the bigfoot chiro-wellness-alien-5g-windmill-keto connection REVEALED

On the incredibly slight chance you haven’t seen the hit documentary The Bigfoot Alien Connection Revealed, let me break it down for you: bigfoot (species) are not cryptozoological creatures at all, but aliens. As in, extraterrestrial. As in, not-of-planet-earth. And they are among us. What other possible reason could there be for no one having seen one, like, ever?

While talking about sightings, one “bigfoot contactee”, as described by the film, explains that he doesn’t even bring his camera with him anymore when he’s out looking. Sure, he used to feel like the crazy one who had to prove bigfoot’s existence, but now? Now he does it for his own personal experience (putting aside his participation in a film… trying to prove bigfoot’s existence). “No longer afraid of ridicule,” the narrator tells us over B-roll of a relatively crowded bigfoot/supernatural phenomena convention, “people are coming out of the shadows with their contact reports and have formed communities of their shared experiences.”

The Bigfoot Connection Revealed… changed me. Or maybe not changed, but it certainly crystalized my understanding of my own interest in how humans choose, relate to, stumble upon, and/or are born into their belief systems. When I say belief system, I’m talking the highest level of existential admin. I’m talking about the top-level bureaucracy that governs our own existence. The ones that attempt to explain the existence of the Other (here referring to supernatural creatures, aliens, cryptids, ghosts, chakras, energies, auras, pretty much any spiritual or religious concept that is unprovable by the—yes, belief system— we know as science).

One of the interviewees, a paranormal investigator, says, “Is it just that we’ve transposed this process [of alien abduction] to a technology and a language that appeals to us now? People are not talking about fairies the way people talked about some of these same things hundreds of years ago. So maybe just the clothing of the experience has changed to suit our modern age. But the process seems to remain fairly consistent throughout the ages and it results in the same sort of thing. Transformation of consciousness, which affects the body, affects how we think, how we interact with each other; an awakening of what in supernatural terms would be called superpowers.” OK, she went off the rails a little bit at the end there, but the first half of what she said is, as far as I’m concerned, hitting the nail on the head. Unexplainable events, or, similar but different, events that a layperson can’t explain, invites speculation, and often, that speculation takes on a reverent, supernatural quality that results in tight-knit communities like the ones seen in documentaries like The Bigfoot Alien Connection (seriously, watch enough docs like these, and you see some frequent flyers, especially anyone with legit credentials or author/investigator listed as their occupation). It’s not exactly new information that people band together over shared interests, and the more intense/eclectic the interest, the tighter the band. The weirder it is, the more you need support, validation, and re-affirmation from those around you. People caught in MLM schemes need it (why do you think they’re always on Zoom calls hyping each other up?!). Back in the day when Supernatural was still on-air and we were watching season 8 with our hearts in our throats because Dean and Cas were totally in love, guys (!!!), we may as well have been holding hands over a seance table and conjuring up spirits that were definitely real and not just Victorian-era special effects. I mean… people go to church every week. People flock to supernatural phenomena conventions to be around fellow believers. We like in-group (you believe what I believe) but… we also like out-group (what you believe is WRONG).

My (mediocre) understanding of this social phenomenon is that out-groups are actually more important than in-groups. So, as important as having a hand to hold is, as important as the foile a deux (or troi, or quatre…) of it all, it’s just as, if not more important that you have naysayers. Dare I say, the haters have an incredibly important role to play in all this. Like, yes, it was fun that we knew the secret truth: Dean and Cas are in LOVE. But you know what else was fun? When someone said they weren’t. When someone who liked Wincest tried to Wincest it up. Or when some CW exec got dogpiled on twitter about deancas and tweeted the equivalent of “what are you talking about they’re straight”. When there was a villain in that narrative, guess what that made us? How could we define ourselves as the progressive lefties rabid for representation while also just happening to get exactly what we wanted from a fandom perspective without, ugh, ugly old wincest shippers who were probably like, SOMEONE’S MOM, or some FAT CAT in a SUIT at the cw who had never even HEARD of gay people, and the conservatives, and probably Elon Musk for some reason, and all our stupid suburban mothers who didn’t know any better, to measure ourselves against? There’s no correct opinion if there’s no incorrect opinion. If there’s no one around to drag you down, no one else is going to extend a hand to help you back up. If no one argues with you about bigfoot’s existence, you have no reason to spend hours and hours of your life wandering around in the dark like a dolt trying to prove them wrong.

I’d like to make it clear that while I think these beliefs are ridiculous, much in the same way I think believing in god is ridiculous, I don’t think this alone makes these people crazy or unstable or any other unpalatable term that calls their sanity into question. Certainly, there may be comorbidities here— are religious people, fandom-lifers, or people who believe that bigfoot is an alien, or that bigfoot exists at all, regardless of its terrestrial status, more susceptible to certain mental illnesses, or certain proclivities, or certain patterns of behavior? Maybe. Keep in mind, though, I’m also totally batshit, and I don’t believe in any of this junk. So we’re entering a bit of the pot calling the kettle black situation here. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in making fun of these people, but I wouldn’t go so far as shoving them into lockers.

To demonstrate the intriguing devotion to pseudoscience, misinformation, and impeccable lack of critical thinking skills, here’s a clip from Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot (2011-2018) that will stay with me till I die:

As far as I’m concerned, my guffaws are obnoxious, but warranted.

Despite the obvious reality TV edit, I’m taking this clip at face value. Doctored as it is, I don’t think the excitement— especially on the part of our hosts— is manufactured. These people spent years making what I assume to be a reasonably high salary at their job of “believing in Bigfoot” and being a superhero to the freaks and weirdos all over the country (and world!) who believe in this stuff. I believe in their belief, but at the same time, I would not be surprised if that belief was… supplemented, shall we say, by the reflection of dollar signs in their eyes. This is not a Bigfoot specific phenomenon, though. Science, religion, technology, MLMs, cults, all the heavy-hitters in the world of utmost devotion, have their true believers, their snake oil salespeople, and, maybe worst of all, the ones who fall somewhere on that spectrum that is not one extreme or the other.

It does not take much in-depth Googling to find a “character sheet” you can fill out for your homemade blorbos. There are tons of options, with varying degrees of depth; favorite color, childhood memories, nicknames, political affiliation, hopes/dreams, wants/needs, fears, sexual orientation, attractiveness, skills, personality traits, etc… etc… etc… Insult incoming, but I can see how these are attractive to people who want to be writers, but aren’t. You should certainly know some of these things about your character— it will depend on the character, the story, and their role in it— but it’s kind of like a Pinterest board, right? Fun to make, pleasing to look at, not much more beyond that. The most important of these details will come naturally in a story— they’ll self-select. I can’t think of a time, beyond fact-checking canon while writing fanfiction, that having a character sheet with little Q&A’s about them would have been helpful. Like almost everyone does in real life, you have to go with what feels right in the moment, even if it doesn’t necessarily fit into the little personality checklist you’ve built for your character. We’re not static beings, and beyond unchangeable facts like eye colour or where we were born, how much or little of anything we are is going to be up in the air depending on the circumstances of the moment.

I’m making fun of character sheets because I’m about to make a case for understanding your character’s belief system, instead. A belief system creates a trickle-down affect. Whatever your character believes about the world and their place in it, the organization of society, our classification of everything, the machinations of the universe—even if they don’t think about it ever, at all— is one of the few things you need to know before setting them off on their narrative journey.

Supernatural was a TV show made by many different people with many different interpretations of the main characters and the main themes of the story. Not only that, but it was on for fifteen years, and often not good. This lead to worldbuilding inconsistencies, confusing character choices, and, well, just a lot of bad writing. I’ll caveat with the fact that “inconsistent characterization” isn’t really a thing in real life. You can feel “not yourself” but like, you do what you do, right? If you make an uncharacteristic choice, you still made it. In fictional worlds, that gets more complicated, because you’re walking the line between “real people are inconsistent” and “narratives demand character growth, which requires characters to be consistent”. I understand this. I find it very intriguing. However, back to my actual point: there were times during Supernatural’s run where a character would say or do something that was like… why? And the answer was: just cause. Which, whatever. News at 11, writers made a silly character choice because they work on a goofy-ass genre TV show that should have been canned years ago. But you know what gave me a banging high in the good old days? Taking those disparate pieces of the character (Dean, it was Dean, and much more rarely, Castiel) and making it all make sense. Why did Dean do this when it didn’t seem to make sense at all? Well, allow me to unfurl my scrolls and you shall see… And making something out of nothing almost always came down to a few unarguable facts about Dean and how he saw the world: no matter how hard you work to even the scales, the world is a cruel and uncaring place, made worthy only by the little guys who keep fighting the good fight, even when they’re going to lose. Not super pithy, but you get the point. As someone who considered herself a Dean Winchester scholar once upon a time, I think you can draw a line between almost anything he’s ever done and that belief system he holds.

Consider Wren (you know Wren, from the book), someone who is not in the protagonist of a bad genre show, but of a literary novel that takes place in an approximation of the real world. She’s not someone who’s had much cause to consider her own belief systems and isn’t particularly interested in investigating them. However, just because she doesn’t spend a lot of time philosophizing doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. She’s a pessimist: the world is bad, and in an endless, violent power struggle that men consistently dominate. In a way, her journey in the narrative is finally finding a response to that unchangeable belief system, with a shrug and an, “OK, bye then.”

I think it’s more common for characters to have belief systems that are challenged, and then changed, as opposed to my current approach of a character accepting/coming to terms with their current, cynical one. An obvious example would be the anti-social misanthrope who is convinced by the bubbly love interest that there is still good in the world, after all. Or a character who believes strictly in logic and science, only to be confronted by a supernatural event. Belief systems are a very common discussion in the world of “learning to write”. At least in the world I inhabited, back in dinosaur times. It’s funny to consider how, in the end, stories all come back to conflict. Even the conventional approach to belief systems involves conflict— the opposing forces of “I believe X, but current events are challenging my understanding of X”. I am such a hard pessimist in my writing that I rarely write characters doing total U-turns on their belief systems. There’s not a whole lot of “I hate the world” to “I love the world!” pipelines in my writing. In fact, you could say my own cynical belief system prevents me from doing exactly that. I don’t think people can change like that.

This approach to writing also explains why every one of my works worth their salt has at least one discussion that emphasizes the fact that falling in love/finding happiness ultimately fixes nothing, and after the story ends, the characters are still the same people they’ve always been, and will face the same challenges, because while there may be a cure for a physical malady, there’s still no cure that I’m aware of for a difficult personality. The moment they release Ozempic for misanthropic losers with commitment issues, I’m all over it.

Every person is unique and beautiful and special and blah blah blah but also, people, largely, can be grouped under a small number of wide umbrellas, and that holds true for belief systems, too. Logical, spiritual, self-centered, utilitarian, I can enact change, I can’t enact change, facts over feelings, feelings over facts, we are alone in the world, we aren’t alone in the world, you get it. If your character believes in bigfoot, is she more likely to believe her love interest lying to her? If your character is in a pyramid scheme, is she someone without a moral compass who would recruit others for her own financial gain? If your character is a staunch atheist, will her rigid stances on things like astrology being garbage and tarot being absurd push away a potential relationship? Whether you have to state a character’s belief system in a story at all will largely depend on the story. For example, I don’t think Wren’s understanding/stating of her own belief system truly crystalizes until right at the end, when she’s decided to accept that the world is terrible and inescapable, while also carving out the scantest corner of fulfillment she can find. However, you could make cases for either end of the spectrum; a belief system that is trumpeted loud and proud from the start that gets plucked and picked at for the entirety of the narrative, or a much quieter one that never explicitly gets mentioned, but is still a strong driver of character and action. Either way, belief systems are very much the shadowy puppetmaster behind a lot of narratives. It’s just a matter of how much you decide to obfuscate them to meet the needs of your story.

Our worldviews and belief systems are human-created, and as a result, emotion-driven and largely irrational. Doesn’t matter if it’s believing that bigfoot is an alien or that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis or that having your body enter ketosis is healthier than losing weight, like, normally. Considering your characters’ belief systems is an excellent way to approach writing when you want “literary realism” as opposed to a blorbo checkbox. Nothing wrong with the blorbo checkbox— after all, you’re talking to a retired professional Fandom Blorbo Haver. However, I would suggest that if you’re looking to add complexity and contradiction to your characters and their relationships with both themselves and the people and world around them, I think this would prove a good thought exercise.

A thought exercise, I should add, I don’t always participate in. I don’t always practice what I preach, sue me. I can’t say I was thinking intimately about Lily or Rat’s belief systems when I was writing Rat on a Horse. Just as an example.

In Novel Two, though, I have definitely given more thought to it, and I think it’s paying off creatively (no comment on potential commercial value, haha, it’s fine). I know I mentioned in a previous blog post that I focused a lot on my characters’ relationship to class in this one, and letting that trickle down into how they view the world around them and theirs and others’ “rightful” place in it ended up driving a lot of the rewrites and strengthening the emotional narrative. Um, in my opinion, anyway. Kind of makes the comedy vomit early on feel a bit out of place, but tone standardization is a problem for later. I already know it’s not going anywhere, to be honest. If there’s going to be anything in my stories, it’s going to be a rom com dram vom. Batman has the bat signal. I have that.

There is a very interesting divide that The Bigfoot Alien Connection Revealed highlights within its own community: those who believe Bigfoot is of-this-planet, and, of course, our heroes who are right and know that Bigfoot is an alien species. A little unfair, considering the bias is right there in the title, but then again, what are documentaries if not bias machines, well-argued? These are two subgroups in what I would already consider a subsub group of society. Becoming privy to this rather private drama feels equivalent to what someone who only casually watched Supernatural would feel witnessing the collective manic episode everyone (the deancas shippers on tumblr circa 2012) experienced after Dean hugged Cas in season eight, episode two, after they reunited in purgatory. Another unfortunate connection to be drawn is that bigfoot, extraterrestrial or not, is not real. Dean and Castiel, god as my witness, were not romantically involved. You guys… the shit that people believe. Imagine how granular these arguments get, over evidence that exists only in the mind of Schrodinger’s cat. If nothing else, the gems that can be mined from this intensity of… belief systems, I say kindly… are deeply valuable from a writer’s point of view.

Forgive me, a full grown adult, for referencing children’s media, but it’s like the Sorting Hat. You just get flicked into one belief system or another based on a pre-determined set of traits, pledge allegiance to it for no reason other than It’s What You Believe, and then you spend the next however many years leaning into it, cause it’s like, you already bought the color-coordinated scarf. Seems insane. Now consider the amount of adults you know who know exactly which house they’re “in”. Or how many people know their MBTI type. Or any other arbitrary personality test you can get a free version of online. Or sports fans who have “their” team. Or, hell, gay stereotypes a la, “only bisexual people cuff their jeans” and assorted nonsense. As long as there’s an in group and an out group, no matter how silly the item of contention, people will sort and divide themselves into one or the other, and then, as god intended, argue about it to the grave.

The clothing of the experience has changed to suit the modern age, that one interviewee said. And she was right. That’s it. There will always be new belief systems or new ways of engaging with old ones. Maybe more relevant at this point in history, there will always be a new way for snake oil salespeople to target and indoctrinate you into them, maybe out of true-believer-duty, more likely because you have money in your pocket they think would look better in theirs.

From a real world perspective, I have no solution for this besides assuming every single person who even breathes in your direction is trying to sell you something, and your best bet is to preemptively clamp your hands over your ears and sprint in the opposite direction. From a writing perspective, this is a fascinating tool to have in your arsenal when it comes to creating interesting, nuanced, and complex characters.

One final note: if you are someone who partakes in the devil’s lettuce, I highly recommend doing so right before starting up the documentary. It really heightens the viewing experience. Heck, plan a whole Friday night around it. Order pizza. You won’t be disappointed.