Nothing to brag about, really … or is it? You know what they say about guys with big feet. But seriously (not), officials in Malaysia appear to be pretty tickled with the Christmas present they got this year in the form of a whacking great Sasquatch out in the Johor bush. A couple of sightings and an extremely alleged footprint were more than ample to get the world press in a froth, although apart from that picture of Pope Benedict XXXLCMIII in a Santa hat it was definitely a slow news weekend.

A fellow with the Johor Malaysian Nature Society broke the story that three “Bigfoots”, as everyone’s calling them because it will sell lots of newspapers, were sighted in November by workers in Kampung Mawai, a town
way out in the sticks of Kota Tinggi, which is a district way out in the sticks of Johor province, which is way too close to Singapore as far as those prissy Singaporeans are concerned.
The hairy and evidently quite foul-smelling creatures were believed to be between 2.4 and three metres tall, which is really big, it’s true. And the footprints they found were almost a metre long in themselves.
Hence the name.
Bigfoot.
Above: YIKES! Not Bigfoot.

Left: Bigfoot, but clearly an American one.

Mr Foot and his friends, if they truly exist, could turn out to be a major crowd-puller for the country’s eco-tourism sector, The Star newspaper quotes Johor National Parks Corporation director Hashim Yusoff as telling a Malay-language daily. “Any physical and scientific evidence of Bigfoot’s existence would turn the state’s forest into an attraction for researchers and tourists alike,” he told the Malay paper, which told the Star, which told The Nation, which told me.
Tourists. Coming to get a snapshot of Bigfoot. Admittedly there are a couple of giftshops in the American Northwest peddling Sasquatch postcards, but it’s not a high-volume business, is it? Not even a cottage industry. Barely an outhouse industry, I would think.
In any event, Yusoff said he just doesn’t have enough guys to go out and track the ape-thingy down. Well, that’s all it took, and now there are all kinds of scientific, social, civic, tribal, non-governmental and historical associations, and some guys with guns, falling all over each other to volunteer for the hunt, er, search.
This is apparently far from the first time a Bigfoot-type-beastie’s been spotted in Malaysia. In fact, he was in Mawai in the 1940s, and clearly liked it well enough to stick around.
On the other hand, let’s double-check these eyewitness accounts.
“It was like a big gorilla about four storeys tall,” the Utusan Malaysia actually bothered to quote deputy parks superintendent Mohd Fakri Che Sulaiman as saying, and so am I, damn it. “Although it was foggy, we could see it was staring at us with its hands on its hips.” Kind of fruity for King Kong, wouldn’t you say?
This was 26 years ago, on the Thai-Malaysian border (uh-oh) and Che (which means “friend” in Cuban) still remembers that he stared at the thing for 10 minutes until it got so angry at his rudeness that it started “shouting” and pounding its chest.
Well, what did it shout? The paper didn’t ask.
“It was about 8.30pm when 10 of us from Platoon 15 heard loud footsteps in the forest,” Che goes on. “We were ready to fire at it but were advised otherwise as we were worried it might become violent.” Bigfoot walked off soon after, and no way were they going to follow it. But they did measure the “two left footprints” that remained in its wake and they were .9 metres long. Each.
“Many trees were broken and uprooted as Bigfoot had trampled on them,” he said. I saw this movie, and that Peter Jackson is something else.
The Star then quotes the Bigfoot Field Research Organisation, “a group which conducts scientific research to ascertain Bigfoot’s existence”, as saying Bigfoot could be found on most continents, including the Americas and Asia. He/she/it had been sighted in 49 of the United Snakes, with California (somehow not surprisingly) recording the most sightings – 326. Then they elected it governor. Ba-bada-BISH!

Anyway, now this bloke with the Nature Society is saying he saw the thing’s footprints himself, at a swamp near Sungai Sedili in Mawai. The Nature Society has an adviser named Vincent Chow, and he says the villagers have seen Bigfoot loads of times, so often in fact that they josh around with it and call it hantu jarang gigi (snaggle-toothed ghost). It usually shows up during the monsoon and fruiting seasons, sometimes raiding orchards but not harming anyone.
When he was a kid, Chow says, he and his dad joined search expeditions whenever a sighting was reported. “These creatures could be trapped in a time warp and have not evolved like other animals,” he says. “Forced to breed among themselves, they have not changed much over the ages and are greatly reduced in numbers.”
Mysteries are … um … mysterious. Groucho Marx, for example, once shot an elephant in his pyjamas, and he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out how the elephant got into his pyjamas in the first place. I kid you not.
Partly cloudy in Kota Tinggi, and thus a lousy day for Spot the Missing Link.