STRANGE NEW BELIEFS

FERAL HUMANS

s well as the notion that we are surrounded by the remains of ancient giant trees (see p9), other odd ideas have been gaining ground in some quarters. One such is the belief that there are significant numbers of feral people living secretly in America’s National Parks. Primarily spread via TikTok videos and Reddit posts, the assertion is that the country’s National Parks were not created to preserve areas of natural beauty, but to corral packs of subhuman cannibals that prey on visitors. These are either a race of human-like beings unknown to science, or humans who have gone off-grid, lost the trappings of civilisation and now live a primitive feral existence as cannibals. The tales exploded in early 2021 and have continued to spread through the year, with people posting stories that claim to be their own experiences of encounters with these ferals. The posters point to the almost 3,000 deaths in US National Parks