FINDING BIGFOOT: Bigfoot & Wolverines

Animal Planet - Original Air Date: 12/16/12

If you've seen the show or read my other reviews by now, you know the drill for this series.  The team goes someplace -- northern lower Michigan in this episode -- following a photo or video.  They evaluate whether they think the video is real or fake (with Ranae, the skeptic, often the only one voting "fake"), then do some night investigations, hold a town hall meeting, talk to witnesses, and have a solo campout.  So, I'll only be remarking on results or unusual evidence during this review.  The inciting incident on this show is a moving truck supposedly being hit by by a bigfoot-thrown log (at night), with footprints as evidence.  Ranae, remains skeptical, citing misidentification.  Naturally, the footprints are no longer around to look at.

One woman in the town hall has an impressive recorded howl that might be a bigfoot, a sound she's heard on numerous nights in the last weeks (including the night previous).  Matt camps out near there, but finds/hears nothing.  For their final search, the team takes to horseback and tries to find places where deer would currently act as prey for sasquatch.  (An idea they maybe should have hit on long ago.)  At night, they hear knocks and howls.  "Show yourselves, you hairy bastards. I want to see you," Ranae declares.  She could not explain the wood knockings.  Sadly, no prints and no video -- at least, though, they have some sounds on tape.  And that's better than a lot of these investigations.  Maybe they should stick around and spend more than a week in Michigan.

FINDING BIGFOOT: Dances with Bigfoot

Animal Planet - Original Air Date: 12/10/2012

The group is off to the pine-forest mountains of Arizona to investigate a video purporting to show a sasquatch (juvenile) in a camp ground. (Looks juvenile to me, all right -- as in human teenager, complete with logo sweatshirt, pants, and long hair.)  The recreation shows Bobo is much larger than the figure on the video, but the videographer still thinks it's a bigfoot, and this is a training ground for their young.  Yeah.  Right.  More night investigations turning up nothing, more town-hall meetings (with interesting stories) ensue.  Ranae meets a witness who seems credible, and can't discount what he's seen (a running bigfoot by the road).  But are credible stories proof?  Cliff camps out, finding nothing but strange sounds (cougar?).  Really, I could practically write these show descriptions without watching them, and since I'm only interested in real evidence, there's very little to tell.  They do talk to some Native Americans, who believe the sasquatch to be real; Bobo and Ranae have a discussion in which she says she understands their belief in totem animals, but that doesn't mean the creatures are physically real.  Ranae needs scientific proof, and so do I -- but this is another episode without any.

FINDING BIGFOOT - Sierra Spy

Animal Planet - Original Air Date: 12/3/2012

The team goes to the Sierra Nevada Range (CA) to investigate ongoing sightings, recordings of strange sounds, and smudge prints. My favorite "bigfoot excuse" of the show: "It could be a sasquatch trying to sound like a coyote." Really?  Why not analyze that recording with an expert (and not a bigfoot expert).  The smudges in question were left on the windows of a truck and are described as "looking like gorilla prints."  But Cliff can't recreate them, his anatomy is wrong (as are the hands of all primates), and Ranae conjectures that a bear is more likely.  Indeed.  Later, on one of the traditional night investigations, Matt momentarily mistakes Cliff for an unknown creature on IR camera.  The usual tromping around in the dark, town hall meeting, and witness interviews ensue.

Ranae is stumped by one story in which a woman describes a huge, hairy creature leaning on her window momentarily before it moves away.  It's much too large to be a human, and Ranae concludes either the woman is delusional, or she saw something that can't be explained.  Another witness story has Ranae saying "too far away to be sure," but the believers are certain that the sighting was a bigfoot.  The team also visits some ancient Native American pictographs that supposedly depict bigfoot; the believers are thrilled to see them, but the show doesn't let us know (resident skeptic) Ranae's thoughts.  A final night investigation yields a sound that seems like a falling tree (though they don't GPS the spot to investigate during the day), but nothing more.  So, again, many stories, no proof.