I Want To Believe

So some of you might know I'm a HUGE X-Files fan. In fact, I just finished an X-Files marathon of season 1 - season 7. I kinda need to buy season 8, I guess and find out if Mulder is returned and see Scully have the baby. An episode I watched the other day featured Mulder finding a genie. Every time people made their 3 wishes, however, it was never quite what they had in mind. Like the guy who wished for a yacht and she put it in his trailer park space - completely and totally landlocked. So Mulder rolled her out of her magic carpet and in doing so was due three wishes. Knowing her history of not quite giving the wisher what they were going for, he thought about it a while and finally decided that the reason it didn't work for others was because their wishes were for selfish gain only. So he told her he wanted peace on earth. She said "no, you don't." He insisted and so she made it happen - by removing all human beings from the planet.

You gotta love that sense of humor. Cynical, perhaps, but that doesn't make it any less true. I find the show fascinating - loved the characters and mostly loved the storylines, whether it was a conspiracy show or M&S were off on some non-UFO related investigation. I love the unexplained because I love figuring things out. The paranormal offers so much cool stuff to consider with no concrete proof - or at least no proof today.

So in keeping with my upcoming release (Feb '09) that features a ghost, I've decided to blog about different unexplained phenomena and see what you all think. For the record, I personally believe in the possibility of everything. Who am I to limit God?

Today's topic - Bigfoot.

Why Bigfoot, you might ask....well, remember in Sep when me and my friends went to stay at a haunted hotel in Jefferson, Texas? Well, Jefferson is well known as being the most haunted town in Texas, but it's also the home of the annual Bigfoot convention every year in October. You see East Texas contains the most Bigfoot sightings of anywhere else in this region. So some people are probably thinking it's a bunch of yahoos and weirdos, wearing costumes or tromping around the woods. Not at all. The speakers are well-educated zoologists, anthropologists, authors, college professors who find the subject fascinating and devote their spare time to looking for answers.

The Texas branch has a website complete with an interactive map showing all Bigfoot sightings with a description of the sighting. The site also lists all detail of sightings as it becomes available. One of the recent posts was a police record from 1990 where a woman, her friend, and her three children were driving down the highway at night and reported a tall hairy creature that ran across the highway in front of their car then off into the woods. This is what the reporting officer had to say about their claim:

I believe the witnesses to be of the highest credibility and I believe they truly believe that they saw a bigfoot. Misidentification, while often a possibility, can likely be ruled out in this case. All witnesses had clear recollection of an upright and tall subject. There is no other species that can be comfortably applied within such descriptive parameters. I could detect no hints or signs of hoaxing, either by the witnesses or that they were hoaxed. It seems unlikely that someone larger than the average human would don a suit and risk running across Highway 59 only a few car lengths in front of a vehicle traveling at approximately 60 miles per hour; while possible, it seems improbable.

This case appears to be another example of an event reported by multiple and highly credible observers, for which there is no conventional explanation that is readily apparent.

For those of you who might want to read more, the url for the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy is

http://www.texasbigfoot.org/

Soooooo, what do you think? Bigfoot - fact or fiction?

Deadly DeLeon