Chupacrabra, Sasquatch or ....?

We recently spent a weekend at our “vacation house” (the nice way of saying we have two mortgages right now) where we met St. Pauli Girl's brother and sister-in-law. After a bit of conversation, her brother said, “I don't mean to alarm you, but you might have a chupacabra living here.”

He then took us to the backyard where to put it simply, some animal had turned a small area of the lawn into its personal litter box. We were all puzzled as none of us could think of an animal that would do something like that in the same spot (well except for cats and litter boxes but that's only because the cats force their human pets to clean up after them.)

But I immediately got excited because I realized I now had to go to a town hall meeting of the “Finding Bigfoot” crew to report these findings. I decided I would wait and let them bag the evidence themselves. I could already imagine Matt or Bobo talking about this amazing find:

“We were skeptical of the story at first but when you have hard or maybe squishy evidence like this, you can't ignore it. I've never seen Bigfoot dung but I have no reason to believe this wasn't Bigfoot dung. So as an experiment, we had Bobo take a dump and then compared it with the Bigfoot dung. They weren't close at all. That's when I knew we had some credible Bigfoot evidence.”

My mind came back to reality as we all discussed possibilities. Since all of the droppings were beneath trees, I reasoned that it had to be a bird like a hawk or owl. Everyone seemed skeptical until I told the story of my golfing experience a few years ago when I saw a Mississippi kite getting terrorized by two smaller birds and well, those birds literally scared the crap out of that kite. And I'm glad I wasn't standing any closer as the pile would have been large enough for rave laughs in an Adam Sandler movie.

Luckily in this modern day and age, we can answer any question via the internet. I queried “owl droppings” which revealed a whole page of pictures which really didn't seem to match what we had seen. Next I searched for “hawk droppings” which brought up more pictures plus the heartwarming story of a hawk dropping a miracle puppy from the sky. At this point, I became convinced the droppings had not come from a bird. So I entered my next query, “lot of poop in a small area” which brought up a page full of results. After a quick glance, I changed the query to “lot of animal poop in a small area.” Lo and behold, I found an animal forum where someone had the exact same situation in his yard.

I quickly went through the answers, sorting out the the far fetched (“bears or otters”) from the smart ass (“I consider myself wild”) to the most likely (“Sasquatch”). I had Bobo on speed dial when I realized the consensus of the answers was racoons. Apparently this is how raccoons roll and raccoon latrines are very common as well as a serious health hazard. I just wish I had found all of this info before we left the vacation house. Instead I get to spend the next few weeks imagining a party of raccoons talking in Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider voices, “Hey, watch this!”

Meanwhile, every time I do a new internet query, I get pestered with ads like “still looking for poop?” or “click here for more poop pictures” or “history of the poop deck webpage.”

Bigfoot Prefers Not to Be Found

A while back I wrote about my late-night television guilty habit of watching Ghost Adventures. I have since lost interest in that show as it has become less about hunting for ghosts and more about their audio detection devices such as the “spirit box,” which can amazingly translate white noise like “grrmphhxsskshhelkuyayt” into “kill you!” I have since discovered a much more superior show, Finding Bigfoot.

The show follows the adventures of three bigfoot nerds (including a man named Bobo) and a skeptical female biologist as they travel the world trying to find hard evidence of Bigfoot. But you don't have to watch the show--I'll just summarize one, because they are all pretty much the same:

Opening stock “preview” scene: video of a roaring beast that looks suspiciously like a gorilla.

Cut to: The team is in a car headed to a town hall meeting. Upon arrival, locals relate their Bigfoot stories. The Bigfoot hunters then pick the most credible sources from the meeting, jump back into the car, and tear off to where the most impressive incident happened. There, the eye witness demonstrates what he/she was doing and what he/she saw or heard. Then the experts send Bobo to the exact spot of the Bigfoot sighting. The witness then points out, “No, no, the creature was much taller than that.” At this point, the experts then deem the witness as extremely credible, since the measurements reported by the witness concur almost exactly with other reports of the height and breadth of a sasquatch (or “squatch,” to those in the know).

One time a witness described a series of footprints where a Bigfoot had come through. The experts recreated the footprints and decided that no human could possible duplicate that gait. The female biologist, ever playing devil’s advocate, quickly ran through the footprints demonstrating just the opposite. Bobo said, “Yeah, but how far could you have kept up that pace, huh?”

At this point the experts pick a spot to stake out during the night. They separate into pairs and proceed to make bigfoot calls hoping to attract one or two. The first night usually ends in disappointment.

Next comes a commercial break including Bigfoot trivia like:

“True or False. A bigfoot can run up to 30 miles per hour.”

“True or False. A bigfoot can swim.”

Amazingly, both of those statements are true! Not sure how they figured it out, but I guess they timed Bobo in a forty yard sprint and figured an animal twice his size can run twice as fast.

Next one member of the team will spend a few days by himself/herself in the woods in a solo field investigation. This usually involves a scary encounter with a raccoon or deer via night vision goggles. Meanwhile, the others continue interviewing more witnesses.

Finally, the whole team spends another night in the woods making Bigfoot calls and hitting trees with baseball bats because bigfoots like sports (another true fact, you heard it here first). Then they will stumble into an area where tree branches have been mysteriously bent, which we learn is obviously caused by a Bigfoot traipsing through the area. Then we reach the startlingly climax where someone will suddenly say, “Stop!” or “Ssshhhh! Did you hear that?” and cut to commercial.

After the commercial, we see everyone looking around through night vision goggles which will display a small blip in the distance. “Yep, that's Bigfoot,” or more likely a raccoon, or a deer, or a jackalope. Sometimes they'll say, “I heard it! There's definitely a squatch in the area!” Amazingly, they never record the sounds.

In the end, they gather up in the dark and assess the mission and congratulate themselves: “Well, there was definitely a lot of activity in the area, and this mission was a success!”

By contrast, perhaps that's where Ghost Adventures succeeds: the ghost hunters realized after several seasons that they needed the viewer to hear the sounds of ghosts, so they came up with devices that would interpret the white noise for us, while the Bigfoot crew just says, “Yessirree, we heard a lot of ‘squatches tonight! Trust us. Would Bobo lie?”

But I always have to stay up for the ending, because I don’t want to miss when they actually capture a Bigfoot on film.