Byrne's Bigfoot Part 3:
The Quarry
by Greg Long — April 1, 1996
Vancouver — After a brief period of freedom, the Chehalis Indian reservation near Harrison Lake is again being harassed by Sasquatch, the strange hairy giants of the mountains who have been particularly active this year.
Mrs. James Caufield was washing clothing in a rivulet when she heard a buzzing sound. At first she thought it was a humming bird hovering over a flower.
"But it was no bird," reported Mrs. Caufield. "It was the most terrible thing I ever saw in my life — a huge man covered with hair from head to foot. He was only a few feet away from me, and staring at me.
"I knew right away he was a Sasquatch and turned my head, for the Indians say that if Sasquatch catches your eye you are surely in their power. I backed away, hiding my eyes, and fell into a tub of soap suds. When I had recovered my balance the giant had disappeared."
Mrs. Caufield says that the Sasquatch was more than six feet tall and of unusually large proportions." - Toronto Daily Star, May 28, 1934
We've entered the final hour of our interview with Peter Byrne, director of the Bigfoot Research Project. The phone has stopped ringing. It's still a gray day outside with remnants of hard-packed snow on the ground.
Somewhere in the woods that start immediately across the highway, beyond the confines of Byrne's headquarters, Bigfoot could be walking right now.
What exactly, I asked, is this thing you're seeking?
"The creature stands between six feet and seven feet tall," Byrne said, "and has hair that's either black or dark brown.
"The creature has hair all over except the palms of its hands and the soles of its feet, and face. The hair is thick and flowing, perhaps on the back of the head here, and covers its whole body.
"It's hard to estimate, but Bigfoot might be 300 pounds; witnesses say 500 to 800 pounds, but I don't know. But 500 pounds is not impossible because an adult gorilla is — if he stands up and he's under six feet — weighs 500 pounds. Bigfoot are obviously heavy.
"The creature looks like a large, bipedal primate walking upright — massively built, with arms the same length as human arms, not like a gorilla's arms. The creature has huge shoulders and a very short neck, as if it has no neck."
Byrne touched his forehead. " It has a ridged head — a ridge of some kind. A creature this large probably eats herbivorous matter, probably foliage, reeds, bark, grass." Byrne touched his jaw. "If it was herbivorous [Byrne has concluded that Bigfoot is omnivorous, eating both vegetation and meat], it would need big muscles here, in the jaw, just as most animals who are herbivores have big muscles. Big muscles need an anchor line for the tendons to hold them. You see this in gorillas and to some extent in orangutans." And, therefore, Byrne said, this would account for the ridge on its forehead. "A ridge to hold the tendons for the muscles of the big jaw."
Byrne warmed up to the subject; speaking as if he has observed the creature everyday.
"People describe the face as strangely human. We're getting these reports again and again. It's a strangely human face, a slightly ridged face. A straight nose; large eyes; big jaw; big mouth; eyebrows; eye ridges that protrude a little bit more than they do in the human face. 'That thing looked human to me,' people say."
Usually the creature is observed as a single individual, although there are a few cases of Bigfoot in groups of two, three, or four. Bigfoot is seen at night or early in the morning. If the creature is seen during the day, Byrne believes that this is the result of it being disturbed by humans.
I was bothered by the fact that Bigfoot was usually seen alone; if it had human characteristics, surely it would be more familial. Byrne had obviously given this some thought.
"When we see one, that doesn't mean there isn't another one a hundred yards away moving through the brush. Look at the forest here — you can see 100 feet and that's it. Many animals are single. For example, the gibbon, the Asian ape. If you see two gibbons together, they're either mating or it's a female with a young one. It's a solitary animal. Orangutans and gorillas are solitary animals. Tigers are solitary. In November and December they mate, and they start calling. They'll call across two to three miles, you'll hear them. The males call, the females come in, and they mate."
Byrne cautioned me. "Bigfoot may mate, reproduce, and perhaps go their ways. But we speculate, there are a lot of areas of speculation with Bigfoot. When we say they're nocturnal, we speculate they're nocturnal."
If tigers call across miles, then could Bigfoot? I wondered.
"It was a kind of screaming roar. A powerful sound, a tremendous sound."
"We hear two sounds repeatedly. One is whistling, very powerful, high-pitched whistling. The other is the scream, which I think I've heard. In all my contact with this thing, all I've got is the scream, and that's all. I was camping, and it was two o'clock in the morning. And there were two screams. It was an incredible sound! It was a kind of screaming roar. I can't even attempt — It lasted about five seconds, and there was a second one lasting about five seconds. A powerful sound, a tremendous sound. And I know the animals in the Pacific Northwest fairly well here. The big animals are bear, elk, deer and mountain lion — those four animals. None of them makes a sound like this."
Bigfoot also has an odor, an unmistakable odor.
"It's possibly glandular."
Byrne described how gorillas and elephants emit an odor when they are agitated, threatened by man. "Have you smelled the smell of fear? Have you ever smelled someone who has been really nervous or frightened? There's a definite smell there, from under the arms." Byrne talked about hunting Himalayan goats. "You've heard the expression 'smells like a goat'? If the wind is right, you can smell them from 300 yards away, a tremendous smell. Powerful; goats really stink.
"Diane Fossey [famed gorilla investigator] encountered a wave of odor [when gorillas were agitated and charged]," Byrne said. So, Bigfoot's odor might be a physiological response to human threats.
This seemed reasonable to me. But why would a creature that was reportedly so elusive, so resistant to photographs or capture, even allow its self to be seen, especially on roads — I heard of such sightings.
"Inability to judge the speed of a modern vehicle. I've just been driving in Nepal, and you have to watch Nepalians on the road because they're not used to vehicles yet. You're driving 20 miles an hour, and a hill man will walk straight up to the front of the car, and he stops and he looks at you. He'll walk straight into you. He has no idea of speed. Bigfoot gets caught in the road, caught in the headlights."
"A creature more man-like than ape-like possessing unusual intelligence but prone to occasional detection by humans"
Byrne painted a fairly detailed picture. A massive, inoffensive, shy, and non-aggressive bipedal creature with superb visual proficiency and highly developed hearing. A creature more man-like than ape-like possessing unusual intelligence but prone to occasional detection by humans, however fleeting the observations. With at least a hundred credible accounts in the Bigfoot Research Project's computer, why did the skeptics still doubt?
"The complete die-hard knows nothing about the subject, has read nothing, has done no studies, and is not going to."
"With an absolute die-hard skeptic, you aren't going to get anywhere," smiled Byrne. "The complete die-hard knows nothing about the subject, has read nothing, has done no studies, and is not going to. They [Bigfoot] don't exist, that's all there is to it.
"The skeptics we see have four areas of argument that they continuously come up with.
"The first is how come with all the people living and searching, all the scientific institutions, the expeditions, and so on, no one has found one until now? Our answer is that there haven't been any expeditions. There hasn't been any professional searching. No one has done anything. The great institutions, like the Smithsonian, the National Geographic, haven't even touched it.
"The second question is, 'How come there are no carcasses, no bones?' When things die here in the Northwest, it's just like East Africa, it's just like Asia — they disappear almost immediately. They're eaten quite naturally by other animals, by bears and so on..."
"Three weeks ago when I was in Nepal I was looking at the carcass of an elephant. It was probably a 10,000-pound elephant. It had been dead for a week, and there were only the bones left. Ten thousand pounds of elephant, and the hyenas were working on the bones, coming at night and chomping them up. This is the way everything disappears.
"We lost a young man by the name of Cory Fay 20 miles from here in October 1993. He just disappeared. In October 1994, they found his rifle propped against a tree. They did a search, and all that was found were some tiny splinters of bone and a piece of his shoe. Everything else was eaten. The great garbage man out there in the forest is the bear. He can home in on a decaying carcass from half a mile away.
"The third argument is, 'It's a man in a fur suit.' The man in the fur suit jumps out on roads, goes boo to people, runs through the forest. That's a little bit unacceptable to me because of the historical record. We've got reports going back to the 1700s.
"And the fourth argument is that people are hallucinating; people are just hallucinating. So we say, 'Right. All the people up and down the Cascades here are hallucinating when they see one. But what's wrong with the people over in eastern Oregon? Why aren't they hallucinating? [There are few reports of Bigfoot from eastern Oregon.] What's wrong with the people up and around the Olympic Peninsula? A marvelous area for Bigfoot. There's something very strange about the people out there on the Olympic Peninsula — they aren't hallucinating, they should be.'
"And the fifth argument — and it's not a very good one, is: 'It's some kind of vast conspiracy of lies amongst people; there's some kind of secret society, or something.' That doesn't hold up because 99.9% of the people we've interviewed don't know anyone else who has seen one. Certainly none of the people we've interviewed know each other."
Despite these arguments to counter the skeptics, Byrne admits that there is no material evidence. "There is none. There are no bones, there are no feces. There's no hair. Nothing. I think if there was, we would know about it."
However, Byrne puts stock in other forms of evidence: old newspaper accounts going back to the 18th century and journals and letters written by missionaries and miners; Indian stories of Sasquatch; footprints (14 to 15 inches on average); the sightings; and the 1967 Roger Patterson film. This short piece of 16-mm film (990 frames), shot in northern California in October 1967, shows in daylight a tall, extraordinarily muscled, hairy man-like creature striding across an open field. Byrne has driven 5,000 miles over the years investigating the case and believes the film is of a real Bigfoot. "We think it's real, and it's universally dismissed by science, with the exception of one or two scientists. When I went to the Smithsonian years ago with a copy of it, they said if they [Bigfoot] are there, we would have known by now, we would have had one by now. I said, 'Well, did anybody go and look?' 'No, we don't go look because nothing like that exists.'"
Byrne remains undaunted. I collected my recorder up, and before leaving, Byrne showed us photographs of prints. In 18 months, funding for the Bigfoot Research Project will run out; funding may or may not be renewed. Is he frustrated by the lack of definitive evidence?
"There is an area of frustration, which is, when are we going to make a finding?"
"No, I'm not frustrated. There is an area of frustration, which is, when are we going to make a finding? Will it be another 10 years? With my age, I don't have another 10 years. In the 1960s the whole of my life stretched before me. But it's the excitement of the challenge that pushes aside the frustration."
And Peter Byrne started talking about a new set of dart guns that the Project recently bought to help secure the blood and tissue sample of a Bigfoot. "It has a dart that has a little barrel; it penetrates into the animal about a quarter of an inch. It seizes blood and tissue inside the tiny barrel, and then falls out. We only need a tiny amount of the DNA. We had tranquilizing equipment for years, but were afraid of using it because you can kill a wild creature very easily. So we bought this. It's actually safe, and now they are using it for elephants."
Somewhere out there, in the wilds of the Cascades, in the shadows cast by daylight, something huge, human-like, and stealthy rests. As the shadows lengthen, and the sun drops behind the peaks, it rises and begins moving under cover of the night.
To report a Bigfoot sighting, write or call:
The Bigfoot Research Project
Box 126
Mount Hood, Oregon
800/244-3668 or 503/352-7000
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