Well, he could have been, and you could have scored his carcass through eBay, where all disreputable carcasses can be purchased for a modest fee.
You might recall the widely-reported ‘discovery’ of Bigfoot some months ago, and the promises of videos and big reveals and scientific amazingness spread across the evening news like so much butter across a hairy, Bigfoot-shaped muffin…. and then the subsequent (and completely predictable) revelation that the Bigfoot in question was not a real Bigfoot, but instead a big ol’ hoax made of a Halloween costume and animal entrails frozen in a block of ice. An artifact that once had enormous scientific value was reduced to an apparently worthless mess, and I don’t think that anyone was seriously disappointed – except for the hoaxster who lost his job in law enforcement for the deception.
And then the whole thing ended up on eBay.
There are collectors and institutions who have a special place for the supernatural and pseudo-supernatural – potato chips that bear the face of Jesus, things that remotely resemble meteorites, alien artifacts – all of these things, as unverifiable as they are, have fetched some pretty high prices.
The fake Bigfoot is no exception. Having gained some modicum of pop culture notoriety and entering mass awareness, the Bigfoot became a completely different kind of unique artifact. It was no longer a scientific, biological entity, but had easily transformed into an anthropological statement about our modern society. Strangely, the latter kind of artifact can often prove more valuable than the prior.
The whole ordeal brings to mind the Cardiff Giant hoax from about 140 years earlier, in which a petrified, 10-foot tall ‘man’ was put on display at various locations and advertised as a biblical humanoid, straight from the book of Genesis. Of course, the petrified Giant was nothing more than a limestone sculpture, but even after a judge ruled that the Giant was a fake (unless the Giant were willing to testify in favor of his own veracity), it continued to travel and be put on display, presumably so further audiences could draw their own conclusions, or gawk at the obvious forgery that fooled so many before them. The Cardiff Giant remains on display in Cooperstown, NY today.
Of course, none of the original witnesses of the Cardiff Giant lived in today’s litigious society. The Bigfoot hoaxsters were hit with lawsuits for a variety of reasons, and the legal fees began to mount – which is why Bigfoot ended up on eBay.
The auction itself is a spectacle worthy of P.T. Barnum himself (who once rented the Cardiff Giant and secretly made a copy of it for his own profit, creating a kind of meta-hoax). The auction’s description astutely tells us that one of the primary reasons that this item is ‘important to the world’ is that it might be observed closely to prevent such a hoax from ever happening again, which is kind of like lighting your house on fire so that you’ll know what it looks like when it actually happens. Also, the auction states, Halloween is coming. You know, in case you want to, like, chuck him on the lawn to scare the kids. This is a bigfoot that covers all of the bases, and even comes hand-delivered by his creators.
With a closing bid of over $250,000 after over 100 bids, Bigfoot’s a pretty solid example of the strangeness of what we might value, but I think that little bit of strangeness is what exists at the core of every collector. And to the winning Bigfoot bidder, I totally have a coffee cup that Bigfoot left in my yard last Saturday. Drop me a line.
