Professor says no way in Ohio

[From “The Canton Repository”. August, 15/ 2004.]

Gene Poirier, retired chairman of the anthropology department at the Ohio State University, maintains it’s next to impossible for Bigfoot to exist in Ohio or the United States.

“As close as one could say,” there’s “zero” chance “that anything exists in Ohio whatsoever. I think it’s a myth feeding on itself, quite frankly.”

Hard-core Bigfoot believers are not in Poirier’s fan club.

“My life has been threatened more than once by these so-called true believers,” he said.

Poirier says Bigfoot might exist — just not on this continent.

He’s researched the Yeren, also known as the China Wildman. His study of China’s Bigfoot has been featured on Discovery Channel and PBS.

But Bigfoot could not exist in the United States, he said, let alone Paris Township, where a Bigfoot sighting was reported in 1978.

Here, he says, is why:

Primates could not survive in this country because of the habitat and environment. “Primates are usually tropical or sub-tropical animals.”

“If they do exist,” he said, “they exist in such small numbers they’re not a viable breeding population.”

Bigfoot may exist — in your head.

“We need to have unexplained things out there. It makes us who we are as humans. The human mind doesn’t want everything to be explained, so these legends may simply be a phenomenon of the universal human mind.”

What about photos?

“People have sent me photos and say it was just here, then it was gone, or my camera did not function.”

He also dismisses one explanation by some true believers that UFOs and Bigfoot are in cahoots. They maintain “the creatures are emitting certain waves ... and you could actually pose them for a photo, but the aura around these creatures doesn’t allow them to show up.”

Nobody has produced bones or body of a Bigfoot. And footprint evidence is not convincing. Hair samples, footprint castings and fecal matter are “shaky evidence,” because the material can be easily contaminated if not collected properly.

“The evidence could be good, but we don’t always know who’s collected it and we don’t always know where it’s from.”

Most sound recordings are “crap.”

“I can’t tell you how many tapes and sound tapes I was sent by different people in Ohio saying here is the sound of Bigfoot baying at the moon. It could be anything under the sun.”

WCSRO, 2006.