simply cannot find sufficient food resources in both environments. Stack that against minimum viable population sizes, genetic drift, and the near-elimination of the American bison within thirty years of intensive hunting, and the arithmetic becomes unfriendly to Bigfoot’s survival odds.
She also distinguishes two camps of Bigfoot believers: those who treat it as a supernatural, shapeshifting entity (a conversation science simply can’t join) and those who claim it’s a real corporeal primate — perhaps a relict Gigantopithecus. It’s the second group with whom a productive, evidence-based dialogue is possible. She revises her famously quoted “5% chance on a good day” estimate downward in light of those stacked ecological improbabilities — while cheerfully admitting every physical anthropologist alive would do handsprings if Bigfoot turned out to be real.
🧬 The Evidence So Far
Every physical sample subjected to rigorous analysis — hair, scalp, alleged DNA — has resolved to a known mammal: horse, bison, bear, or similar. The Patterson–Gimlin film from Bluff Creek, California, remains the most famous piece of visual evidence; Eugenie’s assessment lands where most skeptics do — a tall person in a convincing suit. She draws a parallel to UFO evidence: a residual of unexplained cases doesn’t license the conclusion “therefore extraterrestrials”; it licenses “we don’t know yet.” Scientists, she notes, are comfortable with that phrase. Much of the general public is not.
On Gigantopithecus specifically: the fossil record consists almost entirely of teeth and mandibles — no post-cranial skeleton. That means locomotion (bipedal vs. quadrupedal), ranging behavior, and most ecological questions remain genuinely open. She mentions fellow physical anthropologist Jeff Meldrum, author of 📚 Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science 💵, as a serious scientist applying genuine methodology to the question — even if Eugenie finds the overall evidence unconvincing.
📖 Folklore, Diffusion, and the Frequency Problem
Does the sheer volume and global spread of Bigfoot sightings make the creature more likely to exist? Eugenie invokes the concept of cultural diffusion: just as flood myths and Cinderella variants appear in cultures worldwide without proving a universal flood or a real Cinderella, the spread of the big-hairy-primate idea tracks the movement of a compelling story rather than the movement of an actual animal. Arthur C. Clarke, Blake recalls from a 1950s Long John Nebel radio recording, made the same point about UFOs: high sighting frequency combined with zero physical evidence argues against an extraterrestrial explanation, not for it.
Sightings also cluster in conditions unfavorable to reliable observation — dim light, poor sight lines, obscured backgrounds — and nobody, Eugenie notes with some amusement, ever reports Bigfoot stepping out at midday in front of a Woolworths. The proliferation of high-quality smartphone cameras has not produced a single unambiguous photograph.
🏫 Monsters as a Teaching Tool
Far from being a waste of skeptical energy, Eugenie argues that pseudoscience — Bigfoot, dowsing, UFOs — is among the best available vehicles for teaching scientific method to students who are already interested in the subject. She praises materials from the Australian Skeptics on dowsing as classroom-ready tools for demonstrating blinding, controls, and hypothesis testing. She has actively encouraged teachers to use such examples as entry points into critical thinking.
The conversation touches on the influence of large states like Texas on national textbook content — and the potential of digital, modular publishing to break that grip. Blake notes that elementary school book fairs stock titles like So You Want to Catch a Bigfoot (tied to the Finding Bigfoot television series) but very little skeptically oriented material for young readers. Both hosts express admiration for Daniel Loxton‘s work filling that gap. Blake also recalls with fondness the monster books of Daniel Cohen — an early fellow of CSICOP — which, on adult re-reading, turn out to have a strong skeptical undercurrent.
🤝 On the Value of Diplomatic Skepticism
Eugenie offers what she calls her “sermon”: people accept ideas from those they trust and respect, not from those who belittle them. Research on science denialism — including work done at NCSE on why people reject evolution and climate change — consistently shows that trusted messengers matter as much as correct information. The image of a skeptic standing cross-armed saying “you’re all wrong” is both inaccurate and counterproductive. Catching more flies with honey, she suggests, is not just good manners; it’s good strategy.
She closes with a defense of skeptical pluralism: just as Hal Bidlack and James Randi performed an invaluable service exposing the fraudulent handheld “bomb-detection” devices sold to the U.S. military for use at Iraqi checkpoints, every skeptic contributes most where their own expertise and interest lie. Criticizing colleagues for investigating Bigfoot rather than war — or vice versa — misunderstands how a healthy skeptical community actually works.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction 💵 by Eugenie C. Scott
– 📚 Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools 💵 edited by Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch
– 📚 Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science 💵 by Jeff Meldrum
🔗 Related Links
– National Center for Science Education (NCSE)
– NCSE: Evolution resources for educators
– Patterson–Gimlin film (Wikipedia)
– Gigantopithecus (Wikipedia)
– Selman v. Cobb County School District — the evolution textbook sticker case
– ADE 651 — the fraudulent bomb-detection device exposed by Randi and Bidlack
– Cultural diffusion (Wikipedia)
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Dr. Eugenie Scott is an anthropologist but is probably most well known for her work fighting against Creationism in the American public education system as director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Perhaps less well-known is the fact that she’s long been interested in Bigfoot. In this episode of MonsterTalk we discuss Bigfoot, science promotion, and the usefulness of thinking about monsters in honing critical thinking skills.
Links for Eugenie Scott
Books by Eugenie Scott
The Debate about Bigfoot Skepticism
Responses
What is Skepticism?
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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