QUOTE
Opinion: They seek him here, they seek him there...
REHMAN RASHID - March 20
The Bigfoot phenomenon reflects a part of the defining human capacity for curiosity and wonder, without which we’d be apes, writes REHMAN RASHID.
THE trouble with Bigfoot is that he’s giving cryptozoology a bad name.
It’s ridiculous to presume that every life-form on Earth has been discovered, more so even than to imagine we might be the only form of intelligent life in the Universe. This is the worst kind of arrogance, borne on what we do not know.
But our ignorance of a creature’s existence has no bearing on whether or not it exists, and speculating on unknown fauna — "cryptozoology" — is part of the defining human capacity for curiosity and wonder, without which we’d be apes.
Once in a while, some fantastic discovery reminds us of how much we never knew. It happened in 1938 with the discovery of the "living fossil" coelacanth, believed extinct for 65 million years, and in 1976 with not just a new species but a whole new family of deep-sea sharks. (And they were five-metre-long monsters dubbed "Megamouths" — how on Earth had they remained completely unknown to science until the mid-1970s?)
About the same time, an entire new ecology was discovered at the bottom of the sea, at hydrothermal vents, where the enormous pressures, frigid temperatures and pitch darkness of the abyss proved no impediment to life, overturning centuries of the received wisdom that all life ultimately depended on photosynthesis. Just 30 years ago, we learned that life’s essential supplies can also be made where the sun doesn’t shine, by chemosynthesis.
And just 10 years ago in the remote montane forests of Laos and Vietnam, long inaccessible due to topography, poverty and war, two hitherto unknown species of deer were discovered: Beautiful velvet-antlered muntjacs that look like they belong in a Tolkien tale.
The boundaries of our knowledge constantly expand, as scientists and seekers delve ever deeper and venture ever further from the known to the unknown. Only two months ago, a Sumatran stream yielded a brand-new species of fish that may be the tiniest vertebrate yet discovered.
That special little event in natural history, however, was hereabouts drowned in the hullabaloo over the Johor Bigfoot, which had reached fever pitch since the reported sighting last November of a huge, hairy, bipedal beast in Kota Tinggi district.
The tiny Sumatran freshwater carp Paedocypris progenetica, about half the length of its name, may have penned a new footnote in the story of Life on Earth as we know it. The size-50 footprints, broken branches and matted vegetation in Johor have so far added no more than a few scrawled lines to the turgid reams of pseudo-science and outright chicanery spawned by this enduring, worldwide and absolutely silly "Bigfoot phenomenon".
For some reason, in a world replete with genuine wonders, people throughout recorded history have needed to believe in the presence among us of a large, hairy man-ape unknown to science. A throwback from our evolutionary past, perhaps, or a lost branch of the family tree, such as the diminutive 12,000-year-old human remains found in Flores in 2004 and instantly dubbed "Hobbits" by the Western media, much to the disgust of modern Indonesians.
Bigfeet — sorry, Bigfoots — have been reportedly sighted for centuries all over the world. They are known as Sasquatch in North America, Yeti in the Himalayas, Yeren in China, Yowie in Australia, and Sukhdev Singh in a certain quarter of Petaling Jaya.
All this while, people have been trying to meet them. With modern technology brought to the hunt in recent years, the number of sightings has escalated, their global distribution has widened, and the number of footprints so far collected would seem to indicate a world population of Bigfoots about the size of Nauru’s.
But no one has yet snapped a decent photo of one, or even found anything that could pass for a Bigfoot’s droppings, fur, artefacts, skeletal remains, or any other evidence of the presence anywhere of a three-metre-tall man-ape, anytime between 100,000 years ago and last night.
Oh yes, there was that infamous 16mm home movie by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, shot in northwest California in 1967 and featuring a few seconds’ footage of a Bigfoot loping off into the middle distance, even casting a nonchalant glance back at the camera.
The debate over whether that creature’s bouncy chest meant it was female was enough to divert attention from the fact that Patterson and Gimlin had made that film at the same time as Charlton Heston & Co were filming Planet of the Apes on location nearby.
The Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot was a man in a monkey suit, as surely as the Loch Ness Monster in its best-known photograph was a plasticine model stuck on a toy submarine.
As 1990s pop-culture icon Fox Mulder of The X-Files would have agreed: It’s about wanting to believe.
No less an eminence than the late great naturalist Sir Peter Scott so wanted to believe a set of images made in 1972, purportedly of a mysterious creature in Loch Ness, that he formally named the beast Nessiteras rhombopteryx. Ostensibly Latin for "the wonder of Ness with the kite-shaped fin", the name was later decrypted as a perfect anagram for "moNster hoax by sir peter s". Coincidence? Maybe.
Movie tie-ins are not unknown in these matters. The re-make of King Kong was showing in local cineplexes when the Johor Bigfoot made its appearance late last year, again suggesting the power of suggestion. But appear it reportedly did, to Orang Asli, jungle-fringe villagers and weekend hikers with a common propensity to believe in the paranormal, supernatural, or plainly implausible.
If it wasn’t the Bigfoot, it would be the "toyol" or some such thing, like the crudely carved voodoo doll in a bottle found by a Kuala Pahang fisherman earlier this month, which immediately drew droves of witch doctors and sundry weirdos to that hapless estuarine village in search of more heebie-jeebie flotsam.
Rank superstition is enough of a debilitation to any religion, culture and society, but this Bigfoot thing is something else again. These sightings, footprints and what-not are as readily attributable to mistaken identity, hallucination or hoax as to anything else imaginable.
Ironically, this is all the more reason to support those expeditions now barging through the forests of Johor looking for Bigfoot. Searching for what isn’t there may pay dividends in finding what is — unless such rare wonders as the world’s tiniest vertebrate end up crushed beneath the big feet of Bigfoot-hunters.
In considering the existence or otherwise of cryptic creatures, however, the principle of "Occam’s Razor" is useful: It holds that the obvious explanation is usually the right one. ("If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.") As US Vice-President Dick Cheney learned last month, when he failed to discern a hunting buddy from a covey of quail inviting buckshot, people can easily be mistaken about what they hear and see.
This doesn’t stop them seeing what they want to see, alas, and what the gullible are prepared to believe they see could make a monkey of anyone.
REHMAN RASHID - March 20
The Bigfoot phenomenon reflects a part of the defining human capacity for curiosity and wonder, without which we’d be apes, writes REHMAN RASHID.
THE trouble with Bigfoot is that he’s giving cryptozoology a bad name.
It’s ridiculous to presume that every life-form on Earth has been discovered, more so even than to imagine we might be the only form of intelligent life in the Universe. This is the worst kind of arrogance, borne on what we do not know.
But our ignorance of a creature’s existence has no bearing on whether or not it exists, and speculating on unknown fauna — "cryptozoology" — is part of the defining human capacity for curiosity and wonder, without which we’d be apes.
Once in a while, some fantastic discovery reminds us of how much we never knew. It happened in 1938 with the discovery of the "living fossil" coelacanth, believed extinct for 65 million years, and in 1976 with not just a new species but a whole new family of deep-sea sharks. (And they were five-metre-long monsters dubbed "Megamouths" — how on Earth had they remained completely unknown to science until the mid-1970s?)
About the same time, an entire new ecology was discovered at the bottom of the sea, at hydrothermal vents, where the enormous pressures, frigid temperatures and pitch darkness of the abyss proved no impediment to life, overturning centuries of the received wisdom that all life ultimately depended on photosynthesis. Just 30 years ago, we learned that life’s essential supplies can also be made where the sun doesn’t shine, by chemosynthesis.
And just 10 years ago in the remote montane forests of Laos and Vietnam, long inaccessible due to topography, poverty and war, two hitherto unknown species of deer were discovered: Beautiful velvet-antlered muntjacs that look like they belong in a Tolkien tale.
The boundaries of our knowledge constantly expand, as scientists and seekers delve ever deeper and venture ever further from the known to the unknown. Only two months ago, a Sumatran stream yielded a brand-new species of fish that may be the tiniest vertebrate yet discovered.
That special little event in natural history, however, was hereabouts drowned in the hullabaloo over the Johor Bigfoot, which had reached fever pitch since the reported sighting last November of a huge, hairy, bipedal beast in Kota Tinggi district.
The tiny Sumatran freshwater carp Paedocypris progenetica, about half the length of its name, may have penned a new footnote in the story of Life on Earth as we know it. The size-50 footprints, broken branches and matted vegetation in Johor have so far added no more than a few scrawled lines to the turgid reams of pseudo-science and outright chicanery spawned by this enduring, worldwide and absolutely silly "Bigfoot phenomenon".
For some reason, in a world replete with genuine wonders, people throughout recorded history have needed to believe in the presence among us of a large, hairy man-ape unknown to science. A throwback from our evolutionary past, perhaps, or a lost branch of the family tree, such as the diminutive 12,000-year-old human remains found in Flores in 2004 and instantly dubbed "Hobbits" by the Western media, much to the disgust of modern Indonesians.
Bigfeet — sorry, Bigfoots — have been reportedly sighted for centuries all over the world. They are known as Sasquatch in North America, Yeti in the Himalayas, Yeren in China, Yowie in Australia, and Sukhdev Singh in a certain quarter of Petaling Jaya.
All this while, people have been trying to meet them. With modern technology brought to the hunt in recent years, the number of sightings has escalated, their global distribution has widened, and the number of footprints so far collected would seem to indicate a world population of Bigfoots about the size of Nauru’s.
But no one has yet snapped a decent photo of one, or even found anything that could pass for a Bigfoot’s droppings, fur, artefacts, skeletal remains, or any other evidence of the presence anywhere of a three-metre-tall man-ape, anytime between 100,000 years ago and last night.
Oh yes, there was that infamous 16mm home movie by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, shot in northwest California in 1967 and featuring a few seconds’ footage of a Bigfoot loping off into the middle distance, even casting a nonchalant glance back at the camera.
The debate over whether that creature’s bouncy chest meant it was female was enough to divert attention from the fact that Patterson and Gimlin had made that film at the same time as Charlton Heston & Co were filming Planet of the Apes on location nearby.
The Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot was a man in a monkey suit, as surely as the Loch Ness Monster in its best-known photograph was a plasticine model stuck on a toy submarine.
As 1990s pop-culture icon Fox Mulder of The X-Files would have agreed: It’s about wanting to believe.
No less an eminence than the late great naturalist Sir Peter Scott so wanted to believe a set of images made in 1972, purportedly of a mysterious creature in Loch Ness, that he formally named the beast Nessiteras rhombopteryx. Ostensibly Latin for "the wonder of Ness with the kite-shaped fin", the name was later decrypted as a perfect anagram for "moNster hoax by sir peter s". Coincidence? Maybe.
Movie tie-ins are not unknown in these matters. The re-make of King Kong was showing in local cineplexes when the Johor Bigfoot made its appearance late last year, again suggesting the power of suggestion. But appear it reportedly did, to Orang Asli, jungle-fringe villagers and weekend hikers with a common propensity to believe in the paranormal, supernatural, or plainly implausible.
If it wasn’t the Bigfoot, it would be the "toyol" or some such thing, like the crudely carved voodoo doll in a bottle found by a Kuala Pahang fisherman earlier this month, which immediately drew droves of witch doctors and sundry weirdos to that hapless estuarine village in search of more heebie-jeebie flotsam.
Rank superstition is enough of a debilitation to any religion, culture and society, but this Bigfoot thing is something else again. These sightings, footprints and what-not are as readily attributable to mistaken identity, hallucination or hoax as to anything else imaginable.
Ironically, this is all the more reason to support those expeditions now barging through the forests of Johor looking for Bigfoot. Searching for what isn’t there may pay dividends in finding what is — unless such rare wonders as the world’s tiniest vertebrate end up crushed beneath the big feet of Bigfoot-hunters.
In considering the existence or otherwise of cryptic creatures, however, the principle of "Occam’s Razor" is useful: It holds that the obvious explanation is usually the right one. ("If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.") As US Vice-President Dick Cheney learned last month, when he failed to discern a hunting buddy from a covey of quail inviting buckshot, people can easily be mistaken about what they hear and see.
This doesn’t stop them seeing what they want to see, alas, and what the gullible are prepared to believe they see could make a monkey of anyone.