You remember those four words, proudly displayed on Fox Molder’s poster, the grainy image of a flying saucer hovering over the tree line. The X-files, in my opinion, the best in television.
I was a kid of the 1970s, lover of monsters and mysteries. I had a voracious appetite for stories, anything that suggested monster lore, supernatural tales, or extraterrestrial visits might be true. Books. Chariots of the Gods. The Bermuda Triangle. Vampires, Werewolves, and Ghouls. Films. The Legend of Boggy Creek. Television. In Search Of. I have an especially fond memory of The Legend of Boggy Creek.
In 1978, a nasty blizzard slammed the Midwest. Indianapolis was hit especially hard by the storm. We were snowed in for two weeks. Not days, weeks. The subzero temperatures and the constant wind whipping the snow made outdoors hazardous. Once the worst of the weather broke and streets plowed, my mom gave me money to take my siblings to the movies. She needed a reprieve from her five, couped up children. We bundled up, trudged down to the main street, and hopped on the city bus, the Emerson Theater, our destination. The main feature was, you guessed it, The Legend of Boggy Creek. I honestly don’t remember much about the film, except its documentary style, reenactments, and the featured mystery, the star of the show, the Fouke Monster. The Arkansas cryptid was none other than “Bigfoot.”
You cryptid connoisseurs, of course, are not surprised. The tall ape-like creature purportedly populates the remote forests and wilderness of North America. For novices, the term, “Bigfoot” refers to the large footprints left by the creatures. Sasquatch is the anglicized pronunciation of the First Nation word, “sasq'ets,” meaning “hairy man” and it is often used synonymously with “Bigfoot.” Most books on the subject had a least one photo of a plaster cast made of the legendary animal’s footprint. No discussion of “Bigfoot” ever omits the lore of the Yeti or the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Cousins, I guess or the same species. No one knows with any certainty if they’re real. The only proof of the creature’s existence are its footprints, sightings, and oh yes, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film of the beast strolling, unconcerned through a forest in Northern California. Many places in the US and Canada have their local legends and monikers for their Sasquatch lore. I live in the Appalachia of Southwester Virginia. Our beast is the Woodbooger.
The other cryptid that I was obsessed with was, you guessed it, “Nessie” or the Loch Ness Monster. I remember fondly the In Search Of episode about the legendary lake monster. Fans of the mythic monster are familiar with the famous, now infamous, 1934 photograph by Robert Kenneth Wilson. The monster is displayed in shadow. To me, it looked like an arm sticking out of the water, thumb squashed against the palm of the hand. The shape you would make doing shadow puppets of a duck or swan. There have been numerous accounts and sightings of the beast. There is even a film showing something large skimming below the surface of Loch Ness. The speculation was, is, that “Nessie” is a long lost, aquatic dinosaur, trapped in the lake. The Loch is large, deep, and purported to have underwater caverns. Many believe it to be a plesiosaurus, a creature with a long neck and flippers. This hypothesis further fueled by the discovery of the coelacanth, an ancient fish thought extinct until one was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938. If this prehistoric animal exists today, why not the plesiosaur? What fueled my hopes it was real were the sonar studies of the Loch and the underwater camera’s capture of what appeared to be flippers. There have been numerous scientific searches for the creature including a recent DNA survey. Alas, nothing definitive. However, in 1977, the carcass of a purported plesiosaur was caught off the coast of New Zealand. Remember the earlier account of the coelacanth.
Why did I say earlier the Wilson photo as being “infamous?” In 1994, a deathbed confession revealed the famous photograph was orchestrated with a toy submarine and a wood putty head and neck. I remember how much that story burst my bubble. What about the dead plesiosaur found off the coast of New Zealand? It turns out, scientific analysis proved it to be a decomposed basking shark.
The child in me keeps hoping someday we’ll uncover a lost species from a lost time. Biologists are finding new species every day. In 2026, scientists discovered several new reptile species in Cambodian caves. There are numerous examples of rediscovered extinct species. I hold out hope someday for the proof of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monsters, and other cryptids.
I’ll continue this discussion later, focused on lost civilizations, extraterrestrial contact, Chariots of the Gods. I want to believe. So do you.