Ray Wallace: Was He The "Clever Hoaxer" Some Said He Was?

In November 2002, a longtime Bigfoot enthusiast, Ray Wallace, died in a nursing home in Washington State. This is normally not so unusual, except for the fact that his death caused quite a bit of controversy in the Bigfoot community because of track finds that occurred in 1958 in northern California. Ray Wallace was the supervisor for the Thomas Sourwine-run company of road construction workers in that part of California in the Bluff Creek area. There were tracks found several mornings in a row, one of which was cast by Jerry Crew and photographed in early-October '58. Because of these footprint finds, the name "Bigfoot" entered the national consciousness. For many years after that, Wallace had a store in which he sold fake footprint castings; he was also known to tell wild stories about Bigfoot and UFO's which no one took seriously. During the initial 1959-61 Tom Slick-sponsored "Pacific Northwest Expedition", Wallace told the expedition that he had a captive Bigfoot in a cage, and the expedition leader, Peter Byrne and Tom Slick consulted on how much they would pay for this captive Bigfoot. Wallace claimed that he was feeding the creature bags of Frosted Flakes and that they weren't getting any cheaper. Before Byrne and Slick could collect the Bigfoot after scraping up the funds, Wallace claimed the creature got sick and he let it go. Wallace did this kind of stuff for years and years, even filming hoax films. They didn't fool anyone, but Wallace was a nice old guy. However, it is interesting that he did hoax tracks at Bluff Creek around 1958, and some of those tracks have been accepted as real by some researchers (the Jerry Crew casts are real, however, and may match the tracks found by Pat Graves in 1963 and possibly "Patty" herself!). Wallace never admitted to hoaxing tracks while he was alive, but anyone who is truly objective will admit that some of the casts that were taken in that area did match the Wallace fakes. The Wallace story somehow also got mixed up with the Patterson/Gimlin film as well, with Wallace in some news reports allegedly having been involved in hoaxing that film, with his wife as "Patty". Some news reports had a "deathbed confession" from Roger Patterson that the film was a hoax, which was not true at all. The whole thing was a cluster-foulup from the media, who immediately declared that this proved that Bigfoot never existed before 1958, and of course they got other elements of the mystery mixed up. It's indicative of the media to screw up on things like this, and of course, they were already pre-disposed to not believe there was a Bigfoot, so of course they screwed things up. But Bigfoot research obviously doesn't suffer much despite the hoaxing of Mr. Wallace. I think it's time that the Bigfoot community police its ranks and throw out the bad evidence and realize that not ALL the Bluff Creek tracks are of a real creature.