Can Bigfoot Really Be Debunked?
Scot Violette Takes A Scientific Approach To Finding Sasquatch & Compiled His Research In A Website Containing A Database Of Sightings
It started at the age of 7. Scot Violette was at the movie theatre in the late 60s. “Back then they played short films before the movies, along with previews,” explains Violette, “And I saw the Patterson film and I was instantly interested.” The Patterson film he is referring to is called the Patterson-Gimlin film - a short film that supposedly shows an unidentified creature, who Patterson and Gimlin call Bigfoot. Whether the film was fact or hoax doesn’t seem to mean much to Violette - it just started his interest in the search for Bigfoot. “I was basically raised in the woods and I spent a lot of time there,” recalls Violette.
The search for Bigfoot never subsided much for Violette, though he lived most of his life providing for his family. “I was always looking for footprints and things, but eventually I got married, then had kids, and spent time in the army and did a few tours of Iraq during Desert Storm,” recalls Violette. When his kids went to college, though, is when Violette decided to do the same. “I wanted to take the search more seriously and scientifically,” he explains. Violette got a degree in anthropology and has seriously been pursuing his search for about the last 10 years. “My kids sometimes look at me with raised eyebrows,” he chuckles, “but they are generally supportive. My eldest will come out with me tracking and he doesn’t really believe, but doesn’t disbelieve either.”
Violette lives in Baker City in eastern Oregon, which is the area where many Bigfoot sightings take place - in the Blue Mountains. He says he has a focused system on his regular expeditions out in the mountains. “We have a small camper we call the ‘squatch pod,’” he explains, “which has 8 cameras in it that has a enough space and battery power to record day and night for 30 days.” Violette says they haven’t recorded any visuals of abnormal animals, however they have caught some peculiar audio. “We also found a footprint about 4 weeks ago, along with some other older footprints,” he explains, “They are about 15 inches long with a 6 foot stride.”
Violette approaches his interest scientifically and helps others to do the same. His website, squatchoregon.com, is a database of sightings of Bigfoot in Oregon, California, and Washington. He also sets up a booth at festivals. “We try to give people an opportunity to record their experiences with Bigfoot and organize it into credible dates and times to try and focus our research at certain places,” he explains.
Being interested in Bigfoot for such a long time has led to a lot of knowledge from previous research and recorded sightings. “There are commonalities with reports that I consider credible,” Violette says, “certain sounds and smells and the way Bigfoot looks help.” He also sees many reports that are probably not credible. “When you get a report saying that Bigfoot walked into a tree that is a teleport to other dimensions, you question that,” he laughs.
A lot of common reasoning is given by scientists for Bigfoot not existing, and Violette has some valid questions to scientific consensus. First, are the frequency of sightings. There are thousands of sightings of Bigfoot, plus a whole history surrounding it. “Every single Native American tribe has a Bigfoot legend,” explains Violette, “and, though legends have many things fabricated, they are usually founded on some truth.” Another question he refutes is the fact that there has never been a Bigfoot body found. “One possibility is that they bury their dead,” Violette says, “but there is another possibility, too: natural-death animal bodies are extremely hard to find.” He sites an anthropology professor in Washington who presented an interesting challenge to find a naturally deceased bear and no one was able to do it. “One reason is that the bear population is not very large, they live in caves and their bodies get buried really quick,” he says, “as well as porcupines who live in this area have a primary diet of bones.”
Due to these ideas and more, Violette is a firm believer in Bigfoot. “I don’t really like the word belief, though - I tend to keep that for religion,” he says, “I prefer to say I studied the evidence and I am 99% sure that Bigfoot is out there.” He knows that the scientific community won’t accept it until there’s a “body on the table,” but there are a few who encourage people like Violette who are searching for the unknown. One such person is none other than Jane Goodall, one of the most famous scientists of all time. She says in an interview that, “You will be amazed when I tell you that I’m sure that they exist.” When pressed a bit behind her reasoning, she talks about talking to many Native Americans about their legends surrounding Bigfoot and then shows the heart of the reason, which is why many people believe in such things: “Well, I’m a romantic, so I always wanted that to be true.”
Andrew Malo
A graduate of Northeastern Illinois University in Education, Andrew has taught for the past decade in Chicago, New Mexico, and Japan. He enjoys tinkering with trucks and motorcycles, woodworking, reading and computer programming.
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