Source: Bigstock
June is now here, which means the annual Silly Season of nonsensical filler stories in the media should soon be upon us, as all the proper journalists jet away on their summer vacations. This year, though, the whole thing got started a whole month early, with the following amazing scoop being splashed across the supermarket tabloids in May: Before he died in 2021, Prince Philip saw Bigfoot in Balmoral!
This at first sounds somewhat surprising, as the Royal Estate of Balmoral is of course located in rural Aberdeenshire in Scotland, whereas Bigfoot is generally said to reside within the dense and vast forests of the Pacific Northwest region of the USA. However, according to a man described as being “Britain’s leading ufologist,” Mark Christopher Lee—who is in fact neither Britain’s leading ufologist, nor even a close celluloid avatar of Count Dracula—Philip had been staying at Balmoral during one summer Silly Season himself with the late Queen when he spotted the hairy hominid lumbering through the Highlands entirely kilt-less.
Probably Phil was just mentally primed to spot Bigfoot by his own known prior fascination with the creature. So obsessed were the Royal Couple with such things that, while on a previous tour of Canada, they had purportedly already sought out an audience with a prospector named Albert Ostman, who claimed to have been kidnapped by an entire family of Bigfeet. This intriguing detail came straight from the mouth of hirsute and ursine actor Brian Blessed, who once claimed a frightening yeti sighting of his own. By looking in a mirror one morning, perhaps?
“Regrettable though it all may be, this isn’t really deliberate ‘racism,’ is it?”
Rape an Ape
If he really did see McBigfoot, given Prince Philip’s proud long-term record of making racially off-color remarks, it’s a wonder he didn’t just approach the thing and ask it if it was one of Princess Meghan’s estranged matrilineal relatives, come to seek her out for a reconciliation (if he had spied a rogue orang pendek orangutan-person-monster, Philip would have just presumed it was Sarah Ferguson).
Had the Duke of Edinburgh really uttered such a non-PC thing, however, then the consequent inevitable accusations of “Ray-cism!!” against him from the Markle tribe would hardly have been unprecedented—for it turns out the entire profession of monster-hunting is in itself an innately racist pursuit upon behalf of arrogant, self-entitled, hyper-privileged white people like Philip, and always has been.
Loren Coleman is perhaps America’s No. 1 cryptozoologist (as investigators of mysterious animals, or “cryptids,” are technically known), a genuine expert in his field, who tracks anomalous fauna of all kinds out in the field, and is definitely no racist himself. Sometimes, however, he receives bizarre emails from people who are, like this one, which landed in his inbox one day from someone signing himself off only as “Big Duke E”:
Here is what Bigfoot is. Long before Jesus was born there were thousands of slaves who ran off around the world and started their own countries. When they left there was a large group of men and boys who took off and ended up in Africa. When they got to Africa some of these men and boys caught female Orangutans and took them over to South America and had sex with them and created the American Indian [and Sarah Ferguson and Prince Harry]. The men and boys who stayed in Africa caught female Gorillas and had sex with them and created the Black man…. That’s where Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Orangutan-Man and the Skunk Ape come from…. They are not prehistoric creatures from millions of years ago but they are man-made creatures from several thousand years ago.
That certainly explains where George Floyd and Idi Amin originated perfectly satisfactorily—but surely not far more evolved non-white primates like Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell, and various other prominent and erudite black men whose names likewise rhyme with the word “bowel.”
Supposedly, such ultra-fringe beliefs are somehow “dangerous” and “exactly how Nazism got started” (there was a fake cryptid called De Loys’ Ape from which some fascism-friendly theorists guessed the Jews had descended), but realistically, I doubt any modern-day Second Holocaust perpetrated against either blacks or Jews will really end up being sparked off by a particularly compelling episode of Finding Bigfoot on the Animal Planet channel being viewed in white households.
Indeed, maybe Bigfoot is actually a degenerate wild white man like John Fetterman, not a degenerate wild black one like George of the Urban Jungle. Apparently, non-white natives on the obscure Indonesian island of Halmahera claim their own mysterious mythical anthropoid giants are just the jungle-bound de-evolved descendants of 17th-century white European Portuguese colonizers. I wonder if any contemporary Lisbon-dwellers would bother accusing the Indonesians of antiwhite racism for holding this strange belief, though, or simply shrug and say, “To be honest, I don’t really care.”
Harry and the Agenda-sons
A more common critique of cryptozoology from an “anti-racist” perspective is that Big White Hunters of the Ernest Hemingway/Bungalow Bill type are just arrogantly blundering out into the field with their pith helmets and elephant guns and searching out “animals” that are not truly physical biological creatures at all, but ancient animal-like spirits from Native Indian, aboriginal, Asian, or African folklore, which have been completely misinterpreted by materialist modern Western minds.
Robert Jago, for example, is a Canadian Indian activist who complains that the 1987 kids’ movie Harry and the Hendersons, about a U.S. family who befriend and stroke a benign Bigfoot, has by now influenced the popular image of the entity, even amongst indigenous people like himself, more than the original body of age-old native lore has. In Jago’s view:
When the story is taken from us and told by outsiders without our involvement, its identity can be lost, and Sasq’ets [Sasquatch, the original native spiritual version of Bigfoot] becomes Bigfoot. The cultural dominance of non-Natives means that a B-movie like ‘Harry and the Hendersons’ can have more influence over Salish [Indian] children than the legend that inspired it.
Maybe so. But is it likely thin-skinned white people who live in Scotland think the same about The Family Ness, do you reckon, Robert?
Thunderbirds Aren’t Go
Regrettable though it all may be, this isn’t really deliberate “racism,” is it? It’s just how the shallow and profit-hungry media industry slop machine works. But various commentators and activists have now taken up this same grievance, producing bumper stickers with slogans like “INDIGENOUS BELIEFS AREN’T CRYPTZOOLOGY” on them, or essays with titles like “LOVE BIGFOOT, HATE RACISM.”
Thus, when an American health-food company innocently produces a new brand of energy bar called “Thunderbird Energetica,” named after a magical giant bird of the same name from Red Indian lore, whose manufacturers jokingly boast of being “the only energy bar company to harvest the mystical powers of spirit animals during the fabrication and design of our product,” this is decried as a form of cultural genocide by hyperventilating Injuns, rather than simply a harmless packaging gimmick that is easily ignored by simply not buying the thing.
Plus, some indigenous people seem to want it both ways. Ogopogo is Canada’s most famous lake serpent, their rough equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, said to inhabit Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, an entity imagined by white people as a non-saline plesiosaur-like reptile, but by the Native Indians as an immaterial water spirit with a long green body and a horselike head. As a well-known and well-liked icon, Ogopogo’s image has been used for decades as a handy cartoon branding mechanism for everything from locally grown apples to novelty pop songs.
Consequently, in 1956, the nearby city of Vernon somehow acquired copyright over the name and image of Ogopogo, hoping to benefit commercially from it, which, once the fact became widely known decades later, caused an outcry amongst local Indians from the Syilx Nation—who demanded copyright be handed over to them instead, the clans succeeding in this “sacred” quest in 2021. This was framed as an issue of religious and spiritual rights, but in practice it would just mean that the Indians, rather than the Europeans, can now rake in the cash from selling dream catchers and peace pipes with Oggy’s image on them instead, doesn’t it?
Surely, being a figure of ancient myth, Ogopogo should have no copyright restrictions placed upon it whatsoever, any more than the Hydra or the Minotaur does. One Syilx chief specifically equated the local council’s ownership of the serpent’s image rights “to someone taking ownership of the Bible and suddenly copywriting the name Moses.” Careful, Chief—you’ll give the Jews ideas with that one.
Imaginary Offense and Where to Find It
Even more ridiculous was the depressingly widespread condemnation of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling back in 2016 when, in order to promote her spin-off work Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, she published a short fictional history of magic in North America online, detailing the chronology of an imagined New World College of Magic called Ilvermorny. This was said by some to be “problematic,” as the exercise engaged in the “cultural appropriation” of various Native American cryptids like Thunderbirds in its story.
In the words of one critic with far too much time on her hands (and far too much enthusiasm for reading children’s books while aged over 18), Rowling’s history of magic was guilty of “recapitulating a neocolonialist stance on indigeneity” in the following fashion:
Just as early anthropologists stole artifacts from sacred Native American sites, Rowling takes concepts of great cultural and spiritual significance and uses them for the supposed edification of other primarily white witches and wizards. [Note: If Rowling had made all her witches and wizards black or brown, these exact same critics would have accused her of painting non-whites as being simpleton primitives who all believe in juju and voodoo instead.] Rather than being placed in a glass case at a museum, [indigenous sacred semi-cryptids like] the Wampus and the Horned Serpent are emblazoned upon the Ilvermorny tapestry, forever memorializing the misconception that these creatures somehow belong to the public domain.
Yes, if Rowling’s squib also happened to involve Ogopogo, I hope she got full copyright clearance from the Syilx Indians first, otherwise they could sue her.
How appropriate that a piece of fiction turned out to produce a series of equally fictional problems like that. I bet people who have cancer or polio are glad they don’t have concerns in life that big.
Compared with some of this nonsense, the idea of Prince Philip seeing Bigfoot in Scotland now seems perfectly sensible. For far too many persons in the pampered modern West, it appears that Silly Season lasts all year long now.