Sasquatch

Artistic depiction of Bigfoot

Sasquatch, colloquially known as bigfoot, is an alleged primate-like animal believed to inhabit the forests of North America, although people have allegedly 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 fervor. 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 discrepancies 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 orangutan 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 feral 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, apparently 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 prevalent. 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 referred 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, apparently 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 alleged 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 curiosity, 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 Himalayas for the Yeti or abominable snowman, as it was commonly referred to. The idea of an elusive creature, blending the characteristics of man and ape, becoming 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, amateur 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 alleged bigfoot was filmed by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, two big foot researchers. The 16mm film footage shows an apparent female sasquatch (large breasts are easily noticeable 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 etching-like 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 received 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 hypothesizes as to what type of creature sasquatch actually is. Below is a list of the most popular theories.

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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" . Anthropologist David Daegling 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"

Hoaxes

Nearly every alleged piece of evidence supporting the existence of bigfoot has been claimed as a hoax at least once. Some reports are clearly hoaxes. 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, suggesting it was a gorilla or other ape from a circus .

The Hoax Debate

Nearly every piece of bigfoot evidence to emerge in the 20th century has at some point been dubbed a hoax. Bigfoot researchers sometimes are forced to prove evidence is not a hoax, before they are able to study it scientifically. Bigfoot researcher Grover 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 .

One of the most contested incident involves Jerry Crew who 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 (this is also the source of the name bigfoot, coined by an editor in response to the size of the foot print cast) 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. 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."

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.

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

While the specifics of bigfoot may be uniquely American, nearly every culture to ever exist has its own stories and legends regarding large, human-like creatures that live isolated from the main population. Perhaps this has something to do with a sub-conscious collective of earlier primates that roamed the Earth, stories passed down from meetings between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, or reflects a Jungian archetype of the wild, primitive men that exist in humanity. While the exactly symbolism may be debated, the idea of sasquatch clearly captures the imagination of the populace as a whole, inviting some to believe that there are still elements of this Earth left to discover and others an opportunity to further prove the legitimacy of scientific thought.

Bigfoot has made several appearances in pop culture over the years. Several horror films in the 1970's, specifically The Legend of Boggy Creek, Creature from Black Lake and The Capture of Bigfoot, all portraying a violent and monstrous version of the creature. However, the most famous film representation of sasquatch was the 1980's hit Harry and the Hendersons where a bigfoot is brought to live with a suburban family. The sasqautch in that film is presented as an intelligent, gentle giant that develops a strong bond with the family and portrays many human characteristics. In the 1990's, with a surge in interest revolving around the paranormal, several documentaries, conferences and groups formed around the bigfoot phenomena.

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.[1] 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. [2] (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.[3]
• 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. [4], [5][6]
• 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.[7]
• 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. [8],[9], [10], [11], [12],[13]
• 1955: William Roe claimed to have seen a close-up view of a female sasquatch from concealment near Mica Mountain, British Columbia.[14]
• 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. [15]
• 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.[16]
• 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.[17][18]

External links

• Bigfoot: Fact or Fantasy? Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• Article by Kal K. Korff and Michaela Kocis, in Skeptical Inquirer, July 2004 Retrieved April 19, 2007.
• Bigfoot - from the Skeptic's Dictionary Retrieved April 19, 2007.
• Bigfoot-lives.com Retrieved April 19, 2007.
• The Bigfoot Giganto Theory Retrieved April 19, 2007.
• Information on Sivapithecus - Sivapithecus is the common ancestor to both orangutans and Gigantopithecus Retrieved April 19, 2007.
• Bigfoot Vanishing and other Bigfoot related Strangeness Retrieved April 19, 2007.

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