Last Call
Beston, Paul
G rowing up in the 1970s, I was a Bigfoot fanatic. I took out every book in the library and read eyewitness accounts to my father, who of course scoffed from behind his newspaper. Finally I...
...Reading some of the accounts of sightings on the Web—"saw Bigfoot crossing neighbor's lawn...
...He was democracy's monster, but the last recount has come in...
...Michael Wallace says it was probably his own mother in a monkey suit...
...The elder Wallace, who owned a construction company, decided to put a scare into building-site thieves by carving sixteen-inch wooden "feet" and tracking around in them...
...For another, he had the best name"Bigfoot " tells you all you need to know...
...Sasquatch works almost as well, resonating with "squash?' You get the idea...
...Ray Wallace decided not to reveal his prank...
...Without Wallace, they would have had to get real jobs...
...We became less interested in proving that hoaxes were real, and more interested in proving that real events were hoaxes...
...It all started innocently enough...
...saw dark Bigfoot behind barn at dusk"—one is struck by the sheer number of people who became invested in the phenomenon...
...The gimmick seemed to work...
...First described in Native American legends, he entered popular culture in 1958 and quickly eclipsed his Old World peers, becoming as American as Elvis, as omnipresent as McDonald's...
...The story of his rise and fall is a classic American tale of ingenuity, chutzpah, and, yes, innocence...
...James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, in one of those accidentally hilarious sentences that populate reference books...
...Bigfoot was available to all...
...Only the Abominable Snowman (a.k.a...
...In the end, Bigfoot did not stand up under the scrutiny to which a democratic society subjects every claim...
...Then a local paper came around to investigate, and one of its reporters dubbed the phenomenon "Bigfoot...
...The '60s and '70s were Bigfoot's golden era...
...In the finest tradition of American marketing, the name, described the product...
...Sasquatch) was actually the new kid on the block...
...Wallace's son, Michael, has confessed that his father cooked up Bigfoot and was behind many of the "sightings?' The most celebrated piece of Bigfoot lore, a twenty-eight-second film shot by hunter Roger Patterson in 1967, purportedly showed a female Bigfoot fleeing...
...The popular culture that nurtured him expected results, and none were forthcoming...
...He brought out the Bigfoot suit for occasional film and photo shoots...
...The resulting frenzy spread quickly to the rest of the country...
...He lumbered across postwar America, giving a tease of wonder to a triumphant but troubled people...
...Finally I challenged him...
...In the end, his forty-year career helped remind Americans how free we are—free to doubt, free to believe, free to explore for ourselves until we've made up our own minds...
...If you need a concession speech, Big Fella, my rates are low...
...For one thing, he had the American media...
...Bigfoot quickly took on the democratic traits of his country: wherever there were woods, you had a shot at seeing him...
...Bigfoot's advantages over his older brethren were many...
...Hairy hominids have been reported in nearly every state in the nation?' writes the St...
...In one of those immortal replies fathers sometimes make, he answered: "Do you really think, Paul, that a country that sent a man to the moon couldn't find a hairy ape walking around in the woods...
...He made more footprints and wrote countless letters proclaiming Bigfoot's existence...
...But coupled with a similar debunking in 1994 of the Loch Ness Monster, the Big Three of twentieth-century monsters are now officially endangered...
...For those without the good fortune of a skeptical father, the death of eighty-four-year-old Ray L. Wallace last fall might be instructive...
...No doubt many of these "eyewitnesses" were hoaxers as well, but others probably came by their accounts honestly...
...Yeti) still thrives...
...Nessie wasbound to one God-forsaken lake, Yeti to distant, forbidding mountains...
...There was the Patterson film, Bigfoot action figures, and his command performance: an appearance on The Six Million Dollar Man, played by Andre the Giant...
...the thieves went elsewhere...
...Ray Wallace, after his initial trepidation, decided to ride the wave and become a Sasquatch entrepreneur...
...Now that image has been removed from all but the most credulous among us: Which doesn't change the fact that Bigfoot brought excitement and intrigue to millions, and hurt no one...
...Like his rise, Bigfoot's slow decline was in large part due to democracy...
...Naturally enough, Bigfoot became an industry, inspiring books, documentaries, research centers, expeditions...
...My Bigfoot illusions came crashing down forever in the face of his unassailable common sense...
...Added to that was a coarsening of American interests, from fantasies to conspiracy theories—JFK, Roswell, "faked" moonlandings...
...Throw in some marketing and the leisure-time fantasies of an affluent people, and you have the recipe for stardom...
...Even with all the hoaxing, innocence was at the heart of the Big-foot story...
...A generation of "crypto-zoologists" is forever indebted to him...
...The confession hardly comes as a surprise...
...Chalk up another one for American improvisation...
...They went camping, or took out the trash, and saw something, or thought they saw something...
...With the myth in their heads, they had an image to anchor a muddled experience...
...Bigfoot (a.k.a...
Vol. 36 • January 2003 • No. 1
