“People believe in these things because they like to believe in them, and it keeps on going because people like it. And why not? It’s a charming story.”
Ian McTaggart Cowan
“The father of wildlife
This is the first of a six-week series on Sasquatch, a gigantic, reclusive beast that walks on two legs deep within our remote forests — or, depending on one’s beliefs, only deep within the recesses of gullible minds.
This series is not intended to promote or dispel belief in Sasquatch, but will focus largely on the evidence, efforts and experiences of those who advocate acceptance of its possible existence. Why? Because as a whole, the worlds of science and “common knowledge” dismiss it as, as scholar and conservationist Ian McTaggart Cowan noted, “a charming story.”
Writing about what is commonly accepted isn’t a charming story, or even interesting.
The unacceptable being championed by anecdotal evidence and scientists willing to consider it, though, is intriguing.
“The public in general, and the scientific community more importantly, believe there can’t be any such thing,” says John Green, a retired British Columbia newspaper publisher who has researched Sasquatch for a half-century. “Some call themselves skeptics. How can you be a skeptic when you’re just trumpeting what everybody believes? They’re not skeptics.
“Skeptics are people like me who don’t accept what everybody believes.”
Consider this series, by that standard, a study in skepticism.
• • •
YAKIMA, Wash. — Do you believe somewhere within the deep, wooded slopes of the Cascades and other remote forests there exists an eight-foot-tall, hairy beast walking on two legs?
Thom Powell, left, talks about The London Trackway with Tom Rutledge during the Richland Bigfoot conference in Richland, Wash. Friday May 4, 2012. Powell was one of the people who examined and made casts from tracks found in a lake bed south of Eugene, Ore. (ANDY SAWYER/Yakima Herald-Republic)
Do you believe in Sasquatch? In Bigfoot?
It’s basically a yes-or-no question. People usually fall into one of two groups: those who are convinced Bigfoot exists, and those who believe people in the first group should not be allowed to operate heavy machinery.
Believers are fervent, sometimes even devout. It matters to them. It’s personal. In many cases, they — or someone they know — have seen, heard or sensed something that, in their minds, could only be explained by accepting the seemingly inconceivable.
Non-believers couldn’t care less. For them, the whole idea is a crock of hooey. Sasquatch? Yeah? How about the Tooth Fairy, you believe in that too?
No, say the believers. Just Sasquatch.
You might be surprised at how many people are OK with the concept of a race of giant, two-legged forest denizens.
According to a 2011 Northwest poll by PEMCO Insurance, 40 percent of Washington residents believe Sasquatch could be a reality. In that same poll, 13 percent say they’ve either seen one or know someone who has.
If that number seems high — 13 percent of nearly 7 million? seriously? — consider this: The number of reported Sasquatch sightings or other “close encounters” over the years is upwards of 40,000.
One Bigfoot researcher has followed up on nearly 400 reports in the Wenatchee area alone. In Yakima County, the closed area of the Yakama Reservation and the thickly forested hills around Bumping Lake have each been the site of literally dozens of reported sightings.
Many of those 40,000 reports involved multiple people who saw or heard the same thing.
Bigfoot sightings have been reported by police and military officers, by college professors and scientists, by loggers and backpackers, by construction contractors and car-campers, and by couch potatoes who think of the great outdoors as the place where the car lives.
Are they all crazy? Deluded? Drunk or drug-addled? Are they part of some loose-knit but far-reaching hoax?
Or are they simply the tip of a much larger iceberg? Are there thousands more out there who saw something they can’t explain, but are keeping quiet about it to avoid being ridiculed?
If the latter is true, their silence is understandable.
A Blewett Pass resident says he and his nephew encountered a “huge creature … eight, nine feet tall” killing chickens in the coop behind his cabin in the winter of 1976-’77. The creature escaped despite their shooting it at point-blank range with a shotgun, says the cabin owner, who notified the Chelan County sheriff and almost wishes he hadn’t because of the weeks that followed.
“The newspapers got hold of it,” he says, “and made fools of us.”
A forestry technician with the Yakama Nation says his willingness to look into Bigfoot reports has gotten him in hot water with his superiors.
“I got taken aside by one of my higher-ups,” the forester says. “He told me, ‘What are you doing, why are you investigating these and openly reporting this material? What you’re doing, if we know something’s there, you’re shutting this whole forest down! It’ll be like the spotted owl situation — protocol will have to be followed. Basically, you’re going to turn us into a reserve. There won’t be any logging allowed at all.’
“I thought that was a little extreme. Hey, you guys don’t believe me anyway, so what does it matter?”
A college professor and anthropologist specializing in the evolution of bipedalism (walking on two legs) saw his own career jeopardized when the promotion process turned to scrutiny of his research into alleged Sasquatch tracks.
Another renowned scientist was driven to the verge of tears when he realized he was beginning to accept what he had repeatedly and quite publicly denounced — that Sasquatch, cause celebre of the wacko set, might, in fact, exist.
Could it all be a hoax? Some reports have been proven so.
With others, it’s not as easy to discern the truth, such as the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film. Nearly a half-century later, it remains the subject of heated debate — more than a decade after a Yakima man, Bob Heironimus, swore under oath that he, wearing a monkey suit, was the creature on that jittery, blurred footage.
But if it’s all a hoax, it’s unimaginably elaborate and expensive — as well as historic in scope, dating back hundreds of years.
Tribal lore of Native American peoples from California to Canada includes stories of giant, hairy humanoids variously referred to as Hairy Man, Giant of the Woods and Hairy Giant. They are depicted on centuries-old pictographs. Even the term Sasquatch is derived, and somewhat anglicized, from a Salish tribal term for such a creature.
Hoaxers would also have to go to remarkable lengths to perpetrate the ruse, because tracks have been found in places so remote it’s surprising they were even found.
On a December day in 1998 two foresters found three distinct track trails of bare footprints in the snow, measuring 22, 18 and 8 inches — a family unit? — on the Yakama Reservation’s closed portion, in thick woods unlikely to attract picnickers, hikers or even hunters.
And then there were the tracks found 21 years ago at a remote Canadian lake by two journalists, one of them a documentary filmmaker from Minnesota.
The lake is accessible only by float plane and inhabited only seasonally by the few dozen anglers who visit the lake’s lone fishing lodge. The two men, there to film a story about fishing for huge lake trout, were on an impromptu boat trip when they happened to stop at a sandy shoreline a good 10 miles from the lodge.
There they found and followed a long line of barefoot, 17-inch tracks with a 42-inch stride that continued, unbroken, off into the endless tundra.
“The whole thing didn’t make sense to me,” the filmmaker says. “There’s no way anybody would go to any lengths to hoax something up there. Nobody would ever find the tracks. Not a chance.”
And what can we make of the thousands of eyewitness reports?
If not Sasquatch, what are they all seeing and hearing? Bears?
Try telling that to the retired Army colonel who, as a 16-year-old elk hunter in the Blue Mountains, spotted a towering, hairy beast through his hunting rifle’s scope, magnified such that the animal looked to be barely 45 yards away. The creature appeared so “man-like” that the hunter felt guilty even watching it through his rifle scope.
But because he was too fascinated to look away, he kept watching it — for 45 minutes.
Ohio paralegal Melissa Hovey has never seen a Sasquatch — “so,” she says, “I can’t tell the world they’re out there” — but has interviewed hundreds of what she describes as credible witnesses before and since becoming president of the American Bigfoot Society.
“I’ve spoken with politicians, with oil magnates, police officers, people in the military, factory workers. Police officers or military people may be more believable or credible, but they’re telling the same thing. Why would all these people be telling the same story? They don’t want to be involved in something that sounds crazy,” she says, “but they come from all walks of society.
“You can’t watch and listen to what they’ve gone through and say they’re crazy — because if you don’t believe what they’re saying, that’s what you’re saying. And that’s not fair.
“Either it’s a misidentification with another animal or they’re really seeing what they say they’re seeing. It’s one or the other.”
Not surprisingly, many “Bigfooters” share a sort of gallows humor about how the world perceives them.
The skeptical wife of a Bureau of Indian Affairs timber appraiser hated hearing her husband talk about his and other forest workers’ Sasquatch sightings deep within the wooded Cascade foothills.
Then last February, while driving from White Swan to her job in Yakima in the pre-dawn darkness, she saw in her headlights what she later described as a large, hairy, two-legged animal cross Branch Road in front of her, step easily over a barbed-wire fence and disappear into the darkness.
“Now,” cracks one of her husband’s co-workers, “she’s in the crazy club with the rest of us.”
• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment