Bigfootage (Blobsquatch)

More than most any other kind of dubious/authentic footage, the sightings of the Sasquatch are the stuff of goosey imagination. Allegedly purchased at a yard sale in 1977 or something, this blob that walks out of a field, turns around and walks back in is shrouded in groovy mist, with decomposing nitrates and blobs of Stan Brakhage-ish emulsion. As we strain in the fog to see the outline of what looks like Joe Pesci in a big overcoat, we realize it could be just about anything... including the legendary primate known as Bigfoot, but probably a lost farmer... with stubby arms!

Focusing on the "found footage" phenom in and of itself, I dig these little clips as they are part of an ongoing mystery that has plagued/blessed mankind since the dawn of time, when sleestacks once made merry on the minds of Chakas and time warped Aryan families from beyond the centuries (in Land of the Lost see photo at above right).

While some of us fringe dwellers consider alien tampering with prehistoric life forms all but proven empirically, there are still a few "logical" types for whom a 1970s TV show doesn't count as "proof" anymore than the strange similarities of Egyptian and Mayan pyramids (which would be unnoticeable without an airplane), even though it is more far-fetched to presume such things coincidental.

Watching with an open mind a piece of Rorschach footage like the above is to imagine all sorts of things, and that's part of the appeal. Of course I loved THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT for the same reason; the way the paranoid mind needs to discern animal or human shapes in the bushes when under duress; we're hardwired to pick out hostile shapes in the shadows of leaves and vines, and when our circuits are frazzled, we see these shapes appear everywhere, we see the outline of a monster in the shadow of a bookcase or the laugh of an evil uncle in the fizz of a late night alka seltzer. In a society where we're determined to overdo and over-label every new exciting development until it's old and stale, we need indecipherable scripts and puzzling objects, things that actively resist interpretation. Without unexplainable demons in the night to be afraid of, our fear cannot find a screen on which to project and then it filters amorphously through the minutiae of your life, blackening all it touches.

The idea isn't to prove the existence of the Sasquatch with this video but to see what might be just a foggy picture of a lost dude through the eyes of a newborn spirit, one unmarked by the enslaving blinders of scientific deduction and rational language. When we can behold not just "blobsquatch" but all natural phenomena with the awe and reverent mystery they deserve then, my friends, we are not so much gullible as enlightened! Ask not for what the bell tolls, as Stan Brakhage well knew, the Bigfoot toe's for thee. Dog Star power activate!