Johor: The Other Side
Posted by: Loren Coleman on December 22nd, 2006
Last Wednesday, as part of Zainul Arifin’s column, this editorial appeared:
DATUK Sazmi Miah, please don’t rain on our parade. We want our Bigfoot, real or otherwise, please.
The parliamentary secretary to the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry said there was no evidence – droppings or hair samples, for examples – to suggest the Johor Bigfoot existed. It is a hoax, Sazmi declared.
He also said that since we have only found single footprints, the creature can’t be hopping on one foot all this while.
He has a point there, unless of course, Bigfoot is actually a one-legged creature, or one leg had been amputated in a freak jungle accident.
A reader wrote to this newspaper suggesting that Sazmi was a spoilsport, and was not able to see beyond evidence of bodily discharge and follicular fallouts, to see the advantages of the Bigfoot myth.
Think of the tourism earnings, Cecilia Lee of Johor Baru wrote.
"I think Lee may be right. Think of the Loch Ness monster and how the Scots have been benefiting from tourists lured by the romance of the underwater creatures. While they have been promoting the mystery of the creature to visitors the world over, I am certain half of the people in Edinburgh do not believe it existed."
What’s next? No Santa Claus? On that note, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Source: New Straits Times, Malaysia, December 20, 2006, "We want Bigfoot, real or otherwise"
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
