Sasquatch You Get: The Era of Digital Deception

A hoax is defined as any act intended to deceive or trick. 

Hoaxing is an American tradition and it's never been easier to perpetrate (and to reach a larger audience) than through social media. Even old standbys like Sasquatch can still draw a crowd.



Making the viral rounds this week is a video shot by a camper in Provo Canyon, Utah, that purports to show Big Foot rising to his oversize feet in the woods. Unfortunately (suspiciously?), the videographer and his wife high tail it immediately after the figure stands, leaving us with only a few tantalizing seconds of Big-Footage, which has racked-up more than four million YouTube hits.

I love this stuff. Not because I hold hope of discovering an unknown humanoid species (although that would be awesome), but it provides a glimpse into how people approach unknowns. The videographer, whose YouTube name is Beard Card, originally linked his video on the BYU Cougars message board.

Like many "unexplained phenomena" stories, this latest entry into the shaky camera club tells us less about Big Foot than it does human beings. I've watched the video several times and don't feel there is enough visual or other information to know what I'm seeing. I lean toward hoax, though, based on the odd details of the story and his sort of contrived "Is that a bear?" mumble at the beginning. After reading through hundreds of comments on various sites, it is clear that the majority have come to definite conclusions based on the footage alone, split mostly between those who think it's either a hoax or a black bear.

I'm happy to see a lot of people crying hoax because healthy skepticism is important where extraordinary claims are involved. One should also rule out the possibility (however slim) that someone else was hoaxing the witness. 

There are comments by those who say they have years of experience working with bears who are certain it's a black bear. Others with similar experience say it is definitely not a black bear. Then you have videographer-types who are equally convinced that CGI was involved. At least one person thinks it's one of many monsters that Satan has sent to us in the End Times.

There is also comedy.

Interestingly, it's not so much the footage of the furry figure but the reaction of the campers that people are using to gauge authenticity. Some say they take off running because a longer shot would have revealed it's a guy in a suit or digital imagery. Besides this, they argue, he could had the best footage of Big Foot on record but lost his nerve at a suspiciously inopportune moment. Others say that anyone in the same situation would have fled (proof they were genuinely afraid) and that it would have been equally suspicious had he stood motionless in order to get a perfect shot. 

If it turns out that Beard Card was hoping to win the recently-offered prize for Big Foot evidence we shouldn't be surprised. The internet has made hoaxing easier to perpetrate and disseminate. Facebook scams and disinformation are commonplace, from hoaxes about dead celebrities to how to set one's security settings. Now that sharing information is as simple as clicking a button, it is expected that a lot of that information will be suspect if not deceptive. It's bad enough we have to worry about identity theft and computer viruses - -now we have scammers trying to infect our brains with erroneous information. Internet hoaxes are so prevalent that there are entire websites dedicated to debunking them. There are also sites that debunk the debunkers.

It's maddening, I tell you.

Some believe that deception has played a vital role in the rise of human intelligence. We are born into the world with little in the way of natural defense; our success as a species owes much to our ability to deceive and to recognize deception. Hopefully, then, hoaxes are something like vaccines in that they help bolster skepticism. I like to think the constant stream of bogus internet photos and stories has made people more vigilant in checking facts and less gullible in terms of believing everything they see.

Then again. . .