An author, Lisa Shiel, received a write-up in our local paper when she released, through her own publishing company, the book Backyard Bigfoot: The True Story of Stick Signs, UFOs and the Sasquatch. In a spirit of community affection and curiosity I bought a copy. Echoing Strindberg and his sticks, she devotes 52 pages and no less than 56 black and white photographs to the phenomena of “stick signs,” which she describes as “sticks arranged in meaningful and distinctly unnatural displays [which] serve as the medium for their [bigfoots9] nonverbal communication.” The “stick signs” she catalogs are arrangements of simple shapes: squares, triangles and crosses, although she asserts that “parallel sticks and crossed sticks seem to dominate.”
It’s really a lovely example of apophenia in action. If we remember Conrad’s two tier definition: an unmotivated seeing of connections and a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness, we can see both of these here. The author has seen shapes (connections) in the arrangements of the sticks and has ascribed a great deal of meaningfulness to them by associating them with a supernatural creature. When we think back to Ramsey (and common sense), we know that it would be difficult not to see some sort of patterned arrangement among sticks lying on the ground.
