As discussed before, the program caused a panic and was blamed for at least one death. Once again the paranormal had managed to cross the boundary between fiction and reality by transcending the popular entertainment medium; in this case, television. And it was the second time in less than a century that a new medium had unleashed a wave of paranormal fright and reaction. Only this time, instead of Pennsylvania country folk reacting to an on-air reading of War of the Worlds, it was a modern, technologically savvy British public that was misled by the blending of fiction, reality, and the paranormal. It is ostension (as Bill Ellis defines it) in the truest form; the imagined, the mythical, had reached out of the television screen and become reality, and suddenly Britain, for a brief period of time, was under attack by evil, otherworldly spirits. As Terence Hines indicated in his argument for scientific inquiry into the paranormal, “the unthinking acceptance of pseudoscientific claims poses real dangers. Believers may act on their beliefs and cause physical harm, even death.”
In this next section we will examine three specific paranormal programs, which can be viewed online (web addresses are provided in the Notes). We will look at the History Channel’s MonsterQuest as the documentary-style program, Discovery’s A Haunting as a reenactment-style program, and finally Ghost Hunters as a reality-based program. We will examine the motives and methods of each of these programs as they present their cases of the paranormal. Are they real or just entertainment? How close are they to the true stories? And why are they presented in their particular style? This section will serve to deconstruct and analyze these programs based on modern television media and the history of the paranormal in the United States.
THE HISTORY CHANNEL’S MONSTERQUEST: “SASQUATCH ATTACK”8
“Around the world people report seeing monsters; are they real or imaginary? Science searches for answers on MonsterQuest.” These are the opening lines for one of the History Channel’s more successful paranormal programs, which, as of this writing, is into its fourth season (It was announced in March 2010 that History had cancelled MonsterQuest in an effort to pursue a new direction). MonsterQuest interviews witnesses and scientists to examine the possibility of the existence of species that are unknown to science, such as Sasquatch, or sightings that are unknown to a particular region, such as sightings of a panther-like big black cat in rural England. In four seasons they have managed to find solid evidence for two possible “monsters”: a mountain lion in North Carolina that was previously believed extinct from the area, and a shadowy underwater image of what is possibly a giant, killer Humboldt squid at a depth of 50,000 feet. They have also managed to disprove several monster theories, such as the flying rods that occasionally appeared on camera but which actually turned out to be out-of-focus insects. However, the odds are stacked against MonsterQuest when it comes to finding these mythical beasts; do they really hope to prove, over the course of a one-week excursion into the animal’s territory, the existence of an animal that has remained hidden for centuries? The answer is no, probably not. While these beasts have had eons of time during which the myths and stories have developed, MonsterQuest has only one week to try to find them, albeit using superior technology. MonsterQuest is, therefore, immediately at a disadvantage in finding these creatures; but is finding these creatures really the point?
“Sasquatch Attack” begins in much the same way as many other paranormal programs—a presentation of evidence, snippets of witness testimony, and flashes of possible evidence supporting the possibility of paranormal phenomenon. In the case of “Sasquatch Attack” we see an insurance video of a ransacked fishing cabin in the remote wilderness of Canada and hear eyewitness testimony, speculation by amateur cryptozoologists, and a teaser of the action to come with various MonsterQuest crewmen coming under attack by the creature and the possibility of DNA evidence proving the creature’s existence. This is the part of the program that separates it from a traditional documentary in that the program establishes a dramatic tone to maintain audience interest. It is a form of sensationalism, which, of course, is important to gaining an audience and maintaining interest. However, does it create a disparity in the authenticity of the program and the reputation of the History Channel? The History Channel has long been regarded as a source for accurate, factual documentaries regarding history, both ancient and modern; is MonsterQuest a break from that style of programming? Is the History Channel using its reputation in order to gain a wider viewing audience for a subject matter that is most likely unsolvable? It comes down to a matter of audience expectation and trust. The audience watching the History Channel puts more faith in the producers and editors to present a clear and truthful case than do, perhaps, the viewers of the Syfy Channel, where the term “fiction” is embedded into the concept of the channel itself.
Doug Hajicek has never had to worry about money. He is the creator and executive producer of MonsterQuest. As a young man he realized that the only way he could pursue his dream of making nature films was to invent something that would make him wealthy so that he would not have to worry about becoming a starving filmmaker living off charity and wild grasses for the rest of his life. So by experimenting with polymers and mixing a few different ingredients that supposedly wouldn’t work, he created and developed a new form of polymer that is still in use by car manufacturers 30 years later. Following this breakthrough and the subsequent financial windfall, Doug was able to pursue his true passion without having to live a poor man’s life. He became a producer of television programs, the newest of which has become a hit for the History Channel—MonsterQuest.
“One of the reasons that the show has been a hit is because, unlike a lot of other documentaries or paranormal shows, we don’t have an agenda. Our mission is simply to find out the truth whether good, bad or indifferent,” Hajicek said. He went on to reference a BBC program, X-Creatures, which was highly critical, if not mocking, of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot video.9 Hajicek states that it was obvious, from the narrator’s tone to the efforts put forth in recreating the beast walking into the forest, that the BBC’s sole purpose was to disparage the film and prove that the whole thing had been a hoax. “That really sours the audience to the whole experience. We actually hope that people learn something from our show. People want to be informed, but they don’t want to be told what to think.”
MonsterQuest, in fact, did not begin as a foray into the paranormal; it was originally a scientific documentary influenced by Peter Jackson’s release of the remade King Kong film. Hajicek set out to make a documentary about the real “King Kong” that once roamed the Asian continent and may have made its way to North America by crossing the land bridge during the Ice Age. This was a large, presumably bipedal ape species known as Gigantopithecus blacki that weighed in at a massive 660 pounds. In the course of their filmmaking, however, they found that many Bigfoot researchers believed Bigfoot was actually an existing Gigantopithecus. The subsequent documentary, Giganto: The Real King Kong, aired on the History Channel and explored the history and fossil findings of Gigantopithecus. The documentary received good reviews and good ratings, so the History Channel approached Doug about doing similar, shorter features, thus birthing MonsterQuest.
Hajicek doesn’t see MonsterQuest as a diversion from the History Channel’s mission, but sees belief in monsters and the paranormal as a part of American history and a part of our mythic heritage. “We have this European heritage that has been repressed, we have very little culture in this country, we don’t have the ancient culture that Europe or the rest of the world has and our culture seems to manifest itself because people generally do live by the rule of paranormal. You can put religion in that category, you can put a lot of things in that category, but here’s the kicker … the paranormal is fueled constantly by experiences people are having. Here in America every third person you talk to has had some kind of experience they can’t explain, they saw something they couldn’t identify, saw something in the sky they couldn’t identify, saw something around the corner of th
eir house they couldn’t identify, there’s something going on constantly that fuels this belief in the paranormal. If it wasn’t fueled it would die off.” Doug makes the point that there are never reports of unicorns, so we don’t talk about unicorns and they are not part of our cultural language. Instead, people are seeing giant bipedal apes roaming the forests, strange crafts in the skies, and apparitions in their attics. “Nobody claims to see unicorns,” he explained, “and since nobody is seeing them, the belief is not fueled and it dies off. That hasn’t happened for Bigfoot.”
Doug, however, has more to base his interest in monsters on than just stories from witnesses. While filming in the Arctic during the summer, Doug and his crew landed their seaplane on an isolated lake in the farthest reaches of Canada. When they came ashore they found footprints lining the sandy beach. They were human-like and massive, and there were hundreds of them walking the shoreline of this wilderness lake high in the Arctic. They followed the tracks as far as they could and then tried to convince the pilot to take them further in search of the animal. He refused, and they were left with only the tracks leading out into the cold wilderness where no barefoot man could survive.
That was what led Doug originally to question the existence of a mysterious creature and, of course, to create MonsterQuest. His interest was only fueled as he began to talk to scientists, such as Jeff Meldrum, who were examining the evidence of giant footprints very carefully and putting their careers on the line to explore the possibilities of an undiscovered giant humanoid creature. But Doug was soon going to find himself the subject of his documentaries more than he cared to be.
The remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness featured in “Sasquatch Attack” isn’t just a random location that the MonsterQuest team decided to investigate. It was where Doug would take his family and friends for some time away from civilization to fish the plentiful waters and stay in a cabin run largely by solar energy and located 250 miles from the nearest town. It was his refuge—his vacation spot, where some nights he would pull his mattress out onto the dock and sleep under the stars. “I felt safer there than I do in most hotels,” he said.
The story begins rather modestly when some coworkers that Doug had brought to the cabin claimed that a good-sized branch had been lobbed at them from the forest. They couldn’t see who had thrown it and none of them thought very much about it, figuring that it was somehow an anomaly of the wind moving through the trees, much like the groans of a house settling. Years later, while at the cabin with his son who had recently graduated from high school, they heard singing in the middle of the night from across the lake. “We sat there and listened to a very human-like voice singing in a language I could not understand. It sounded native but I couldn’t distinguish any words; it was beautiful, almost like opera. It wasn’t a bird. It was something big with big lungs that could really belt out a tune. It sounded female, big but feminine and we listened to it for nearly an hour.” However, Doug still did not believe that this was anything out of the ordinary; after all, the cabin was in such a remote and strange part of the wilderness that it was like a different world and a different time. “It’s like a T-Rex could come wandering out of the woods and it wouldn’t surprise you.” In essence the enchanting wilderness had lulled them into a dream; and in that prehistoric dream, there was a voice singing in an unknown tongue—something strange, but also familiar.
Then, while Doug and two of his friends were there on a father-daughter fishing trip, things changed and took a more dangerous turn. Following a day of fishing, they heard a loud wood-knock. A wood-knock is the act of knocking a piece of wood against a tree and is often used by apes as a warning to others. It is often cited as evidence of a Sasquatch in the area and is one of the more commonly reported phenomena in the deep northern wilderness. Around 2 a.m. they decided to wood-knock while sitting around the fire. They received an immediate response that sounded nearly 20 yards away. “We turned white,” Doug said. As the wood-knocking continued back and forth, they threw some rocks into the forest. The rocks were immediately thrown back and landed directly at their feet. They continued this strange form of communication for nearly an hour. After the rock throwing ceased they tried several other methods to entice the creature to communicate, but to no avail. They retired to the cabin and all fell asleep except Doug. “I was too wired to sleep so I stayed up and read some magazines.” Before falling asleep, Doug went to the kitchen sink to wash his face. “The moment I turned the light on, screaming started at the front and the back of the cabin, things started hitting the cabin and the cabin started getting lifted and shook.” He quickly blocked off the skylight in the roof, fearing that something would be thrown through the window and immediately tried to awaken his friends, but they didn’t wake. And then, as quickly as it had started, it ended. “It was the scariest moment of my life.” Doug’s immediate thought afterward was, “we have to get some scientists up here.”
Thus, this particular episode of MonsterQuest was born from Doug’s own experiences with his friends and the experience of the cabin owner who documented the damage done to his cabin by an unknown source. During the filming of “Sasquatch Attack” the crew was lucky enough to have their stone throwing returned, and then, at one point, they were forced to hide in the cabin out of fear.
Laura K. Leuter is the president and founder of the Devil Hunters in southern New Jersey. They, like their Bigfoot-hunting counterparts, collect stories of encounters with a creature known as the Jersey Devil; they gather statistics and conduct field research in an effort to find the legendary beast. Laura and her group have been featured on a number of programs, including MonsterQuest, but it was the portrayal of her experience on World’s Scariest Places, a program on Fox Family that angered her and summed up why many people may doubt paranormal programs such as MonsterQuest.
There appeared to be two glowing orbs way off in the distance, at the point from which we had come. We were a little baffled by it at first, and we started to check it out. We couldn’t get it on the camera, and the film crew was of course playing it up like it was the best thing in the world. Finally, I had a bright idea—I knelt down and said “I’ll put a stop to this” and reached into my bag, producing the night vision goggles. Through the goggles, I discovered that the light we were seeing was produced from a reflection off the headlights of Harry’s jeep. False alarm. Of course, the film crew cut that part out … Of course, before we left, they tried to stump us with fake tracks, which we picked up on instantly. The tracks in the video appeared to be made by a creature that would have had two of the same feet! Neither print resembled anything real, either. And as any Jersey Devil buff knows, the prints are usually hoof-like. This one looked like someone’s hand with a few random fingers here and there. The production assistant later told us that Harry had been in charge of creating them for us.10
This is the fine line between entertainment and serious inquiry that Doug Hajicek and his crew have to walk, and it is the blurring of this line that causes so many skeptics to critique these programs. Are otherwise reputable scientists convincing themselves that there is a boogeyman outside in the hopes that if they believe hard enough, there will be?
“Certainly if I ever heard of a crewmember doing anything like that, I would fire them,” Hajicek said. “Obviously, we have a lot of crews, but if anything like that happened I would deal with it. But I think we do a pretty good job with presenting things as they actually happened. We can’t have a boring show, but we can’t be fabricating things either. You can dramatize what did happen by adding music and things like that.” The third season of MonsterQuest marked a return to the cabin in Canada and another effort to entice the creature to come forth. This time Doug went armed with a full budget of gear and complex plans that would keep the crew safe while allowing them to view what was happening outside the cabin, as well as a host of different tracking, infrared, and motion-sensitive lighting and equipment, only to turn up empty-handed. Absolutely nothing happened at the camp. �
�If I was going to fake something, that would have been the episode,” he said. “We poured tons of money into that project and got absolutely nothing.” The project was saved by a freak coincidence. The pilot of their transport plane had to touch down 150 miles away for repairs, and while there, they heard that a local woman had spotted a Sasquatch in the area. This led the researchers to theorize that the creature may have been following the seasonal blueberry harvest. Either way, it was a minimal payoff for the money and effort that had been put forth by Hajicek and his crew, and they barely came away with a show.
However, Doug feels that despite having to dramatize certain aspects of the program, MonsterQuest has aided the scientific community. Hajicek and his crew have developed new and interesting methods for capturing wildlife on film. He is particularly proud of capturing a glimpse of a giant squid by attaching a camera to a smaller squid, something that had never been done before. MonsterQuest is experimenting with new and different ways to find the truth, and while a majority of the time they find nothing but more questions, the process of attempting to answer those questions has led to breakthroughs for modern scientific inquiry. They have developed a laser camera that both films and measures an animal within a quarter of an inch. They found the elusive Greenland shark off a man’s dock in fresh water, a species which grows up to 20 feet in length, and they documented evidence that mountain lions were returning to parts of North Carolina where they had been thought to be extinct. Hajicek believes that science is best benefited by thinking outside the box and trying new things, “doing things so bizarre that there was no way it would work.” This is Hajicek’s scientific method: try anything and everything because, who knows? Scientists can often face ridicule from within their own community by working on paranormal cases. Hajicek thinks that this is “flat thinking” and results in scientists constantly “repeating the past.” Doug believes that skeptics aren’t necessarily close-minded people, because they are open to finding answers for paranormal experiences as much as anyone else; their findings just differ from others in many cases. Thus, the lack of agreement in the scientific community regarding the paranormal and the numerous eyewitness statements, combined with the numerous possible logical explanations, begin to make the science of the paranormal a matter of faith. “I know that my statements about what happened at the cabin probably don’t count,” Hajicek said. “I’m a producer of a paranormal television show, but I can tell you that what we experienced up there was absolutely real or else someone was playing a very elaborate hoax on us. I don’t know how or why someone would do that but those are the only two options. There is either an animal there or someone managed to pull an amazing hoax.”
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