Bigfoot in the news

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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On the trail of Bigfoot
John “Punnyman” Le was hot on the trail of Bigfoot Thursday after he picked up newspaper reports that the legendary creature might have been spotted out in Madison County. As loyal reader marc noted a couple of days ago, the Madison weekly, the News Record & Sentinel, had a big splash on its front page.

The “fuzzy stranger,” as Le termed it, was spotted in Hot Springs and a group from the Bigfoot Field Research Organization brought a team in last week to look around. The weekly newspaper story quoted the “researchers” as saying that they had received credible eye-witness reports. The first was that some hunters said a big, shrouded animal was in a tree throwing limbs down at them. The other report was that someone heard some wild screams and thrashing around in the bushes. (Wasn’t that just the usual redneck lovin’ that happens in Madison County every Saturday night?)

Anyway, Le went out and talked to your typical man and woman on the street. One woman said yeah, it’s possible that Sasquatch lives around here. A Forest Service employee said you never know what lives up in the mountains. Somebody else noted that bomber Eric Robert Rudolph eluded capture for five years by hiding out in the woods. Five years!

Then Le hit up the real experts. First up, WLOSer Bob Caldwell, a Madison County native and avid outdoorsman. Caldwell said he knows for a fact that Bigfoot loves blueberries and has been spotted in blueberry patches. Caldwell said it’s also a known fact that Bigfoots do “bear young,” cause he’s heard reports of Bigfoots carrying bigfoot babies.

Then Le went to Joshua P. Warren, Ashvegas’ own ghost hunter. Warren is head of LEMUR, some acronym for something spooky and paranormal, and he runs ghost tours around town. He’s also written a couple of books. All this doesn’t make him more legit or anything, but he did happen to have a giant silhoutte of a Bigfoot in his office, so Le talked to Warren.

Warren said in all seriousness that Bigfoot could be an inter-dimensional being who somehow operates both in the physical world and the non-physical realm. Spooky, no?

WLOSers get it right
WLOSers ran yet another story about the Uzi raffle. As you’ll recall, the North Buncombe Youth Athletic Association had a parent donate an Uzi to help raise money for the group. But the group president called it off after a parent complained.

The whole point of WLOSers story seemed to be to pat themselves on the back and say “we were right – we called the weapon a semi-automatic rifle, unlike other media reports that mistakenly called it a machine gun.”

That self-righteous attitude comes despite the fact that WLOS reports are riddled with errors, inaccuracies and other overblown mess that they never correct or apologize for.

Don’t eat the spinach!
Bagged spinach could be contaminated with e-coli, according to the radio this morning. There’s a recall or something. Be careful.

In other news…
Tonight is the last Downtown After Five concert down by the Grove Arcade. Papa Grows Funk is playing… This weekend is the last weekend of the Mountain State Fair. Get your turkey leg and fried Oreo right now… Susan Mundy talked to school counselors, who say they’re ready to help kids in cases of disaster, such as that campus shooting up in Canada… WLOSers did some sort of story about North Carolina’s law against co-habitation being declared unconstitutional. So unmarried couples can live in sin. The best quote came from a dude WLOS quoted on the street, who said living with a babe “is kinda like test-driving a car. You wanna see if it works good before you buy it.”… WLOSers showed us video of the baby panda that has all of Atlanta abuzz. Little Lulu sure is cute… A tree fell on Kennilworth Drive and hit a FedEx truck – does anybody care?… Segway recalled all of its people-movers, so the Asheville Police Department parked its Segways until they can get ’em fixed next week… A SUV hit an activity bus at the corner of Leicester and Patton. The bus was filled with special-needs kids, but nobody was seriously injured… And somebody else was complaining about erosion, this time out in Jackson County.