Biography: Peter Byrne

Peter Cyril Byrne was born in Dublin, Ireland, on August 22, 1925, to an Irish father and an English mother. He graduated school, and joined the Royal British Air Force during World War II. After his service, he came to work on a tea plantation in northern India in the late 1940's; he opened Nepal's first tiger hunting concession (today he helps protect them) and soon found himself face to face with stories about the "abominable snowman" or yeti. Funded by a Texas oilman, with the unlikely name of Tom Slick, he began a three year mission to hunt and track down the Yeti. They found footprints and a mummified hand in a monastery (which Byrne took a finger of and replaced it with a human finger; the finger was tested and found to be somewhere between human, gorilla and chimpanzee, but the finger was lost), but the creature remained shrouded in the blowing Himalayan snow. Hearing of the discovery of big footprints in northern California, Slick asked Byrne to head up a "Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Expedition" in 1960, which for a short time included Rene Dahinden, John Green and Bob Titmus (and these gentlemen were not happy having a Brit (actually, an Irishman who sounds like a Brit) being brought in to run the show; Dahinden left after a month-and-a-half, but Green and Titmus stayed a little longer until Slick was killed in a plane crash in 1962). Byrne could not continue his efforts until the early-1970's, when the Boston Academy of Applied Sciences began bankrolling Byrne, who was able to establish a Bigfoot Information Center near The Dalles, Oregon. This effort continued for 9 years, from 1970-1979. During that time, Byrne appeared on "In Search Of..." and also his own short documentary, titled "Manbeast: Myth or Monster" in 1978. He also wrote a book, "The Search For Bigfoot: Monster, Myth or Man" in 1975. Byrne seemingly dropped out of sight after that project was finished until 1992, when he was once again bankrolled by the B.A.O.A.S. to form the Bigfoot Research Project, this time based near Parkdale, Oregon, in the Hood River region. This was a full-scale monster search, complete with helicopters, infra-red sensors and 1-800-BIGFOOT phone number. Byrne's efforts, which continued until around 1997, did not produce much in the way of good evidence, but he gave it a good shot. After this project, Byrne was commissioned to investigate sightings of a Bigfoot-type creature in Southern Florida, the famous "Skunk Ape". This effort was documented in a production called "Shaawanoki", produced by Andreas Wallach and Ronnie Roseman (Byrne directed it). Today, Byrne is semi-retired in the Bigfoot field and continues his tourist/adventure work around the world.