“I have droppings of someone who saw bigfoot.” – Futurama
I think this happened to me in the summer of 1982, but I don’t remember when, or where I was. Pictured (green abductor): Brett Kavanaugh.
I was staring straight up at the ceiling in my bedroom, under the seven* heavy quilts that made the -40°F nights comfortable in my unheated** bedroom, every muscle tense. This was what terror felt like.
I had seen him, or at least his glowing red eyes, on the small hill that was visible 1,175 feet from my bedroom window. And I knew that he was headed toward me. I knew that he had seen me.
I couldn’t see him headed toward me since I was too scared to look out the window, but I knew his inhuman, ground-devouring strides would be taking him to my window soon enough. And then? What would he do?
I gradually fell asleep, as the adrenaline drained from my nine-year-old bloodstream. I remember wondering as I dozed off how exactly I knew that the hill was exactly 1,175 feet from my back window, and then I remembered. Google® Maps™.
Okay, I didn’t know that it was 1,175 feet from my window until just now when I measured it on Google® Maps©. But it was uncomfortably close.
What, though, was it?
It was bigfoot. I had been reading a UFO magazine that day. The UFO magazine had several helpful facts for me:
- Bigfoot was, in fact, not a creature from Earth at all. Bigfoot was an alien.
- Bigfoot was a psychic alien.
- Bigfoot, the psychic alien, had glowing red eyes.
- Bigfoot was known to inhabit the hills near where I lived. Since I lived in the hills – the exact hills the little gray and white map in the pulp UFO magazine had shaded as “high bigfeet activity areas associated with alien psychic bigfeet that will probably kill, dismember, and eat wee John Wilder in his sleep, and if he’s lucky, in that order.”
- Okay, the graph didn’t say they would kill, dismember and eat people, but it did talk about increasing incidents of violence against people.
So, I was a little tired when I went off to school the next day. Thankfully, I also concluded that the glowing red eyes might have been something else, like a reflection in the window. Or maybe that was a memory that psychic bigfoot put into my nine-year-old brain?
Really, it had been quite a long time since I was allowed to be scared, specifically since the night when I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door at 2AM and Pop Wilder made it clear that my presence was no longer requested at 2AM waking him up because I was scared. At that point, I became more afraid of what Pop Wilder would do to me versus anything a psychic bigfoot could do. Besides, I was sure Pop Wilder was real.
Alien psychic bigfeet? Not so sure that they existed.
Farrah kept me safe from the bigfeet. And made me feel real funny when I was 13.
Honestly, after this one night of terror I didn’t give bigfoot a whole lot of thought. My focus shifted to girls, where huge feet and lots of hair wasn’t exactly a selling point for me.
Words only a teenage male bigfoot would type into Google®.
So, I grew up. Then one day, I heard the words again . . . Alien Psychic Bigfoot.
The Mrs. and I were travelling across country, and listening to a radio program as we drove through a cool high desert night. A guest was on talk radio, patiently explaining that he was a bigfoot researcher, but more specifically, a bigfoot researcher that had the theory that bigfoot wasn’t a critter, it was, instead, a some sort of alien creation, just like in the UFO magazine from my youth.
But it gets better.
You’d think that the biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers would be skeptics? No.
The biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers is . . . bigfoot researchers that have a different theory than them.
So, if you’re in the “bigfoot is just an animal that we haven’t found conclusive evidence for yet” camp then your biggest enemy is the “bigfoot is a psychic alien” guy.
And vice versa.
This makes me laugh, inside. But it’s a truism of life. When people believe in something, their biggest enemy isn’t someone who doesn’t believe, it’s someone who believes, but just a little bit differently than them, most often over something that doesn’t have any real bearings on the truth of their belief.
I was talking about a particular Christian denomination with a friend.
He asked, “Are they dunkers or splashers?” Dunkers are those that baptize by immersing the baptized into water, while splashers use a Papal-Approved® Super-Soaker™ to baptize.
I replied, “I have no idea.”
“It’s important, you know.”
And that’s always amused me – the biggest fights are about the smallest things, often with the people that are closest to you in belief.
So I guess that’s the thing that I learned when alien psychic bigfoot held me in its hairy loving arms: love one another – it’s the only way to get to a true inner and outer peace. Except for the “bigfoot is just a critter we don’t have proof of” people – don’t love them. They’re awful.***
To be clear, I do not claim to have seen a real bigfoot. I also do not claim to have seen a UFO, except the band, UFO, and them only on YouTube®.
*Yes. Seven is an excessive number of quilts. It was also quite warm.
**The bedroom was unheated because I turned off the electric baseboard heaters, and, in an escalating war with Ma Wilder, I eventually flipped the breakers off. Eventually she got the message. I like/liked it cold. I even had the windows cracked sometimes when it was below zero. I was an awful child.
***Just kidding. I don’t really care. My current bet is they’re both wrong.
