Imagine for a moment that you are standing at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. Ahead of you stretches a vast and unforgiving wilderness, thick with pine and cloaked in clouds.
Now imagine being told that everything in that wilderness has already been discovered. Every lifeform, every track, every whisper in the trees.
My Townhall Media teammate Ward Clark seems to take that position in one of yesterday's columns, scoffing at an alleged Bigfoot encounter in Monroe County, Mich., and brushing aside decades of research with a wave of the hand and a wink of condescension.
This rebuttal is not written to convince the most hardened skeptic but to invite readers back to the very foundation of scientific inquiry: curiosity.
The Vastness of the Unseen
Roughly 36% of the United States' land area is forested, accounting for over 800 million acres, some so remote that no human foot has ever stepped upon them. The Rocky Mountains still house unclimbed peaks and valleys, unreachable except by air.
And if you want to talk about remote, consider this: Glasgow, Mont., has been identified as the most isolated town in the contiguous United States. According to Oxford University's Big Data Institute, Glasgow is about 4.5 hours from the nearest city with a population of 75,000 or more.
That's not a day's walk.
Even in more populated states, forest coverage is striking. Michigan is over 53% forested, Wisconsin is 46%, Minnesota is nearly 34%, and Texas, which many associate with wide-open plains and deserts, maintains around 38% forest cover.
These aren’t just urban parks or trimmed tree lines. We're talking about dense, wild forests with tens of thousands of square miles of habitat that remain under-explored.
When such states offer this kind of wooded real estate, the notion that every inch has been cataloged is not just arrogant; it’s scientifically reckless.
In Alaska, the Tongass National Forest sprawls across 16.7 million acres, larger than the entire state of West Virginia. Are we truly so arrogant as to believe that we have discovered every creature within this expanse?
That's a full tank of gas and change. Yet even in places like this, surrounded by thousands of acres of untamed land, the idea of an undiscovered species is somehow mocked. But how can we dismiss what we haven’t truly explored?
Suppose we accept that creatures like the coelacanth, a fish once thought extinct for 65 million years, could be rediscovered alive in 1938. Why is the possibility of an undocumented primate in North America treated as laughable?
Scientific Voices, Not Campfire Stories
Dr. John Bindernagel was a Canadian wildlife biologist with a doctorate in biology from the University of Wisconsin. His professional background included work in Africa, the Caribbean, and British Columbia, focusing on large mammal behavior and field evidence.
What set Bindernagel apart was his conviction that the evidence surrounding Sasquatch sightings and tracks deserved academic scrutiny.
He was not an armchair theorist. He spent his later career in the field, collecting hundreds of eyewitness accounts and studying physical evidence such as tracks, hair samples, and supposed vocalizations.
His 1998 book, "North America's Great Ape: The Sasquatch," remains one of the most comprehensive studies of the sasquatch from a zoological perspective.
Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a tenured professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, holds a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His specialty is primate foot morphology and locomotion, which is precisely the expertise relevant when evaluating footprint evidence.
Meldrum has amassed a collection of over 300 footprint casts, many of which display dermal ridges, pressure indicators, and midtarsal breaks consistent with primate anatomy but difficult to fake convincingly.
He has published work in scientific journals and public literature, including his widely read book, "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science."
He has also been an invited speaker at academic conferences and wilderness research summits, defending the possibility that Sasquatch represents a surviving hominid species.
Both men have published peer-reviewed material and spoken publicly, not as zealots, but as scientists asking uncomfortable questions. They have endured professional criticism for daring to question the mainstream narrative, not because their work lacked rigor but because the topic invited ridicule.
The Eyewitnesses Who Refuse to Be Ignored
Skeptics like Mr. Clark often treat Bigfoot witnesses as either hoaxers or fools. But to listen to the podcast "Sasquatch Chronicles" is to hear real people: hunters, law enforcement officers, hikers, and veterans.
These are not cartoon characters. They are often reluctant participants who wait years before sharing what they saw or heard. They describe massive, bipedal figures, often with red or amber eye shine, seen at twilight or in total silence.
Do these people suffer from mass hysteria? Are the military officers, EMTs, and wildlife biologists who have contributed accounts suddenly untrustworthy once "Bigfoot" is spoken?
I challenge Mr. Clark and the rest of you non-believers to listen to just one month of "Sasquatch Chronicles" and the dozens of level-headed interviews that don't seek fame but understanding.
Fundamental Research, Real Organizations
The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) maintains an extensive, searchable database of sightings, cataloged by date, geography, and reliability.
The North American Wood Ape Conservancy (NAWAC), composed of former military personnel, biologists, and wildlife officers, conducts year-round expeditions, seeking not to entertain but to document and verify.
These are not fantasy clubs.
They operate in the same tradition as the early ornithologists who believed in the ivory-billed woodpecker long after it had been declared extinct.
There are dozens more. The Olympic Project in Washington uses high-tech drones and acoustic monitoring, and the Texas Bigfoot Research Center logs encounters throughout the Southwest.
None of these groups claims to have captured a living specimen.
But they do what all scientists do: observe, measure, and remain open to discovery.
The Burden of Arrogance
Skepticism is healthy. However, condescension is a disease that spreads faster than common sense in today’s clickbait culture. And what Mr. Clark penned reads more like ridicule than rebuttal.
His tone is not that of a cautious scientist asking questions, but of a weekend camper jeering at the dark woods from the safety of a lit tent.
Science has never advanced by dismissing data before reviewing it. Galileo was mocked, as was Ignaz Semmelweis, who dared suggest that doctors wash their hands. Progress is often first met with laughter, and that laughter usually ages poorly.
The Math of Mystery
Let's say there are 100 reported sightings of a supposed Bigfoot. I’ll be the first to admit that 96 of them are likely hoaxes, the kind of backyard tales that give every authentic witness a bad name.
Three more? Probably misidentified animals, bears on their hind legs, people in ghillie suits, shadows playing tricks.
But that last one?
That one sighting out of a hundred that defies easy explanation, that leaves behind a footprint with dermal ridges, or a howl unlike any known animal, that’s the one that matters.
Because science doesn’t require a unanimous consensus, it requires one compelling case to spark serious inquiry. If you're a scientist, you chase the anomaly. You don't bury it because it makes you uncomfortable.
A Personal Invitation
Mr. Clark, if you are truly skeptical, then prove it scientifically. Examine the evidence. Listen to the reports. Talk with Dr. Meldrum. Reach out to the researchers in Washington and Texas. Tune in to "Sasquatch Chronicles" not for entertainment but for education.
Dismissal is easy. Discovery is hard.
And right now, you’re dismissing something you’ve never studied, like a guy trying to judge a trophy buck by sniffing the trailhead.
You don’t field-dress a debate with a headline and a smirk.
You lace up your boots, bushwhack, and listen to what the land tells you.
So go ahead, Ward. Prove us all wrong. But don’t do it with a keyboard and a punchline. Do it like a real outdoorsman, head into the woods, keep your ears open, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find that the real joke was how little we knew all along.
Somewhere in the shadow of the giants, both the literal ones in our forests and the scientific ones we ignore, there may yet be answers.
But we will never find them if we choose to sneer instead of search.
Mr. Ward, Bigfoot is real.
And he's spectacular!
Author's Note: But we will never find them if we choose to sneer instead of search. I also want to make one thing clear: I respect Ward Clark. I’m a massive fan of his Alaskan know-how and his writing. Everything in this rebuttal is written purely for fun and in the spirit of lively debate, except for the existence of Bigfoot. He is real.
They used COVID to test how far they could push. Lockdowns. Mandates. Misinformation labels.
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