Some say he is an animal: he has fur
like an animal’s, and sharp teeth;
others say he is a man, or something
that was once a man; his hands are a man’s,
his eyes face forward.
To me he is neither,
what he is for you
will depend on what he wishes to show you,
what he is for you
will depend on what you want from him.
(from Margaret Atwood’s “Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man, and Two Androids.”)
This is it. It’s early December,
hat-and-scarf weather here in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve just driven
into a fog so suddenly dense that I had to slam on the brakes. Fog that
blanketed the North Fork Reservoir like down. I crept through that fog
going ten, fifteen miles an hour; climbing out until the ground
glittered beneath my headlights, as though the earth were sunk with
jewels. I’m alone. The wind, steady and cold, carries the smell of
skunk. They say that Sasquatch smells like skunk, like garbage, like
carrion. I’ve come here to find Sasquatch. I can hear the flow of the
Clackamas. I can see my breath.
Thom Powell lives in these parts, and it’s
here, in these woods, that he says he’s communicated with Sasquatch.
Something of an elusive creature himself, Powell is a middle school
science teacher in Hillsdale, Oregon, and the author of two novels about
Bigfoot. He claims to have had numerous strange encounters with the
beast. “They have the ability to cloud your thinking, to interfere with
your ability to perceive what they don’t what you to perceive. Some of
us have experienced this thing that can only be described as a cloaking
capability,” he says, adding that the Sasquatch has a complex society,
that they have weddings and funerals, secret meetings. “So when you ask
us to provide proof that Sasquatch exists, that it has language, those
of us who’ve been doing it a while are just totally bored with that. We
don’t want to talk about that because we worked past that a long time
ago.”
One problem that the novice Bigfooter
confronts is that hoaxes abound in this world, so that sifting around
for Truth – the universally accepted kind – can get mighty hairy. Every
Bigfoot believer I’ve spoken to has mentioned hoax perpetrators and
perpetuators. Enoch author Autumn Williams, one guy said. Tom
Biscardi, pretty much everyone agreed. Cliff Cook, proven hoaxer. And
then there’s Ray Wallace.
In their day, Wallace and his brothers owned a
logging company in Northern California. In 1958, the company was
clearing a timber access road near Bluff Creek, when a cat skinner named
Jerry Crew discovered some rather large, deep footprints near his
bulldozer. These were the first of many such tracks found at the
jobsite, and the media were called in to investigate the phenomenon. The
Humboldt Times (who coined the term Big Foot) ran a story, and
then another and another, and the story took on a life of its own. But
Wallace was a known trickster, and after his death in 2002, his family
admitted that the Bluff Creek prints had been a prank perpetrated by
Wallace in good fun; a prank that got out of hand.
Yes, there have been hoaxes. Does this
force us to approach all evidence with mistrust? All proponents of
Sasquatch with scorn? Benjamin Radford, in his wry Tracking the Chupacabra, recalls
his years searching for lake monsters and Bigfoot as a “robust history
of gumption (and near-spotless track record of failure).” Nevertheless,
he sets off to find another mythological creature, the Chupacabra. This
requires gumption, yes – and a sense of adventure, and the belief,
common in Cryptozoology, that there have simply been too many sightings
for every last one to be a hoax.
Guy Edwards is, at 37, one of the younger
members of the Oregon Bigfoot community, and he considers himself an
armchair journalist on the topic of Sasquatch. To that end, he runs a
website called Bigfoot Lunch Club. He’s also been my unofficial guide through the
world of the ‘Squatch and an indispensable source of information. Guy
has never seen a Bigfoot but he is a believer, and is a strong proponent
of developing a solid methodology for its study.
“I think we just need some good, solid
models, and then to test against those models,” he says. “So if it is an
orangutan relative, what do orangutans do? If it is nocturnal, then
that’s a different story. Then we need to ask, what do lemurs do? Most
people think it’s nocturnal, but to me, that would be a question of –
why would a primate be nocturnal? Most primates are not.” Guy is part of
what’s known as the flesh and blood camp of Bigfoot believers. These
are people who seek physical evidence of the Beast and who believe said
evidence is out there and deserving of real scientific study.
For evidence, many Bigfoot stalwarts point to
the Patterson-Gimlin Film. Taken at Bluff Creek in 1967 and named for
the two ranchers who shot it, the film is short and grainy, but
inarguably depicts an ape-like biped walking through the woods. Among
believers, the biped is known as Patty, and Patty is a large-breasted,
barrel-chested, seven-foot-tall female Bigfoot. However, the film is not
without controversy, as accusations of hoaxing and other shady dealings
have swarmed it from the beginning. For one, a fellow named Bob
Heironimus claimed that Roger Patterson paid him to put on an ape suit
for the film. Guy Edwards believes that the footage is real, but
concedes that it cannot be the be-all, end-all evidence. Footprints, a
body, DNA, bones – this is what Guy and many others want to see.
Dr. Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University is
the most vocal and respected academic in the flesh and blood camp of
believers, and his work – influenced by the late Dr. Grover Krantz –
focuses on footprints and dermal ridges, mid-foot flexibility in bipedal
locomotion, DNA evidence, and evolutionary linkages that he claims are
suggested by his vast collection of Sasquatch footprint molds. Some
people say that Meldrum’s work is pseudoscience, but among believers, he
is a pillar.
In the footsteps of Krantz, Meldrum posits that the creature we call Bigfoot is a possible descendent of Gigantopithecus Blacki.
This presumed-extinct oversize ape, writes Meldrum, has left “a meager
fossil record consist[ing] of two mandibles and isolated teeth…. That an
‘extinct’ giant ape is accepted by science on the basis of such scant
fossil evidence, one might ask why serious consideration has been slow
in coming to the hundreds of documented footprints (not to mention
sightings, vocalizations, hair, scat, etc.).” The argument goes that the
dearth of physical evidence isn’t reason enough to rule out Sasquatch.
Ron Morehead, a Bigfoot researcher from
Mariposa, CA, calls himself “absolutely, a believer.” He’s ruddy-faced
with a shock of white hair; he’s not very tall. His first encounter with
the Sasquatch came in 1971, when he was at a high-altitude hunting camp
in the Sierras. As he tells it, “there were six of us at camp. We were
disturbed during the night by horrific sounding somethings. The
tracks that were left were eighteen-inch, five-toed prints. This was
the beginning of several years of this particular family of creatures
coming around our camp.”
Since then, Ron’s spent a great deal of time
in the Sierras, making recordings that he has released collectively as
the Sierra Sounds. “At first the sounds were very intimidating, like
they were trying to scare us off,” he said, “but then it kind of
mellowed out after a couple years. I think they trust us, trust that
we’re not going to shoot our own. They’re like a people, and that’s what
I say. If you treat them like Native Americans that don’t want to be
found, well, they don’t want to be found. They don’t want anything to do
with us.”
I have listened to the Sierra Sounds, the
crying and chest beating, the teeth popping and rock-rolling. There is
howling and crying. Whistling, hooting, some very inhuman-sounding
noises, indeed. Were these sounds made by people? By bears? Or by some
unidentified primate? Unfortunately, because the study of Bigfoot is by
and large considered pseudoscience, those in a position to answer that
question are generally unwilling to ask it in the first place.
M.K. Davis of Benton, Mississippi has been
studying the Patterson-Gimlin Film for some fifteen years, and is
credited in the Bigfoot community with clarifying and stabilizing the
once-shaky footage. He is adamant that the film’s Bigfoot is real, but
he theorizes that Patterson and his partner Robert Gimlin walked into a
Bigfoot massacre that day, insisting that there are at least ten minutes
of unreleased footage showing other men, some dogs, and a pool of
blood.
“I found another film that was taken the same
year, where men were down there hunting with dogs and horses for
Sasquatch. On the very best image of the [Patterson] film, down at the
bottom there’s a bloody red paw print of a dog. It was cropped out of
most of the images that were released to the public but I got this from
Mrs. Patterson. They made up this story, ‘two innocent guys just walking
down the creek and they just happened upon a Sasquatch in broad
daylight and she didn’t run in the woods,’ – Nope. That’s not true. They
were there in an effort to hunt Sasquatch, in an effort to kill them.
Patterson was not a part of the group but he stumbled upon them. He
didn’t have anything to do with it; I don’t believe that for a minute.
He became a part of it by accident.”
But why would anyone want to kill Bigfoot?
Davis argues that the creatures were a hindrance to the logging
industry, frightening off the workers who were clearing access roads
into the forest.
Davis believes the Sasquatch are a people who
have intentionally eluded society. Over the phone, he was kind, gentle-
and plain-spoken, and clearly sympathetic to the Sasquatch. He told me
“these people have been hiding out for a long time. And there’s also
other mixes of people that have been in there. 10,000 Chinese were in
there hydraulically mining gold at one time. So when you see the film
you don’t know whether you’re seeing a typical Sasquatch, or a mix, or a
hybrid, or what.”
“Hybrid, meaning what?” I asked.
“Hybrid meaning a mix of Chinese or perhaps whoever happened to be in the area. Indian? Indigenous?”
I changed the subject. I asked something
about the importance of Sasquatch to society. What it would mean if we
were to find irrefutable proof. Rather than answer my question, he
referred back to the film, in his opinion the only real evidence there
is, and the only evidence we need. I admired his tenacity. I admired his
disinclination to answer my fluffy philosophical questions. “I would
like to elevate [the Sasquatch] if I could, but if I can’t, it’s not
going to bother me. They’ve been living like that for a very long time
and they’re perfectly happy as far as I can tell.”
I’ve been wondering about the lack of
physical evidence; specifically bones, and I’ve asked many enthusiasts
why no Bigfoot bones have been found. Well, they’ve said, the
forest is vast and impenetrably dense. The Northwestern soil is high in
acidity which speeds the process of decomposition. There are many
creatures who feast on carcasses, and anyway, they rhetorically ask, how many Bear bones are found in the woods? And this is a good question.
Dr. Virginia Butler is a professor of
Anthropology at Portland State University who specializes in the study
of animal remains found at archaeological sites. I asked her about
bones. “We can’t use the absence of Bigfoot bones to
defend the case that Bigfoot doesn’t exist. We don’t find remains of
many animals that we know once lived in a given area. What gets
preserved for the long-term is only a crude reflection of what once
lived in a given place.” Further, she explained, “in forested
environments of the Northwest, bone preservation is problematic. The
best places for bone preservation are caves or lava tubes in our basalt
rich area. But the only way we’re going to get animal bones in there is
if an animal naturally dies or a predator or scavenger drags the bones
in there.”
In his own NPR interview, Dr. Meldrum stated “I don’t use the word[s] I believe in the existence of Bigfoot.
To me, that connotes a conviction in the absence of proof or evidence,
at least. I simply say that the evidence is there, there’s no refuting
that.” Meldrum has amassed a large collection of footprint casts, which
he regards as solid proof of Sasquatch’s existence. “What
does the evidence tell us?” he wants to know. “Where does it lead us,
and is there something behind this persistence of this phenomenon in
western North America?”
Once a month, Bigfoot believers and other
interested parties gather for discussion at Pattie’s Home Plate in St.
John’s, north of Portland. I attended a meeting in the fall in order to
hear Thom Powell speak on the future of Bigfoot research; I’d been
forced to cancel our prior meeting and my attempts to reschedule with
him had been thwarted. More specifically, he was no longer responding to
my emails. Thom is sinewy, with the complexion of an outdoorsman; he’s
got short, salt-and-pepper hair and had a few days’ beard growth.
I got to Pattie’s around 6:30. The walls were
covered in pegboard and faux wood paneling, and dusty 45s hung by dusty
strings from a water-stained drop ceiling. There were framed posters
along the walls that said “Jazz” in a jazzy font, and Coca Cola ephemera
was scattered about the place. I spotted two mannequins, numerous
trophies, and a playpen with a real live baby inside. Behind the counter
was a horseshoe, hung luck-side down. There were two paper towel racks
on the floor by my feet, each holding full rolls of paper towels. It
seemed as good a place as any to discuss our mysterious friend, the
Bigfoot. There were maybe 18 or 20 people in attendance for the meeting.
Ceiling fans whirred at top speed.
I sat down at an octagonal table across from a
fellow named Dan Ronyak, a friendly, baby-faced man who was probably in
his forties. I asked him what the most compelling evidence in support
of Bigfoot might be.
“I think the best evidence is seeing someone
close to tears as they recount what they saw,” he answered. “When
somebody has seen something, and they’re the average Joe, they wouldn’t
have gone out of their way to make up a story like this. And then when
they describe what they’ve seen, it’ll almost give you chills.” He
adjusted his glasses. “I mean, I want to get to the point where I have chills and I’m scared to walk out of here.”
At 7:00, Thom began. “You might be on the cusp of a big game changer,” he said, announcing that Sunday’s New York Times would
feature an article about a Bigfoot movie, “Letters from the Big Man”:
“They’re actually treating the subject with an uncharacteristic amount
of respect.” The next day I leafed through the Times, eager to
see this potentially game changing article. The article, “In the Deep
Forest, an Unusual Bond and Untamed Beauty,” was in fact a film review
with very little to do with Sasquatch, but the reviewer called it a
“lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic” film and its Sasquatch “beguiling….
an elusive and transformative presence.” “Harry and the Hendersons” this is not.
A woman who looked to be in her fifties sat
behind Dan and I, intently listening to Thom while filing her nails
rhythmically. Ch-ch. Ch-ch. Ronyak was wide-eyed and smiling toward
Thom, nodding in recognition. There was a plump, middle-aged woman with a
cute blonde bob sitting in front of us.
“It’s not for everyone to go that deep into
what’s going on,” she said. “It can mess with your head. It can crack
some people’s psyche to know these are not animals, to know holy cow I’m dealing with something really, really powerful. They do
speak your language, no matter what that language is. They can speak
Hmong, they can speak Vietnamese. I have a good friend that’s Hmong from
Vietnam, her family came over in the early 70’s through Thailand to
here. They were staying in Northern California and her uncle saw the
Bigfoot sitting down in the river, and in his head he heard what do you want, what are you doing here?
And I said, ‘was that in English or was it in Hmong?’ and she said it
was in Hmong. So they do speak many languages. They speak your language,
they speak other languages.”
Thom nodded, and the lady went on: “I don’t
know if you’ve heard of Henry Franzoni – he dubbed a term called
telepathic ventriloquism – you can hear it in your head, you think it’s
being said out loud but it’s not.”
“Right,” agreed Thom.
I looked down at the checkerboard floor. I
contemplated the wooden paper towel racks on the floor beside my feet,
and their full rolls of paper towels. I looked over at Guy, who offered a
wry smile and rolled his eyes like a kid whose parents have just done
something embarrassing. This paranormal stuff is not for everyone.
“My whole dream is just to see Bigfoot,” Guy told me once. I
asked him what he would do if that happened. He told me that he spent a
few months during his twenties in Thailand as a Buddhist monk. That
when he was there, he saw a man get shot. “I was almost incapacitated,”
he said. “I had to prop myself up. I saw his blood. It took me a long
time to get help; it might’ve been 2 seconds or it might’ve been 2
hours. If I ever saw Bigfoot I’m sure I’d have the same reaction: My
knees would get weak, I’d just stand still.”
Before Thom’s talk, I’d asked Ronyak about
belief. “For me, the question ‘do you believe in…’ right away sets up
the whole scenario of ‘are you a kook?’ But you wouldn’t come out and
ask someone that,” he said. “When you ask, ‘do you believe in Bigfoot?’
for me it’s just something that’s out there and part of the biological
community.”
So what, ultimately, is the appeal? How do
all of these folks maintain interest in something that is utterly
unproven? I’ve been thinking about this as I stand alone in the dark,
smelling skunks on the wind, listening to the river, listening for the
call of the elusive beast. Just what led me here into the deep Oregon
woods on this frosty December night? I reflect on something that Ronyak
said to me, and the answer is really quite simple:
“The stories are great. Listening to people
talk about something they saw, they’re sure they saw, something that I
have not seen….” Dan paused then; looking past me, looking toward an
undefined landscape of his own imagining.
“I love a good story,” he said. “And there’s some truth to most of it, probably.”
