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Sasquatch have been reported to hunt and kill larger woodland game including Elk, Deer, and in a couple of rare cases Bear. |
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Sasquatch still looms large, and scientists are intrigued |
KEYWORDS: bigfoot lore bigfoot legend Bigfoot Legend Pacific Northwest legend Ray Wallace Sasquatch bigfoot museum giant ape giant primate Bigfoot tales Bigfoot memorabilia Tom Slick Willow Creek-China Flat Museum Grover Krantz bigfoot researcher Skookum cast
AUTHOR:Eric Bailey, Times Staff Writer
A prankster's posthumous confession appeared to doom the legend. But
Sasquatch still looms large, and scientists are intrigued.
WILLOW CREEK, Calif. -- Here on the doorstep of the Pacific Northwest,
trees grow tall and mystery runs deep. For generations, the dark gorges
have yielded lumber, and a legend.
Willow Creek is a vortex of Bigfoot lore. This is where the discovery of
jumbo footprints attributed to the oversized and doggedly undiscovered
man-ape first captivated America nearly a half century ago. Years later, a
classic film snippet caught a purported Bigfoot nearby. The one-time
logging town long ago adopted the beast as civic emblem and tourist draw.
With so much at stake, the claims of Ray Wallace's clan landed like a gut
punch.
Wallace, a road builder and inveterate prankster, died late last year, at
84. After the funeral, his survivors let loose a secret: Their father had
used a set of carved alder-wood feet to stomp the footprints that his work
crew found north of Willow Creek in 1958. The whole thing was a hoax, his
kin declared. Ray Wallace was Bigfoot, and Bigfoot was dead.
Not so fast. Wallace's passing coincided with a quiet ripple of curiosity
in the scientific community, where Sasquatch had long been derided as a
fuzzy-headed myth best suited to the supermarket tabloid rack.
Some well-regarded scientists now say the possibility that the giant
primate exists deserves a serious look. A brave few lay odds that Bigfoot
could be real, among them renowned chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, who
is expected at a Sasquatch summit this September in Willow Creek.
George Schaller, a pioneer in gorilla research and director of
international science for the Wildlife Conservation Society, is a Bigfoot
skeptic but says the giant ape cannot be dismissed as fantasy or folklore
without a thorough scientific inquiry. Finding the animal "would reshape
our thinking of the status of humans on this earth," he said. "People write
it off as a hoax or myth. I don't think that's fair."
"It would be one of the greatest discoveries ever made," said Esteban
Sarmiento, a primate researcher at the American Museum of Natural History
in New York. It also would be "one of the most bizarre."
No more bizarre than the Bigfoot tales that have been the stuff of everyday
conversation in Willow Creek for decades.
The town, barely five blocks long, is cradled in a valley carved by the
Trinity River, 30 miles east of Eureka. Puffs of clouds hug woodsy
hillsides. With industrial logging gone belly up, the hamlet (population
1,500) long ago hitched its fortunes to sightseeing, fishing, rafting - and
Bigfoot.
It was 30 miles north, in the remote expanse of the Six Rivers National
Forest, that Bigfoot tracks were spotted 45 years ago near Bluff Creek.
Jerry Crew, a tractor operator for Wallace, returned to town with a plaster
of Paris cast of a whopper footprint. Jaws dropped, the news media pounced
and the hunt was on.
Tom Slick, a Texas oilman and adventurer, hired a team of hunters and
outdoorsmen to find the creature in 1960, the same year Sir Edmund Hillary
conducted his celebrated Himalayan search for Bigfoot's putative cousin,
the Yeti. Both came up empty.
The wild lands north of Willow Creek also produced the most hotly debated
piece of Bigfoot memorabilia - the jerky one-minute film of a hulking
figure striding up a dry riverbed, shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson, a rodeo
cowboy and part-time Sasquatch sleuth. The 16-millimeter film, brushed off
by doubters as a man in a monkey suit, has yet to be proved fake.
"Bigfoot has become a part of our culture," said Jo Ann Hereford, president
of the Willow Creek-China Flat Museum, a repository for Bigfoot artifacts
and lore. Hereford considers herself a skeptic. But, she adds with a wink,
"I firmly believe in the economic value of Bigfoot."
Sasquatch's capitalist imprint here is impossible to miss.
There is the Bigfoot Country Club and Bigfoot Lumber, Bigfoot Rafting and
the Bigfoot Motel. A local cafe features the Bigfoot Burger and Chocolate
Bigfoot doughnut (both are big and, of course, shaped like a foot). The
weekly newspaper features the hairy hominoid on its masthead. Highway 299,
the main drag through town, is the Bigfoot Scenic Byway.
Out front of the museum, a wood carving of the creature, nearly two stories
tall, beckons the curious. Inside, the Bigfoot wing's curator, Al Hodgson,
says many who believe in the beast - or at least in its possibility - were
rankled when Wallace's clan tried to blow up the Bigfoot legend.
Museum docents struck back by offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who
could demonstrate that the scores of footprints discovered in 1958 were
fraudulent.
Bigfoot devotees say it can't be done. Wood-carved feet can't sink deep
enough, they say, can't produce the dermal ridges - the tiny lines on a
footprint - and shifting toe positions, step by step, that make many of the
plaster casts so tantalizing. "There's $100,000 that says it's impossible
to hoax," said John Green, a retired journalist, longtime Bigfoot
researcher and author.
Reports of ape-like behemoths predate Wallace by generations. A race of
huge hairy giants has long been part of Native American lore, and settlers
in Northern California talked of it as far back as the 1880s. Teddy
Roosevelt related a Bigfoot yarn in his 1890 book "The Wilderness Hunter,"
telling of a Northwest trapper thought to have been slain by a huge
man-beast.
These days, Bigfoot's presumed haunts include the forests of British
Columbia, the Cascades and the Bitterroot Range. Sightings have been
reported in Ohio and the tangled thickets of Florida. China has its own
hairy "wild man," and in Russia true believers are desperately seeking the
Snezhni Chelovyek (Snow Person).
Hodgson, who ran Willow Creek's general store for decades, once counted
himself among the doubters. But then two trusted friends - one from Bible
study - confessed to having had frightening forest encounters with a huge
bipedal ape. "It is a hard thing to swallow," said Hodgson, 79. "But I
absolutely believe these folks were telling me the truth."
On the town's sidewalks, not everyone shares his conviction.
Curt Benson, 67, spent a lifetime in the woods stringing power lines and
figures Bigfoot is simply good-natured poppycock to pump up the tourist
trade. "If I were a businessman like Al Hodgson, everything I saw would be
a Bigfoot."
But some believe it is more than mythology. Joyce Matthews, a former
schoolteacher, recalled how her logger husband once rushed home to grab a
camera; he shot a photo of his foot, looking tiny beside a presumptive
Bigfoot print.
A bushy-bearded carpenter named Tim Bauer joked that most folks consider
Bigfoot to be "one of my cousins."
Bauer turned deadly earnest when he told of hearing a howl up by his place
near Fish Lake. He figures it was Bigfoot. "It's like a screaming child
that's been burned," he said. "Sends chills up your spine."
On any weekend, the backwoods of Humboldt and Del Norte counties are alive
with amateur sleuths. Some are quite sophisticated, using infrared scopes
and blasting taped howls - ostensibly those of a Bigfoot - over
loudspeakers into the woods.
But academia has been slow to embrace Bigfoot as a subject worth serious
scrutiny.
Robert Michael Pyle, a biologist and writer who turned a Guggenheim grant
into the book "Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide," says the
simple act of studying Sasquatch takes guts. Academics who open their minds
to the possibility of Bigfoot "run a real risk of being ostracized," Pyle
said. "It becomes a practical thing to avoid the topic."
The late Grover Krantz, a Washington State University anthropologist, was
for years academia's highest-profile Bigfoot researcher. He spent nights
driving lonely Pacific Northwest back roads, rifle by his side, in search
of the creature. Krantz believed shooting a Bigfoot was the surest way to
turn myth into reality. For years he struggled before finally winning
tenure, promotions and respect, Pyle said. "He was almost a Shakespearean
tragic figure."
One of Krantz's few protégés is Jeff Meldrum, an associate professor of
anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University.
Meldrum is a respected scientist, a serious fellow who specializes in the
evolution of primate locomotion. He said he has put up with "thinly veiled
expressions of incredulity" from colleagues since he began looking into
Bigfoot in 1996. In the academic world, where you either publish or perish,
a Bigfoot paper doesn't stand much chance with the scientific journals,
Meldrum said. "But to offhandedly brush this aside as a myth is not very
scientific."
He is increasingly convinced such an animal may exist, swayed in particular
by eyewitness accounts and plaster-cast imprints that have emerged from the
woods over the decades. Many of the footprints are fake, he said, but
scores look to be genuine. Meldrum said a few provocative hair samples have
failed to produce usable DNA, but can't be matched to any known animal.
Patterson's 1967 film also intrigues Meldrum. As the creature tromps off,
its muscles bulge, long arms swing, legs move in a high-step gait that
Meldrum suggests evolved to avoid the woody debris of the forest floor. It
also appears to be female, prompting Meldrum to ask: "Who is going to add
breasts to a monkey suit?"
If such a creature exists, he said, it is obviously shy and extraordinarily
elusive. Based on witness accounts, a profile can be drawn: Bigfoot is
likely 7 or 8 feet tall, largely nocturnal, a solitary omnivore with
footprints sometimes in excess of 20 inches long and half a foot wide.
One theory, Meldrum said, supposes that hundreds or several thousand of the
creatures skulk in North America's deepest forests, the offspring of a
towering ancient ape from Asia dubbed Gigantopithecus blacki. Bigfoot
researchers hypothesize that Giganto, thought to have gone extinct more
than 200,000 years ago, wandered to North America during the Ice Age.
(The scientists who discovered Giganto have a different theory: This huge
animal, which walked the Earth with early man, so frightened our ancestors
that it ingrained in us the myth of the giant ape).
Skeptics say most Bigfoot evidence can be explained away. Many of the
whopper footprints are really tracks left by bears that overstepped their
front paw mark. Some recorded Bigfoot howls are the screech of the barred
owl, said Bruce Marcot, a Portland wildlife ecologist. Sightings prove
nothing: As any criminal court judge knows, eyewitness testimony is often
unreliable.
What's needed, all agree, is a specimen, dead or alive. But no skeletal
remains have been produced, let alone a body. Peter S. Rodman, a UC Davis
primate expert, says he will remain dubious "until Bigfoot walks in the
door."
But a few doubters have been turned around. A breakthrough came in 2000,
when Bigfoot researchers produced a 200-pound block of plaster dubbed the
Skookum Cast. It is billed as the impression a Bigfoot made while lying at
the muddy edge of a small pond near Mount Adams in Washington State.
Meldrum and others marveled over what they consider indisputable anatomical
features - a gigantic heel, leg and backside. If the cast is a forgery,
Meldrum said, it is a masterpiece.
Daris Swindler, a University of Washington emeritus professor of
anthropology and long among Bigfoot's most fervent doubters, took one look
at the slab of plaster and declared himself "impressed," particularly by
the imprint of an enormous Achilles' tendon, which he said would be
difficult to fake.
Swindler has done an about-face, joining Meldrum and a few other scientists
to push for a more concerted scientific investigation of Bigfoot.
Goodall and a few other big names in the ape business have lent moral
support.
The National Geographic Society's explorer-in-residence and a Cornell
University professor-at-large, Goodall gained fame for her chimp studies at
Tanzania's Gombe National Park. She has long been intrigued by the notion
of undiscovered great apes, and last year told a National Public Radio
interviewer that she's sure Bigfoot exists.
Her promised appearance at the Willow Creek conference planned for
September represents "a watershed moment" in legitimizing Bigfoot as a
topic of science, author Pyle said.
More than 300 Bigfoot buffs - amateurs and academics, believers and
skeptics, even three Sasquatch scientists from Russia - are expected at the
two-day International Bigfoot Symposium, sponsored by the local museum.
Anyone hanging on for a third day can join a field trip to the Patterson
film site.
Goodall will mostly be preaching to the choir in Willow Creek, where many
folks don't doubt the legend. The absence of a corpse bothers them not.
Those woods chew up bones, they say. Anything can get lost out there.
"I just grew up believing," said Tina Still, a hair stylist. "There's got
to be something out there."
As for Ray Wallace, he is shrugged off as yesterday's news. Old-timers knew
him as a joker, and Bigfoot researchers - while insisting that the 1958
footprints were real - say Wallace became a purveyor of tall tales, phony
movies and laughable photographs. When he died, they say, the media blew
the story, making Wallace the father of Bigfoot, even though the legend -
and sightings - preceded him by at least a century.
In death, Ray Wallace "finally became a celebrity," said Michael Brady of
Willow Creek. Brady conceded that he has never seen the creature. But he
doesn't doubt Bigfoot for a second.
"There's just too much proof," Brady said, standing halfway between the
Bigfoot Hotel and Bigfoot museum along the Bigfoot Scenic Byway. "Ask
anyone around here."
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