• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Bigfoot before the Internet

William Parcher

Show me the monkey!
William Parcher
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
Messages
27,471
What was Bigfootery like before the Internet and what we see now?

I take for granted that Bigfooters can communicate and exchange things with each other in seconds now and even around the world. Things like the Georgia Boys Hoax, Jacobs Creature, Munns Report, Ketchum DNA Fiasco, etc. would seem to need something like the Web to get started and sustain any momentum. Now just about any Footer or Skeptic can engage in rapid message exchange at any hour of the day or night.

How did Bigfoot believers find each other? How did they exchange stories and experiences? I understand there were some club newsletters but how did you find those? Has the Internet caused a great increase in Bigfoot popularity and submission of encounter reports? I know at least one or two members here were involved or interested back then.
 
I think the internet helped Bigfootery grow into the disaster it is today. People who don't step out into the woods are suddenly becoming habituators from their own home or Youtube heroes who somehow have an experience every time they're around a bunch of trees. Hoaxers like Melba Ketchum and Rick Dyer use the internet to their advantage. Come to think of it, hoaxing and the internet go hand in hand. It's a great way to fool thousands and milk money from the gullible. It turned the question of Bigfoot into the cult of Bigfootery.
 
I've had an 'interest' in Bigfoot since 1968, when my dad brought home a borrowed copy of the infamous Feb. issue of Argosy magazine (still have it and another one too). "Wait, did they say a BIG HAIRY APE-MAN was runnin' around the woods up north?" I was hooked. I'd then regularly cruise the bookstores for anything new and actually did buy all the books and magazines (through the years) that I could get my hands on, including the standards by Green, Napier, Byrne, Slate et al. Several of which I loaned out over the years never to be seen again. I randomly discussed it casually amongst my friends, but I surely don't remember anyone having the same degree of interest I did. I told numerous scary Bigfoot stories during many a backpacking trip in the mid/late 1970s. In the late '80s had a guy who worked for me tell me he'd seen one at a lake in Washington when he was a kid. Or that he was pretty sure he'd seen one. And that's just about it.

In all honesty, potentially true 'scary monster stories' were all that I really wanted. And although I wasn't a true skeptic during that time, I have never been wholly convinced they existed. Only that it would be way ******* cool if they did. :)

Then on Dec. 28, 1995 at about 6:45 PM, I get the Internet. At about 6:46 PM I was looking for Bigfoot on it. :eye-poppi
 
Surely the issue of Bigfoot was settled back in the 1970s in The Six Million Dollar Man? ;)

On my side of the Pond, we still don't hear much about Bigfoot, but conspiracy/paranormal types in general have been amplified by the internet.

Prior to the internet, these people were generally social misfits who had very few platforms to spread their views. Most of them spent their time writing letters to newspapers and people in the public eye, which were usually long, rambling, incoherent, full of strange capitalisations and often in green ink apparently. Hence the term "green ink brigade". Others would stand on a soapbox, or wearing sandwich boards with messages like "The end is nigh", trying to shout their ideas to a world that didn't care.

But the internet changed all that. Now they could find people just as nutty as themselves, so they didn't feel as isolated any more and started to feel strength in numbers. The internet gave a platform to anyone who could create a web page, regardless of skill in terms of either design or content. With the advent of Geocities and free webspace from ISPs with basic site-building tools, they didn't even need any HTML skills by the mid-90s (and boy, did it show on those Geocities sites - oh, my eyes! :eek:)

Now I think this aspect of the internet is still one of its strengths - but I despair of the lack of critical thinking skills among people exposed to the internet. There are far too many people with internet access who are incapable of distinguishing between credible sources and worthless ones, and with no understanding of logical fallacies. Sadly, I'm finding this tendency is getting worse, not better, over time. :(
 
I think I first started thinking about bigfoot/sasquatch after seeing a guy with a t-shirt with the BFRO logo on it. This seems to me to be about 5 years ago which means it's probably at least 6 years ago because that's the way things go for me. I struck up a conversation with this person and found him to be an enthusiastic believer and went home with the intent of looking up all the goofy stuff he told me. It was indeed the internet that, in about 2 hours, showed me that no such critter was remotely possible. I think the internet is what drives the current perveyers of woo and also makes it possible for the Dyers and Ketchums of the world to exist as quasi famous. I have, mostly at a younger age, treked some of the wilder parts of North America without ever seeing anything that resembles bigfoot but I have seen most of the things that have been mistaken for it. The current silliness that comes from the pro bigfoot camp I think reflects an actual decline in true belief and a kind of desperation on the part of those who still do. The Ketchum fiasco certainly reflects that and was comepletely driven by the internet. The idea that many of these people spend most of their weekends searching for a mythical creature in the woods is greatly overstated; they spend most of their "researching" time in front of a computer. I think I lost the OP in this novel, but, I guess I think before the internet bigfoot ideas and theories were much more locally held until the intrenet gave some of them a way to make money at it or provide them with 15 minutes of fame.
 
In the late 70's it was often word-of-mouth stories. My older cousin used to tell me there was 'Bigfoot in the woods behind his house'. So what would we do? we would walk out towards the woods, and we would pretend we saw Bigfoot, we would make fake Bigfoot tracks and pretend we were tracking Bigfoot. This was probably around the time Six Million Dollar Man, and In Search Of... were on the Tee Vee.

That is the extent of my Pre-Internet Bigfoot experience.

When I thought I encountered a Bigfoot, during an early morning hunt, I started searching the internet and rationalizing my experience to match other's BF experiences. I had not learned about sleep-disorders, Hynagogic Hallucinations and things like that at that time. Bigfoot was the easy answer. And it prevented me from having to admit I hallucinated something smashing trees behind me while I was paralyzed in my hunting spot.
 
I recall reading a scholarly book on the possibility of Bigfoot back in perhaps the late 70s. It was pretty decent, as I recall... The author dismissing "Yeti" out of hand due to lack of anything for the poor critter to eat....
However accepting at least the possibility of some presence in the Pacific Northwest due to the large expanse of relative wilderness.
However, as I recall he also decried the lack of any evidence.

We had a very brief fling with "Momo" or the "Missouri Monster" back around then... Quickly determined to be hoaxing by University of Missouri frat boys.
 
OntarioSquatch said:
I think the internet helped Bigfootery grow into the disaster it is today. People who don't step out into the woods are suddenly becoming habituators from their own home or Youtube heroes who somehow have an experience every time they're around a bunch of trees. Hoaxers like Melba Ketchum and Rick Dyer use the internet to their advantage. Come to think of it, hoaxing and the internet go hand in hand. It's a great way to fool thousands and milk money from the gullible. It turned the question of Bigfoot into the cult of Bigfootery.
Click to expand...

It would seem that Bigfooters in the pre-Internet days could have excluded skeptics and deniers more effectively. It would have been difficult for skeptics to really engage the believers in any kind of meaningful forum. I wonder if that period (pre-Internet) without the constant presence of skeptics was necessary to get a good base of convicted believers to carry into the Internet age. Back then you had Beckjord doing research on a flesh and blood Bigfoot and he wasn't regarded as a kook (afaik). Also Biscardi was a research leader.

It may have been a time when hoaxers got more free passes because there was just no way to effectively witch hunt them within minutes like we can now.
 
Robrob said:
Newsletters and conventions.
Click to expand...

How were those advertised? Lets say a local Kentucky guy saw a group if Bigfoots up in the hills where he lived. How would he become a Bigfooter and mingle with others who had also seen them?
 
Was it like Fantasy Football before the internet? Did you mail in your sightings, and then people write you letters back? I had a friend in college who played fantasy football by snail-mail. Talk about frustrating.
 
Like many, my first exposure to this cryptid came through the Argosy (or perhaps Saga) stills; to be frank, I liked their occasional cheesecake layouts better. I was a budding coureur des bois at the time as were many of my friends and together we just couldn't figure how such a thing had avoided getting plugged or arrowed.

It didn't even make for a scary campfire story amoung our group, though I understand why it may have for some.
 
People could get organized pretty well pre-Internet if they wanted to. In my experience, the great flourish of local bird clubs and Audubon Society chapters took place in the 1950s. They seemed to start with one or more ringleaders who would host like-minded people in their homes to talk birds and plan the next local field trip. They collected data that grew from notebooks to filing cabinets, in just about every case started monthly newsletters, and in a lot of places started their own journals. In a lot of ways, people were even better connected then because they actually saw each other regularly, as opposed to simply sending emails or Facebook updates like we do today.
 
The Shrike said:
In a lot of ways, people were even better connected then because they actually saw each other regularly, as opposed to simply sending emails or Facebook updates like we do today.
Click to expand...

When Bigfooters meet in person they can't call out hoaxers and liars. That starts fist fights. Bigfootery has a serious problem because it can't effectively purge itself of hoaxes. It could have only been worse in the old days.
 
I grew up by Lake Tahoe, and there was a Bigfoot club in Incline Village when I was a kid. That was around the same time as the PGF. I recall one of the members showing it to us in school and talking about BF sightings in the Sierra Nevadas. I'm sure it was a group of guys mostly swapping stories with the occasional "expedition" into the Tahoe forest. The group probably still exists, second generations, etc.
 
During the 70s and 80s (mostly the 70s), the magazine racks were constantly populated with stories of Bigfoot (and other popular fads), Books, TV specials and shows (In Search Of...) made Bigfoot believable, but I never saw anything that debunked it. What was a young skeptic to do?

With the internet upon us, the Bigfooters have a much larger audience, but the skeptics now have a much bigger forum to get their points across, something they sadly lacked before the internet.
 
HarryHenderson said:
Then on Dec. 28, 1995 at about 6:45 PM, I get the Internet. At about 6:46 PM I was looking for Bigfoot porn on it. :eye-poppi
Click to expand...

Let's be honest with ourselves. You're among friends. ;)


In all seriousness, I think William Parcher has hit on something. Pre-internet, it would have been easier to keep oneself away from unwanted counter-beliefs. Meanie-head skeptics would not have been able to insert themselves in the conversation and successfully confront the believers.

For me, I first came across Bigfoot in the Six Million Dollar Man and In Search Of. I enjoyed the stories and really wanted it to be real. But ultimately, the truth is more important.
 
My Dad thought going to the Movies would be a way to kill some time. So he took me a 9 year old to see the Legend of Boggy Creek, I wouldn't go outside the rest of the summer.
What a waste of a summer.

That is the first time I ever heard of Bigfoot.
 
Last edited:
In the early days of digital communications we had email mailing lists like the IVBC, Bulletin Board Systems, and Usenet newsgroups like alt.bigfoot.

In the mid 90's I created a bigfoot webpage based on John Green's Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. Ran the site for something like 6 years or so.

In the pre-internet days though, it was mostly just folks like myself who read the books about bigfoot (Green, Napier, Byrne, etc.), and watched the cheezy bigfoot movies that came out in the mid-70's.

RayG
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom