Sasquatch

Artistic depiction of Bigfoot

Sasquatch, colloquially known as bigfoot, is an alledged primate-like animal believed to inhabit the forests of North America, although people have alledgedly sighted the creature in every part of the United States and most of Canada. Akin to the infamous Yeti of the Himalayas, sasquatch lore dates back to the earliest Native American tribes, and continued as regional phenomenon until the twentieth century, when the need to prove or debunk the existence of bigfoot became a widespread frevor. Today, while most people are aware of bigfoot stories but dismiss the creature as a mere footnote among such paranormal subjects as the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs, there are those trying to use serious science to prove bigfoot is a very real hominid living in America, while most serious scientists discredit the idea. Whether sasquatch does in fact exist, its ability to capture widespread attention and imaginations proves that bigfoot is a powerful symbol to Americans.

Description

File:Bigfoot-at-socrates-sculpture-park.png

Bigfoot at the Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, Queens, NY

According to most eyewitness accounts, the sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest is a large, powerfully built bipedal apelike creature between 7 and 9 feet (2.13 and 2.74 meter) tall, and covered in dark brown or dark reddish hair. The head seems to sit directly on the shoulders, with no apparent neck. Witnesses have described large eyes, a pronounced brow ridge and a head that has been described as rounded and crested, similar to the sagittal crest of the male gorilla. . There are regional discrepnacies regarding the appearance of sasquatch creatures outside the pacific northwest. In the midwest the creature sometimes is all white with pink or red eyes, while in the south reported sightings describe a more gorilla or orangatun animal. In the Eastern United States, sasquatch appears as a slightly smaller, darker and much more violent form of its western cousin.. One of two most common characteristics of the creatures by witnesses are the intensely pungent smell that seems to permeate the area before and even after a sasquatch has been seen and the loud screeching noises made at night, comparable to some of the sounds apes and monkeys have been known to produce.

Native American Legends

Nearly every tribe of Native Americans to have populated the areas of sasquatch sitings have legends and traditions regarding "wild men" of the forest. While each tribe had its own understanding of the creature, there are numerous similarities among hundreds of documented stories by anthropologists and folklorists. Sasquatchs were at the least something to be cautious of, at the most evil and an omen of death. Stories prevail of them stealing children and animals to eat and of terrorizing those who got lost in the forest. Often they were believed to be ferral humans, their long hair seen as a step backwards in primitivism.

Each tribe had its own name for the creatures. Variations of the word Windigo were common in the Northeast, while Oh-Man, Skookum and Tenatco were common in the west. The name sasquatch, appearently is the "anglicization of the word sesqec, which occurs in the mainland dialects of the Halkomelem language" .

Early Reports

Encounters with these creatures continued with the European settlement of the continent. Beginning with the newspapers of the East, reports of encounters with wood spirits and demons that the Natives had knowledge of became prevaliant. The idea that they were perhaps wildmen and cannibals carried over to the new settlers. However, the more developed the country became, the more these stories seemed to become regionalized and forgotten on the national level, until an incident in 1924, commonly known refered to as Ape Canyon in which miners working in Mount St. Helens area discovered strange tracks in the woods one day, followed that night by a series of bigfoots laying siege to their cabin. Holding off their attackers until morning, the miners managed to escape, never to return to the site (ironically, today the area is called Ape Canyon, appearently named not after this incident but after a group who called themselves the Mt. Saint Helen's Apes).. One of the most famous, and hotly debated, stories happened in the same year, only it was not made public until the 1950's, by one of the first bigfoot researchers, John Green. Interviewing Albert Ostman, a retired lumberjack, Green reported on how Ostman alledged that in 1924, while camping in the Vancouver area, he was kidnapped and held hostage by a family of bigfoots for a total of six days. While terrifying to Ostman, he was able to observe a nuclear family structure, a pronounced sexual dimorphism among the female and males, and the creature's vegetarian diet. Treated without harm and mild curosity, Ostman claimed to have escaped by confusing the bigfoots with a cloud of snuff from his personal stash. .

Further fueling the national attention of sasquatch were the adventure stories of expeditonaries in the Himalyas for the Yeti or abomindable snowman, as it was commonly referred to. The idea of an elusive creature, blending the characteristics of man and ape, becaming an almost Romantic notion in the U.S., and peaked interest in the existing legends of sasquatch, which was seen as an American version of the yeti. Like John Green, ametuer big foot researchers started to spend their time investigating claims. Such interest is responsible for the widespread attention given to two of the most famous reports in American history: the first involved hundreds of tracks discovered by Jerry Crew and Ray Wallace in Bluff Creek, California, during a road construction project. The second is the infamous Patterson Film in which an alledged bigfoot was filmed by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, two big foot researchers. The 16mm film footage shows an appearent female sasquatch (large breasts are easily noticable in the film) walking slowly away from the camera. In addition to the film, both researchers were able to fill plaster casts of the creature's foot print. The debate over the legitimacy of both these encounters is discussed below (see hoaxes).

Cryptozoology

In the later half of the 20th century, a new phase in bigfoot investigation began to emerge. As a reaction against bigfoot related investigations and stories being lumped into paranormal research and discredited as fantasy, serious researchers turned towards the rationale of science as their new tools. Incorporating elements of evolutionary anthropology, biology and zoology, cryptozoology became the new discipline for serious bigfoot hunters. Cryptozoology is the academic discipline that focuses on searching for animals that have not yet been discovered but potentially exist, such as bigfoot, using scientific methods and technology. .

Not only did this time produce more field hunts for the creature, it also turned a critical eye to the most prominent type of evidence over the years: footprints molded in plaster casts. In the earlier 1980s, anthropologist Grover Krantz noticed dermal ridge impressions on some of the foot print casts he had collected over the years. Dermal ridges are the etchinglike lines found on the palms and bottom of the feet on humans, each unique to the person (the basis of fingerprinting is the pattern of dermal ridges in each print). The dermal ridges in the bigfoot casts moved horizontally from toe to heel, the opposite of humans. . While this hardly conclusive proof, it is unlikely that a hoaxer would both know to include dermal ridges in their hoax and re-create them so convincingly. Believers point to such details as reliable proof, or at the least enough to inspire more widespread inquiry.

Even with a more discipline approach, the study of bigfoot has never been recieved as a serious course of work on a widespread level. And yet, such works as Pyle's Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, as much a survey of Bigfoot’s cultural impact as of the likelihood of the creature’s reality, was researched and written with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Pyle, author of Wintergreen, the acclaimed 1987 requiem for the forests of Washington's Willapa Hills, had well established his credentials as a scientist and nature writer. Although most scientists find current evidence of Bigfoot unpersuasive, a number of prominent experts have offered sympathetic opinions on the subject, such as Jane Goodall,George Schaller, Russell Mittermeier, Daris Swindler and Esteban Sarmiento.

Beginning in 2000 the American/Canadian association called the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization began organizing informal searches of wilderness areas in the U.S and Canada where sightings have been reported. During these searches several sightings and track finds have reportedly occurred. The most notable piece of evidence obtained so far is the Skookum Body Cast. The group expects their accumulating observations and evidence will lead to formal long-term studies in certain areas where sightings and tracks occur most frequently.

Suggested Identities

Cryptozoologists had put forth numerous hypothesises as to what type of creature sasquatch actually is. Below is a list of the most popular theories.

File:Munns clear.jpg

Bill Munns creates realistic statues of endangered apes and this Gigantopithecus.

The Gigantopithecus hypothesis is generally considered highly speculative. Rigorous studies of existing fossilized remains indicate that G. blacki is the common ancestor of two quadrupedal genera, represented by Sivapithecus and the orangutan (Pongo). Given the mainstream view that Gigantopithecus was quadrupedal, it would seem unlikely to be an ancestor to the biped Bigfoot is said to be. Moreover, it has been argued that G. blackis enormous mass would have made it difficult for it to adopt a bipedal gait. However, an analysis of the famous Patterson-Gimlin film shows that frames 369, 370, 371, and 372 all show a slender lower mandible, that does not match the massive lower mandible of Gigantopithecus blacki, which, assuming that the Patterson-Gimlin film is legitimate, would eliminate G. blacki as a candidate for Bigfoot.

A species of Paranthropus, such as Paranthropus robustus, with its crested skull and bipedal gait has been suggested as has Homo erectus to be the creature, but neither type of skeleton hes ever been found on the North American continent, and all fossil evidence points to their extinction thousands of years ago.

There was also a little known genus, called Meganthropus, which reputedly grew to enormous proportions. Again, there have been no remains of this creature anywhere near North America, and none younger than a million years old.

Skeptics

Mainstream scientists and academics generally dismiss the idea of bigfoot as fantasy, due to a lack of conclusive evidence to date, and a common sense approach that such a large creature is unlikely to have been discovered in a country so developed and charted. Additionally, scientists often cite the fact that Bigfoot is alleged to live in regions, i.e. temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere unusual for a large, nonhuman primate, while all other recognized nonhuman apes are found in the tropics, Africa, continental Asia or nearby islands. The great apes have never been found in the fossil record in the Americas, and no Bigfoot bones or bodies have been found to date.

Moreover, the issue is so muddied with dubious claims and outright hoaxes that many scientists do not give the subject serious attention. Napier wrote that the mainstream scientific community's indifference stems primarily from "insufficient evidence ... it is hardly unsurprising that scientists prefer to investigate the probable rather than beat their heads against the wall of the faintly possible" (Napier, 15). Anthropologist David Daegling echoed this idea, citing a "remarkably limited amount of Sasquatch data that are amenable to scientific scrutiny." (Daegling, 61) He advises that mainstream skeptics take a proactive position "to offer an alternative explanation. We have to explain why we see Bigfoot when there is no such animal" (ibid 20). While he does criticize mainstream science and academia, Krantz concedes that while "the Scientific Establishment generally resists new ideas ... there is a good reason for it ... Quite simply put, new and innovative ideas in science are almost always wrong" (Krantz, 236).

On May 24, 2006 Maria Goodavage wrote an article in USA Today entitled, "Bigfoot Merely Amuses Most Scientists," in which she quotes Washington State zoologist John Crane, "There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No data other than material that's clearly been fabricated has ever been presented."[1]

Hoaxes

There are times when a Bigfoot sighting or footprint is a hoax. Author Jerome Clark argues that the "Jacko" affair, involving an 1884 newspaper report of an apelike creature captured in British Columbia (details below), was a hoax. Citing research by John Green, who found that several contemporary British Columbia newspapers regarded the alleged capture as very dubious, Clark notes that the New Westminster, British Columbia Mainland Guardian wrote, "Absurdity is written on the face of it" (Clark, 195). Interestingly, Clark failed to see the same possibilities when researching cattle mutilations, calling them "extraterrestrial" in nature.

In the past decade or so, the style of Bigfoot hoaxes winning wider news attention were false claims of hoaxing famous pieces of evidence such as the "Patterson Footage" or the Jerry Crew tracks from Bluff Creek.

In 1958 bulldozer operator Jerry Crew took to a newspaper office a cast of one of the enormous footprints he and other workers had been seeing at an isolated work site in Bluff Creek, California. The story and photo garnered international attention through being picked up by the Associated Press (Krantz, 5). Crew was overseen by Wilbur L. Wallace, brother of Raymond L. Wallace. Years after the track casts were made, Ray Wallace got involved in Bigfoot "research" and made various outlandish claims. He was poorly regarded by many who took the subject seriously. Napier wrote, "I do not feel impressed with Mr. Wallace's story" regarding having over 15,000 feet of film showing Bigfoot (Napier, 89).

Shortly after Wallace's death, his children claimed that he was the "father of Bigfoot." They claimed Ray faked the tracks seen by Jerry Crew in 1958. There were some wooden track stompers among Ray's inherited belongings which the family claimed were used to make the 1958 tracks. The shape of Ray's wooden track stompers did not match the shape of the Crew track, but the Wallace photo did provide a catchy visual element for the news story, which circulated internationally as "The Father of Bigfoot Dies." At the height of the publicity, the Wallace family sold the story rights to a Hollywood filmmaker. The film, set to star actor Judge Reinhold, was never produced.

Canadian newspaperman John Green was closer to the Jerry Crew events than any other living journalist. He points out the Ray never claimed to have made the Bluff Creek tracks, and was not present in the Bluff Creek area when the Crew cast was obtained. Wallace had road-building contracts in various parts of the Northwest and was usually not around in Bluff Creek. Years after the fact, Wallace attempted to capitalize on the interest in various ways. He tried to sell various items from a roadside shop, including Bigfoot footprint replicas, which he made behind his shop using a pair of wooden track stompers.

Arguments against the hoax explanation

Krantz and others have argued that a double standard is applied to Sasquatch studies by many academics: whenever there is a claim or evidence of Sasquatch's existence, enormous scrutiny is applied, as well as it should be. Yet when individuals claim to have hoaxed Bigfoot evidence, the claims are frequently accepted without corroborative evidence.

Primatologist John Napier acknowledged that there have been some hoaxes but also contended that hoaxing is not always an adequate explanation. Krantz argues that "something like 100,000 casual hoaxers" would be required to explain the footprints (Krantz, 32-34).

As noted above, it was claimed that Ray Wallace began the modern Bigfoot phenomenon in 1958 by using phony foot casts to leave Bigfoot prints in Humbolt County, California. His family received major press attention in 2002 when they detailed Wallace's alleged hoaxing, to which Wallace himself never admitted (and which Bigfoot supporters deny). One writer, for example, argues: "The wooden track stompers shown to the media by the Wallace family do not match photos of the 1958 tracks they claim their father made. They are different foot shapes." From May 10-May 13 1978, the University of British Columbia hosted a symposium, Anthropology of the Unknown: Sasquatch and Similar Phenomena, a Conference on Humanoid Monsters. Presented, were 35 papers (abstracts collected in Wasson, 141-154). Most attendees came from anthropology backgrounds, and Pyle writes that the conference "brought together twenty professors in various fields, along with several serious laymen, to consider the mythology, ethnology, ecology, biogeography, physiology, psychology, history and sociology of the subject. All took it seriously, and while few, if any, accepted the existence of Sasquatch outright, they jointly concluded 'that there are not reasonable grounds to dismiss all the evidence as misinterpretation or hoax'" (Pyle, 186).

Symbolism

Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle argues that most cultures have humanlike giants in their folk history. "We have this need for some larger-than-life creature."[2]

It is worth noting that Sasquatch reports antedate Wallace's claims by several decades — see Burns's Maclean articles of the 1920s [3], and a series in The Oregonian from 1924 about the alleged Ape Canyon attacks [4]]

Bigfoot, whether it is a real creature or not, has had a demonstrable impact as a cultural phenomenon, and closely related genres such as yeti fiction have also appeared.

Alleged Bigfoot sightings of note

• 1811: On January 7 1811, David Thompson, a surveyor and trader for the North West Company, spotted large, well-defined footprints in the snow near Athabasca River, Jasper, Alberta, while attempting to cross the Rocky Mountains. The tracks measured 14 inches in length and 8 inches in width.
• 1870: An account by a California hunter who claimed seeing a sasquatch scattering his campfire remains was printed in the Titusville, Pennsylvania Morning Herald on November 10, 1870.[5] The incident reportedly occurred a year before, in the mountains near Grayson, CA.
• 1893: An account by Theodore Roosevelt was published in The Wilderness Hunter. Roosevelt related a story which was told to him by "a beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman" living in Idaho. Some have suggested similarities to Bigfoot reports. [6] (Note: Roosevelt's testimony is the only evidence this encounter ever occurred).
• 1924: Albert Ostman claimed to have been kidnapped and held captive for several days by a family of sasquatch. The incident occurred during the summer in Toba Inlet, British Columbia.[7]
• 1924: Fred Beck and four other miners claimed to have been attacked by several sasquatches in Ape Canyon in July, 1924. The creatures reportedly hurled large rocks at the miners’ cabin for several hours during the night. This case was publicized in newspaper reports printed in 1924. [8], [9][10]
• 1941: Jeannie Chapman and her children claimed to have escaped their home when a large sasquatch, allegedly 7½ feet tall, approached their residence in Ruby Creek, British Columbia.[11]
• 1940s onward: People living in Fouke, Arkansas have reported that a Bigfoot-like creature, dubbed the “Fouke Monster,” inhabits the region. A high number of reports have occurred in the Boggy Creek area and are the basis for the 1973 film The Legend of Boggy Creek. [12],[13], [14], [15], [16],[17]
• 1955: William Roe claimed to have seen a close-up view of a female sasquatch from concealment near Mica Mountain, British Columbia.[18]
• 1967: On October 20 1967, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin captured a purported sasquatch on film in Bluff Creek, California in what would come to be known as the Patterson-Gimlin film.
• 1970: A family of bigfoot-like creatures called "zoobies" was observed on multiple occasions by a San Diego psychiatrist named Dr. Baddour and his family near their Alpine, California home, as reported in an interview with San Diego County Deputy Sheriff Sgt. Doug Huse, who investigated the sightings. [19]
• 1995: On August 28 1995, a TV film crew from Waterland Productions pulled off the road into Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park and filmed what they claimed to be a sasquatch in their RV's Headlights.[20]
• 2006: On December 14 2006, Shaylane Beatty, a woman from the Dechambault Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada, was driving to Prince Albert when, she claimed, saw the creature near the side of the highway at Torch River. Several men from the village drove down to the area and found footprints, which they tracked through the snow. They found a tuft of brown hair and took photographs of the tracks.[21][22]

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Allen Zullo, The Ten Creepiest Creatures In America, Published by Troll Communications, ISBN 0-8167-4288-X. One of many sources for the Fouke Monster and Momo the Monster.
• Bayanov, Dmitri, America's Bigfoot: Fact, Not Fiction, Crypto-Logos, 1997, ISBN 5-900229-22-X

• Alex Boese (2002). The Museum of Hoaxes: A Collection of Pranks, Stunts, Deceptions, and Other Wonderful Stories Contrived for the Public from the Middle Ages to the New Millennium. Dutton/Penguin Books. ISBN 0-525-94678-0. 

• Bourne, Geoffrey H. and Maury Cohen, The Gentle Giants: The Gorilla Story, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1975, ISBN 0-399-11528-5
• Bryant, Vaughn M. and Burleigh Trevor-Deutch, "Analysis of Feces and Hair Suspected to be of Sasquatch Origin" (in Halpin and Ames)
• Byrne, Peter, The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Man or Myth, Acropolis Books, 1975, ISBN 0-87491-159-1
• Campbell, Bernard G., Humankind Emerging, Little, Brown and Company, 1979, Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 78-78234
• Clark, Jerome, Unexplained! 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences and Puzzling Physical Phenomena, Visible Ink, 1993, ISBN 0-8103-9436-7
• Coleman, Loren and Jerome Clark, Cryptozoology A to Z, Fireside Books, 1999, ISBN 0-684-85602-6
• Coleman, Loren and Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide, Avon Books, 1999, ISBN 0-380-80263-5
• Coon, Carelton, "Why Sasquatch Must Exist" (in Markotic and Krantz)
• Daegling, David J, Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America's Enduring Legend, Altamira Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7591-0539-1
• Gill, George "Population Clines of the North American Sasquatch as Evidenced by Track Lengths and Average Status" (in Halpin and Ames)
• Green, John Willison, Sasquatch - The Apes Among Us, Hancock House Publishing, 1978, ISBN 0-88839-123-4
• Guttilla, Peter, The Bigfoot Files, Timeless Voyager Press, 2003, ISBN 1-892264-15-3
• Halprin, Marjorie, "The Tsimshan Monkey Mask and Sasquatch" (in Halpin and Ames)
• Halpin, Marjorie and Michael Ames, editors, Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and Modern Evidence, University of British Columbia Press, 1980, ISBN 0-7748-0119-0
• Hunter, Don and Rene Dahinden, Sasquach/Bigfoot: The Search for North America's Incredible Creature, Firefly Books, 1993, ISBN 1-895565-28-6
• Krantz, Grover S., Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch, Johnson Books, 1992, ISBN 1-55566-099-1
• Long, Greg, The making of Bigfoot: the inside story, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004 ISBN 1-59102-139-1 (Long was able to track down the man who wore the monkey suit for Roger Patterson's film, and obtained a complete confession of the hoax.)
• Markotic, Vladimir and Grover Krantz, editors, The Sasquatch and Other Unknown Primates, Western Publishers, 1984, ISBN 0-919119-10-7
• Mozino, Jose Mariano, Noticas de Nutka: An Account of Nootka Sound, Iris Higbe Wilson, editor and traslator, University of Washington Press, 1970, ISBN 0-295-95061-7
• Napier, John Russell Bigfoot: The Sasquatch and Yeti in Myth and Reality, 1973, E.P. Dutton, ISBN 0-525-06658-6
• Powell, Thom, The Locals, Hancock House, 2003, ISBN 0-88839-552-3
• Pyle, Robert Michael, Where Bigfoot Walks, Houghton Mifflin, 1995, ISBN 0-395-44114-5
• Sanderson, Ivan T., "First Photos of 'Bigfoot', California's Legendary 'Abominable Snowman'," Argosy, February 1968, pg 23-31, 127,128, ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN: a legend come to life.
• Sjögren, Bengt.Farliga djur och djur som inte finns, Prisma, 1962
• Shakley, Myra, Wildman: Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma, Thames and Hudson, 1973
• Sprague, Roderick, "Carved Stone Heads of the Columbia and Sasquatch" (in Halpin and Ames)
• Sprague, Roderick and Grover Krantz, editors, A Scientist Looks at the Sasquatch II, University Press of Idaho, 1978, ISBN 0-89301-061-8
• Suttles, Wayne, "On the Cultural Track of Sasquatch" (in Sprage and Krantz)
• Wasson, Barbara, Sasquatch Apparitions: A Critique on the Pacific Northwest Hominoid, self-published, 1979, ISBN 0-9614105-0-7
• http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/06/30/china.bigfoot/
• http://www.parascope.com/en/articles/bigfootRussia.htm
• http://skepdic.com/bigfoot.html
• http://www.who2.com/bigfoot.html

Further reading

• Long, Greg, The Making of Bigfoot: The Inside Story, 2004, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1-59102-139-1.

External links

• I Still Believe in Bigfoot: The Bigfoot Song
• Reviews of Bigfoot Movies
• Mac Guy Meets Bigfoot

Organizations

• Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers - International organization which investigates sightings and conducts scientific research
• Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization
• Willow Creek - China Flat Museum - includes an entire building dedicated to Bigfoot, including foot print casts, maps, photos, and other documents
• Sasquatch Research Initiative (SRI)

Regional

• Georgia Bigfoot -investigating the Bigfoot Phenomenon in Georgia
• Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society - for information about Bigfoot on the East Coast
• Texas Bigfoot Research Center - for information about Bigfoot in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas & Louisiana
• West Coast Sasquatch - for information on Sasquatch in British Columbia, Canada
• Bigfoot Discovery Museum - Bigfoot Museum located in Felton, California.

Science

• Article by Kal K. Korff and Michaela Kocis, in Skeptical Inquirer, July 2004
• Bigfoot - from the Skeptic's Dictionary
• Bigfoot-lives.com
• The Bigfoot Giganto Theory
• Information on Sivapithecus - Sivapithecus is the common ancestor to both orangutans and Gigantopithecus

Researchers

• Interview with Greg Long
• LorenColeman.com - website of legendary Bigfoot researcher, Loren Coleman

Paranormal or alternative theories

• Beckjord.com - a site maintained by Erik Beckjord, a controversial Bigfoot enthusiast
• Bigfoot Vanishing and other Bigfoot related Strangeness
• Hairy Humanoids

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