Praise for Loren Coleman and his landmark book

Mysterious America

“There are a lot of strange ‘things’ happening in these United States(and other American countries), and a goodly number of them aredescribed in Loren Coleman’s Mysterious America … out-of-place animals, ‘phantom’ cats, mystery kangaroos, mad gassers, and even The Jersey Devil himself. In short, it’s a potpourri, with something for almost any lover of the strange and the unusual.”

—Cryptozoology

“Coleman has done more than sit in a library reading room, he hascollected information in the field…. I recommend it to everyone who is interested in the strange, bizarre, and unusual.”

—Fate magazine

“An entertaining and open-minded book…. A useful reference tool as well as a record of the unexplained.”

—Library Journal

“The lists are worth the price alone.”

—Critique

“Objective, painstaking, exhaustive.”

—London Times

To John Green

The author gratefully acknowledges Barbara Smith for permission to use the lyrics that appear on page 207.

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Acknowledgments

This book is the result of decades of work, and my thanks for the assistance that hundreds of people have provided in making this volume a reality.

First off, a deep appreciation to Caleb and Malcolm, my two honor-roll, baseball-player, artistic sons, for coming along with me on the quest.

The book is dedicated to John Green, who, from the beginning, served as a model of morality and open exchange in a field that oftentimes gets caught up in personalities during the pursuit of these elusive new apes.

Foremost thanks go to Patrick Huyghe, for the years of friendship, editorship, and his suggestion to write this book. Another tip of my bush hat goes to Mark A. Hall, for years of intellectual stimulation and research exchanges. For numerous bits of information regarding primatology and hominology, I thank the following Homo sapiens, who with friendship and grace, shared moments and insights with me: Grover Krantz, Diane Horton, Dmitri Bayanov, Bernard Heuvelmans, Jeff Meldrum, Gordon Strasenburgh, Carroll Riley, George Agogino, Carleton Coon, Matt Bille, Karl Shuker, and Phil Sirois.

Very specific acknowledgments are to be given for permissions to use materials in this book. Special thanks to Chris Kraska for his photograph of a Colorado road sign, to Zack Clothier and Craig Wooleater for photographs, to Janet Bord for the FPL images noted throughout, to Jim McClarin, Richard Noll, Roger St. Hilaire, Brian Wyatt, John Green, Kyle Mizokami, Fate, Fortean Times, The Anomalist, and Ivan T. Sanderson for permission to quote from their interviews and written material, to songwriter Jaime Mendoza-Nava of Highmeadow Music Company to quote lyrics from The Legend of Boggy Creek, and Steve Newmark of Hen’s Tooth Video for use of The Legend of Boggy Creek image.

A variety of materials, reports, casts, ideas, and suggestions flowed from a wide selection of Bigfooters who shared much with me. The top folks on my list, with apologies to all those not mentioned, are Alexis Rockman, Allen Greenfield, Amy Hayes, Andrew D. Gable, Archie Buckley, Berthold Schwarz, Bill Grimstad, Bill Rebsamen, Bjorn Kurten, Blake Mathys, Bob Betts, Bob Hieronimus, Bob Jones, Bob Tarte, Bob Titmus, Bobbie Short, Brad Steiger, Brent O’Donnell, Brian Wyatt, Burt Warmeister, Carol Michels, Chad Arment, Chester Moore, Chris Kraska, Chris Woodyard, Constance Cameron, Cosma Shalizi, Craig Heinselman, Craig Woolheater, Curt Krumpe, Curt Sutherly, Curtis Fuller, Dan Porter, Daniel Cohen, Daniel Perez, Darren Naish, David Barkasy, David Bittner, David Downs, David Fideler, David Grabias, David P. Mikkelson, David Walsh, David Webb, Dennis Pilichis, Des Miller, Don Keating, Don Worley, Donald Shannon, Dorlores Phelps, Doug Tarrant, Dwight Whalen, Eric Altman, F. Henner Fahrenbach, Gary Mangicopra, Gene Duplantier, George Earley, George Eberhart, George Haas, George Wagner, Gilbert Miller, Gordon Rutter, Graham Conway, Gregg Hale, Grover S. Krantz, Hank Davis, Harry Trumbore, Henry Bauer, Henry Franzoni, Ira Walters, Jacob Davidson, Janet Bord, Jay Garon, Jeff Glickman, Jeff Meldrum, Jerome Clark, Jim Auburn, Jim Boyd, Jim Lyding, Jim McClarin, Joan Jeffers, Joe Beelart, Joel Hurd, John A. Keel, John Kirk, Jon Downes, Karl Shuker, Kenn Thomas, Len Aiken, Libbet Cone, Linda Godfrey, Lisa Stone, Lou Farish, Louise A. Lowry, Marcello Truzzi, Mark Dion, Mary Margaret, Matt Drudge, Matt Moneymaker, Matthew Johnson, Michael Bershad, Michael Goss, Michael Newton, Michel Raynal, Mike Oxbig, Monte Ballard, Pat Bontempo, Paul Bartholomew, Paul Herman, Paul Johnson, Paul Willis, Pauline Strawn, Peter Byrne, Peter Hassall, Peter Jordan, Peter Rodman, Phil Sirois, Philip Levine, Phyllis Galde, Rachel Carthy, Ramona Hibner, Ray Boeche, Ray Crowe, Ray Nelke, René Dahinden, Rich La Monica, Richard Brown, Richard Crowe, Richard Hendricks, Richard Leshuk, Richard Noll, Richard Smith, Rick Fisher, Rob Riggs, Robert Downing, Robert Goerman, Robert Mason, Robert Neeley, Robert Rickard, Robert Stansberry, Roberta Payne, Rod Dyke, Roger St. Hilaire, Ron Dobbins, Ron Schaffner, Ron Westrum, S. Miles Lewis, Sara Garrett, Scott Lornis, Scott McNabb, Sean Foley, Stacy McArdle, Stan Gordon, Stephen Foster, Steve Collins, Steve Hicks, Sunny Franson, T. Peter Park, Terry W. Colvin, Thomas Archer, Tim Church, Tod Deery, Todd Lester, Todd Neiss, Todd Roll, Tom Adams, Tom Miller, Tom Page, Tom Slick, Ron Winebrenner, Toni Campbell, Tracy Boyle, Troy Taylor, Warren Thompson, Wayne Laporte, William Corliss, William Gibbons, William Zeiser, Zack Clothier, and last, but by no means least, my old mentor, long-gone-but-not-forgotten friend Ivan T. Sanderson.

Additionally blessings go to my mom, sister, and brothers, for their encouragement. I send out gratitude to my late dad, whom I miss being able to talk with, about Wild Kingdom, Bigfoot, and baseball. Thanks, Desmond, for letting me know you played that Bigfoot game as a kid. And finally to Leslie, for the female companionship that nourished this ape in many ways, thank you.

With appreciation,

Loren Coleman

Portland, Maine

October 20, 2002

PART 1

Bigfoot Stomps into the Twenty-First Century

1 The Summer of Sasquatch

2 Strange Cast of Skookum

PART 2

A Look Back

3 Native Traditions

4 Wildmen, Gorillas, and Ape Canyon

5 Fruit Crate Label Art and Ruby Creek

6 “Bigfoot” Discovered

7 Bigfoot Filmed

8 Frozen Man

9 Bossburg, Momo, and Other Flaps

10 On the Trail in the Midwest

PART 3

Reflectionsd

11 Myakka and Other Southern Apes

12 High Strangeness

13 Sex and the Single Sasquatch

14 The Changing Image of Bigfoot

15 The Bigfooters

16 Three Big Questions

Appendix A

Twenty Best Places to See Bigfoot

Appendix B

Scientific-Quality Replica Bigfoot Track Casts

On the Matter of Style

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

My body is soaked from trogging miles through heavy underbrush, literally drenched from my own sweat and the heavy mist in the forest. The object of my quest seems just ahead, around the next bend, right after that ridge. I’m after Bigfoot, and I push on. I’ve sunk waist deep in the swamps of southern Illinois, frozen overnight in a tent in the Trinity-Shasta area of California, looked at the stars from the Sasquatch Provincial Park in British Columbia, interviewed witnesses from Maine to West Virginia, Florida to California.

Bigfoot hunting has been my passion for over forty years. I’m convinced these creatures are out there to be discovered. A dream? I grew up with dreams. I am the son of heroes, the son of a city fire-fighter and a mother who speaks proudly of her Cherokee legacy, the grandson of a retired farmer who worked a field of dreams as the head groundskeeper for a minor league baseball team. I wanted to become a naturalist, in the original meaning of the word, and trek around the world seeking all sorts of animals. Instead, I did one better; I became a cryptozoologist, one who searches for new animals, yet to be discovered.

When I was young, growing up in Decatur, Illinois, I found myself outdoors all the time, camping, hiking, and, yes, at baseball games. My brothers and I, as kids, explored the “hollers and hills,” the local name for the wild parts near the edges of town and beyond. In the 1950s, those were the safe feral places farther out, past the trailers and the cemeteries, the swampy, rugged, unexplored, and forgotten lands unused by farmers and asyet undiscovered by developers. Animals used them as natural greenways to travel from place to place, unnoticed.

I explored these and gathered snakes, turtles, toads, and other animals for my summertime zoo. I would keep, observe, and then let the animals go. In preparing to be a naturalist, I wanted to handle the things I read about in the books by Roy Chapman Andrews and Raymond Ditmars. I had visions of being a zoologist, but never could I have imagined what awaited me.

I now look back on one March evening in 1960 as a critical juncture that changed my life. I was watching the broadcast on the local Decatur TV station of a science fiction movie, a Japanese picture entitled Half-Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman (Ishiro Honda, 1957), about the search for the Abominable Snowmen in the mountains of Asia. It was fascinating, for even though I knew it was fiction, there appeared to be an underlying truth to this tale of an expedition in pursuit of an unknown species of hairy, upright creature. One does not pick their entry point into mysteries, I suppose; for me this just happened to be the one.

I went to school the next week and asked my teachers about this elusive, mysterious creature called the Abominable Snowman. They were discouraging and lacked interest. They told me that I was wasting my time on a “myth.” But their words did little to put out the fire in my belly. I was one very curious young man. I began looking for everything I could read on the Abominable Snowman. I discovered a large literature on the Yeti and soon found out, through the writings of Ivan T. Sanderson in magazines in 1959 to 1961, and in a book published in 1961, about North America’s version of the Abominable Snowman, the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest and the Sasquatch of Canada.

I started writing to people all around the world who were investigating and searching for these creatures. Soon, I was corresponding with more than four hundred people, including the likes of Ivan Sanderson, John Green, Peter Byrne, Bernard Heuvelmans, and others. Then I decided to do some research, to look for old newspaper reports about Bigfoot, to interview witnesses, and to go out in the field myself and seek out these creatures.

In his book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, Ivan T. Sanderson mentioned some cases from the U.S. Midwest and South he liked to call Little Red Men of the Woods. This is where I would start, and before I knew it, I was interviewing witnesses and tracking the beasts in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Kentucky.

My interest in Bigfoot led to some specific life decisions. For example, I picked my college and its location—Southern Illinois University in Carbondale—because folklorist John W. Allen had written of authentic sightings of these animals by a minister and farmers from the area’s bottomlands. I studied anthropology, minored in zoology, to have some scientific background to pursue these Bigfoot.

Sometimes my classes would suffer because I was hitchhiking deeper into southern Illinois to look into more cases, or to farther-away places such as Mississippi, to interview more witnesses. While I was in Carbondale from 1965 to 1969, I explored the swamplands of the area, ran down reports of strange, hairy creatures thereabouts, and spent endless hours in the microfilm sections of the libraries at SIU, as well as getting materials from Indiana University on local cases. I explored places that would later become familiar in Midwestern Bigfoot lore—Murphysboro, Chittyville, and other places in Little Egypt, as that part of Illinois is called.

I sent reams of material—raw reports, transcripts of eighteenth-century articles, and modern news clippings—to my correspondents. Eventually, I became Ivan Sanderson’s and John Green’s “man in the East.” Sanderson was so excited by what I was finding outside of the Pacific Northwest that he wrote in 1967, “Yes … Please … any reports you have … Little Red Men of the … or Giant Hairys of the suburbs. The whole bit is getting hotter and hairier by the month.” John Green and John Keel, among others, mentioned me in their books, as the source of many accounts I had forwarded their way.

Finally, in 1968, Lou Farish, a correspondent in Arkansas, suggested that I begin writing articles on my own. A year later, I began writing about Bigfoot in the Midwest. Soon Ivan Sanderson introduced me to Mark A. Hall, and John Keel introduced me to Jerry Clark. The old generation was mentoring the new.

In 1974, I constructed a cross-country trek, from Illinois to California, via a southwestern route, stopping at various locales that had histories of Bigfoot reports, from the Ozarks to the Sierras. I lived in California for parts of two years, working closely with George Haas and Jim McClarin, and meeting and discussing Bigfoot with many others, including René Dahinden, Archie Buckley, and John Green. When I decided to move back East for my long-delayed entry into graduate school, I once again used my journey as a way to see parts of the Bigfoot story, on-site, staying not in motels or RVs but in a sleeping bag, under the stars or, on rainy nights, in a tent. From the mid-1970s, from my base in New England, I continued to crisscross the country seeking Bigfoot and Bigfoot reports.

I have written much, consulted on documentaries about Bigfoot, and done more than that boy in Illinois could ever have dreamed. By the turn of the twenty-first century, I had been on treks, hikes, expeditions, and explorations in forty-eight states. I have canoed the backwaters of the Everglades, Okefenokee Swamp, Hockomock Lake, Honey Island Swamp, Caddo Lake, and dozens of other Bigfoot locations throughout the land. I have explored the most likely habitats of these creatures. I have climbed peaks from Yosemite to Fort Mountain, from the Trinities to Mt. Blue, looking for signs of Bigfoot. I have interviewed hundreds of Bigfoot witnesses. Four decades later, I’m convinced that ordinary people are having extraordinary but real encounters with these creatures, these hairy giants. This is what I now know about them.

Coast to Coast

The classic Bigfoot is a real animal living in the montane forests of the Pacific Rim, specifically the United States of America’s and Canada’s Pacific Northwest wilderness areas up through southern Alaska. There probably exists a much rarer Eastern subspecies or regional race of primates with distinctive behavioral and physical characteristics. The American Bigfoot, also known historically as Sasquatch in western Canada, has affinities to giant, hairy, apelike hominoids reported from the western mountains of Central and South America, as well as the forested areas of China, Tibet, and Indochina, although this volume will focus only on the North American variety.

It has been estimated that the population of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest is between two thousand and four thousand individuals, with the greatest concentrations around Bluff Creek, California, and with other random spots such as the Skookum Meadows region of Washington State getting routine visitations. I tend to think the number may be smaller, only 1500 Bigfoot.

Witnesses have reported seeing Bigfoot in groups, including females and juveniles, demonstrating that breeding groups do exist. Detailed descriptions of the young of the Bigfoot are rare, but we do find some records of encounters at the edge of forested areas abutting new human habitats.

In general, the upright Bigfoot ranges in height from six to nine feet at maturity, with the conditions of available light, temporal length of the encounter, and the hair covering of the animals causing an often exaggerated estimate of greater stature. Their hair-covered, stocky bodies have enormous barrel torsos, with well-developed buttocks in both genders, penises seen on males, and large breasts clearly visible on older females. The breasts are often reported to be hair-covered except for the nipple area. Their heads are relatively small and peaked with no visible neck or forehead, with a heavy browridge that sports a continuous up-curled fringe of hair. Both genders exhibit a sagittal crest, the peaked ridge found in fossil hominoids and modern great apes, which runs from the front to the back of the top of the skull where the muscles of the jaws are attached. Their jaws project forward markedly. Canine teeth that are noticeable enough to be called fangs are only rarely reported in males. The skin seen on the faces of the young is generally light-colored, while that of older individuals tends to be dark. Their eyes are small, round, and dark.

The hair of Bigfoot is reported to be relatively short and shaggy with no difference in length between body and head hair. In the young, the hair is usually dark, moves into shades of red and brown with age, and finally, at extreme maturity, evidences some silver, as in male mountain gorillas (“silverbacks”). Among the eastern North American subgroup of Bigfoot, piebald, or “two-tone,” coloring has been reported.

Evidence of these animals, as their name implies, is often in the form of large tracks found in mud, sand, and snow. The Bigfoot foot has an hourglass outline and measures 4 to 9 inches in width by 11¾ to 20 inches in length. Unlike in the human foot, halfway down the Bigfoot foot is a “split-ball” or double-ball arrangement that is unique for these primates. Each foot has five toes, all aligned together, with some individual variation in number of toes either showing in the prints left behind or actually existing. Four-toed prints are rare but not unknown.

Bigfoot do not wear clothes of any kind and never display weapons or tools. They seem to nest in caves or beds made in the open and in trees. They appear to be vegetarian, though they have been seen to take small rodents and fish on occasion. Bigfoot are highly vocal, making high-pitched whistles, animal-like screams, howls, and such sounds as eeek-eeek-eeek and sooka-sooka-sooka.

Bigfoot are nocturnal, with sightings also at dawn and dusk. They are retiring, alert, and clever, generally avoiding humans, though firsthand encounters and native folklore plus a few modern reports indicate they have been known to kidnap humans. Bigfoot are intelligent. They appear to have a heightened sense of smell and avoid metal objects such as guns, cameras, and human dwellings in general. The Eastern variety has routine negative interactions with dogs, and an intriguing curiosity about such domestic animals as horses and cows. Sightings are scarcer than generally acknowledged, and close encounters in which good details are reported are extremely rare.

Undiscovered in North America?

Could a bunch of large, hairy, near-human ape-men, or hirsute giants, be living unfound in America? A parallel story, from just fifty years ago, suggests that this is a very real possibility.

The largest land animal in Canada, the wood bison, had been disappearing from all over North America for centuries when the last animals were officially declared extinct in 1940. Then in 1957, a wonderful discovery occurred. During a regular air patrol, federal wildlife officers flying over a remote part of the Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta, spotted a small, isolated herd of two hundred wood bison. They had gone completely unnoticed for decades—and had kept physically and genetically separate from their cousins the plains bison, so familiar to Americans as the buffalo. The wood bison were found about one hundred miles from a new road being built from Alberta to the arctic circle and within fifty miles of a mission station that had existed for a hundred years. Inspection of these animals showed that they were indeed the last remaining pure wood bison (Bison athabascae), an enormous Ice Age species not known to exist in a pure strain anywhere else in the world.

The rediscovery of a hidden group of wood bison in a remote valley in Canada is as remarkable as the discovery of the coelacanth, the mountain gorilla, and the giant panda. I don’t believe those who insist that North America has no new secrets. One day Bigfoot will be officially recognized as a living creature.

I hope to see that day soon. In the meantime, the sightings continue, the number of Bigfoot seekers keeps growing, and the search is still afoot.

Part 1

Bigfoot Stomps into the Twenty-First Century

1

The Summer of Sasquatch

DATE: Monday, June 10, 2002

LOCATION: Near Sappho, Washington

Police investigate a reported Bigfoot sighting from a man living on Burnt Mountain Road, about thirty miles northeast of Forks. The man, whose name was not released, said he spotted the hairy, humanlike creature near his house.

“We were unable to locate, identify, or capture the Sasquatch,” Forks police chief Mike Powell told the Associated Press. An animal control officer checked the area but found no signs of the creature.

Local authorities noted this was not the first recent report in the area. They mentioned that the sighting happened in the same general area where, in June 2000, Gene Sampson found two sets of large footprints in the woods behind his home on the Hoh Indian reservation.

Clallam County undersheriff Joe Martin said he heard of Sasquatch sightings on the North Olympic Peninsula about once every five to ten years. “Out West, that’s not an uncommon thing,” he said.

DATE: January 16, 2002

LOCATION: Near Multnomah Falls, Oregon

An Idaho family has a run-in with a Bigfoot that almost turns into a roadkill. Linda Boydson claims she and her son came within inches of running over an unusually slender Bigfoot. Rounding a corner on the freeway at night, Boydson saw a “very, very skinny, ninefoot-tall, hairy man” standing in the slow lane. She remarked that the thing was bony, as if it needed to eat, but was otherwise muscular like a well-toned athlete. She nearly hit the creature.

There is nothing remarkable about these Bigfoot reports from 2002. Bigfoot sightings happen all the time in North America, especially in the Pacific Northwest. While the media may cite two or three reports per month during spring, summer, and fall, people are probably seeing Bigfoot and finding footprints at the rate of about ten unpublicized encounters a week. More than 550 reports a year. Year after year. Accounts of Bigfoot in America go back as far as this land is mentioned in history, and in legends and folklore long before that.

What’s remarkable about these reports is that, despite the overwhelming evidence for the existence of Bigfoot, the media and most scientists largely act as if the creature is a joke, a mass delusion. The truth is that at least one unknown species of primate exists in America. It’s a big story and it’s not getting the attention it deserves.

But it almost did in 2000. So many sightings were reported by the media in the summer of that year, with so much positive press attention, that it’s now referred to as the Summer of Sasquatch. The sightings actually began popping up in the papers in the spring.

On March 28, 2000, at about five-fifteen in the morning, James Hughes was delivering the little local newspaper, the Black River Shopper, along County Highway H, near Granton, Wisconsin, when he noticed a figure standing in the roadside ditch and carrying what appeared to be a goat. At first he took it to be a large man, but then he saw it was about eight feet tall and had an apelike face.

“He was all covered with hair, a real dark gray color, with some spots that looked a honey color. It was walking on two legs, and it was mighty, mighty big,” Hughes said. In its left hand it held what Hughes at first took to be a goat but later thought might have been a small sheep. But he was certain it was a dead animal. When the Bigfoot-like beast turned to look at him, Hughes said he floored the gas pedal and sped away, scared.

“I didn’t call it in [to the Sheriff’s Department] until the next day, because people would think I’m crazy. And I don’t drink, I don’t use dope, and I was wide-awake,” Hughes said.

Hughes finally did file a report with the Clark County Sheriff’s Department, and a deputy was dispatched to the scene but could not find any large footprints or other evidence. The Sheriff’s Department said Hughes gave a detailed description, but without tracks or other evidence suggesting a creature was in the area, the officers had to finally call off their searches.

In April 2000, two fly fishermen discovered a series of huge, humanlike footprints, seven miles apart along the banks of Colorado’s Eagle River. Bill Heicher, a wildlife biologist at the Colorado Division of Wildlife, evaluated the evidence and drew two conclusions. He told Theo Stein of the Denver Post that the tracks were not faked and were not made by a bear. Heicher observed, “It’s no animal that we know of.”

Reports of footprint finds and sightings then appeared throughout the Pacific Northwest. On May 7, 2000, campers found a set of Bigfoot tracks in the wilderness along the Sandy River, near Troutdale, Oregon. On May 18 at Grants Pass, Oregon, a motorcyclist told of having seen a Bigfoot beside Highway 101. On June 3 a family found large footprints on their property in Orting, Pierce County, Washington. Two days later, near Orting again, an elderly woman saw a hairy giant pass by her car.

Meanwhile, back East, on Friday, June 9, 2000, at approximately 7 A.M., a woman was driving to work on Route 30 between Jeannette and Greensburg, Pennsylvania, when she spotted a Bigfoot. She had slowed down to look at a car for sale when she turned to her right and spotted a creature six to seven feet tall standing on the back road, she told investigators Eric Altman and Stan Gordon. The creature was covered with black hair and appeared neckless. When the manlike creature crossed the stretch of road, she lost sight of it as it took three long strides into a nearby wooded area.

On June 16 giant bare footprints were found along the Mountain Loop Highway in Darrington, Snohomish County, Washington. On June 21 hikers climbing the 5,324-foot-high Mount Pilchuck, Washington, found huge footprints. And on June 24 large Sasquatch footprints were discovered in Washington State’s Olympic National Park, along the Sol Duc River.

Three days later Gene Sampson found giant footprints behind his home on the Hoh Indian Reservation, near Port Angeles, Washington. Hearing strange bam, bam noises, Sampson searched and discovered two different and distinctive sets of footprints, which he measured at fourteen inches and seventeen and a half inches in length, and seven and eight inches in width. Cliff Crook, a local Bigfooter, made casts of the prints. To the late Grover Krantz, a Bigfoot researcher and retired Washington State University anthropology professor, who examined them within days, the footprints on the Hoh reservation indicated the presence of one male and one female Sasquatch. Soon after Sampson’s encounter, a forestry manager for the Suquamish First Nation saw a Bigfoot in the forest on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State.

Then on July 1, the true media storm began when a psychologist reported seeing a Bigfoot while hiking with his family near the Oregon Caves National Monument, Selma, Oregon.

Grants Pass psychologist Matthew Johnson was squatting in the woods, near one of the monument’s backwoods trails, hiding behind a tree, taking a bathroom break, and keeping his family in sight. Then he heard grunting and smelled something strong and unpleasant.

“I turned my head quickly, and I saw this very tall, dark, hairy animal walk from behind one tree and over to another tree,” he told me.

The creature was watching his wife and children too, Johnson said. Terrified, he ran back to his family and hustled them away from the area. “I didn’t immediately tell them what I saw,” Johnson would repeat many times later to me and others. “I didn’t want to freak my kids out. I didn’t want to freak my wife out.” When the family stopped along the trail for a water break, Johnson just had to tell his wife. “I said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but I saw Bigfoot.’ She said, ‘I believe you.’”

Johnson would later tell reporters such as Tim LaBarge of the Statesman Journal, “It was nothing else but a Sasquatch. I swear to God. I lived a lot of years in Alaska. I’ve been chased by a grizzly bear. This was no bear.”

Media attention to Dr. Johnson’s sighting was the big event of the summer, if one was to judge by how much newspaper, radio, and television coverage the sighting received. Johnson was interviewed widely, appeared on several morning and news programs, and was videotaped by filmmakers from around the world. His sighting was taken seriously, although some within the Bigfoot study ranks were upset that the press would treat a Ph.D. so nobly when the media ignores reports from truck drivers, farmers, and hunters every week.

The incident did catch the attention of some Bigfoot researchers in northern California, who spent parts of the summer retracing the Johnson family’s steps along the monument’s Big Tree Trail. Soon after the July 1 incident, investigator Scott Herriott and Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization’s John Freitas, accompanied by Park Ranger John Roth, followed the family’s path along the monument’s pathways. Johnson said they found a large “impression in the ground.” He termed it a partial footprint.

On July 3, near Concrete, Skagit County, Washington, hikers found giant footprints near Highway 20. Then in August 2000, two hikers forced by stormy weather to camp in the high wilderness north of Crested Butte, Colorado, emerged with quite a tale, reported the Denver Post. They told of having been shadowed for two nights by at least one Bigfoot that came close to their tent and camp.

The media kept covering the Bigfoot story as the summer ended. Chris Wright, who lives on the Mountain Loop Highway near Granite Falls, Washington, just wanted his midnight cigarette that Sunday night, September 24, 2000, according to Everett, Washington’s the Herald. But he got more than he bargained for—a close encounter with a Sasquatch.

“I was not a firm believer in Bigfoot,” Wright, twenty-nine, a broadcast communications tower manager, told local authorities. “But after last night, I’m rethinking that.”

Wright stepped out on the back porch of his residence near Iron Mountain rock quarry, lit his cigarette, and walked off the porch and into the yard. That activated the motion detectors, and on came his security lights.

“At that point, I heard a loud, high-pitched yell,” he recalled. “I turned and looked to my right and that’s when I saw him. I was looking right at the son of a gun.”

The beast was only seventy-five feet away from the tree line. The Bigfoot stood upright, about seven feet tall, was dark in color, and appeared to be covered with hair. “When the lights came on, he ran into the woods,” Wright said. “It sounded like a human running through the woods.” Being a hunter, Wright knew it wasn’t a bear: “Bears don’t run like that.”

Running back into his home, Wright went after his rifle.

“I have guns in a gun case, and I was going for them when I decided to wake up my roommate and tell him what I saw,” Wright noted. “At first, he sort of laughed at me. But then he could see how shaken I was, and he began to believe me.”

Herald reporter Leslie Moriarty interviewed Wright and learned that he had seen a television show on Bigfoot sightings a few weeks before the sighting. On that documentary, a recording of a Bigfoot yell was played.

“What I heard sounded just like that,” he told Moriarty. “That’s why I know this was Bigfoot.”

The next morning, Wright looked for footprints but found none.

Granite Falls police received no calls about Bigfoot sightings that Sunday night. “I haven’t ever gotten any in the five years I’ve been here,” officer Rich Michaelsen said.

“I thought all those guys who said they saw Bigfoot were loony,” Wright said soon after his sighting. “But I know what I saw…. It had to be Bigfoot. Nothing else is that big or that tall.”

Meanwhile, the most dramatic event of the year was occurring just due south, also in Washington State, not far from Mt. St. Helens and Ape Canyon, where a group of Bigfoot hunters had set a trap for Bigfoot. Their effort would produce one of the most concrete pieces of Bigfoot evidence to date—the Skookum cast.

2 Strange Cast of Skookum

The Native American Chinook word Skookum, according to linguists, is another name for Sasquatch or Bigfoot, and settlers in the West employed it to name geographical sites. Over two hundred Skookum place names are found in Oregon, Washington State, British Columbia, Idaho, and Alaska. During September 2000, Richard Noll, Matt Moneymaker, and eleven other individuals on an expedition looking for evidence of Bigfoot made a remarkable find, as chance would have it, near Skookum Meadow in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southern Washington State. In a mud trap they created, they obtained a half-body print—literally a butt print—of a Sasquatch. If authentic, noted Benjamin Radford, editor of the Skeptic Inquirer, the cast would be “arguably the most significant find in the past two decades.”

A Powerful Name

More than three thousand years ago, the Chinook First Nation, Native American traders extraordinaire, dwelt at the mouth of the Columbia River, Washington. Their trade routes reached east as far as the central Great Plains, as far north as Sitka, Alaska, and as far south as the Monterey Peninsula and Taos, New Mexico. According to the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company, about 90 percent of all furs shipped to Europe and Asia passed through the Chinooks first. While the Indians today are practically extinct, their name survives in the trade language they created and used, known as Chinook jargon. It is composed of two-fifths Chinook, two-fifths other Native American tongues, and the remainder English and Canadian French. One of the first to record the language was the great Pacific Northwest anthropologist Franz Boas, in reports for the Smithsonian Institution, beginning in 1894. Authentic snippets of it can even be heard in the Clark Gable movie Across the Wide Missouri.

Of the one hundred or so Chinook words that remain today, perhaps none is more intriguing than Skookum. When Chinook was in its purest form, before 1790, the word Skookum appears to have simply meant “powerful,” according to Chinook historian Joel Freeman. Asouthwest Washington stream, Skookumchuck, for example, translates as “power water,” denoting a swift stream.

Others see a more direct link between Skookum and Sasquatch. In 1867, U.S. geodetic surveyor F. W. Brown of Tacoma would write in his journal of the humanlike monsters that left tracks and were seen by the natives near Mount Rainier and Boisfort Peak. The Indians called the monster Skookum Quash, or in English, “strong terror.” Bigfoot researcher and First Nation worker Henry Franzoni’s interest in Skookum goes back to his first experience with Bigfoot in 1993. At a place called Skookum Lake, Oregon, Franzoni and his companion encountered what he would later call the “Bigfoot phenomenon.” After his encounter, Franzoni began collecting Native tales and started noticing the links between Skookum and other names and the sightings of the creatures. Not coincidentally, Franzoni discovered that Skookum was another name for Sasquatch or Bigfoot. He has identified 214 Skookum place names all found in Oregon, Washington State, British Columbia, Idaho, and Alaska. It’s a common name in the Pacific Northwest, as common as reports of the classic Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

In the book Oregon Place Names, written in 1928, author Lewis A. MacArthur explained, “The Indians, particularly of the Coast Range region, were fearful of a number of lakes and localities that were supposed to be inhabited by skookums, or evil wood-spirits. Some of the lakes are still called Skookum lakes, others are called Devils lakes. Many Indians avoided these places and considered them haunted.”

In 1998, Franzoni outlined his thoughts about Skookum. “The modern Chinook jargon meaning,” he stated in an e-mail to me, “is ‘big, strong, and swift’ whilst the original Chinook village meaning is ‘Evil God of the Woods.’ Places have to be examined as to when they were named, and often a correlating old story has to be located to really suggest that a particular skookum place is worthy of our Bigfoot interest. A number of skookum places fit the bill just fine after being investigated though. Places like Mt. Duckabush in the Olympic Range was once named ‘Mt. Arleta’ by Lt. Patrick O’Neill, who led the second group ever across the Olympic Mountains in 1890. O’Neill mentioned in his diary that the native guides he had with him called it skookum and believed their gods lived on it. His native guides abandoned him and his group when a panther shrieked at their camp continuously one night. Oddly enough, most native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula did not venture into the interior, because they thought their gods lived there. There are some interesting parallels between some stories of the Himalayan Shangrila and native legends of a hidden valley in the Olympics, guarded by Skookums…. The Chinook jargon does have many different interpretations for the word skookum depending on which expert is consulted. I used MacArthur’s 1924 definition, but for me the Bigfoot connection was strong once I went to a skookum place and figure that I stood ten feet from a smelly Bigfoot on my very first day of looking.”

Franzoni’s experience is remarkably similar to that of others. Paul Kane (1810/79), who was a well-known painter of Native Americans, mentioned in his journal entry of March 26, 1847, of hearing that Skookums at Mt. St. Helens, in what is now Washington State, had eaten a man. At Skookum Lake, Clackamas County, Oregon, Bigfoot was encountered in 1991, 1993, and 1995. As the twenty-first century was breaking, Kyle Mizokami, a former Bigfooter, who was on a casual hike at Skookum Creek, Washington, found two fourteen-inch-long Bigfoot tracks. The biggest prize, of course, was to take place at another Skookum place.

Imprint of the Century

When reports of twisted trees and hair alerted investigators to new activity in the spring of 2000, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) decided the Skookum Meadows area was a good location to search for Bigfoot. Frustrated by past searching there, they decided in September 2000 to get a group of specialists together to look anew and use a variety of techniques. Those there included tracker Richard Noll, psychiatrist and pheromone expert Greg Bambenek, zoologist LeRoy Fish, wilderness guide Jim Henick, local Gifford Pinchot Park guide Jeff Lemley, assistant Erin Lee, bait expert Thomas Powell, animal tracker Derek Randles, communications professional Alan Terry, and BFRO founder, director, and expedition leader Matt Moneymaker. Joe Beelart was the off-site equipment supplier, and a film crew from the British television series Animal X was along to see what they could find.

As the group established base camp on September 16, 2000, they were well prepared. They had infrared cameras, night-vision goggles, sound equipment, and a sexual attractant. Since no Sasquatch pheromone has ever been gathered, Bambenek (nicknamed Dr. Juice) created a mixture of human and gorilla scent. They placed samples of this special fragrance on trees near their camp, in hopes that a Bigfoot would come for a visit. They also set out fruit in and around a “mud trap” they constructed, in the hope of getting some Bigfoot tracks.

They also broadcast a sound recording of what was supposedly a Bigfoot call from California, recorded in 1999. Soon they heard “answers” to these screams. Rick Noll told reporter Mark Hume of the National Post that the responses “sounded sort of like a highpitch scream by a woman, trailing off to a gurgle.”

On September 22, Noll, Randles, and Fish checked on the fruit “traps” and noted the fruit was gone from two locations. Whatever took the fruit from those places did not leave behind any footprints. When they came to what they called the Skookum Meadows “mud site,” however, the three noticed that half of the six locally grown apples were gone. They also noted the presence of older tracks of coyote, bear, deer, and elk.

Then, suddenly, Noll was startled to see another large impression at the edge of the muddy patch. Fish and Randles came over to view what Noll had found, and they all quickly agreed that it seemed to show an animal, indeed the animal they were pursuing.

Others from camp rushed to the site, and photographs and other recordings and measurements of the area were made. Noll was transporting some casting material, Hydrocal B-11, in his truck and thus had a larger amount than normal. A casting of this half-body print was taken by Noll, Fish, and Randles. Meanwhile, Lemley, Terry, and Bambenek helped in the making of the cast—holding a sun shade, retrieving water, lifting the cast out of the ground, and removing food debris and hair from the cast site. Moneymaker coordinated the whole effort.

It took 325 pounds of casting material to capture the imprint, while the crew from Animal X videotaped the event. The BFRO folks were stunned to realize that they had a good plaster copy of a Sasquatch’s butt, ankles, testicles, hip, thigh, left arm, and apparent hair on the body. They believe the impression was made as the creature sat down and reached over to pick up the bait. The imprint of hairy buttocks in the mud is the strongest hint yet that Bigfoot is roaming the American Pacific Northwest, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which sponsored the expedition.

Other evidence was gathered, such as portions of the apple the creature had chewed, to see if any Sasquatch salvia could be found.

Details of the events at Skookum Meadows were widely reported in daily newspapers, by Channel 5 in Seattle, and in the New Scientist. The media had a field day with the Skookum cast discovery, with several wire service stories playing with the obvious “butt” imprint humor in their headlines and articles. Nevertheless, a serious piece of the puzzle had been found, and the investigation kicked into full gear after the BFRO members returned from the rain forest.

Skookum Cast Analyses

One individual, Cliff Crook, a sometimes thorn in the side of the Bigfoot community and the former director of Bigfoot Central, quickly came forward and convinced some in the media to print his theory that the cast collected was nothing more than impressions from the chest or belly of a kneeling elk. Crook called the Skookum cast either the “Spoofem” or “Wapiti” cast. “Wapiti,” Crook e-mailed to Bigfooters across the country, “is the name given to the elk by the Shawnee Indian Tribe and means ‘white rump.’”

Crook didn’t convince many of his theory. In response, BFRO’s Richard Noll pointed to the fact that besides the hair of coyote and elk, unknown primate hairs and a Bigfoot footprint was found in the Skookum cast area. “The imprint,” Noll wrote to Bigfoot researchers, “is consistent with an animal that can use its forelimbs as leverage separate from the hind limbs in raising its body from a sitting position. There are no elk prints behind the heel marks, nor in the main body of the cast impression, as would be expected if it were a four-legged animal. It apparently could use one of its limbs to support its weight and thrust it out of the mud to leave this imprint.”

Meanwhile, Grover Krantz and others not on the expedition began to examine the Skookum cast. I got a chance to examine the cast of the leg imprint when Rick Noll showed it to me at a Bigfoot conference in 2001. And anthropologist Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University also examined the cast. In an article published in New Scientist, Meldrum noted that the imprint seems to have been made by a large, hair-covered hominoid more than 2.5 meters tall. Meldrum found markings that look like human dermal patterns (such as those found on human feet) on the heel print. “All we’re trying to say at this stage is that there’s evidence that justifies objective consideration,” Meldrum wrote.

In rebuttals to the Skeptical Inquirer’s attacks on the Skookum cast, Sasquatch chronicler John Green stated, “Some of the holes in the mud, not readily identifiable in that form, turned out in the cast to be beautiful prints of huge, humanlike heels, complete with hair patterns on the Achilles tendon—good enough to cause the author of a text on primate anatomy to reverse a long-held opinion as to the existence of the Sasquatch. And those poor fools who have found the cast completely convincing include several people with relevant doctorates and careers, one of them considered by many to be the greatest field zoologist of our time. Primatologists at the Smithsonian Institution, on the other hand, have said they will not look at the cast even if someone drives clear across the country to show it to them. Who are the scientists and who are the believers?”

In June of 2002, the Discovery Channel gathered three noted anthropologists in an Edmonds, Washington, hotel to tape them examining anew and commenting on the Skookum cast. Financing for Sasquatch searches is wanting, but cable television subtly supports the efforts of interested parties in at least attempting to gather information and in scrutinizing the evidence. University of Washington professor emeritus Daris Swindler, American Museum of Natural History anatomist Esteban Sarmiento, and Idaho State University anatomy professor Jeffrey Meldrum were gathered together to investigate the cast of the imprint for the filming of a documentary on the science behind the search for the Sasquatch. The presence of Sarmiento, a functional anatomist who has concentrated on African gorilla populations and the study of hominid skeletons, constituted the first sign of interest in Bigfoot by the New Yorkbased American Museum of Natural History.

David Fisher, a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was allowed to observe the anthropologists’ examinations. According to Fisher, one impression “lined with hair marks,” said Sarmiento, “could have been made by a huge hindquarters.” Meldrum pointed out for the camera that “a deep knob-shaped hole with a fluted groove running into it could have been made by the back of a huge heel jammed into the mud. Fine lines, reminiscent of the fingerprint patterns on human heels, are faintly visible.”

Meldrum feels all the evidence points to an eight-foot-tall Bigfoot’s having left the overall impressions at Skookum Meadows.

During 2002, zoologist LeRoy Fish and anthropologist Grover Krantz, both strong Skookum cast supporters, died. The Discovery Channel documentary, entitled Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, was shown in January 2003. The program highlighted the scientific analysis of various pieces of purported Bigfoot evidence, including the Skookum cast.

As exciting a find as the Skookum cast is, the decisive quest still remains—for the animal that made the hairy-buttocks impression.

“Obviously, to me,” remarked Sarmiento of the American Museum of Natural History, “the ultimate evidence that this thing exists is if somebody found one and brought it back.”

“Bringing one back” to prove they exist has not always been the goal of people knowledgeable about Bigfoot. For the first people on the continent, the Bigfoot were simply cohabitants, the giant hairy neighbors in the woods.

Part 2

A Look Back

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5 Fruit Crate Label Art and Ruby Creek

Curiously, there are no contemporary accounts of Bigfoot in California from 1900 through 1957. As Bigfoot researcher John Green recently observed, “Checking my files, there are several dozen reports from California before 1958, but all are recollections of one sort or another. Not a single one is from a newspaper story in the 1900s. That is indeed odd.”

Though news accounts of Bigfoot for this era are not available, some stunning cultural evidence for the existence of Bigfoot in California in this period does exist. I recently found a fruit crate label that appears to have a direct bearing on Bigfoot in early-twentieth-century California.

“Fruit crate labels,” so called even if the items being packaged were vegetables, were in common use from the 1920s through 1950s. These labels were originally designed to get the attention of distributors and wholesalers. The labels were glued to the ends of wooden crates of produce so as to distinguish one grower’s product from another’s. The label art reflected local items of interest and were made to be highly visible in the fruit and vegetable auction sales. The most desired brands were those that could be recognized from a distance and were distinctive, often by taking advantage of a local pun. When new technologies and cardboard replaced these labels, the old labels became prized as art and have been highly sought after items among collectors of printed ephemera.

In October of 2000 I stumbled upon a fruit crate label called the California Giant while scanning items for sale on eBay. The vendor from whom I purchased it, Dwayne Rogers of Chico, California, informed me this specific label would simply be called Giant, or California Giant, among fruit-crate-label collectors.

The label shows a large, hairy, humanlike form not unlike what we have grown to know from the descriptions of Bigfoot. The California crate label references either the Giant brand lettuce or carrots from the Salinas area. From a label collector’s point of view, Rogers told me, the fact the California Giant is actually carrying a crate of lettuce with the same label is unique in crate label art.

Since I knew that such labels essentially disappeared in the 1950s, I decided to track down, if possible, the age of this particular art. I thought it curious that a hairy giant would be on a California crate, and that no one in cryptozoology had ever mentioned this before. Rogers thought it dated back to the 1930s, perhaps from the 1940s, but certainly before 1950. Rogers also remarked that a black-and-white image of this label is dated to the 1930s in Gordon McClelland’s 1983 book, Fruit Box Labels.

Rogers suggested I talk to agrilitholigist Thomas P. “Pat” Jacobsen, dean of fruit crate art and author of Pat Jacobsen’s Millennium Guide to Fruit Crate Labels!!

Jacobsen did some digging for me and sent me these findings: “I have gone into my collection, and found a few samples of the label ‘California Giant’ or ‘Giant.’ There are two different versions of the artwork that I know of; one says ‘carrots,’ the other says ‘lettuce.’ One of the labels I have says ‘lettuce’ on it and was made by the L. A. Miller Label Co., in business from 1925 to 1934 when they ostensibly merged with H. S. Crocker Co. Then, in December of 1936, I have a dated file copy from Schmidt Lithograph Company, the largest in the West, whose basement I acquired. On the bottom of the label in green letters is their name. This is the only printing of ‘carrots’ that I know of. Another copy is dated August 1941 and still [has] the green Schmidt name. In 1950, it is produced again with a black Schmidt name and ‘Produce of the USA’ added in the bottom border. So I am sure [this California Giant label] was used between 1934 and 1950 … probably more like the Depression era (1932, 33, but it may be older).”

California Giant = Bigfoot

The image on the California Giant brand lettuce fruit label definitely shows a large, hairy, hominid form. The figure looks strong, well muscled, with brown, short hair all over the body but on the face. The neck is unusually solid-looking and well defined. It is a rather typical image of a Bigfoot.

The label itself serves as a scale for how large this “Giant” is. The label is nine inches long, and the artistic mirror image of the label itself is three-quarter inches in length. The image of the repeating California Giant label on the label tells us how big this creature is. Basically, the label shows items that are on a 1:12 scale. Therefore, we find that the hairy giant depicted is about ten feet tall and has a foot that is approximately twenty to twenty-four inches long.

These dimensions are comparable to Roger Patterson’s “Giant Hairy Ape” (a creature he discussed in his 1966 book), which had humanlike footprints measuring twenty-two inches long and was taller by several feet than the regular Bigfoot reported at the time. John Green also noted some reports from the 1950s and 1960s that told of hairy men with giant, almost two-foot-long foot tracks.

I am convinced the label speaks to knowledge of reports and traditions of hairy giants in northern California in the 1920s and 1930s, when the label was first created. In the absence of news articles on Bigfoot sightings in California from these early years, I find this surprising bit of evidence from a fruit crate label worth pondering.

But can this label truly be regarded as cultural evidence for the existence of hairy-giant motifs in early-twentieth-century California? Or is this no more than yet another example of folklore immortalized through art? What do we know about the connection to realism in other fruit crate art?

Reality-Based Labels?

Fruit crate labels embellished boxes of Louisiana sweet potatoes, French plums, Washington State apples, and California oranges with vivid artwork of cats, butterflies, beautiful women, cowboys, lions, peacocks, baseball players, and many other reality-based images from nature and history. The labels I have examined rarely show mythical or fanciful creatures, though Santa Claus, knights, and romantic historic figures are sometimes illustrated.

However, one image, familiar to most of us, parallels the California Giant, which we must not ignore. This would be the Jolly Green Giant. If the Jolly Green Giant is mythical, as we must assume, is there perhaps nothing to the California Giant? But let’s look for a moment at the tradition underlying the Green Giant, as it was originally known.

In 1903, Green Giant was founded in Le Sueur, Minnesota, as the Minnesota Valley Canning Company. In 1925, a pale, giant, boy-like figure with a leafy bit of clothing was introduced to market the company’s new line of giant, sweet, early green peas. The name Green Giant for this marketing image soon followed, with the giant figure’s skin then turning green. Eventually the Green Giant came to symbolize not only the peas, but the company as well. In 1950, Minnesota Valley Canning Company disappeared completely behind the trademark it had created and became officially the Green Giant Company. Today, the Jolly Green Giant is the name of the giant figure, having evolved from the youthful figure of 1925.

In our search for the origins of the California Giant in the tales of the California Bigfoot, should we be disturbed that Jolly Green Giants are not running around Minnesota? Perhaps. Perhaps not. First and foremost, the tradition of the Green Giant appears to have a direct link, in terms of artistic imagery, with the folklore and widespread art of the European Green Man.

Green Giants to Bigfoot

From ancient times, the archetypal figure shown as the Green Giant is commonly referred to as the Green Man, or leafy man, and has been discussed throughout European texts, especially in England, and as well as in France, where it is called Le Feuillou, and in Germany, where it is known as Blattqesicht. Authors have written extensively on the pagan and Celtic traditions of these Green Men, and books and Web sites about them are abundant.

Scholars, furthermore, see a direct link between the European traditions of the Green Man and the old tales and encounters with real Wild Men. “The wildman (who may be the same as the ‘green man’),” Myra Shackley notes in her book Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma, “also takes on the role of the spirit of the woods, a kind of pagan nature god…. Over two hundred European families have wildmen as heraldic emblems, and many more as supporters. Any nude figure in heraldry is called a ‘savage’, ‘wildman,’ or ‘woodman,’ and the terms are interchangeable. There is little variation in the way they are portrayed, leafy decorations and a club being the rule…. Wildmen (or green men) also appear carved in wood and as architectural adornments in the Middle Ages…. Green men are frequently shown as a face with foliage emerging from the mouth, and fifty or more of these are known from England alone. The green man is also found carved in stone, as a gargoyle…. In the Elizabethan period wildmen, or green men, were often employed to clear the way for processions, wielding sticks.”

Clearly the Green Man comes from the tradition and evolution of the art form of the burly wildmen, the woodsmen, and thus the man of the woods and greenery. Shackley notes, “Wildmen are important figures in medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts. They may be called ‘wodewoses’ or ‘woodhouses,’ and are frequently shown covered with long hair or fur. An additional class of picture shows actors in plays, masques, and dramas who are depicted in wildman costumes…. The name wodewose is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Wudewasa and thence from Wudu (late Old English for ‘wood’; Wudewasa seems to mean ‘man-of-the-wood.’”

The “wildmen” are an active topic in hominology, and some researchers feel the Wildmen and Green Men are a remembrance of Neandertal. As Shackley, Ivan T. Sanderson, and others have noted, we must view the interrelationship between the hairy wildfolk lurking in the remote woodlands of the Middle Ages and the European wildmen, regardless of whether they were called wodewose or green men.

So the graphic transmutation of the survival of late Neandertals in Europe to Wild Men and Green Men, with an artistic connection to the Green Giant and the Jolly Green Giant, is worth serious consideration. There appears to be a link between that label on a can of peas in your kitchen and the possible existence of relict hairy hominids, even if uncomfortably so.

Just as the encounters of European wildmen survive in medieval carvings and other graphic representations, so too is the early-twentieth-century California Bigfoot evident in an artistic form. Depressionera painters appear to have captured the giant, hairy hominid on at least one fruit crate label. The containers for lettuce, carrots, and, yes, green peas may have much to teach us in Bigfoot studies, beyond our wildest imaginations.

Ruby Creek Incident

Although Bigfoot would not break into public consciousness until 1958, the modern history of this creature is widely thought to have begun with a 1941 encounter labeled by John Green as the Ruby Creek Incident because it happened a half mile east of that little settlement in British Columbia. Although only the Chapman family was involved in this encounter, others in the Ruby Creek area also saw the footprints.

Ivan Sanderson wrote up the Chapmans’ story soon after he interviewed them and then published his account in True magazine in 1960. I will let Sanderson retell the story in his own words, directly from his firsthand interview, in order to do full justice to the Chapmans’ account:

“The modern history of the Sasquatch really dates from September, 1941, when one of these creatures paid a visit—in broad daylight—to an Indian family named Chapman. While the Amerindian stories have usually been dismissed as legend, or laughed off because Indians are not supposed to be reliable, too much physical evidence to be ignored accompanied this experience. The Chapman family consisted of George and Jeannie Chapman and children numbering, at my visit, four. Mr. Chapman worked on the railroad, and was living at that time in a small place called Ruby Creek, thirty miles up the Fraser River from Agassiz, British Columbia, in Canada’s great western province.

“It was about three in the afternoon of a sunny, cloudless day when Jeannie Chapman’s eldest son, then aged nine, came running to the house saying that there was a cow coming down out of the woods at the foot of the nearby mountain. The other kids, a boy aged seven and a little girl of five, were still playing in afield behind the house bordering on the rail track. Mrs. Chapman went out tolook, sincethe boy seemed oddly disturbed, and they saw what at first she thought was a very big bear moving about among the bushes bordering the field beyond the railway tracks. She called the two children, who came running immediately. Then the creature moved onto the tracks and she saw to her horror that it was a gigantic man covered with hair, not fur. The hair seemed to be about four inches long all over, and of a pale yellow-brown color. To pin down this color Mrs. Chapman pointed out to me a sheet of lightly varnished plywood in the room where we were sitting. This was of a brown-ochre color. This creature advanced directly toward the house and Mrs. Chapman had, as she put it, ‘much too much time to look at it’ because she stood her ground outside while the eldest boy—on her instructions—got a blanket from the house and rounded up the other children. The kids were in a near panic, she told us, and it took two or three minutes to get the blanket, during which time the creature had reached the near corner of the field only about one hundred feet away from her. Mrs. Chapman then spread the blanket and, holding it aloft so that the kids could not see the creature or it them, she backed off at the double to the old field and down onto the river beach out of sight, and then ran with the kids downstream to the village.

“I asked her a leading question about the blanket. Had her purpose in using it been to prevent her kids seeing the creature, in accord with an alleged Amerindian belief that to do so brings bad luck and often death? Her reply was both prompt and surprising. She said that, although she had heard white men tell of that belief, she had not heard it from her parents or any other of her people, whose advice regarding the so-called Sasquatch had been simply not to go further than certain points up certain valleys, to run if she saw one, but not to struggle if one caught her as it might squeeze her to death by mistake. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids and so might go into the house to look for them instead of following me.’ This seems to have been sound logic as the creature did go into the house and also rummaged through an old outhouse pretty thoroughly, hauling from it a fifty-five-gallon barrel of salt fish, breaking this open, and scattering its contents about outside. (The irony of it is that all those three children did die within three years; the two boys by drowning, and the little girl on a sickbed. And just after I interviewed the Chapmans they also were drowned in the Fraser River when a rowboat cap-sized.) Mrs. Chapman told me that the creature was about seven and a half feet tall. She could estimate its height by the various fence and line posts standing about the field. It had a rather small head and a very short, thick neck; in fact really no neck at all, a point that was emphasized by William Roe and by all others who claim to have seen one of these creatures. Its body was entirely human in shape except that it was immensely thick through its chest and its arms were exceptionally long. She did not see the feet, which were in the grass. Its shoulders were very wide and it had no breasts, from which Mrs. Chapman assumed it was a male, though she also did not see any male genitalia due to the long hair covering its groin. She was most definite on one point: the naked parts of its face and its hands were much darker than its hair, and appeared to be almost black.

“George Chapman returned home from his work on the railroad that day shortly before six in the evening and by a route that bypassed the village so that he saw no one to tell him what had happened. When he reached his house he immediately saw the wood-shed door battered in, and spotted enormous humanoid footprints all over the place. Greatly alarmed—for he, like all of his people, had heard since childhood about the ‘big wild men of the mountains,’ though he did not hear the word Sasquatch till after this incident—he called for his family and then dashed through the house. Then he spotted the foot-tracks of his wife and kids going off toward the river. He followed these until he picked them up on the sand beside the river and saw them going off downstream without any giant ones following.

“Somewhat relieved, he was retracing his steps when he stumbled across the giant’s foot-tracks on the riverbank farther upstream. These had come down out of the potato patch, which lay between the house and the river, had milled about by the river, and then gone back through the old field toward the foot of the mountains where they disappeared in the heavy growth.

“Returning to the house relieved to know that the tracks of all four of his family had gone off downstream to the village, George Chapman went to examine the woodshed. In our interview, after eighteen years, he still expressed voluble astonishment that any living thing, even a seven-foot-six-inch man with a barrel chest, could lift a fifty-five-gallon tub of fish and break it open without using a tool. He confirmed the creature’s height after finding a number of long brown hairs stuck in the slabwood lintel of the doorway, above the level of his head.

“George Chapman then went off to the village to look for his family, and found them in a state of calm collapse. He gathered them up and invited his father-in-law and two others to return with him, for protection of his family when he was away at work. The foot-tracks returned every night for a week and on two occasions the dogs that the Chapmans had taken with them set up the most awful racket at exactly two o’clock in the morning. The Sasquatch did not, however, molest them or, apparently, touch either the house or the wood-shed. But the whole business was too unnerving and the family finally moved out. They never went back. After a long chat about this and other matters, Mrs. Chapman suddenly told us something very significant just as we were leaving. She said: ‘It made an awful funny noise.’ I asked her if she could imitate this noise for me but it was her husband who did so, saying that he had heard it at night twice during the week after the first incident. He then proceeded to utter exactly the same strange, gurgling whistle that the men in California, who said they had heard a Bigfoot call, had given us. This is a sound I cannot reproduce in print, but I can assure you that it is unlike anything I have ever heard given by man or beast anywhere in the world. To me, this information is of the greatest significance. That an Amerindian couple in British Columbia should give out with exactly the same strange sound in connection with a Sasquatch that two highly educated white men did, over six hundred miles south in connection with California’s Bigfoot, is incredible. If this is all hoax or a publicity stunt, or masshallucination, as some people have claimed, how does it happen that this noise—which defies description—always sounds the same no matter who has tried to reproduce it for me? These were probably the last words on the Sasquatch that the Chapmans uttered and I absolutely refuse to listen to anybody who might say they were lying. Admittedly, honest men are such a rarity as possibly to be nonexistent, but I have met a few who could qualify and I put the Chapmans near the head of the list.”

Before 1958, Sasquatch was merely a regional monster, a hairy forest tribe of the Indians. The California fruit-crate hirsute beast was little known outside of the lettuce- and orange-growing regions. Stories of “wildmen” and “gorillas” had faded from news reporters’ memories. Over in the Himalayas, the Abominable Snowmen were getting some notice, but it had little bearing on America. Something big was about to happen, though. And that something was Bigfoot!

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8 Frozen Man

A film is one thing. A body is quite another. The year 1967 also brought to light what appears to a specimen of a kind of Bigfoot. It began with a mysterious millionaire who was debating what to do with a frozen hairy hominoid that had fallen into his hands. The owner of the Minnesota Iceman, as it would soon be called, wanted to display this frozen Bigfoot-like beast to see what people’s reaction to the “missing link” would be. As the story would develop, the true owner did not wish to be “the one” to undercut the truth of biblical creation. How could this be accomplished without “scientists” getting the specimen? A plan was hatched. The body would be shown around Middle America, from one rural town’s stock shows to the next, off the beaten track, and out of the limelight. No one would notice and the mystery owner could gauge public reaction. But then a series of events began to unravel the plot.

During the autumn of 1967, college zoology major Terry Cullen spotted an extraordinary exhibit in Milwaukee—a fresh, apparently authentic corpse of a hairy, manlike animal. For twenty-five cents people could see the “man left over from the Ice Age” that exhibitor Frank Hansen kept frozen in a block of ice inside a refrigerated glass coffin.

After trying unsuccessfully during 1967 and 1968 to interest mainstream academic anthropologists, Cullen alerted Ivan T. Sanderson, a naturalist and author of the successful book Abominable Snowmen. Sanderson’s houseguest in New Jersey at the time was none other that the Belgian cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, author of On the Track of Unknown Animals.

What everyone wanted to know was, why hadn’t anyone noticed this thing before? After all, the body had been on public exhibit for almost two years in Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, Oklahoma, and other states. Why hadn’t anyone spotted it before Cullen? Sanderson answered such questions this way: “Just how many people with proper training in any of the biological sciences (including medical practitioners and students) go to such shows? If any do, how many are trained physical anthropologists or primatologists? How many have ever heard of the ABSM [abominable snowman] search? The answer is: practically nobody who attended the exhibit.”

After hearing from Cullen on December 12, 1968, however, Sanderson invited Heuvelmans, and the two immediately traveled to see firsthand what Hansen was showing at fairs and shopping centers across the American Midwest. For three days, from December 16 through 18, 1968, Sanderson and Heuvelmans examined the creature in Hansen’s cramped trailer. The specimen was an adult male with large hands and feet. Its skin was covered with dark brown hair three to four inches long. The creature had apparently been shot through one eye, which dangled on its face, but it also had a gaping wound and open fracture on its left arm. Smelling putrefaction where some of the flesh had been exposed from the melting ice, the two concluded that the creature was authentic. They could hardly believe what they saw.

Heuvelmans described it this way in the Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium:

The specimen at first looks like a man, or, if you prefer, an adult human being of the male sex, of rather normal height (six feet) and proportions but excessively hairy. It is entirely covered with very dark brown hair three to four inches long. Its skin appears waxlike, similar in color to the cadavers of white men not tanned by the sun…. The specimen is lying on its back … the left arm is twisted behind the head with the palm of the hand upward. The arm makes a strange curve, as if it were that of a sawdust doll, but this curvature is due to an open fracture midway between the wrist and the elbow where one can distinguish the broken ulna in a gaping wound. The right arm is twisted and held tightly against the flank, with the hand spread palm down over the right side of the abdomen. Between the right finger and the medius the penis is visible, lying obliquely on the groin. The testicles are vaguely distinguishable at the juncture of the thighs.

Sanderson and Heuvelmans nicknamed the creature Bozo. Later Sanderson would write about it in the May 1969 issue of Argosy:

Bozo’s face is his most startling feature, both to anthropologists and anyone else—and for several reasons. Unfortunately, both eyeballs have been “blown out” of their sockets. One appears to be missing, but the other seems (to some, at least) to be just visible under the ice. This gives Bozo a gruesome appearance, which is enhanced by a considerable amount of blood diffused from the sockets through the ice. The most arresting feature of the face is the nose. This is large but only fairly wide, and is distinctly “pugged,” rather like that of a Pekinese dog—but not like that of a gorilla, which actually doesn’t have a nose, per se. The nostrils are large, circular and point straight forward, which is very odd. The mouth is only fairly wide and there is no eversion of the lips; in fact, the average person would say he had no lips at all. His “muzzle” is no more bulging, prominent, or pushed forward than is our own; not at all prognathous like that of a chimp. One side of the mouth is slightly agape and two small teeth can be seen. These should be the right upper canine and the first premolar. The canine or eye-tooth is very small and in no way exaggerated into a tusk, or similar to that of a gorilla or a chimp. But—to me, at least—the most interesting features of all are some folds and wrinkle lines around the mouth just below the cheeks. These are absolutely human, and are like those seen in a heavy-jowled, older white man.

Although Hansen wanted the discovery kept quiet, both Heuvelmans and Sanderson wrote scientific papers on the creature within the year. Heuvelmans named it Homo pongoides. Sanderson, who was a well-known nature personality on TV, mentioned the Ice man on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during Christmas week of 1968. Bozo was out of the bag.

The body then disappeared under mysterious circumstances. U.S. Customs became involved when Frank Hansen exhibited the carcass in Canada. During one of these border crossings Hansen said he had replaced the original with the model made in Hollywood, and Customs let him go back to Minnesota. Had Hansen made up the story of the model to get it through Customs? Was he still showing the real thing? Or did the switch take place when the FBI came around Hansen’s place in the following days? We will never know.

Anthropologist John Napier, then of the Smithsonian, interested Smithsonian president S. Dillion Ripley in trying to relocate the original carcass for official study. When the Smithsonian Institution got involved, Hansen explained that the creature was owned by a millionaire and declined to have it examined further. Later, sometime after February 1969, Ripley wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, asking him to get involved. Hoover was not helpful or interested. He said that as there was no violation of a federal law, the FBI would not officially pursue the matter.

In any case, at some point, the model replaced the original, with various Hollywood makeup artists claiming to have created the Iceman. How do we know that a model replaced the original body? Thanks to photographs of the traveling exhibit that Mark A. Hall and I took, Sanderson and Heuvelmans would later be able to enumerate at least fifteen technical differences between the original and the replacement. They held these in secret in order to differentiate a model from the real thing.

I saw the “exhibit” at the Illinois State Fair in 1969. I wondered at the time whether this was the real thing or the copy. I photographed it extensively and sent copies of those photos to Ivan T. Sanderson and Mark A. Hall. From those photos, Sanderson told me I had seen a copy. Mark A. Hall in Minnesota had a similar experience in 1969, photographing Hansen’s exhibit as it traveled around the upper Midwest, and exchanging those photos with me and Sanderson. Hall would later go on to be director of Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained and become the main chronicler of the Minnesota Iceman mystery.

The Mystery Continues

Some skeptics have shelved the Minnesota Iceman as a joke, a carnival display to fool people. But the Iceman was never a “carnival” exhibit. Carnivals have a certain reputation, personnel, and level of exhibitions. The exhibition milieu in which the Minnesota Iceman was shown was not that of a carnival. Throughout the Midwest, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Minnesota Iceman was shown at stock fairs, state fairs, and shopping malls. Hansen had also shown antique tractors in these shows. He was not a “carnie.” The elitist practice of labeling the Minnesota Iceman a “carnival exhibit” is a way to immediately diminish the possible significance of this evidence even before another word is spoken.

Some of this evidence has never seen the light of day—especially in English. Early in 2000, French researchers Jean Roche and Michel Raynal reminded the cryptozoology world that Bernard Heuvelmans’s detailed color slides of the Minnesota Iceman had never been published. Remarkably, much of Heuvelmans’s work on the Iceman remains outside of an English-language readership as well. Bernard Heuvelmans and Boris F. Porchnev, in L’Homme de Neanderthal est toujours vivant (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1974), wrote a single-spaced, five-hundred-page technical overview of the Minnesota Iceman that should have been translated into English years ago. It has not.

The Smell of a Mystery

One of the pieces of evidence in support of the reality of the Minnesota Iceman is the smell of rotting flesh that Heuvelmans and Sanderson mentioned in their discussions of the Iceman. Here’s how Sanderson noted it: “Let me say, simply, that one look was actually enough to convince us that this was—from our point of view, at least—‘the genuine article.’ This was no phony Chinese trick, or ‘art’ work. If nothing else confirmed this, the appalling stench of rotting flesh exuding from a point in the insulation of the coffin would have been enough.” Debunkers have said this is an old “carnie” illusion, wherein one puts a piece of old meat underneath the exhibit, discouraging people from staying long, so that more people can get in. But it’s not such a simple matter with the Minnesota Iceman.

The entire putrefaction episode is well summarized in Hall’s book Living Fossils: “In the course of the inspection Heuvelmans touched a hot lamp to the top pane of glass, causing cracks in it. The result was the smell of putrefaction came through the cracks.” The smell was the result of an accident during Bernard Heuvelmans’s close-quarters examination, not the result of something that Frank Hansen could ever have foreseen.

When I saw the model in exhibition in 1969, there was no smell manufactured to distract or fool people. The Minnesota Ice-man was exhibited in a glass coffin, as was the original, with no smell coming from the exhibit. If this was a faked model that was supposed to reek with reality, more than ever a manufactured smell would have been called for in such a showing.

What Is the Minnesota Iceman?

Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans disagreed over the exact nature of the Iceman. Heuvelmans’s scientific paper of his description of this new form of living Nean dertal, which he named Homo pongoides (i.e., “apelike man”), was published in February 1969, in the Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium. Few anthropologists today have read it, of course.

“For the first time in history,” wrote zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, the Father of Cryptozoology, “afresh corpse of Neanderthal-like man has been found. It means that this form of Hominid, thought to be extinct since prehistoric times, is still living today. The long search for rumored live ‘ape-men’ or ‘missing links’ has at last been successful. This was not accomplished by expeditions to faraway places and at great expense, but by the accidental discovery, in this country, of a corpse preserved in ice…. This specimen is a contemporary representative of an unknown form of Hominid, most probably a relic of the Neanderthal type. The belief, based on strong testimonial evidence, that small, scattered populations of Neanderthals survive has been held for years by some scientists, mostly Russian and Mongolian.”

In Sanderson’s 1969 paper for the Italian scientific journal Genus, he wrote that the Minnesota Iceman “most certainly should not be assigned to the Neanderthals race or complex.”

Several notable Heuvelmans followers disagree with Sander-son, of course. One is the recently murdered Jordi Magraner, a French-Spanish zoologist who did fieldwork in north Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1990s in search of the local wildman, the Barmanu. He collected more than fifty firsthand sighting accounts, and all eyewitnesses recognized the reconstruction of Heuvelmans’s Homo pongoides. They picked out Homo pongoides as their match to Barmanu from Magraner’s ID kit of drawings of apes, fossil men, aboriginals, monkeys, and the Minnesota Iceman. Magraner agreed this may be a Neandertal. Of course, this only proves the Barmanu looks like Homo pongoides, not that it is a Neandertal.

Helmut Loofs-Wissowa, an anthropologist at Australian National University, also thinks Heuvelmans was correct. He too points to the Neandertals, represented by the Minnesota Iceman, as the source of relict populations of wildmen he has studied in Vietnam. Loofs-Wissowa’s creative work links the semi-erect penis of Homo pongoides with what he sees as Paleolithic cave art and other evidence he connects to Neandertals. His scholarly considerations are worthy of a close reading by all interested in this question.

Mark A. Hall, after being close to the investigation for the last quarter century, is not bothered by the assignment of Homo pongoides to the Asian examples that these scholars have focused on. He merely thinks they have the wrong fossil ancestor linked to the accidental American, the Minnesota Iceman. Hall considers the more proper prehistoric candidate to be Homo erectus.

The Iceman appears to be an accidental, in other words, not of local origin. Heuvelmans theorized the Iceman was a Neandertal who had been murdered in Vietnam during the war and smuggled into the United States in a “body bag.” Its erectus-like features, however, match quite well some of the reports coming out of Central Asia, within and just north of Pakistan. Hall questions the Iceman’s supposed Vietnamese origin and alleged Neandertal affinity and today feels the original Minnesota Iceman was of south-central Asian Homo erectus origin, perhaps even a Barmanu.

Or Was It a Bigfoot?

We should also consider the possibility that the Minnesota Iceman was an example of the Eastern subspecies of Bigfoot.

Jean Roche, a French cryptozoologist and the author of Sauvage et velus: Yéti, Sasquash, Almasty, Barmanou, Bigfoot, tends to believe some of what Frank Hansen said about the origins of the Minnesota Ice-man—that he had shot the creature during the 1960 deer-hunting season while he was staying in a small resort on the shores of the Whiteface Reservoir, at Aurora, Minnesota. He was hunting with Lieutenants Roy Aafedt and Dave Allison, and Major Lou Szrot, when the Iceman was killed.

Hansen reported that the Bigfoot he killed engaged in predatory behavior. As Roche points out in his 2002 theory, that was not known at the time of the peak Iceman media attention (1967-70), but it is well-known now, including the extensive records of these beasts in the Great Lakes area (e.g., Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota) where Hansen said he killed the Iceman.

But clearly, Roche is careful, and he writes me, “Hansen has told several other stories about the case. But I believe he lied just in order to protect himself.”

We may never know what became of the Minnesota Iceman. Until one of these mystery primates is discovered, we will not understand the true role the Iceman should play in the history of hairy-hominoids studies. But for now, we must accept that the enigma of the Minnesota Iceman remains as one of the most hotly debated episodes in hominology. And, indeed, it may belong in the classic Bigfoot file, after all.

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10 On the Trail in the Midwest

I grew up in Illinois and did many field investigations there in the 1960s and early 1970s. During this time, I heard what people claimed was a “Bigfoot” cry and I discovered some “Bigfoot” footprints. But I have never seen a Bigfoot—not in my four decades of searching. I’ve put the word Bigfoot in quotes with reference to my experiences, as Illinois gives us a good example of the differences between the classic Bigfoot of the Northwest, the shorter, more aggressive Eastern Bigfoot, and the much more apelike Southern Bigfoot, which is sometimes seen on the fringes of the Midwest and which I will discuss in detail in the next chapter.

One highlight of my field research came early on for me—the finding of decidedly anthropoid prints not far from where I lived. In the spring of 1962, I, along with my brothers Bill and Jerry, came upon apelike foot tracks in a dry creek bed (a side branch of Stevens Creek) near Decatur, in south-central Illinois. The best print from the series was about ten inches long, with a clearly visible, large opposed toe, the hallux, sticking out to the right of a left-foot impression. The dipping creek bed did not allow much movement on the part of this apparently upright primate, but about thirteen inches in front of one print was another partial footprint. The complete track is very much like those found throughout the South.

During this time I was also interviewing many local residents about the Bigfoot-like creatures they were seeing. For instance, I spoke to Steve Collins and Bob Earle, who had an encounter with a grayish creature in 1962. They saw it in Stevens Creek, just off of East Williams Street Road, Decatur. The monster stood upright in water, glaring at them. Its strange features, humanlike and animal-like at the same time, told them this was no bear. The beast then disappeared into the woods. Later, the witnesses told me it was “like no other animal” they had ever seen.

On September 22, 1965, the local newspaper, the Decatur Review, carried a sighting report, from four young people who were parked in a car at a “lovers’ lane” area outside Decatur called Montezuma Hills, near Stevens Creek. They were sitting in the car when a massive, black, manlike shape came toward their vehicle. They rushed off in a panic, but after dropping off their dates at home, the two young men returned to the area for another look. As they searched around the same parking spot, they suddenly saw the monster again. It began to walk up to their car as though it was curious. The youths were too scared to get out, but even with the windows closed, they could smell the monster’s terrible odor. They immediately left to get the police, and several officers made a thorough, but fruitless, search of the woods. The police on the scene said they had no idea what the young people had witnessed, but they were obviously frightened by whatever it had been.

Into the Bottomlands

While at Southern Illinois University, I dug up folklore and old news articles and also interviewed witnesses—old and new—of hairy-creature encounters. One series of sightings I looked into involved the round-headed Chittyville monster. In late July and August 1968, residents of Williamson County began noticing dogs barking loudly and “carrying on” at night. Then on August 11, 1968, at 8:30 P.M., Tim Bullock, twenty-two, of West Frankfort, and his girlfriend, Barbara Smith, seventeen, of Carterville, sighted a “creature” while riding northeast of Chittyville, near a wooded, bottom-lands swamp, just three miles from the Big Muddy River. Bullock reported the creature threw dirt at them through the window. Smith saw it and started screaming. She described it as “huge”—about ten feet tall, with a head as large as a steering wheel. It appeared to be black, with a round, “hairy” face. They left the area and reported the incident to police. Bullock returned the next day and found a depression in the grass, as if a large animal had rested or slept there. A week later, the creature was seen again near Route 148, also near the Big Muddy River.

Farmer City Monster

Then in 1970, I looked into a new series of monster sightings. It all started in Marion County, where twenty-four hogs disappeared during the last three weeks of May 1970. In the three preceding months, there had been forty-four “hognappings” in the Salem-area farms. In the central part of the state near Farmer City, three sheep turned up dead in the early spring. Officials assumed it was all the work of “wild dogs”—until July 9, anyway. On that date Don Ennis, Beecher Lamb, Larry Faircloth, and Bob Hardwick, all eighteen years of age, decided to camp out on a wild, ten-acre, buffalo-grass-covered piece of land a mile south of Farmer City near Salt Creek. Their campsite, which I discovered was often used as a lovers’ lane, was isolated. Before the night was over, they would realize just how isolated.

About 10:30 P.M., as they sat around the campfire, they heard something moving in the tall grass. When “it” moved between them and their tent, Lamb decided to turn his car lights on. The thing, with widely separated eyes gleaming at them, was squatting by the tent. It then ran off—on two legs. The young men left in such a hurry that Ennis, who had one foot in a cast because of a broken ankle, left his crutches behind.

Soon word about the Farmer City Monster spread. On Friday, July 10, more than ten persons said they had seen a pair of glowing eyes near the site of the first sighting. And on the twelfth and fourteenth, at least fifteen persons swore they had seen a furry creature in the same area. Witnesses I interviewed all said that it seemed to be attracted by the sound of loud radio music and by the light of campfires.

Police Officer Robert Hayslip of Farmer City decided to check out the stories. When he went out to the campsite/lovers’ lane area early in the morning of July 15, between two and three o ’clock in the morning, he heard something running through the grass. Soon after the sighting, he told me, “Out of the corner of my eye I could see these two extremely bright eyes, just like it was standing there watching me.” But as he turned toward it, it disappeared.

Hayslip returned to the site about 6 A.M. He found that the heavy steel grommets in a tent that had been intact at 3 A.M. now were ripped out. A quilt lying nearby was torn to shreds. The Farmer City police chief, who had earlier expressed the curious view that the so-called monster was nothing more than a Shetland pony (evidently one of the bipedal variety), now decided to lock the gate that led to the ten-acre area.

The creature apparently moved on. Or at least the witnesses to it could no longer get to the area where it was being seen, and the Farmer City flap ended.

Then during the first week of August, Vicki Otto contacted me to let me know that she had sighted something near Ireland Grove Road three miles southeast of Bloomington. She figured everyone would think her crazy, so she wrote me a letter about it. She said she saw a pair of eyes reflecting her automobile headlights as she approached what she at first thought was a dog. Then, she told me, “I saw this ape running in the ditch. The thing I saw was the size of a baboon.”

Next, on August 16, 1970, at around 9:30 P.M., Dan Lindsey and Mike Anderson encountered a similar Bigfoot creature while driving on Route 136 approaching the Kickapoo Creek Bridge north of Waynesville. “My first thought was a tall man or maybe a bear or a gorilla,” Anderson said. The thing stood six feet five inches tall, was all brown, and had stooped shoulders. Walking on two legs and illuminated by the car lights, it more or less trotted across to the west side and along the creek’s edge. And then it was gone.

Flap of 1972

During the summer of 1972, even though far more dramatic events were going on just across the border in Louisiana, Missouri, where a smelly, red-eyed creature dubbed Momo was being reported (see chapter 9), a “monster” was seen in Illinois.

The Peoria Journal-Star for July 26 told of Randy Emert, eighteen, who reported seeing a “monster” two different times over the previous two months. Emert said the thing resembled Momo in most particulars, although its height was between eight and twelve feet and it was “kind of white and moved quick.” It also had a rancid odor and seemed to scare the animals living in the woods near Cole Hollow Road. Said Emert, “It lets out a long screech—like an old steam-engine whistle, only more human.”

Emert’s friends had also seen either the creature or its footprints. “I’m kind of a spokesman for the group,” he said. “The only one who has guts, I guess.” Ann Kammerer of Peoria corroborated Emert’s story, stating that all of her children, friends of Emert’s, had seen the thing. “It sounds kind of weird,” she admitted. “At first I didn’t believe it, but then my daughter-in-law saw it.”

According to Emert, an old, abandoned house in the woods had large footprints all around it and a hole dug under the basement. Emert thought this might be where the creature was staying. Interestingly enough, Edgar Harrison, the chief witness in the Momo affair, believed the creature might temporarily be residing in an abandoned building.

On July 25 a Pekin resident reported seeing “something big” swimming in the Illinois River, which also flows through Peoria. On the night of the twenty-seventh “two reliable citizens” told police they had seen a ten-foot something that “looked like a cross between an ape and a caveman.” According to a UPI dispatch, it had “a face with long, gray, U-shaped ears, a red mouth with sharp teeth, [and] thumbs with long second joints.” It smelled, said a witness, like a “musky wet-down dog.” The East Peoria Police Department said it had received more than two hundred calls about the creature.

Then Leroy Summers of Cairo saw a ten-foot, white, hairy creature standing erect near the Ohio River levee during the evening hours of July 25, 1972. The Cairo police found nothing when they came to investigate, and Police Commissioner James Dale warned that henceforth anyone making a monster report would have his breath tested for alcohol.

Enfield Horror

The following year, when creatures descended upon White County in southeastern Illinois and I received some national publicity for my search there, Sheriff Roy Poshard Jr. took an even sterner stance: he threatened to arrest the key witness.

Whatever it was that Henry McDaniel of Enfield saw, it was not a classic Bigfoot. Nonetheless, an undoubted apelike creature was observed during the resulting “monster scare.”

McDaniel claimed that late in the evening of April 25, 1973, he heard something scratching on his door. Upon opening the door, he did a double take, for the “something” looked as if it had stepped out of a nightmare.

“It had three legs on it,” he said, “a short body, two little short arms coming out of its breast area, and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half to five feet tall and was grayish colored. It was trying to get into the house.”

McDaniel, in no mood to entertain the visitor, grabbed a pistol and opened fire.

“When I fired that first shot,” he said, “I know I hit it.”

The creature hissed like a wildcat and bounded away, covering seventy-five feet in three jumps, and disappeared into the brush along a railroad embankment that runs near the McDaniel home.

I also interviewed ten-year-old Greg Garrett, who lived just behind McDaniel. Garrett had been playing in his backyard half an hour before McDaniel’s encounter, when the creature approached him and stepped on his feet, tearing his tennis shoes to shreds. The boy had run inside, crying hysterically.

On May 6 at 3 A.M., the howling of neighborhood dogs awakened McDaniel. Looking out his front door, he saw the creature again.

“I seen something moving out on the railroad track and there it stood,” he said. “I didn’t shoot at it or anything. It started on down the railroad track. It wasn’t in a hurry or anything.”

The publicity McDaniel’s report received brought hordes of curiosity seekers, newsmen, and serious researchers to Enfield. Among them were two young men whom Deputy Sheriff Jim Clark arrested for hunting violations after they said they had seen and shot at a gray, hairy creature in some underbrush. Two of the men thought they had hit it, but the thing had sped off, running faster than a man. Two of their friends, Roger Tappy and Mike Mogle of Elwood, Indiana, who were not arrested, confirmed the incident of May 8, when I spoke to them.

Another witness I talked with was Rick Rainbow, news director of radio station WWKI, Kokomo, Indiana. On May 6 he and three other people saw a strange creature near an old, abandoned house close to McDaniel’s place. They didn’t get a good look at it because it had its back to them and was running in the shadows, but they described it as apelike, about five and a half feet tall, grayish, and stooped. Rainbow taped the cry it made, a distinctively apelike, short, screeching sound. Rainbow’s companions shot at and missed the creature. Rainbow was shaken by the experience and called me back to discuss the reality of such creatures, as he could hardly believe what he had seen.

Then on May 12 I heard the creature myself. I was on-site with Richard Crowe, a Chicago investigator and writer on the unknown, searching the area around McDaniel’s home, when we heard a high-pitched screech. We had spent our time interviewing witnesses, measuring and photographing the sighting locations, and just looking around the area. Suddenly, while examining a plowed field for fresh tracks in the late afternoon, we heard the most ungodly, piercing shriek you can imagine. Though startled, we attempted to locate the source of the sound in a wooded section that abutted the field. We looked around, searched through some sheds, but did not see the creature or any signs of it. We felt we were close, but then we also thought we were the ones being seen.

On June 6, a month after the Enfield events, the police in Edwardsville, Illinois, received and checked three reports of a musty-smelling, red-eyed, human-sized creature said to be lurking in the woods on the eastern edge of town. It was said to be more than five and a half feet tall and broad-shouldered, with eyes that apparently were sensitive to light. It made no sound when it walked. The witnesses said the thing chased them, and one man told police the creature had ripped his shirt and clawed his chest. All told, three sightings occurred, two on June 4 and one on June 8, all in the wooded area near Mooney, Little Mooney, and Sugar Creeks.

The Big Muddy Monster

The rest of the summer months of 1973 were taken up with the events near the Big Muddy River.

The creature—which would quickly be called the Big Muddy Monster after the nearby river—first appeared shortly after midnight on June 25, 1973, and was seen by Randy Needham and Judy Johnson, who were parked on a boat ramp to the Big Muddy River near Murphysboro, a town in southwestern Illinois. The couple was startled by a cry “about three times as loud as a bobcat, only deeper,” emanating from the nearby woods. When they looked up, they saw a huge biped lumbering toward them, still shrieking but now in altering tones. It was not a human sound.

Randy and Judy agreed the thing was about seven feet tall, white, its short body hair matted with river mud. They were not interested in examining it at close range, and by the time it had approached within twenty feet of them, they were bound for the Murphysboro police station. Officers Meryl Lindsey and Jimmie Nash checked the area and found “impressions in the mud approximately ten to twelve inches long and approximately three inches wide,” according to the report they filed later.

Needham later described the impressions as “something like a man with a shoe on would make—only the thing wasn’twearing shoes.” He suggested that toe prints might not have registered in the mud.

At 2 A.M., Nash, Lindsey, Needham, and Deputy Sheriff Bob Scott returned to the scene. This time they discovered fresh tracks, similar in general appearance to those they had seen an hour earlier, but deeper and smaller. The police report noted an especially strange detail: “The prints in the mud were very irratic [sic] in that no two were the same distance apart and some were five to six feet apart. Also prints were found very close together.”

Officer Lindsey left to get a camera to take pictures of the prints, and while he was gone, the other three followed the tracks. While they were bending over to examine some of them, there came “the most incredible shriek I’ve ever heard,” Nash recalled. Apparently the creature was hidden in the trees less than a hundred yards away, but the trio didn’t stick around to find out. They beat a hasty retreat to the squad car. In the hours that followed, the officers scoured the area in pursuit of an elusive splashing sound, but found nothing. When daylight came, things quieted down, but with darkness the creature returned.

The first to see it this time was four-year-old Christian Baril, who told his parents he had seen “a big white ghost in the yard.” They didn’t believe him, of course, but ten minutes later, when Randy Creath and Cheryl Ray saw something very much like that in a neighboring yard, parents and police reconsidered the youngster’s words.

About 10:30 P.M. Creath and Ray were sitting on the back porch of the Ray home when they heard something moving in the trees just beyond the lawn. They saw the creature standing in an opening in the trees, quietly watching them through glowing pink eyes. Cheryl Ray insisted, during an interview with my associate and friend Jerome Clark, that the eyes were glowing, not reflecting, since there was no nearby light source that could have caused the effect.

The creature was either the same one the other young couple had seen the night before or similar to it. It was white and dirty, weighed close to 350 pounds, and stood seven feet tall. It had a large, round head. Ray thought its arms might be “ape-length,” although she wasn’t certain because it was standing in waist-high grass.

Creath went down to get a closer look while Ray went inside to turn on the yard light. The light did not reveal much more of the creature than they had already seen.

Finally the thing ambled off through the trees, making considerable noise. Later, investigators found a trail of crushed weeds and broken brush, as well as imprints in the ground too vague and imper fect to be cast in plaster.

Cheryl Ray’s mother called the police. While waiting for them to arrive, they suddenly began to smell a “real strong odor, like a sewer,” the Ray teen said, but it lasted only a short time.

Soon Officers Nash and Ronald Manwaring pulled up in their car. What happened then is recounted in the official report they shared with me:

Officers inspected the area where the creature was seen and found weeds broken down and somewhat [sic] of a path where something had walked through. Jerry Nellis was notified to bring his dog to the area to see if the dog would track the creature. Upon arrival of Nellis and dog [a German shepherd trained to attack, search buildings, and track] the dog was led to the area where the creature was last seen. The dog began tracking down the hill where the creature was reported to have gone.

As the dog started down the hill, it kept stopping and sniffing at a slime substance on the weeds; the slime appeared periodically as the dog tracked the creature. Nellis put some of the slime between his fingers [and] rubbed it and it left a black coloring on his fingers. Each time the dog found amounts of it, the dog would hesitate.

The creature was tracked down the hill to a pond, around the pond to a wooded area south of the pond where the dog attempted to pull Nellis down a steep embankment. The area where the dog tracked the creature to was too thick and bushy to walk through, so the dog was pulled off the trail and returned to the car. Officers then searched the area with flashlights.

Officer Nash, Nellis, and the dog then proceeded to the area directly south of where the dog was pulled off the tracks. The area was at the end of the first road to the west past Westwood Hills turnoff. The area is approximately one-half mile south of the area of the pond behind 37 Westwood Lane.

Nellis and the dog again began to search the area to see if the dog could again pick up the scent. Nellis and the dog approached the abandoned barn and Nellis called to Officer Nash to come to the area as the dog would not enter the barn. Nellis pushed the dog inside and the dog immediately ran out. Nash and Nellis searched the barn and found nothing inside. Nellis stated that the dog was trained to search buildings and had never backed down from anything. Nellis could find no explanation as to why the dog became scared and would not go inside the barn. Officers continued to search the area and were unable to locate the creature.

The Murphysboro creature was reported twice more in 1973. During an evening July Fourth celebration in a city park near the river, carnival workers said they had seen it watching some Shetland ponies. And on July 7, Mrs. Nedra Green heard a shrill, piercing scream from near the shed on her isolated farm. She did not go out to investigate.

The monster season of 1973 ended on the night of October 16, when four St. Joseph, Illinois, youths—Bill Duncan, Bob Summers, Daryl Mowry, and Craig Flenniken, all high school seniors—encountered a hairy “gorilla-like” creature on a road south of the town. They had stopped their car to investigate what they had thought was a campfire near the bridge on the Salt Fork. One of them lit a match and they all saw the creature, approximately five feet tall, about fifteen feet away. They did not linger to investigate further.

Nevertheless, the Big Muddy Monster again made brief return appearances in July 1974 and July 1975. Officials didn’t know what to make of the Big Muddy Monster. “A lot of things in life are unexplained,” concluded Police Chief Toby Berger, “and this is another one. We don’t know what the creature is. But we do believe what these people saw was real…. These are good, honest people. They are seeing something. And who would walk through sewage tanks for a joke?”

I cut my teeth on those hominological investigations, and they form a body of cases that give me insights into the diversity of the Eastern Bigfoot. The variety of Southern “Bigfoot” would prove to be another matter entirely, one that would hark back to one of my earliest discoveries, that apelike track I had found near Stevens Creek. Deep down in Dixie, an entirely different kind of ape appears to live in the palmettos.

Part 3

Reflections

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16 Three Big Questions

Several major questions arise when considering the reality of Bigfoot, but one stands out above all the rest. People ask me this question all the time. It’s the same question that all Bigfoot researchers face at one time or another.

First Question

If Bigfoot is real, why hasn’t anyone found a dead Bigfoot?

Anthropologist Grover Krantz had a great rejoinder to that troubling question: “Well, if bears are real, then why don’t we find their bones? I’ve talked to hunters, many game guides, conservation people, ecology students, and asked them how many remains of dead bears have you found that died a natural death? Over twenty years of inquiry my grand total of naturally dead bear bones found is zero! Now the best population estimate guess we can make is there are at least one hundred bears out there for every one Bigfoot, and we haven’t found the first bear yet. We would very much like to find the remains of a naturally dead Sasquatch, but the chance is just simply so remote it’s not even serious to even think about it.”

Though we have no dead Bigfoot to study, we do have a good deal of physical evidence that points directly to the reality of this animal, beginning with its footprints. The number and reasonable variety of Bigfoot tracks are quite compelling. Just think of it: over hundreds of years we have found hundreds of miles of Bigfoot tracks in mud, snow, and sand—all looking very human with five toes straight ahead and showing individual differences. They have been discovered in long series, in small sets, and individually, exactly as we would expect from a large, intelligent primate. To top it off, these tracks have been found in the most out-of-place locations, not where they would immediately be noticed or be available for the six-o’clock news.

Since they were first described for the Canadian Sasquatch, the Bigfoot footprints have been remarkably consistent over the years. Obviously there can be no truth to the news stories that appear every dozen years or so about one individual being responsible for all Bigfoot tracks ever found. To think, for example, that retired Washington State logger Rant Mullens’s “confession” in 1982, in which he claimed to be responsible for the legend of Ape Canyon by carving wooden feet to leave large footprints and was somehow involved with the Bluff Creek 1958 incidents, has any merit, is, well, more unbelievable than Bigfoot.

Bigfoot footprints actually support the case for population and individual animal diversity. People taking casts often go for the best-looking print, but researchers today now collect series that illustrate the animal’s movement and individuality. Furthermore, the footprint, along with the Bigfoot behavior, indicates regional differences. The argument for a distinct geographic subspecies in the East is strong and growing stronger, based upon its routinely more curved footprints and more aggressive behavior. This Eastern Bigfoot, which I have called Marked Hominids and Mark A. Hall has dubbed Taller Hominids, are probably the Windigo of old. (The Napes from the American South and lower Midwest have quite different tracks, with footprints that look like human hands. These are so dissimilar that these cannot be grouped with the classic Bigfoot. Since these Napes are so rare and pose such a distraction to most Bigfoot hunters, I will not concentrate on them here.)

Probably the most significant aspect of Bigfoot footprints, however, has to do with the dermal ridges—or “fingerprints”—that have been discovered on many cast footprints. The late Grover Krantz initially discovered dermals in tracks cast in Washington State in 1982 and published the first paper on Sasquatch dermatoglyphics in 1983, in the journal Cryptozoology. Since 1995, however, Jeff Meldrum, associate professor of anatomy at Idaho State University, and a specialist in primate feet, has taken the lead on this significant issue. When Krantz and Meldrum began noticing dermal ridges, something others had never really looked for in footprints or casts, they both felt that they had found a sure proof that the prints being left were from a real, albeit, unknown, primate. Furthermore, when Meldrum began a massive project to collect and examine old prints, he found, to his astonishment, dermals on them too. When I and others showed Meldrum cast prints from the 1960s, he quickly spotted the telltale dermals, those distinctive loops and skin folds on these casts. How could hoaxers have known to include dermal ridges on their fake feet so long before the experts thought about looking for them?

Then in 1999, a Texas police fingerprint expert, Jimmy Chilcutt, heard Meldrum talking about dermal ridges in a television documentary and called him soon afterward. Before long Chilcutt was on his way to Idaho to look over Meldrum’s casts. With his knowledge Chilcutt was convinced he could debunk Bigfoot, once and for all. “If there is a Sasquatch,” he told a reporter for the Houston Chronicle in February 2000, “only a handful of people in the world know the difference between a primate and a human print.”

When the skeptical Chilcutt began studying the Meldrum collection, he examined a cast Meldrum had shown on TV and quickly determined it to be a fake (although the prints may have been contaminated by the routine practice of “fixing up” tracks for casting). On this cast, Chilcutt determined that the toe prints were actually human fingerprints. Meldrum then allowed Chilcutt the freedom to authenticate or dispute the rest of his collection of about one hundred castings of alleged Bigfoot footprints.

“What I actually found surprised even me,” Chilcutt told the Chronicle. He had discovered the print ridges on the bottoms of five castings—which were taken at different times and locations—flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which exist from side to side.

“No way do human footprints do that—never, ever. The skeptic in me had to believe that [all of the prints were from] the same species of animal,” Chilcutt said. “I believe that this is an animal in the Pacific Northwest that we have never documented.”

Besides footprints, other types of physical data have come our way. Hair and fecal samples have been collected since the Pacific Northwest Expedition at the very beginning of the modern Bigfoot era. But the analysis of hair samples has surprised and frustrated scientists trying to figure out what animals these come from. George Agogino, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, was given the task by millionaire Tom Slick, of either analyzing or finding other experts to analyze the hair and fecal samples from those early excursions in California and British Columbia. John Green has written that some hair and fecal matter from those early 1960s efforts have “never been positively identified.” In 1991, when I interviewed Agogino, he confirmed that some of the stool samples were found to contain “parasites we could not identify.” This is significant, as parasites are keyed to their hosts, and if you have parasites that are unknown, then the animal from which it came is likely to be unknown as well. The problem with the results and findings from the Slick years, of course, is that the material has disappeared, most probably destroyed or archived in a Slick institute warehouse. As in the scene from the end of The Raiders of the Lost Ark, Slick’s wish to stay out of the limelight caused most of his expedition’s findings to be lost forever.

The situation in the ensuing years has not improved. During the late 1990s, thanks to Court TV, the O. J. Simpson trial, and other forms of criminal publicity, DNA analysis has been regarded as the dramatic final answer needed to settle the question of Bigfoot. Find a hair sample with a root attached, and shazzam, a DNA analysis can be done. But applying the technique to Bigfoot identification is not enough. A “reference sample” must be available for a matching analysis, and needless to say, there is no “type Bigfoot” available, by which to compare samples. It’s a kind of catch-22. You can’t identify it as belonging to Bigfoot unless you have identified it as belonging to a Bigfoot in the first place.

Late in 1995, Paul Fuerst, a molecular geneticist at Ohio State University, and a graduate student, Jamie Austin, attempted to analyze some hairs said to be from a Bigfoot. They employed a DNA testing procedure being developed by the FBI for analysis of hair strands that lack the roots normally needed for identification. Walla Walla, Washington, resident Wes Sumerlin, former game warden Bill Laughery, and veteran Bigfoot hunter Paul Freeman had found the hairs in two clumps in the Blue Mountains of southeastern Washington State in August 1995. In November of that year, the Ohio scientists told the Associated Press that they would compare the hairs to those of humans and chimpanzees and expected to announce their results by the end of the month.

Instead, in March of 1998, the third member of the analytical team, W. Henner Fahrenbach of the Primate Center in Oregon, announced to researchers through email messages sent worldwide (and published as an “Interim Statement” on the BFRO Web site), that the Ohio-Oregon group had decided to withhold submission of their analyses. They found that the hair without roots was not an acceptable enough sample for them to obtain the results they needed to determine the phylogenetic affiliation of the creature. Fahrenbach was not deterred by the setback and called for tissue samples to be obtained. Of course, Fahrenbach’s statements on the inability to obtain firm DNA evidence was hailed by skeptics as yet more “proof” that Bigfoot does not exist. But such a brush-off is narrow-minded. It completely disregards the difficulties in working with material from an unknown species, even if some misidentifications and pranks do not get into the mix.

Second Question

For years, a debate has been raging among amateur and professional Bigfooters, academic hominologists, and cryptozoologists over the question: Is Bigfoot a human or an ape?

When people speak of “apes,” what are they talking about? Of course, the image most people have is of a tailless, hairy creature that reminds them of something between a monkey and a man. More formally, of course, apes are any of the various large, tailless Old World primates, including the bonobo, chimpanzee, gorilla, gibbon, siamang, and orangutan. The “highest” forms of mammals, by human definition obviously, are the primates. Within the order of Primates, the “very highest” primates are the species of animals we call great apes and humans.

Sorting through how one group of “great apes” is organized (by humans, please note again) might give us some insights into where Sasquatch and humans fit into the picture. Let us examine, as an example, the great apes in Africa, the bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Even among these apes, there is more diversity than is often acknowledged. First we have the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee (Pan paniscus), which inhabits the dense rain forests south of the Zaire (or Congo) River as opposed to the populations of common chimpanzees who live north of the river, suggesting that breeding isolation encouraged by that geographical boundary led to the different species.

There are various subspecies or types of common chimpanzee, including these three: the Western African chimp (Pan troglodytes verus), the Central African chimp (Pan troglodytes troglodytes), and the Eastern African chimp (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). These are the routinely classified three subspecies of common chimps, which are recognized based on their genetic similarity and their location in Africa. Additionally, primatologists now recognize a new fourth subspecies, Pan troglodytes vellerosus, from Nigeria, according to the June 2000 Bulletin of the American Society of Primatologists.

That year the society also divided the gorillas, previously considered a single species, into two species and five subspecies. The eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei) includes the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) of the Virunga volcanoes area of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the yet unnamed, but distinct, population of Uganda’s Bwindi Forest, and the eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri). Western Africa is home to at least two additional subspecies, the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and the Cross River gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli). However, some recent attempts at further classification have considered the mountain and eastern gorillas as separate species.

Obviously, the changes in primatology are impacting the way people look at apes, Bigfoot, and humans. When the great primatologist John Napier wrote his book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, in 1972, his view of where the great apes and humans grouped, in relationship to Bigfoot, reflected the analyses of his times. In 1985, Napier and his colleague wife would author The Natural History of the Primates, which was used in graduate primatology and anthropology courses for years. In that book, John and Prue Napier had an extremely simple view of where humans and the great apes were to be located: apes and men were not really closely related.

DNA findings and other new studies have caused a shift in anthropology. A remarkable realization has occurred within primatology since Napier’s day, to wit that humans are closer to some forms of great apes than those apes are to each other. Among primatologists, this was expressed by noting that the family Hominidae contained the subfamily Ponginae and subfamily Homininae, according to Colin Groves in 1997. The evolving classification system finally led to a radical reorganization of the lesser and greater apes by Wayne State University zoologist Dr. Morris Goodman in 1999. This reorganization acknowledges the extremely close relationship between humans and apes—essentially that humans are nothing more than hairless chimpanzees. This idea has been popularized in such books as The Naked Ape and The Third Chimpanzee.

The amorphous “ape versus human” distinction was brought into sharp focus with a highly ballyhooed, recent fossil find. In July 2002, French scientist Michel Brunet proclaimed that his team had found man’s oldest ancestor, a 7-million-year-old fossil skull he christened Sahelanthropus tchadensis. But the media storm that began with the July publication in Nature of this fossil’s formal description was still in full force when Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris (one of the discoverers of Orrorin tugenensis, “Millennium Man”) stepped forward. She declared, in no uncertain terms, to the Observer’s Paris correspondent, “This is the skull of a female gorilla.” Her colleague Michael Pickford described the creature’s distinctive canines as being typical “of a large female monkey.”

An angry Brunet quickly held a news conference at his University of Poitiers. Waving a copy of Nature, with the skull of Sahelanthropus on its cover, he exclaimed, “Here you see the baptismal certificate of this hominid. If one or two people somewhere disagree with me, that is their problem. But one cannot confuse this with a gorilla.”

If knowledgeable scientists cannot even agree on a fossil they hold in their hands, how could we possibly expect a consensus on a creature such as Bigfoot?

Yet an answer lies close at hand. The explorer Roy Chapman Andrews once wrote, “Man is an ape with possibilities.” Zoologist Morris Goodman more recently noted, “Genetically, humans are only slighted remodeled apes.” We are apes, in other words. It is a simple statement that carries with it all the baggage of soul, intelligence, and religion. But, of course, there is nothing to say that we are not apes who have merely created a world of differences between the chimpanzees and ourselves. After all, we have.

So how does Bigfoot fit into the mix? The discovery may be taken in more calmly than we think.

“If it turns out to be an ape,” Jeff Meldrum told Outside in 2002, “it’s not going to overturn our ideas about human evolution or even primate evolution. In fact, it’ll confirm what some of us suspect, which is that descendants of Mioceneperiod apes populate every northern continent.”

They are apes, as surely as we are. Whether Bigfoot ultimately turns out to be more of a hominid (humanlike) than a hominoid (apemanlike) being remains to be seen, based upon a closer physical examination of the animal.

Third Question

And therein lies the dilemma that forms the third most important question regarding Bigfoot: Should we shoot one if given the opportunity?

Shooting an ape is easier to think about than plugging a human with a .22. Should the Bigfoot hunters kill one to provide the physical evidence to prove it exists? That question is the source of much controversy within the ranks of Bigfooters. While the gun-toting Grover Krantz and John Green have argued yes, the peaceful Russian Dmitri Bayanov and George Haas have said absolutely not. To kill or not to kill?

If the prey is determined to be an “ape”—which most read as “nonhuman animal”—then it would not be murder, so the argument goes, to kill it and throw it at the feet of science. Or to make a million dollars off it.

But things are no longer as simple as they were in the 1800s, or even the 1950s. Hunting for the mountain gorilla, the giant panda, and many other animals that had yet to be discovered meant going out and shooting them. Today’s technology makes such arguments a thing of the past, however. In the twenty-first century, Bigfoot will hopefully be captured, studied, given some rights, and released. Biological sampling, videotaping, and electronic tracking will accomplish what killing and mounting the animals once did.

We all live a life of contradictions. I am firmly convinced that Bigfoot is an ape, but I also believe there is absolutely no justification in hunting it to kill it, as there would have been one hundred years ago, to prove it exists. Bigfoot is a cousin ape, more familiar to us than the chimps perhaps, but the hairy ape to our naked ape. What it means is that through convergence evolution, another ape has changed, like us, into an upright being, but one that has retained its hairy origins.

Seeking Bigfoot is extremely important, and finding them will change us all forever, for we shall never look at humans in the same way again. What Bigfoot “is” probably does not matter for its future. In the end, how we understand Bigfoot and what it has become to us will determine much about how we think of ourselves. We stand at the edge of the forest together. What we discover about each other may surprise us both.

APPENDIX A

Twenty Best Places to See Bigfoot

You’ll have a better chance of seeing a Bigfoot or finding a footprint in one of the following “hot spots” than anywhere else in North America. The sightings are so routine near some communities that many recognize their good fortune through road signs, memorials, statues, museums, and gift shops.

1. Bluff Creek, California Bluff Creek is the mecca of the Bigfoot field, the birthplace of the first “Bigfoot” track finds and the site of the filming of the Patterson-Gimlin footage, made famous by the familiar Frame 352 of a female Bigfoot. Visit the nearby Bigfoot wing of the Willow Creek-China Flats Museum in Willow Creek (take 299 east from 101 at Arcata). It houses Bob Titmus’s entire Bigfoot cast collection and other great Bigfoot exhibits. A twenty-three-foot-tall Bigfoot statue by Gordon Burns stands outside the museum, the eight-foot-tall, life-size Bigfoot sculpture by Jim McClarin is nearby, with yet another statue at The Legends of Bigfoot Museum at Garberville, also in Humboldt County. Willow Creek’s annual Bigfoot Daze celebration occurs on the Labor Day weekend and features speakers and family activities.

2. Fouke, Arkansas The real-life encounters with the Fouke Monster and the filming of the famed Boggy Creek movies occurred near this village. Shop for Bigfoot souvenirs at the local Monster Mart. An annual Boggy Creek Festival is held every April, complete with books to buy, casts to view, and Bigfooters to meet.

3. Ape Canyon-Ape Caves-Mt. St. Helens-Skamania County, Washington Here is where the “apes” attacked in 1924 and where their relatives continue to be seen today. Signage memorializes the event in the Ape Caves area. The county serves as a gateway into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, site of the Skookum cast find. Due to a high level of activity, Skamania is the only county in the nation where it is against the law to kill a Bigfoot. The annual Carson Bigfoot Daze is usually held in August with Bigfoot lectures, statues, exhibits, and family fun. To the east, along the Spirit Lake Highway, in Kid Valley, there’s a Bigfoot statue near a tourist shop. Drive farther north, and find a Bigfoot Crossing sign on the Mt. Baker Highway.

4. Oregon Caves National Monument, Grants Pass, Oregon Grants Pass has a rich history of Bigfoot encounters. A local service group, the Oregon Cavemen, was established in 1922 and then erected a giant figure of a prehistoric “caveman” at the Interstate 5 exit to Grants Pass. Since the Bigfoot sighting in 2000 at Oregon Caves, local shops have been selling Bigfoot memorabilia. Hillsboro, Oregon, holds an annual International Bigfoot Society conference.

5. Mt. Shasta-Trinity Alps, California The Trinity Alps are also steeped in Native and modern Bigfoot lore. The Sisson Museum, southwest of Mount Shasta city, has Bigfoot exhibits and souvenirs.

6. Harrison River Area, Plus Klemetu and the Nearby Islands off British Columbia Sasquatch habitats exist throughout British Columbia. You can also attend the annual International Sasquatch Symposium in Vancouver or go visit the Sasquatch (Dzunukwa) totem poles at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. Campgrounds named Bigfoot and Sasquatch often have statues of the hairy primates at their entrance, especially in the Harrison Hot Springs area.

7. Pike National Forest, Colorado The sightings in the Pike National Forest are a local secret. One authentic road sign in the park warns motorists of frequent Bigfoot crossings.

8. Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon Mt. Hood has been an active Bigfoot area since the 1800s. The shops in nearby The Dalles, Oregon, usually have Bigfoot souvenirs because this town was formerly the location of Peter Byrne’s now defunct Bigfoot Research Center.

9. Payette National Forest, Idaho Payette National Forest is one of the hidden secrets of the Bigfoot world; much more is going on in Idaho than most people realize. Serious researchers only are allowed access to Jeff Meldrum’s collection of over one hundred Bigfoot casts at Idaho State University.

10. Jackson County, Murphysboro, Illinois The home of the Big Muddy Monster is a quiet town. Low-key local acknowledgments like T-shirts are hard to find but surface occasionally.

11. Tuscarawas-Coshocton Counties, Ohio On the edge of Appalachia, this is the territory of the Ohio Grassman. An annual Bigfoot conference takes place in Newcomers-town, where casts, books, T-shirts, and more are available.

12. St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana This is the stomping ground of the Honey Island Swamp Monster. Boat tour guides are aware of the monster’s history. An exhibit at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans has a life-size representation of the monster.

13. Everglades-Big Cypress Swamp, Florida Active pockets of Skunk Ape encounters abound throughout the swampy environments. Shops along Alligator Alley carry artifacts from fake ape heads to T-shirts acknowledging the creatures.

14. Marion County, Texas Here lies Caddo Lake, a spooky spot linked to the Boggy Creek activities. An annual Bigfoot conference at Jefferson focuses on the Texas Bigfoot.

15. Pike County, Missouri This is the home of Momo, so active in the 1970s and still seen around today. Talks at the local Louisiana, Missouri, library occasionally discuss Momo’s place in Bigfoot history.

16. Allegheny-Fayette Counties, Pennsylvania Still haunted by the hairy relatives of Jan Clement’s Kong, this region is abuzz with Bigfoot stories. An annual East Coast Bigfoot Researchers Conference takes place in Jeannette.

17. Lake Louise-Jasper, Alberta Reports of the hairy giant of the woods date back to the 1800s in Lake Louise-Jasper. New reports come in yearly. The Natural History Museum, Clock Tower Village, in Banff, has a life-size exhibit of a Sasquatch.

18. Antelope Valley, California Antelope Valley sees a lot of unusual Bigfoot activity but does not get much publicity, even though it is so close to Los Angeles. South of the city, in Orange County, there is a little Bigfoot museum (with Gigantopithecus skull replica, Bigfoot casts, Bigfoot books) at Knott’s Berry Farm, near their Bigfoot Rapids water-rafting ride.

19. St. Clair-Sanilac-Huron-Tuscola-Saginaw Counties of Michigan The “thumb” of Michigan has seen decades of Bigfoot encounters, with possible migrations into the Sister Lakes and Monroe areas. Recent activity hints that this could be a good location for searches. The Michigan Magazine Museum on M33 between Fairview and Comins has an exhibit of a Bigfoot track cast taken near there.

20. Northern Maine Ninety-five percent of the state is covered in trees, and indications are that the down east side of the Appalachian Mountains, from Aroostook to Kennebec Counties, still serves as a route of activity for what the Micmacs called the Gugwes. In Sidney, look up Richard Brown to see his Bigfoot track casts. Jay Carr’s Outdoor Museum, all the way at the very end of Interstate 95, in Houlton, Maine, has a Bigfoot statue outdoors.

APPENDIX B

Scientific-Quality Replica Bigfoot Track Casts

For those interested in studying Bigfoot further, obtaining well-duplicated footprint casts is an important research and educational step. As early as 1959, Bob Titmus shared copies of his casts. In the 1960s, Roger Patterson sent a copy of a Bigfoot cast as part of the membership to his field research organization. In the 1990s, the International Society of Cryptozoology, a now-defunct scientific body, sold copies of the 1982 Grays Harbor casts to support their mission.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Grover Krantz began molding and recasting, with the assistance of anthropology graduate students, several certified Sasquatch footcasts in the same fashion he had employed to reproduce high-quality skulls of fossil hominids. Krantz wished to share with other Bigfooters and anthropologists this evidence of a unique new primate in America. Krantz passed away in 2002, but various companies and individuals are carrying on his legacy by distributing these artifacts.

Contact the following sources for more information on their products:

GLEN EVANS (private collector)

ADDRESS: 1612 Via Linda

Fullerton, California 92833-1574

E-MAIL: glenevans@earthlink.net

Bossburg, Washington, “Cripple Foot” Footprint Casts with Painted Bone Structure (both feet—right (deformed): 16.5 inches; left: 18 inches), 1969. Full-color, illustrated, foam-core-mounted informational poster included.

Bluff Creek, California, Footprint Cast (17 inches), 1964. Full-color, illustrated, foam-core-mounted informational poster included.

Blue Creek Mountain, Washington, Juvenile “Dermal Ridges” Footprint Cast (14.5 inches), 1967. Full-color, illustrated, foam-core-mounted informational poster included.

Blue Creek Mountain, Washington, Knuckles÷Thumb÷Thumbnail Cast (10 inches across), late 1980s.

Blue Creek Mountain, Washington, Full Hand Cast (11 inches from third digit to heel of hand, whitewashed by Bob Titmus), late 1980s.

BONE CLONES/KRONEN OSTEO

ADDRESS: 21416 Chase Street #1

Canoga Park, California 91304

E-MAIL: kronen@boneclones.com

Bossburg, Washington, “Cripple Foot” Footprint Casts, 1969, licensed by Dr. Grover Krantz’s estate.

Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus skulls, reconstructed by Dr. Krantz, and also licensed for reproduction by Bone Clones by his estate.

SKULLS UNLIMITED INTERNATIONAL

ADDRESS: 10313 South Sunnylane Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73160

E-MAIL: info@skullsunlimited.com

Grays Harbor, Washington, Footprint Casts ( 38 × 18 cm; WFP-16 Replica Single; WFP-17 Replica Pair), 1982.

Contact expert tracker Zack Clothier (fox@cryptozoology.com) regarding the availability of his copies of various Bigfoot casts from around the country. He can also assist with instructions on the best techniques for locating and obtaining Bigfoot track casts, refined to the specifics of your locale’s fieldwork site.

Copies of or questions about field-obtained Bigfoot casts or other evidence would be appreciated by the author of this book. Contact me at: Loren Coleman, Post Office Box 360, Portland, Maine 04112.

e-mail: bigfoot@lorencoleman.com

On the Matter of Style

The style of this book and the use of capitalization for the undiscovered primates under discussion (e.g., Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch, Abominable Snowman) follows the “manual of style” that has been adopted by the International Society of Cryptozoology’s editor, Richard Greenwell, and the ISC scientific, peer-reviewed journal, Cryptozoology. Greenwell details the proper capitalization of cryptozoological names, before and after discovery, in a footnote in Cryptozoology, volume 5 (1986), page 101. His formalization of this matter is furthermore based on what occurs in systematic zoology, firm ground indeed.

Greenwell is clear in his example:

Native name: okapi.

Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Okapi.

Common name after discovery and acceptance: okapi.

For our extended use, this translates into:

Native name: yet-teh or yeti.

Western name for presumed, covered animal: Yeti.

Common name after discovery and acceptance: yeti.

and

Native name: oh-mah.

Western name for presumed, undiscovered animal: Bigfoot.

Common name after discovery and acceptance: bigfoot. Therefore, as Bigfoot has not technically been “accepted” by systematic zoology as of this date, the capitalized form will be employed in this book.

Bibliography

Alexander, Hartley Burr. “North American.” In Mythology of All Races, ed. L. H. Gray. Vol. 10. New York: Cooper Square, 1964.

Alford, Glenn. “ISU Researcher Coordinates Analysis of Body Imprint That May Belong to Sasquatch.” Press Release, Idaho State University, Office of University and Government Relations, October 23, 2000.

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Index

Aafedt, Roy, 119

Abnaki Indians, 29

Abominable Snowman, 2-3

America’s, 202-04

origin of, 42-44

Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, The, 203

Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (Sanderson), 3, 41, 43, 112, 156, 168-69, 221

Across the Wide Missouri, 18

Adobe Systems, 106

Adventures, 198, 199

Agogino, George, 71, 74, 76, 222, 239

Aines, Don, 163

Ainu people, 203

Alexander, Hartley Burr, 29

Algonquin Indians, 27, 29

Allen, Betty, 69-70, 71, 221

Allen County, Kentucky, 158-59

Allen, John W., 3

Allison, Dave, 119

Altman, Eric, 13, 210

Alton, Illinois, 45

Amazing Stories, 212

Amblin Entertainment, 212

Ameche, Don, 212

American Anthropological Research Foundation, 230

American Journal of Folklore, 30

American Museum of Natural History, 23-24, 156

American National Enterprise (ANE), 102-05

American Yeti Expeditions, 230

Ames, Michael M., 105, 231

Ancient Mysteries, 215

Anclote River, Florida, 159

Anderson, Mike, 140

Anderson, California, 174-76

Anderson Lake Indians, 33

Andrews, Roy Chapman, 2, 244

Animal X, 20, 21, 215

Anomalist, 79

Anthropological Series, 31

Antioch, California, 39

Antioch Ledger, 39, 40

Ape Canyon, Washington, 46-52

apes, 241-44 see also specific species

Apes, The (Reynolds), 38, 166

Arcadia Valley, Kansas, 39

Argosy, 113-14, 221

Arkansas, 36

Arkansas Gazette, 158

Arment, Chad, 40

Armstrong, Joie Ruth, 178, 179

Armstrong, Steve, 106

Atcen (Atshen), 29-30

Athabascan Indians, 32

Audubon Society, 234-35

Austin, Chad, 209

Austin, Jamie, 240

Badlands, 177

Baker, Rick, 101, 135, 206, 213

Bald Mountain, North Carolina, 35

Bambenek, Greg, 20, 21

Barbeau, C. M., 29

Baril, Christian, 145

Barkasy, David, 150, 154, 155

Barmanu, 118, 119

Battle Creek, California, 174-75

Baumann, 180-81

Bayanov, Dmitri, 244

Bay Area Group (BAG), 211, 226-27

BBC Wildlife, 199

Beast and the Vixens, The, 206

Beauties and the Beast, 206

Beck, Fred, 46-51

Beck, R. A., 46, 50

Beelart, Joe, 20

Bella Coola River, British Columbia, 195

Bemis, Mrs. Jess, 66, 69

Benedict, Ruth, 44, 45

Berger, Howard, 99

Berger, Toby, 148

Berry, Alan, 171

Berton, Pierre, 30

Betts, Bob, 228

Bhutan, 43

Big Cypress Swamp, 162

Bigfoot:

adolescent, 31, 195

bad luck associated with, 168-70

best places to see, 246-50

buttocks, imprint of, 16-24

changing image of, 201-15

America’s Abominable Snowmen, 202-04

as “another tribe,” 202

back to nature, 214-15

Boggy Creek, 206-10

documentaries, 210-11

Harry and the Hendersons, 211-13

“home movies,” 205-06

making of a modern monster, 204-05

reality TV, 214

commercial ventures concerning, 233-35

described, 5-7, 27, 30, 134-35, 174, 176, 187

discovery of, 64-80

dogs and, 130-33, 138, 142, 146-47, 173, 181, 207

Eastern, 27-31, 119, 130-48, 181, 237

fecal samples, 239

film of, 71-72, 79

Patterson, see Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot

food of, 11-12, 130-31, 151, 160, 181, 187, 188, 196, 207

gap in California reports of, 53

hair samples, 239-41

hoaxes, see hoaxes and possible hoaxes, major

kill versus no-kill positions, 224-27, 230-31, 244-45

Midwestern, 130-48, 165

murderers and, 177-80

naming of, 66, 204-05, 219

native traditions, see Native Americans

odor from, 131, 132, 137, 141, 151, 160

population estimates, 5, 184

protection of, 230

questions about, 236-45

is Bigfoot a human or an ape?, 241-44

should we shoot one if given the opportunity?, 244-45

why hasn’t anyone found a dead Bigfoot?, 236-41

rate of reports of, 11

sex and, 183-200

breasts, 185, 194-97

Cole and, 193-94

genitalia, 185, 188, 191, 197-200

homosexuality, 184-86

kidnappings, 189-94

Klement’s creature, 187-89

mating with cows, 185, 186, 188, 189

Muchalat Harry and, 192

Ostman story, 190-92

Redwoods Video, 198-200

silence about, 200

sounds made by, 7, 21, 28, 30, 47, 62-63, 130, 131, 140, 143, 144, 145, 151, 175, 177, 179, 198

Southern, 136, 150-67

tracks of, 6, 123, 173, 196, 237-39

Big Muddy, 144-45

Bluff Creek, see Bluff Creek, California tracks

“crippled,” 121-30

Momo, 132, 133

Napes, 160-65, 237-38

scientific-quality replica, 251-53

Six Rivers National Forest, 83, 96

Stevens Creek, 136-37

twenty best places to see, 246-50

UFOs and, 170-77

violent, 180-82

Western, 31-34, 136

Bigfoot: The Ultimate Adventure, 230

Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter, 213

Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (Napier), 67, 129, 242-43

Bigfoot Bulletin, 181-82, 196, 226

Bigfoot Casebook, The (Bord and Bord), 67

Bigfoot Central Museum, 22, 105, 109, 212, 231, 233

Bigfoot Co-op Newsletter, 231

Bigfooters, 216-35

adventures in Bigfooting, 217-18

American Yeti investigators, 230-31

Bay Area Group, 226-27

big money, big game, 221-25

the chroniclers, 220-21

the doctor, 225-26

everywhere, 233-35

groups, 232-33

the hunter, 219-20

scientific hominologists, 231-32

the sculptor, 227-29

the tracker, 219

Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), 14, 20-22, 163, 165, 233, 240

Bigfoot (film), 205-06

Bigfoot—Man or Beast—A Rainbow Adventure-Film Report, 104

Big Footnotes (Perez), 208

Bigfoot Outfitters, Inc., 234

Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch (Krantz), 129, 226

Bigfoot Research Project, 224

BigFoot Safari, 233-34

Bigfoot South (Moore), 208

Bigfoot the Mysterious Monster, 210

Bigfoot Times, 231

Bigfoot Travel Ltd., 234

Big Man, 32 Big

Big Muddy Monster, 138, 144-48

Big Tree Trail, California, 14

Bili Ape of the Congo, 166

Bindernagel, John, 183, 199, 232

Bishop Creek Times, 40

Bismark, Steve, 176

Bitterroot Mountains, 180-81

Bittner, David, 154, 199

Blair Witch Project, The, 211

Blattqesicht, 57

Block and Company, 72, 75

Bloomington, Illinois, 140

Blue Mountains, Washington, 240

Bluff Creek, California tracks, 5, 66-80

chronology of events, 68-70

Crew and, 66-67

following the money, 74-80

labeling of Bigfoot, 66

1958 and, 64-65

Ray Wallace and, 71-80

Sanderson investigation, 70-75, 76

source of story, 68

speculation on, 78-80

Boas, Franz, 18, 44, 45

Boesch, Christopher, 166

Boggy Creek, Arkansas, 159, 206-10

Boggy Creek 2: The Legend Continues, 209

Boisfort Peak, Washington, 18

Bone Clones, 129, 252

bonobos, 183, 241-42

booger, 150, 161

Boone County, Indians, 158

Bord, Colin, 67

Bord, Janet, 67

Border Patrol, U.S., 124

Bossburg, Washington tracks, 121-30

circumstances of, 121-26

legacy of, 128-30

Marx and, 127-28

Metlow-Streeter affairs and, 126-27

Boston Gazette, 35

Bowers, Mrs. Wallace, 173-74

Boydson, Linda, 11

Bozo, see Minnesota Iceman

Brave and Other Stories (Matthes), 80

Breazle, Bob, 70

British Columbia, 41-42

British Columbia Expedition, 224

British Columbian, 42

Brooks, Tim, 214

Brown, F. W., 18

Brown, Gordon, 134-35

Browning, Larry, 195

Brunet, Michel, 243

Brunet, Robin, 223-24

Buchanan, Charles, 160

Buckley, Archie, 4, 217, 226

buffalo, 7-8

Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium, 113, 117-18

Bullock, Tim, 138

Burbank Bigfoot, 100

Bureau of American Ethnology, 34

Burns, John W., 32, 33, 189, 202

Byrne, Bryan, 223, 224

Byrne, Peter, 3, 72, 127, 192, 214, 215

described, 223-25

Cairo, Illinois, 141

Calcutta Statesman, 42

California Giant, 54-62

Calumet, Oklahoma, 158

Camacho, Art, 213

Cameron, Constance, 231

Campbell, Nick E., 181

cannibalism, 28-31, 180

Capture of Bigfoot, The, 209

Cardoza, Anthony, 205

carnivals, 115-16

Caro, Michigan, 197

Carradine, John, 205-06

Carrier First Nation, 33

Castle, August, 41

Center for Bigfoot Studies, 231

Centralia-Chehalis Reporter, 173

Chadwick, Alex, 166

Chambers, John, 97-101, 206

Champlain, Samuel de, 35

Channel 5, Seattle, 22

Chapman family, 59-63, 168-69

Chehalis Indian Reserve, 32

Chenoo (Tcenu), 28, 29, 30

Cherokee Indians, 31, 36

Chickly Cudly, 35-36

Chilcutt, Jimmy, 238-39

chimpanzees, 165-66, 198, 241-42

Chinook First Nation, 17-19

jargon of, 18, 19

Chittyville, Illinois, 138

Clackamus Valley, Oregon, 197-98

Clanton, Alabama, 161

Clanton Union-Banner, 161

Clark, Jerome, 4, 76, 145, 170, 171-72

Clark, Jim, 142

Clark, Ramona, 157

Clay, Tim, 209

Clayton, Gail and Patsy, 135

Clearwater River, Idaho, 196

Clipper, Washington, 195

Cobalt, Ontario, 38, 45

Coffman, George, 158

Cole, Bill, 193-94

Coleman, Bill, 136

Coleman, Jerry, 136

Coleman, Sister Bernard, 31

Collins, Andrew, 171

Collins, Steve, 137

Colorado Bowhunters Association, 234

Concrete, Washington, 15

Cooper, John, 29, 30

Crabtree, Smokey, 207, 208

Creath, Randy, 145

Creature: Personal Experiences with Bigfoot, The (Klement), 187-89

Creature from Black Lake, 209

Creatures of the Outer Edge (Clark and Coleman), 172

Cree Indians, 28, 29, 30

Crested Butte, Colorado, 15

Crew, Gerald “Jerry,” 66-80, 122, 219

Cripple Foot, see Bossburg, Washington tracks

Crook, Cliff, 13, 22, 105, 106-07, 109, 212, 231

Cross, Robbie, 175

Crowe, Ray, 106, 232

Crowe, Richard, 131-32, 143

Cryptozoology, 226, 238

Cullen, Terry, 111-12

Curtis, Lawrence, 162

Dahinden, René, 4, 41, 70, 108-09, 110, 191, 196, 212, 215

Bossburg tracks and, 122-29

described, 219-20

Slick and, 222-25

Daily British Colonist, 41, 42,

Wilderness Hunter, The

Dale, James, 141

Darnell, Regna, 45

Darrington, Washington, 13

Dascanio, Dan, 173

Davidson, D. S., 30

Davis, Dickie, 126

Davis, Don, 69-70

Davis, Norm, 122

Dear, William, 212

Decatur, Illinois, 136-37, 160-61

Decatur Review, 137

Denver Post, 12, 15, 234

Derr, John S., 171

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, A, 28

Discovery Channel, 23-24

Ditmars, Raymond, 2

Djenu, 28

DNA, 184, 240, 241, 243

Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? (Patterson), 68, 81-82, 96, 193, 204

Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 166-67

Dominguez, Robert, 209

Dreeson, Howard, 158, 162

dryopithecine, 166-67

Du Chaillu, 38

Duncan, Bill, 147

Eagle River, Colorado, 12

Earle, Bob, 137

East Davenport, Iowa, 37

eBay, 129, 202

Edwards, O. R., 193

Edwardsville, Illinois, 143-44

Elijah Mae’s Booger, 161

Ellisburgh, New York, 36

El Reno, Oklahoma, 162

Emert, Randy, 140

Enfield, Illinois, 141-43, 172

Ennis, Don, 138-39

Eriksson, Leif, 35

Ernst, William “Ted,” 230

Eskimos, 29

Esquire, 179

Essman, Scott, 99

Eubanks, Corey Michael, 213

Eureka, California, 84

European Green Man, 57-58

Evans, Glen, 251-52

Evening Magazine, 214

Exeter Watchman, 36

Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa … (Du Chaillu), 38

eyeshine, 155

Fahrenback, W. Henner, 240, 241

Faircloth, Larry, 138-39

Fardell, Roy, 124, 125

Farish, Lou, 4

Farmer City Monster, 138-40, 172

Fate, 76, 177-78

Fayette County, Pennsylvania, 171

FBI, 114, 115, 240

Feuillou, Le, 57

First Nations of North America, see Native Americans

Fish, LeRoy, 20, 21, 24, 169

Fisher, David, 24

Fisher, Rick, 163

Flannery, Regina, 31

Flenniken, Craig, 147

Flying Eagle, Chief, 33

Flynn, Sean, 179

Fontan, M., 167

Foster, Ben E., Jr., 217

Foster, Richard, 217

Fouke Monsters, 158, 159, 206-10

“Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery,” 215, 219-26

Fox Television Network, 101-05

Franzoni, Henry, 18-20, 232-33

Freeman, Joel, 18

Freeman, Paul, 231, 232, 240

Freitas, John, 14

frozen man, see Minnesota Iceman fruit crate labels, 53-63

Fuerst, Paul, 240

Fugate, Caril Ann, 177

functionalism, 44

Gable, Clark, 18

Gallipolis, Ohio, 38-39

Garrett, Greg, 142

Gates, Denny, 163

Gates, Steve, 163

Gatto, George, 222

Gebhart, Russ, 196

Genus, 118

Genzoli, Andrew, 66, 69-70, 73, 79, 80, 204

George, Mike, 210

Gifford, E. W., 32-33

Gifford Pinchot National Forest, 17

gigantopithecines, 167

Gilbert, Iowa, 37

Gimlin, Robert “Bob,” 79, 82-83, 106

film of Bigfoot, see Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot Gladwin County, Michigan, 181

Glimpses of Other Realities, Volume II: High Strangeness (Howe), 176

Goddard, Anna-Marie, 198-200

Goddard, Colin, 198

Goodman, Dr. Morris, 243

Goodwater, Oklahoma, 45

Gorden, Sharon, 217

Gordon, Stan, 13, 171, 176

gorillas, 38, 102, 165-66, 201-02, 204, 242

in America, 38-42, 157-67

Gougou, 35

Grand Lake Victoria Band, 30

Granite Falls, Washington, 15-16

Granite Logging Company, 75

Granton, Wisconsin, 11-12, 131, 181

Grants Pass, Oregon, 12, 13-14

Graves, Peter, 210

Great Lakes, 119

Green, John, 3, 4, 23, 37, 51, 53, 55, 59, 66, 70, 79, 196, 197, 212, 215, 219, 227, 239, 244

Bossburg tracks and, 122, 126, 127, 128

described, 220-21

on Fox special, 104

Jacko and, 41-42

Ostman and, 190, 191-92

Patterson-Gimlin film and, 82, 83, 95, 96, 110

Slick and, 222-25

Green, Nedra, 147

Green Giant, 56-58

Greenwell, Richard, 199, 231

Grenier, Dave, 186

Groves, Colin, 243

Guentte, Robert, 210

Gugwes, 28

Guinard, Reverend Joseph, 30

Guttilla, Peter, 103, 171

Haas, George, 4, 181, 226-27, 244

Haifley, Anita, 173

Hailo’ Laux, 33

Hairy Booger, 161

Hale, Gregg, 211

Half-Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman (Honda), 2, 203, 205

Halford, Forrest, 210

Halkomelem Indians, 32

Hall, Mark A., 4, 26, 36-39, 51, 115, 117, 118, 160, 163, 231, 237

Halpin, Marjorie, 105, 231

Hamburg, Arkansas, 158

Hand, E. C., 161

Handbook of the Indians of California (Kroeber), 34

Hannibal, Missouri, 159

Hansen, Frank, 112, 114-17, 119

Hardwick, Bob, 138-39

Harrison, Doris, 130, 131

Harrison, Edgar, 131-32, 141

Harrison, Terry, 130

Harrison, Wally, 130

Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, 33

Harrison Mills, British Columbia, 195

Harry and the Hendersons, 101, 109, 134, 135, 211-13

Haxan Pictures, 211

Hayes, Rick, 209

Hayslip, Robert, 139

Heicher, Bill, 12

Heinselman, Craig, 70

Henderson, Bill, 228

Henick, Jim, 20

Herald (Everett, Washington), 15, 16

Hernando County, Florida, 162

Herrington, Verlin, 196

Herriott, Scott, 14

Hestand, Jerry, 209

Heuvelmans, Bernard, 3, 112-19, 194, 231

“high strangeness,” 168-82

bad luck, 168-70

as defining the times, 170

murderers, 177-80

UFOs and Bigfoot, 170-77

Yosemite “people,” 180-82

High Strangeness: UFOs from 1960 through 1979 (Clark), 170

Hilton, Mike, 163

Himalayan Mountains, 42-44

Historical Particularism, 44, 45

History Mysteries, 215

hoaxes and possible hoaxes, major, 157

Bluff Creek tracks, 68-80

Bossburg tracks, 121-30

Minnesota Iceman, 111-20

Patterson-Gimlin film, 81-110

“Redwoods Video,” 198-200

Hoh Indian Reservation, 13

Holland, Harold, 158-59

Hollywood:

Bigfoot films, 203-15

special-effects industry, 97-101, 106-07, 114, 115

Hominology II (Heinselman), 70

Homme de Neanderthal est toujours vivant, L’ (Porchnev), 116

Homo erectus, 118-19

Homo pongoides, 114, 117, 118

Honda, Ishiro, 2

Honey Island Swamp Monster, 211

Honigmann, John, 32

Hoopa (Huppa) Indians, 32, 66, 68, 80

Hoover, J. Edgar, 115

Hopkins, Jim, 122, 123

Hoquiam, Washington, 196

Houck, Joy N., Jr., 209

Houston Chronicle, 238, 239

Howard, Pat, 131

Howard-Bury, Sir C. K., 42-43

Howe, Linda Moulton, 176

H. S. Crocker Co., 55

Hudson’s Bay Company, 18

Hughes, James, 11-12

Humboldt Times, 66, 69, 70, 73, 77, 79, 204

Hume, Mark, 21

Humphrey, Mrs. C. W., 133-34

Hunter, Don, 41, 123, 126, 128, 191, 192

Huron Indians, 29

Hurst, Bill, 134

iceman, see Minnesota Iceman

I Fought the Ape-man of Mt. St. Helens (Beck and Beck), 46-52

I Know My First Name Is Steven, 178

Indiana, 36

Indian Meadow, Connecticut, 37-38

Indians, see Native Americans

Indian Sasquatch Days, 33

In Search Of (ISO) series, 210-11

International Bigfoot Society, 232

International Society of Cryptozoology, 231

Internet, 169, 185-86, 200, 232-33

Internet Virtual Bigfoot Conference (IVBC), 233

Iron Mountains, Washington, 15

Iroquois Indians, 29, 30, 31

Jacko, 41-42

Jackson, Charles, 196

Jacobs, Reverend Royal, 182

Jacobsen, Thomas P. “Pat,” 54-55

James, Bob, 179-80

Jeanette, Pennsylvania, 13

Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, California, 198-200

Jefferson, Texas, 181-82

Jenness, Diamond, 33

Jensen, Dennis, 125, 126

Johnson, F. Kirk, Jr., 222

Johnson, James Earl, 161

Johnson, Judy, 144

Johnson, Lance, 180

Johnson, Matthew, 13-14

Johnson, Paul, 189

Jolly Green Giant, 56-58

Jones, Charles, 158

Journal of American Folklore, 28, 32-33

Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45

Ju Jin Yuki Otoko, 203

Jurassic Park, 213

Kammerer, Ann, 140-41

Kananasis Lake, Alberta, 17

Kane, Paul, 20

Karok Indians, 34

Kaska Indians, 32

ke-cheah (Chick Lay), 36

Keel, John A., 4, 171

Keesey, Mrs. Paul, 73

Kerr, Ray, 70

kidnappings, 189-94

Kinloch, Missouri, 158

Kitsap Peninsula, Washington, 13

Kiwakwe, 29

Klamath, California, 69

Klem, Betty Jean, 172-73

“Klement, Jan,” 187-89

Knobby, 158

Koakwe, 28

Kokotshe, 29

Kong, 187-89

Korbel, California, 68-69, 72-73

Korff, Kal, 102

Krantz, Grover, 13, 23, 24, 28, 32, 41, 167, 169, 183, 184, 200, 212, 215, 219, 231, 238, 244

Bossburg tracks and, 126-29

described, 225-26

on lack of dead Bigfoot, 236

Patterson-Gimlin film and, 96, 110

Krein, Michael, 233

Kroeber, Alfred, 34, 45

kud-leah (Cooed Lay), 36

La Barge, Tim, 14

Lafever, Gabe, 47

Lagrange, Indiana, 37

Lake Huron, 29, 36

Lake of the Woods, Canada, 35

Lake Saint Claire, Michigan, 36-37

Lake Worth Monster, 158, 160

Lamb, Beecher, 138-39

Lambert, R. S., 30-31

L. A. Miller Label Co., 55

Landis, Joe, 206

Landis, John, 98-101, 206

Landsburg, Alan, 211

La Pe, John, 222

Larwick, Leroy, 179-80

Larwick, Michael, 179-80

Laughery, Bill, 240

Lauk, Dr., 228

Lawrence, Frank, Jr., 195

Lee, Erin, 20

Legend of Bigfoot, 210

Legend of Boggy Creek, The, 159, 206-10

Lemley, Jeff, 20, 21

Leno, Jay, 200

Lewis River Canal, Washington, 195

Lifetime cable network, 214

Lillooet Indians, 33

Lindsey, Dan, 140

Lindsey, Meryl, 144, 145

Little Bigfoot, 213

Little Bigfoot II: The Journey Home, 213

Little Egypt, 3

Little Red Men of the World, 3, 4

Living Fossils (Hall), 36-37, 117

Lochart, T. J., 161

Lockridge, Iowa, 163

London Daily Mail, 202-03

London Sunday Telegraph, 99

London Times, 35

Longview, Texas, 181-82

Loofs-Wissowa, Helmut, 118

Lorenzen, Carol, 171

Louisiana, Missouri, 130-33, 135, 181

Lulu Island, British Columbia, 189

Lynn, Francis, 161

MacArthur, Lewis A., 19

McClarin, Jim, 4, 76, 77, 78, 96, 227-29

McClelland, Gordon, 54

McCormick, Jim, 107

McCracken, Mike, 99

McDaniel, Henry, 141-43

Mackal, Roy, 231

McKelvie, Brian, 41

McNabb, Scott, 35-36

Mad River, California, 68-69, 72-73, 75

Magraner, Jordi, 118

Malinowski, Bronislaw, 44

Man and the Vertebrates (Romer), 167

Man Beast, 203

Mangiacopra, Gary S., 37, 39

“manimals,” 158

Manimals Newsletter, 76, 227

Man in Northeastern North America (Flannery), 31

Manlike Monsters on Trial (Halpin and Ames), 105

Manwaring, Ronald, 146

Maple Springs, California, 196

Maren, Jerry, 206

Marked Hominids, 27, 237

Markotic, Vladmir, 231

Marsh, Earle, 214

Martin, Joe, 10

Marx, Ivan, 70, 210, 222

Bossburg tracks and, 122-30

Maryland Bigfoot Reference Guide (Opsasnick), 208

Matthes, Steve M., 80

Mayne, Steven, 171

Mead, Margaret, 44, 45

Meldrum, Jeff, 23-24, 96, 110, 128, 199, 219, 238-39

described, 231-32

Memegwicio, 31

Memphis Enquirer, 36

Mendocino wilderness, California, 216

Metlow, Joe, 126-27

metoh-kangmi, 43

Meyer, Dave, 104

Mica Mountain, British Columbia, 195

Michaelsen, Rich, 16

Micmac Indians, 28, 29, 30

Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada, The (Wallis and Wallis), 28

Miller, Craig, 198, 200

Mills, Joan, 130

Minnesota Archaeologist, The, 163, 231

Minnesota Iceman, 111-20

as a Bigfoot, 119-20

described, 113-14

disappearance of, 114-15

mystery continues, 115-16

nature of, 117-19

shown around mid-America, 111-16

smell of rotting flesh, 112, 116-17

Minnesota Valley Canning Company, 56-57

Minor, Ellis, 132

Misabe, 30

Mitchum, Christopher, 205

Miwok Indians, 180

Mizokami, Kyle, 20, 169-70, 235

Modesto Cranksters, 179

Mogle, Mike, 142-43

Momo (MO Monster), 130-35, 141, 181

Moneymaker, Matt, 17, 20, 21, 233

Monkey Cave Hollow, Kentucky, 158-59

Monkey Kingdom (Sanderson), 156

Monroe, Michigan, 37, 135

Monster of Sister Lakes, 134-35

Monsters: Myth of Mystery, 230

Montagnais Indians, 29

Moore, Chester, Jr., 208

Moore, Tom, 209

Moravec, Marc, 172

Morgan, Robert W., 230-31

Moriarty, Leslie, 16

Mormons, 157, 210, 255

mountain gorillas, 26

Mt. Diablo, California, 40

Mount Pilchuck, Washington, 13

Mount Rainier, Washington, 18

Mt. Shasta, California, 195

Mt. St. Helens, Washington, 20, 46-52

Mowry, Daryl, 147

Muchalat Harry, 192

Mullens, Rant, 72, 76, 237

Multnomah Falls, Oregon, 11

murderers, 177-80

Murder in Yosemite (Savage), 180

Murphy, Chris, 105, 107, 108-09

Murphy, Lee, 209

Murphysboro, Illinois, 144-48

Murray, Stephen O., 45

Muskegoe Indians, 28

Mustang, 43

Myakka Ape, 150-57

Mysterious Monsters, The, 210

Mythology of All Races (Hartley), 29

Naked Ape, The, 243

Napier, John, 41, 67, 114, 166, 183, 242-43

Bossburg tracks and, 121, 125, 128-30

Napier, Prue, 242-43

Nash, Jimmie, 144, 146-47

Naskapi Indians, 30

National Parks Service, 72, 75

National Post, 21

National Public Radio, 166

Native Americans, 26-34, 189

Bigfoot sightings as bad luck, 168-70

Eastern traditions, 27-31

little Windigo, 27-31

tribes, see specific tribes

Western traditions, 31-34

Yosemite “people” and, 180

Nature, 243

Neandertals, 58, 116-19

Needham, Randy, 144

Nellis, Jerry, 146

Nepal, 43-44

Newcomerstown, Ohio conference on Bigfoot, 184-86

Newman, Henry, 42

New Scientist, 22, 23

New Westminster Mainland Guardian, 42

Nimoy, Leonard, 211, 1958, 64-65

1960s, The (Rielly), 170

Nisqually Indians, 32

Noll, Richard, 17, 20-23

Nootka, Indians, 192

North American Apes (Napes), 157-58, 237-38 see also Skunk Ape

North American Science Institute (NASI), 110

North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch (Bindernagel), 232

Northwest Anthropological Research Notes, 226

Northwest Arkansas Times, 133

Northwest Research Association, 81

oak apes, 167

Observer, 243

Oh-Mah, 31, 32, 80

Ojibwa Indians, 28, 31

Old Sheff, 39

Old Yellow Top, 38

Olson, Dean, 103

Olson, Ron, 103, 104

Olympic National Park, Washington, 13

Olympic Peninsula, Washington, 10, 19

O’Neill, Patrick, 19

On the Track of Bigfoot (Place), 51, 68

On the Track of the Sasquatch (Green), 191-92

On the Track of Unknown Animals (Heuvelmans), 112

Opsasnick, Mark, 208

orangutans, 26, 150-56

Orchard, Vance, 231

Oregan Caves National Monument, 13

Oregon Place Names (MacArthur), 19

Oroville, California, 196

Orsburn, Don, 228

Orting, Washington, 12

Osage City Journal Free Press, 39

Osage River, 39

Ostman, Albert, 45-46, 190-92, 220, 229

O’Sullivan, Jay, 155

Otto, Vicki, 140

Outside, 233

Ozark Mountains, 36

Pacific Northwest Expedition, 70, 222-23

Page, Tom, 125-26, 127, 224

Pangboche Yeti hand, 223

Parsons, Elsie Clews, 28

Passamaquoddy tribe, 30

Patterson, Patricia, 108

Patterson, Roger, 55, 68, 72, 79, 106, 125, 126, 127, 169, 194, 204

Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot, 81-110, 169, 185, 220, 225-26, 227

analysis, doubts, and affirmations, 96-97

breasts and, 185, 194-95

Chambers affair, 97-101

circumstances of, 81-83

computer enhancement of, 105-07, 110

“fastener theory,” 105-09

Hollywood movies and, 205, 210, 211, 213, 215

interview concerning, 83-95

money and, 107-10

outfoxed by hype?, 101-05

today, 110

Pekin, Illinois, 141

Pelosso, Silvina, 178

Pennsylvania, 36, 37, 40, 176, 187-89

Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society, 163

Penobscot Indians, 29

Penrod, Clyde, 133

Peoria Journal-Star, 140

Perez, Daniel, 199, 208, 231

Peterson, John, 47

Pickford, Michael, 243

Pierce, Charles B., 207, 208, 209

Piltdown Man, 80

Pixel Workshop, Inc., 154

Place, Marian T., 51, 68, 221

Planet of the Apes films, 98, 99, 100, 206

“Playmate Video,” 198-200

Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 171

Polanski, Jennifer, 106

Porchnev, Boris F., 116

Port Angeles, Washington, 13

Portland Oregonian, 46

Poshard, Roy, Jr., 141

Powell, Mike, 10

Powell, Owen, 158

Powell, Thomas, 20

Presque Isle Peninsula Park, Pennsylvania, 172-73

Primitive Man (Cooper), 29, 30

Psychological Anthropology, 44-45

Public Works Department, California, 72, 75

Pursuit, 42, 221

Pye, Lloyd, 194

Pyle, Robert, 74

Radford, Benjamin, 17

Ragland, Pete, 133

Rainbow, Rick, 143

Randles, Derek, 20, 21

Rawlins, Monica, 209

Ray, Cheryl, 145, 146

Raynal, Michel, 116

Reade, Winwood, 38

reality TV, 214

Rebane, Bill, 209

Rebsamen, Bill, 208

“Redwoods Video,” 198-200, 232

Reinke, Clyde, 102-04

Return to Boggy Creek, 209

Reynolds, Vernon, 38, 166

Rhodes, Joseph, 121

Rich, Darrell, 174-75

Rich, Dean, 175

Rielly, Edward J., 170

Rines, Robert, 224

Ring, Henry, 162

Ripley, S. Dillon, 114-15

Rivera, Geraldo, 214

Robbins, Freddie, 132, 133

Robertson, Steve, 235

Robinson, Barbara, 134

Roche, Jean, 116, 119

Roe, William, 61, 195, 196, 220

Rogers, Dwayne, 54

Romer, Alfred Sherwood, 167

Romney, Jerry, 102, 103

Ron B., 163

Roosevelt, Theodore, 180-81

Rose, Joseph, 105, 106

Roth, John, 14

Round Valley, California, 40

Rowlands, Ted, 178-79

Ruby Creek, British Columbia, 59-63, 168-69

Ryan, Mary, 130

Saginaw News, 197

St. Gaudens, France, 167

St. Hilaire, Roger, 124, 125, 127

St. Joseph, Illinois, 147

Salish Indians, 32

Salon, 169, 235

Sampson, Gene, 10, 13

Sanderson, Ivan T., 4, 32, 58, 65, 194, 219

Bluff Creek investigation, 70-75, 76

Minnesota Iceman, 112-18

Ostman and, 190-91

Ruby Creek Incident and, 59-63, 168-69

writings of, 3, 41, 43, 68, 81, 156, 204, 213, 221, 225

Sanderson, Sabina W., 41

Sandy River, Oregon, 12

San Francisco Chronicle, 193

San Joaquin Republican, 40

Sappho, Washington, 10

Sarasota, Florida, 150-53

Sarmiento, Esteban, 23-24

Sasquatch, 3, 5, 63, 66

American, see Bigfoot

Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, 24

Sasquatch (word), 32

Sasquatch (Hunter and Dahinden), 123, 128, 191, 192, 220

Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (Green), 104, 127, 128, 221

Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot, 209

Sasquatch Odyssey: The Hunt for Bigfoot, 215, 224, 225

Savage, Jim, 180

Scheuhamme, Tony, 156

Schlock, 101, 206

Schmidt Lithograph Company, 55

Schneck, Robert Damon, 177-78

Schwarz, Berthold Eric, 171, 173

Scientific American, 36

Scientist Looks at the Sasquatch (Suttles and Krantz), 32

Scott, Bob, 144

Scott, Paul, 163

Search for Bigfoot, The, 230

Search for Bigfoot: Myth, or Man?, The (Byrne), 224

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 24

Seattle Times, 79

Seeahtiks (Siatcoes, Selahtiks), 51

Senut, Brigette, 243

sésqec, 32

Seton Lake Indians, 33

Shackley, Myra, 57, 58

Shangri-la, 19

Shasta-Trinity National Forest, California, 217-18, 227

Shaw, Wendy, 155

Shawnee Indians, 22

Sherpas, 43

Shoemaker, Henry W., 40

Short, Bobbie, 99-100, 233

Sightings, 214

Sikkim, 43

Silva, Dr. Jose Arturo, 179

Sinkoyne Indians, 32

Siskiyou Mountains, California, 193

Sister Lakes, Michigan, 37, 134-35

Six Rivers National Forest, 82

Skeptical Inquirer, 17, 23

Skookum, 17-19, 31

Skookum Creek, Washington, 20

Skookum Lake, Oregon, 18, 20

Skookum Meadows, Washington, 5, 16-24, 169, 232

analyses of cast, 22-24

imprint of the century, 20-22

powerful name, 17-20

Skookum Quash, 18

Skulls Unlimited International, 252-53

Skunk Ape, 150-67

described, 15

8eyeshine, 155

facial expression, 155-56

long history of, 157-60

Myakka Ape, 150-57

northern range of, 163-65

origin of, 165-67

tale of the toe, 160-63

tentative conclusions, 156-57

Slate, Barbara Ann, 171

Slatzer, Robert F., 205

slave-trading, 165-66

Slick, Thomas B., 70, 71, 72, 127, 214, 219, 239, 240

described, 221-25

Smith, Barbara, 138

Smith, Carlton, 180

Smith, Dwight, 37

Smith, Earl E., 207

Smith, Joyce, 135

Smith, Loren, 131

Smith, Marion, 46-49

Smith, Riley, 37-38, 39

Smith, Roy, 47

Smithsonian Institution, 18, 23, 114-15, 230

Smoky and the Fouke Monster, 208

Snohomish, Washington, 176

Snow Creature, The, 203

Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, 115

sokqueatl, 32

Sol Duc River, Washington, 13

soss-q’tal, 32

Southern apes, 150-67

Southern Illinois University, 3, 138

Speck, Frank A., 30, 31

Spielberg, Steven, 212

Spirit Lake, Washington, 46, 51, 52

Sports Illustrated, 157

Springdale, Arkansas, 133-34

Sprinkle, Leo, 171

Starkweather, Charles, 177-78

Stayner, Cary Anthony, 178-79, 180

Stayner, Delbert, 178

Stayner, Jesse, 178

Stayner, Steven, 178

Stein, Theo, 12, 234

Stevens Creek, Illinois, 136-37

Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma (Shackley), 57

Stone Coats, 30

Stone Giants, 29

Strange Creatures from Time and Space (Keel), 171

Streeter, Bill, 126

Strendu, 29

Stringfield, Leonard, 171

Suchet, David, 212

Suddarth, Mr. and Mrs. Bill, 132-33

Sugar Creek, Indiana, 159

Sumerlin, Wes, 231, 240

Summers, Bob, 147

Summers, Leroy, 141

Sun, 107

Sund, Carole, 178, 179

Sund, Juli, 178

Sunn Classics, 210

Suquamish First Nation, 13

Suttles, Wayne, 32

swamp monster, 150

Swindler, Daris, 23

Szrot, Lou, 119

Taller Hominids, 27, 237

Tappy, Roger, 142-43

Taylor, Darlene, 163

Teit, James, 32, 33

Tenatco, 32

Terry, Alan, 20, 21

Tête-de-Boule Indians, 29

Texas Bigfoot Research Center (TBRC), 209

Third Chimpanzee, The, 243

Thomas, Glen, 197-98

Tibbetts, Douglas J., 172

Tibet, 42-44

Timagami Ojibwa, 31

Timiskaming Algonquin, 31

Titmus, Bob, 70, 83, 122, 126, 222, 223, 224

described, 219

Toba Inlet, British Columbia, 46, 190-92

Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 200

Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 114

Tornit, 29

Track Record, The, 232

Traster, Karl and Steven, 197

Traverspine River, Labrador, 38

Trimble, M. S., 39

Trimble County, Kentucky, 158

Trinity Alps, California, 195

True, 59-63, 68, 72, 74, 75, 81, 204, 221

Trumbore, Harry, 185

Tsiatko, 32

Twenty best places to view bigfoot, 246-50

Ucumar (Ucu) of Argentina, 189

Ufiti, 166

UFO-Anthropoid Catalogue, The (Moravec), 172

UFOs, 50, 71, 102

Bigfoot and, 170-77

Uniontown, Pennsylvania, 171

Universal Studios, 213

University of Washington, 224

Unsolved Mysteries, 214

UPI, 141, 182

USA Today, 105

Utrup, Elevelyn and John, 135

Vader, Washington, 173

Van Acker, Christine, 135

Vancouver Courier, 223-24

Vancouver Island, British Columbia, 234

Vander White gold claim, 47-49

Vietnam, 118, 119

von Puttkamer, Peter, 215

Walker, Luke, 182

Wallace, Dale Lee, 79

Wallace, Michael, 79

Wallace, Mrs. Ray, 79

Wallace, Ray, 67-80, 222

described, 71-74

Wallace, Wilbur, 67-80

Walla Walla, Washington, 231, 232

Wallis, Ruth Sawtell, 28

Wallis, Wilson D., 28

Walnut Creek, Alabama, 159

Walsh, Jeri, 222

wapiti, 22

Wasson, David, 106-07, 109-10

Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, 163-65

Waynesboro Record Herald, 163

Waynesville, Illinois, 140

Weakest Link, The, 200

Web sites, 153, 203, 233

Webster, Jack, 83-95

Wentworth, Frank, 37

Western Bigfoot Society, 232

Where Bigfoot Walks (Pyle), 74

Whiteface Reservoir, Minnesota, 119

Wide World Magazine, 33

Wilder, Miles, 203

Wilder, W. Lee, 203

Wilderness Hunter, The (Roosevelt), 180

“wildmen,” 36-38, 57-58, 202

Williamsport Sun Gazette, 39

Windigo, 27-31, 45, 237

juveniles, 31

variant names for, 27-30

Winsted Herald, 37-38

Winsted Wildman, 37-38

Winsted Wildman and Other Tales, The (Wentworth), 37

Winters, Joe, 203

“Witiko Among the Tête-de-Boule,” 30

wodewoses, 58

Wolf, R. Martin, 171

Wood, Captain, 165

Woodard, Barry M., 107

wood bison, 7-8

Woolheater, Craig, 209

“World’s Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed,” 101-05

Wrangham, Richard, 166

Wright, Chris, 15-16

Wudewasa, 58

Wyandot Indians, 29

Wyatt, Brian, 161

Wyatt, T. E., 161

X-Creatures, 83

Yahoo, 35

Yakima Herald-Republic, 106

Yankton, Oregon, 45

Yeries, James, 175

Yeries, John, 174

Yeti, see Abominable Snowman Yosemite National Park, 178-80

Yosemite “people,” 180-82

Young, Bob, 79

Yukon River, Alaska, 181

Yurok Indians, 34

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1 Bigfoot Stomps into the Twenty First Century

1 The Summer of Sasquatch

2 Strange Cast of Skookum

Part 2 A Look Back

3 Native Traditions

4 Wildmen Gorillas and Ape Canyon

5 Fruit Crate Label Art and Ruby Creek

6 “Bigfoot” Discovered

7 Bigfoot Filmed

8 Frozen Man

9 Bossburg Momo and Other Flaps

10 On the Trail in the Midwest

Part 3 Reflections

11 Myakka and Other Southern Apes

12 High Strangeness

13 Sex and the Single Sasquatch

14 The Changing Image of Bigfoot

15 The Bigfooters

16 Three Big Questions

APPENDIX A

Twenty Best Places to See Bigfoot

APPENDIX B

Scientific Quality Replica Bigfoot Track Casts

On the Matter of Style

Bibliography

Index