Brian came home from the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Festival with something sitting on his chest, and this letter is what came out of it. It is an honest, sometimes uncomfortable piece of thinking about what is happening in the Sasquatch field right now, and where it could end up if we do not pay attention. The piece opens with the people.
The young woman from Ohio who waited until the end of the day to tell him about something she heard on her grandparents' farm when she was thirteen. The man from southeastern Ohio with an audio file on his phone, hoping somebody would tell him it was real. The woman from eastern Kentucky with her folder of photographs and her arrangement of stones. The man who explained, with complete sincerity, that Sasquatch can open interdimensional portals.
The woman who believes they live inside trees. The young man with the dogman map in his head. These are not strange people. They are kind, ordinary, often quite intelligent. And what they believe has been shaped, in ways most of them do not see, by an environment that rewards the spectacular and punishes the careful.
From there, Brian works through why we believe what we believe. He talks about the pattern-recognition machinery in the human brain and what happens when you drop that machinery into a world of trail cameras and YouTube algorithms.
He talks about the human need for meaning, and the quiet pull toward the more meaningful explanation when the simpler one is sitting right in front of us. He talks about the role of community, and what it costs a person to question a belief that has become part of how they belong. And he talks, plainly, about the money in this field, and the incentive structure that rewards extraordinary claims without rewarding extraordinary evidence.
He looks at what happened to UFO research in the nineteen seventies as a warning. A real question, taken seriously by serious people, that collapsed under the weight of louder voices and wilder claims, and spent forty years on the margins before the door cracked open again. He does not want that to happen here. He does not think it has to.The letter gets sharp on two subjects. The first is the Missing four-one-one narrative, and what it means to imply, without evidence, that an unconfirmed creature is responsible for the disappearance of real people from real families. The second is the Patterson-Gimlin Film and the controversy that has erupted around it this past year.
Brian holds his position. He has not seen the documentary. He will not render judgment until he has. But he has plenty to say about what the controversy itself has revealed about the community. Drawing on his sixteen years in law enforcement, Brian spends time on what witnesses are and what they are not, and why taking a witness seriously means doing more than just believing them. He is honest about how his own thinking has changed over nearly forty years in this field, including the things he used to believe and has since had to set down.
And he lands, finally, on the choice every one of us makes every time we sit down with a piece of evidence or a story or a podcast. Are we going to reward extraordinary claims with extraordinary belief, or are we going to reward them with extraordinary scrutiny. This one is long, and it is personal, and it is going to make some people in the community uncomfortable.
Brian's okay with that. He thinks the field is worth more than the place it is drifting toward, and he thinks the only way to get there is to start telling the truth about where we actually are.
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