My Thoughts on Sasquatch

First, a personal note.  I will refer, in these pages, to the phenomenon that manifests itself as a massive bipedal, ape like creature with really large feet as Sasquatch.  The reason for this is simple – I like the name better, it is from a North American culture and Bigfoot just seems to me to be a term that has become almost derisive, especially when it is used in the press.

With that personal note out of the way, let’s look at Sasquatch and, by extension, the wide variety of mysterious creatures that people report sighting throughout the world – the manwolf, the chupacabra (the one in Puerto Rico with the very ‘alien’ appearance – not the poor mangy coyotes that are showing up on the web), various lake and sea monsters, etc.  My basic position on such creatures is that they do indeed exist but not as solid, physical plane unexplained animals.  Rather, looking at the magical side of the equation, I feel that most such monster sightings, when they are not the result of mental illness or misidentification, are the result of manifestations from what I will call the Otherworld.

In magical traditions, it is understood that the world that we live in and have a basic consensual reality about is but one of many different levels or “planes” of reality.  Core shamanic practitioners use a three world model, Qabalists use the ten world Tree of Life system, Norse magicians sometimes use a nine world system and so on.  Modern quantum physics seems to indicate that there could be any number of dimensions “out there”.  Suffice to say, that over the course of human history, people who operate in a magical paradigm have posited the existence of other worlds.  I am not going to argue for the existence of these worlds since one can not prove the existence of something experiential to the “skeptic” (a word much misused in this day and age).  My worldview includes the existence of other worlds and I have been able to “prove” this to myself and I believe that anyone with a modicum of discipline can do the same if they so desire.

Not only do the magical traditions posit the existence of an Otherworld or worlds but they also state flatly that it is possible to interact with the Otherworld either by using trance techniques to enter their world or by bringing beings from the Otherworld through into this world.  There is also a significant body of lore that seems to indicate that the creatures of the Otherworld, for reasons of their own, have some interest in our world and sometimes cross over to “visit”.  Add to this the idea that there are techniques for creating entities (thought forms) that, if given sufficient skill and concentration by the magician, seem to take on a life of their own and you have quite the recipe for explaining the sightings of unknown and mysterious creatures across the globe.

Now, I am oversimplifying in the extreme here and any practitioners of the magical arts may be flinching at this point but I will be laying out more details as I go along in this blog.  What I want to do here though is get the reader thinking along magical and Otherworldly lines from the “get go”.

Moving back to Sasquatch, one of the most popular and most evidenced creatures in cryptozoology, one has only to look around the lab of Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a physical anthropologist who has a huge collection of track casts,  to immediately pose a counter argument to my statements above.  Where do all those footprints come from?  And the limited hair samples etc.?  The answer to this one is pretty simple: creatures of the Otherworld, even though they are not native to this plane, are able to cloak themselves in a semblance of physical form.  This can range from the vague, misty forms seen by many people in paranormal (i.e. ghostly) encounters to the very solid physical form of the Sasquatch or manwolf that can rock a car or leave footprints in its wake.

The Otherworld hypothesis is an elegant explanation for some of the things that trouble open minded Sasquatch researchers.  Along with the “skeptical” battle cry of “no real physical evidence” – which is, in fact, false – Sasquatch researchers are faced with the occasional case that does not ft nicely into the physical animal model.  Cases in which Sasquatch creatures have seemingly disappeared before the eyes of the witness, have been involved in sighting clusters with other strange creatures and/or the UFO phenomenon (something we will get into later) and those in which the Sasquatch seems to telepathically communicate with the percipient are instances which many researchers will ignore, simply cutting such incidents out of their databases because they do not fit the unknown animal hypothesis.  Never let it be said that “skeptics” are the only close minded individuals in the cryptozoological community.

Could there be a breeding population of relic hominids running around the forests and mountains of the world?  I will never say that something is impossible.  However, given the continued elusiveness of these creatures, despite the best efforts of many to photograph them, catch them on video or even capture them, I find it more and more likely that Sasquatch is a creature from the Otherworld that makes its way onto this plane periodically, for reasons of its own.