The Scottish Bigfoot and other beasts of legend
by - 16:37 on 28 March 2007
Saw a hilariously entertaining tv programme about Bigfoot the other day – you know, the famous ape-like creature which lurks in the depths of various forests in the USA and put Willow Creek in California – the ‘Capital of Bigfoot Country’ in particular on the map.
The beast is sometimes referred to as ‘Sasquatch’ which is ‘big hairy giant’ in some Native American language, apparently. I was struck by the fact that you could merely delete the word ‘Bigfoot’ and insert ‘Loch Ness Monster’ and the voice-over would have been identical. The blurred pictures, the shaky film, the hoaxes, the theories and so on. Then there was the marketing and PR that has arrived on the back of the legend and made an important industry out of perpetrating the stories and keeping them alive. Just like Loch Ness with its ‘each uisge’ or ‘water horse’ in Gaelic.
So here’s my contribution to the world of mysteries and unexplained creatures – crypto-zoology I think they call it. I really wanted to put up a picture of the Loch Ness Monster. Or a diving otter’s tail, a swimming red deer stag in August, a mirage, a boat wake or a line of ducks which generally are stand in for it. But I guess I was never there at the right time. Besides, the appearance of Scotland’s mysterious monster seems to be in an inverse proportion to the numbers of cameras trained on Loch Ness at any one time. The more time you spend hanging around the loch with a telephoto lens, the less chance you’ll see anything.
So all I’ve got is a Scottish Bigfoot – a fleeting shot of the Macyeti or ‘Mucklefit’. To be honest, it looks very like an orang utan or a gorilla though you don’t get many of them in the Scottish pinewoods, in my experience. Naturally, I couldn’t divulge the location of the shot for fear of some enterprising local opening ‘The Mucklefit Experience’ on the site. Besides, I sometimes walk the dogs there – which obviously disturbed the beast in the first place. Sorry about the camera shake. I’ve tried to enhance one of the shots but otherwise what you see is what I got. As for Nessie, here’s a plug for ‘The Loch Ness Monster: the Evidence’ by Steuart Campbell which is a comprehensive demolition of any argument that the beast exists in anything other than then land of legend. I have to mention it, as I married his daughter. And you should hear him on UFOs.
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