“Is Anyone Feeling Closer To Sasquatch Discovery?”
What Squatchers Discuss Online
For Bigfoot believers who come to sit around the virtual campfire on BigfootForums.com, there is one major idea they can all agree on: Sasquatch is real and it is a species of undiscovered apes living in North America. Other than that unshakeable cornerstone of membership, everything else is up for debate. They can’t even agree on the name of the creatures! So what does a typical day on BigfootForums look like?
Campfire Tussles
On the forums, in the General Discussion section, as at a potluck, members bring their grudges, their old encounters, their favorite theories for the group to chew on, stew over, and mull. Some are certain recipes for a showdown. Many of the users are “pro-kill,” meaning that when they go out looking for Sasquatch, they’re bringing their guns and hunting dogs. Others are against such a measure, and argue for capture, for video footage, for anything but the killing of an endangered animal. A thread that starts with a fairly simple question, “What’s the best camera for outdoor use?” can set off a grand old melee.
Another surefire way to start a fight is to bring up another website, BFRO.net. BFRO stands for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, and boy do they think they run the Bigfoot community online. Their founder, Matt Moneymaker (yes, this is the name he was born with) was one of the main people behind the Animal Planet TV show Finding Bigfoot, which brought the Bigfoot community, both online and off, into greater mainstream culture. So the hardcore Squatchers who have been around forever, and are also usually pro-kill, resent the success, money, and the anti-kill/pro-capture people behind the BFRO. Threads asking for opinions on the site regularly spiral into personal attacks and are locked by mods.
Above, you can see that this particular thread, “Opinions on the BFRO?” is locked after an argument escalated from mild critiques of the organization to scorched earth insults and anger. It all began when one user said “BFRO? A pipeline to the feds,” and then proceeded in other posts to attack various members of the larger Squatcher community with tons of baseless claims of alcoholism, theft, and more.
Squatcher Solidarity
It’s not all flame wars and below the belt attacks between users on BigfootForums.com. Often, users bond by sharing their fan art, by detailing their latest hunt out in the woods, or politely discussing and critiquing evolutionary theory, how and where Sasquatch branched off from the primate family tree, and how closely related they are to homo sapiens or neanderthals.
But mostly, these users gather to commiserate and encourage each other. In a thread titled, as this post is, “Is Anyone Feeling Closer To Bigfoot Discovery?” Squatchers admit that sometimes they feel dispirited or suffer from a lack of faith that one day Bigfoot’s existence will be uncategorically proved, with one user, MIB, a moderator in training, actually writing that “Nope … not exactly stalled out, but pretty nearly. I simply don’t spend the time in the woods I did up ’til about 3 years ago.” Others tell those questioning the creed to buck up, buttercup, because just like the CIA confirmed that aliens are real a few years ago (a very rash and inaccurate way of framing a series of military reports that admitted that they can’t explain a few small instances of unidentified aircraft), the government will soon have to buckle to public pressure and reveal where the Sasquatches are.
Still, the fact that these questions keep appearing, on their own as new threads or in the middle of someone else’s questions about the best Sasquatch bait, points to one reason why Squatchers keep the campfire chat of BigfootForums.com going. No one there wants to say that Sasquatch isn’t real, but they can admit to a lack of hope in finding them, knowing that their friends, their allies, their fellow believers, will put another log on the fire, put their arm around them, and tell them about the time their uncle saw a mysterious figure out in the woods, and say, wouldn’t you know, it just so happened to look and sound exactly like a Sasquatch…
