In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,63

we hold two pieces of contradictory knowledge at the same time: cognitive dissonance. Instead of going back to the drawing board or recomputing in the face of new information, we resort to chicanery. We reject, ignore, rationalize, or distort the new data, becoming even more hardened in our position. We cherry-pick, find additional evidence, and reinterpret facts that support our position—a process known as confirmation bias. In more extreme cases, in which political power or wealth is at stake, we simply marginalize, penalize, cast away, or kill the messengers responsible for the dissonant information. Turkish journalists who write critically of their regime are labeled “terrorists” and thrown into jail. Environmentalists who loudly protest deforestation in certain Latin American countries are often killed by police or thugs hired by logging companies.

This devotion to what we think we know and what we think should be runs deep. Margaret Heffernan, author of Willful Blindness, says that at the root is a fundamental preference in our lives for what is known and familiar to us, whether real or imaginary. Anything that falls outside that—the unknown, the dissonant, the alien—is seen as an enemy. “Embedded within our self-definition, we build relationships, institutions, cities, systems, and cultures that, in reaffirming our values, blind us to alternatives,” she writes. “This is where our willful blindness originates: in the innate human desire for familiarity, for likeness, that is fundamental to the ways our minds work.”*

This is partly why many members of the ever-growing congregation of Bigfooters, never having seen a creature for themselves, push aside the dissonance caused by the fact that a Sasquatch body has never been presented. Even John Bindernagel and his Bigfoot-positive scientist colleagues, who are not pure “believers” because their arguments stem from professional assessment of the Sasquatch data, are still working with their own cherished models of reality. Their emotions and intuitions are fully engaged. Their minds are no less like Storr’s “bitter curmudgeon,” defending their models to the end.

All of this also applies to debunkers or conservative scientists. The desire to discredit or deliberately disbelieve, whether rightly or wrongly, is also a mental posture. Because science operates within the convenient circle of what fits with its preconceptions—which is anathema to what science is supposed to be about—it has rejected the work of Bindernagel and his colleagues outright.

Alex, the Guardian Watchman, it turns out, is hard to find. He’s never at his place. When I ask Lena about him, she tells me he has no phone and that he uses only the radio. I try calling out to him on the VHF channel, but I get no response save for some unintelligible, static-filled chatter coming from the sportfishing camps out in the inlet.

While at Lena’s I find myself restless and unable to stay put. I decide to walk to a place called “the reload”—the old logging depot at the edge of Owikeno Lake. Lena advises me not to make the hour-long walk. A huge grizzly, she says, was seen earlier on this side of town. She tells me to take her pickup instead and throws me the keys with a smile.

I drive along the heavily potholed gravel road through a stretch of forest that separates the village from the lake. The approach is dark and a touch ominous: a landscape of silhouetted, mossy trees, streaked with sunbeams, towering above huge spiderlike ferns. I drive out of the forest and into a wide clearing strewn with old logs and rusting equipment. Before me are the azure waters of Owikeno Lake, a long, flooded alpine valley stretching far into the distance. About a dozen seals are sunning themselves, lazily, on a log boom a few feet offshore.

Once I step out of the pickup I hear voices from behind a pile of timber and the sound of an engine starting. Then I see a motorboat drone away from the edge of the reload toward the distant reaches of the lake. That’s followed by laughter and a dog yelping. I walk over to the other side of the woodpile and find a man and two women, all in their forties, sitting on logs around a small fire. A tiny, rodent-like dog with puffy brown fur is running around them, barking madly. Parked behind them is a truck. All three are holding cans of Budweiser beer, and they stare at me as if I were an apparition.

“You’re that guy from New York who’s staying at Lena’s,” exclaims the man, who’s dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. The two