Believing in Bigfoot

Continuing with our week of Halloween-themed posts.

The Associated Press reports today that members of Sasquatch Watch of Virginia were looking for Bigfoot in the Allegheny Mountain highlands of the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia. The group didn't have a sighting, but they did take footprint casts.

I was a huge Bigfoot fan when I was a kid. For some reason, Bigfoot was huge in the 70s. Sunday morning had Bigfoot and Wildboy (1977):



And in 1976 the Bionic Man had a big fight with Bigfoot (and we found out, during the fight, that Bigfoot was actually a robot! Man, was I surprised as a kid.):



A lot of this craze was probably kicked off by the famous Patterson-Gimlin film which came out in 1967, the year I was born:



I ate this stuff up as a kid. I hunted for Bigfoot in the Pennsylvania woods behind my grandparents house. I read books about Bigfoot. I even tried to convince my friends that Bigfoot lived in our neighborhood by walking around in the snow late at night in Bigfoot snowshoes, a Christmas present I asked for, that looked kind of like this:



Now you might be wondering, what does Bigfoot have to do with psychology and religion? Well, my very first published paper after getting my PhD was an examination of how beliefs in the paranormal (e.g., ESP, aliens, Bigfoot) relate to beliefs in the supernatural (e.g., God, angels, miracles). At times these seem very similar, like seeing Jesus in a piece of toast:



Or the paranoia and conspiracy theory similarities between alien abduction accounts and the Left Behind series. It's these similarities that drive people like Dennett, Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens crazy.

So is there a difference between believing in Bigfoot versus believing in angels? Or even God? I can't say that my study shed a lot of light on the issue, but I don't think I've ever stopped asking that question and pondering the answers.