BIGFOOT! Read online

  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 ex
tinct, 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.