Why Canada Needs the Sasquatch

Canada should invest serious resources in creating a race of blurry ape-people.

It hasn’t been a great year for those of us in the suspect-the-Sasquatch-might-be-a-real-thing community.

This was supposed to be the year of scientific evidence, of the settling of all bets. This was meant to be the year when conclusive, not-just-your-buddy-in-half-a-horse-costume proof would be discovered. No questions asked. No more teasing. No more, “You boys been drinking?” This was where it was all supposed to end.

But it didn’t.

As it turned out, the groundbreaking study that “Bigfoot insiders” (that’s a thing you can be) had promised would prove the existence of the long-thought-to-be-bullshit ape-man turned out to be a shady, self-published affair by a Texas veterinarian who believes Sasquatch contains things like “Angel DNA.”

It’s all getting kind of desperate. People are losing hope. Though the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project is still collecting hair and flesh samples from various camouflage-outfitted cryptozoologists (this is also a thing you can be), Sasquatch types on the internet seem to be regressing into a sort of paranoid, Creationist-like state; they’re full of dark speculation about historical cover-ups and appear willing to accept obvious hoaxes at face value.

The same guy who assembled America’s major media outlets to look at an ape suit in a freezer in 2008, says he has a body again. In Vegas. And Bigfoot people (like California linguist Robert Lindsay, who blogs about both Bigfoot and how much the nation of India sucks—it’s a marginal field) are buying it.

This isn’t good for anyone, but it’s particularly not good for Canada.

Why? If it exists, the Sasquatch is essentially a Canadian thing. It was one of our mascots at Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics, and its uncanny features grace any number of totem poles on First Nations land throughout British Columbia. Other countries might have their Abominable Snowmen (Tibet), their Yowies (Australia), or their Yeren (China), but I think we can recognize them for the fringe counterfeits that they are.

We already have the infrastructure.

In the realm of the Sasquatch, Canada is a superpower. In a world where Sasquatch truly existed, Canada would be the populous mainstream of North America, with the United States serving the role of an unimpressive place whose phenomena are largely confined to the border region. In order to claim that Sasquatch influence, we would have to ensure that the giant ape-men exist. We have committed substantial resources toward ephemeral things before (federal bilingualism?), and I think it is time to do it again.

Back in January, Harvard Medical School Professor George Church stated that he was looking for an “adventurous female” volunteer to aid him in his quest to bring Neanderthals back to life. It’s a cloning thing; George claims that he can reconstruct a Neanderthal’s complete genetic sequence from bones and other remains, inject the DNA into stem cells, and then inject that hot mixture into a human embryo, which said adventurous female would then carry to term.

According to George, “It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done.”

We believe you, man.

The difficult thing here is that the Sasquatch might not exist. Yet a vast array of cultures seems to believe in a big hairy monster in one form or another. So while the forests of the Pacific Northwest might seem like a remote-enough place for it to actually exist in, you know, reality, they're not the only place in which people claim to see the thing.

In medieval Europe, they called it a “woodwose.” In the deserts of Iraq, it’s known as “Tanttel.” The majority of the samples collected for Melba Ketchum’s self-published DNA study were collected at a location in the Cincinnati suburbs. We see these things everywhere. Rather than a flesh-and-blood animal, or protohuman, it might be that it’s a kind of archetype. Some half-remembered amalgam of Cenozoic night terrors, maybe, or a universal bonhomme sept-heures. It might be that it all never happened.

But that doesn’t matter.

Canada is one of the wealthiest and most-advanced civilizations to ever sit atop the Earth. We can clone goats. We can do all sorts of weird shit. The Montreal Neurological Institute will really fuck you up, just for example. Or so we’ve heard.

Though the whole Neanderthal project might not fit the Sasquatch profile, you don’t have to go too far back into our family tree before finding something that does. A lot of people in this field of research (if we can be that grandiose about it) seem to feel that Homo Heidelbergensis, just for instance, could be a good fit, and based on a terrifying childhood excursion to the Smithsonian, we think Homo erectus (heh) might work in a pinch, as well.

This is not something to be taken lightly. This would be Canada’s Manhattan Project: an attempt to harness the chaotic, dangerous, root forces of nature in such a way as to add to the glory and the prestige of our civilization forever. At worst, we could end up with our own Hiroshima or Nagasaki or a race of mutated beings whose merest and most-guttural squawks and murmurs would communicate the idea of kill me now to anyone who heard them.

But, at best, it would be awesome.

Also: diversity. Could that be part of this too? Don’t discriminate against Sasquatch Canadians just because they may not have gone through the formality of actually existing. They are your countrymen.

And they are fucking enormous. And they will fuck you up, once we build them.

So let’s do this thing.

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