A surprising number of Americans believe in Bigfoot, and many more in the existence of extraterrestrial UFOs. Photo via iStock/Joel Masson

Campus Life

“I Want to Believe”: BU Class Explores UFOs, Bigfoot, and Why We Believe

CAS writing course ponders the question of why we believe what we do

Take it from us: if you spotted Bigfoot on Comm Ave earlier this year, it wasn’t the real thing, just one of William Giraldi’s students. As to whether there is a real thing, Giraldi (GRS’03), a master lecturer in the College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program, suggests you hold the giggles. 

Bigfoot belief, he says, isn’t all that different from religious convictions. Ditto for subscribing to the existence of extraterrestrial visitors, the other topic of his class “I Want to Believe”: UFOs & Bigfoot in Myth & Fact. (The first half of that name, those of a certain vintage will recall, borrows from an X-Files mantra.) Giraldi’s class has been known to inspire students’ creative fun: at the end of last spring’s inaugural run, he says, some arrived for final presentations in Bigfoot costumes and alien masks. 

But to many people, these creatures are more than Halloween costumes.

“Nearly every recorded culture and established mythology has some version of anomalies in the sky and a hairy man-beast in the woods,” notes Giraldi’s syllabus. Half of Americans believe, with “religious vigor,” that UFOs exist, it adds, while 15 percent think Bigfoot is an actual animal. (The latter group, Matthew Watkins [CAS’27] noted during a recent class, includes as brilliant a woman as Jane Goodall, the world’s leading chimpanzee expert.)

In a recent interview, Giraldi poses the key question the course raises: “Why do so many people need to believe that [Bigfoot and UFOs] exist?” When speaking of “belief in the supernatural, belief in the otherworldly, belief in the sublime or the extraordinary,” he says, “we’re talking about the psychological workings of the human mind.

“The thing that makes Bigfoot and UFOs different from, say, vampires or ghosts or witches or the Loch Ness Monster, is that science can actually have something to say about this.” BU scientists, for example, have joined official probes of UFO reports. Meanwhile, whether Bigfoot exists or not, Giraldi says that there’s an extinct analog—Gigantopithecus, an Asian ape from the Pleistocene—while “many of the people stomping through the Pacific Northwest right now looking for Sasquatch are scientists who are doing fieldwork.”

Giraldi and students in a recent College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program class on Bigfoot and UFOs. During last spring’s class, some came to final presentations in Sasquatch and alien costumes. Photos by Jackie Ricciardi

During a recent session, Giraldi, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, guided the class through a reading assignment detailing the different views of Bigfoot among Indigenous peoples. 

One student noted that many considered him simultaneously “a supernatural, spiritual sort of thing” and an animal. That belief is akin to Christianity’s view of Jesus as half human and half divine, Giraldi said: “Christianity is the most successful brand ever invented, and the key to Christianity’s success is that Christ is half human.”

Another student cited Indigenous mothers who warned their children that Bigfoot would snatch them if they wandered off. That “boogeyman” image, Giraldi said, was a forerunner of modern parental admonitions to stay away from strangers—a parenting approach that, though thousands of years old, “isn’t any different than me. A parent is a parent.” Yet a third student pointed out that some Native Americans believed that Bigfoot is victim rather than victimizer, fearing us more than we fear him: as Giraldi summarized it, “He’s scared shitless of all these dumbasses for chasing him with guns.” Still other Indigenous peoples regarded Bigfoot as the Creator.

A God on a cloud or a giant ape in Oregon?

These multiple guises conjure interreligious debates over Jesus’ identity—was he the Messiah or not? (Even within Christianity, the gospels give differing takes on Jesus, based on the varying circumstances and traditions of the Evangelists’ communities.) Giraldi tells BU Today that the class suggests that those who scoff at Bigfoot or UFO acolytes should “stop for a second and look at your own beliefs. And ask yourself, are there a lot of differences there between believing in a God on a cloud and a giant ape in Oregon?

“It’s hard to be alive without some hope of the extraordinary. Bigfoot and UFOs represent a hope in what is extraordinary, the sublime. It means that life can be more exciting than our humdrum nine-to-five lives, that there’s the possibility of mystery, that there’s the possibility of the otherworldly and the sublime.”

Practicing what he preaches, Giraldi, a Catholic, has asked himself the class question: Why do I believe what I believe? The dual answer: in a world of bad actors, he wanted his children, who attend parochial school, to imbibe Christian tradition. And “I tend to be contrarian, and we live in an atheistic city, despite its Catholic heritage. So I seem to be primed to take the opposite view of things.”

He certainly startles students expecting a lark of a class. At the start of the semester, Kevin Kupeli (CAS’27) says, he thought, “Okay, this is going to be a super easy class, I can get by it, no problem. [But] I didn’t think it’d be so profound. I didn’t think it’d be so deep, in terms of social, psychological ideas, and even religious and spiritual ones as well.”

Not that profundity bleeds fun away, he adds. “PG [Professor Giraldi] does a great job at explaining the topic in a way where he sounds like a complete anthropological expert. But also, he does it in a way that’s very entertaining and both comical and captivating.”

Jen Hu (CAS’27) had the same epiphany. Other Writing Program offerings sounded “a lot more serious, and I wanted a more fun class. And then, turns out it’s a lot deeper than I thought it would originally be…the ideas behind it are a lot more complex.” 

She says Giraldi’s course reminds her of an anthropology class she took freshman year. “We have to have this myth of Bigfoot in our culture. In almost every culture, we have something kind of like that phenomenon…. It’s something built in the history of human beings, society, and civilization.”