This Sunday, cable channel Animal Planet will air the 100th and final episode of Finding Bigfoot, a show documenting a group of people not finding Bigfoot. It’s not everyday that a television show whose premise and title is self-evidently flawed gets a chance to be celebrated, and I thought it was a good time to reflect on the elusive man-beast it references.

I found a relevant quote several years ago in the Mütter Museum of anatomical and physical anomalies in Philadelphia. Written by pioneering medical investigator Stubbins Ffirth in 1804 and displayed now on a pamphlet, it said, “The interests of truth have nothing to apprehend from the keenness of investigation, and the utmost severity of human judgment.”

Though the language is from 200 years ago, the message remains relevant: no theory, no bit of evidence, no argument should be immune from critical examination. Dogma hides truth, while open debate helps expose it.

If you’ve seen Finding Bigfoot at any point over the past nine seasons, you know that cryptozoologists and the monster-enthused public deserve better than this pseudo-investigation. They deserve a fair hearing of all the evidence and arguments. Cryptozoology should not be about advocacy or faith; it should not be about mystery-mongering nor debunking.

Cryptozoology should be about getting to the truth of what remains undiscovered. Skeptic and proponent alike need to let the mistakes, hoaxes, false theories and faulty arguments fall by the wayside, so we can get on with the real business at hand: searching for Bigfoot.

Could Bigfoot exist? Absolutely. Anything is possible. But it’s also the wrong question. The question is not what is possible, but instead what is probable — in other words, what the evidence supports. Bigfoot is a convenient, culturally-understood categorization for “an unidentified large, hairy, bipedal creature.” Bigfoot is not an identification; it’s a label for an experience.

You can read it HERE. 

You can find more on me and my work with a search for “Benjamin Radford” (not “Ben Radford”) on Vimeo, and please check out my podcast Squaring the Strange!