Letter to Sasquatch

I’m choosing to communicate with you in this method because I’ve concluded that you must be able to read minds. How else have you managed for centuries to elude capture? How in an age of technology and advanced scientific gadgets have we not proved that you exist? You are always one step ahead and, therefore, must have some advanced form of telepathy at your disposal.

So, I write this in hope that you will invade the brain space of someone who has read this and see that I’m speaking directly to you. In a sense, I’m extending myself to you. Of course, this is under the assumption that you live within the confines of our readership. I’m not sure how psychic powers work exactly, but I will assume your powers can only extend within certain parameters before losing strength–perhaps operating something akin to magnets or wireless routers.

My only hope is that some adventurous reader of this column is hiking and stumbles upon your den or nest or whatever it is you live in and this aforementioned reader’s brain is sucked dry of its contents. Here’s where we, hopefully, intersect. In such an event, I have a few things I want you to know.

First, you have teased us with your existence for far too long. How many footprints and batches of matted fur are you going to tease us with? Do we really need to hear one more exuberant hunter’s testimony of your existence only for them to claim that you inevitably smashed their camera and stole their trophy buck? I mean, what is the deal?

It’s almost like you want to be discovered so badly, yet you chicken out every time you have the chance. Humanity is the hot cheerleader and you’re the nerdy chess-club captain who’s too afraid to make a move. Ask us to prom already! Maybe this isn’t it at all.

Perhaps you aren’t afraid at all. Could it be that humanity simply isn’t ready? I could see the reasoning behind this–given our track record of wars and rumors of wars. Maybe, with your psychic abilities, you’ve seen into the future and you know that revealing yourself will cause some chain reaction of cataclysmic events that will destroy humanity. I guess this brings up greater questions of what it means to be the only “evolved” species on the planet. How lonely we must feel.

Or even worse, maybe you don’t want to associate with humanity because you hate us. All these years have you been some silent stranger in the shadows, examining and studying us as a species only to perceive that we are a threat to your existence? I suppose I could understand this as well. Humanity probably has a sign written across our spiritual forehead that reads, “Outsiders not welcome.”

Truth be told, I’m not even sure why I want you revealed so badly. Maybe you have come to represent something that I, that humanity, longs for on some deeper level. Could it be that you represent the hope that there is something out there that remains pure and unadulterated by society? Maybe you are like aliens or like God–some intangible something that only slightly and without persistence reveals itself–offering tiny glimmers of hope that there is something “out there.”

I’m not sure, but I’ve heard a great deal about you. I’ve heard you were multi-dimensional. Some say that you are really an alien race trying to enslave humanity. Others speculate that you are the missing link to our evolutionary development. Whatever you are, you have something that humanity desperately longs for–maybe it is truth or maybe it is a reason to keep searching and peering into the unknown. Whatever it is, I hope one day we reach that point where mystery and truth collide. The place where the certainty and confusion seem to linger. The place you seem to call home.