On a myth and a footprint

By Stewart Bell, from unknown newspaper
October 23, 1993

Is a hairy, ape-like creature with big feet in the mountains of British Columbia, carefully avoiding scientists and bounty hunters? Three recently released books revolve around this question and the search for the elusive beast that lives in the house of unsolved mysteries along with the Loch Ness Monster, Ogopogo and whoever puts the filling into Cadbury bars. For some reason this seems to be the year of the Sasquatch in the North American publishing world, which leads me to suspect it's been a slow year. Or does someone out there really take Bigfoot seriously enough to publish a 300-page "scientific" study of the issue? Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch is an attempt to bring what is so far only a campfire tale into the world of factual science. Although no Sasquatch has ever been captured-dead or alive-and no skeleton has ever been found, Grover Krantz's book painstakingly argues the case for its existence. The book reads like a physics tex, with exhausting detail, diagrams, studies of the posture of Bigfoot and photographs of large footprints. A lighter telling of the Bigfoot legend appears in Sasquatch/Bigfoot: The Search for North America's Incredible Creature,by longtime Sasquatch enthusiast Rene Dahinden and Don Hunter, a columnist with the Vancouver Province. Like Krantz, Dahinden is a believer in Bigfoot, and Hunter seems to lean that way as well. But rather than overwhelming readers with pseudo-scientific "proof" that the creature exists, the authors simply tell the stories of those who claim to have seen it. There is Albert Ostman, who claims that in 1924 he was held captive for a week by four Sasquatches. There is Myles Jack, a member of an Alberta rig crew, who believes he saw a Sasquatch near Dawson Creek in 1987. And there is Roger Patterson, who in 1967 shot a grainy, out-of-focus film of an ape-like animal in Northern California. The book is like a tabloid newspaper. It's entertaining, but only if you temporarily suspend your mental faculties. Thinking too hard about this stuff will take all the fun out of it. Richard Hoyt's Bigfoot, on the other hand, is a mystery novel that uses the Sasquatch as the backdrop for a tale of love and murder. When a real-estate developer offers $100,000 to anyone who can prove that Bigfoot exists, private eye John Denson teams up with a native Indian shaman named Willie Preettybird and a female Russian scientist to claim the prize. It is interesting that of the three books on the topic, Hoyt's work of fiction comes closest to an intelligent examination of the Bigfoot phenomenon. The other two books fail to ask the most important questions" What is it about the Bigfoot mystery that fascinates some people? Why do people believe so strongly in an animal that has never been proven to exist? Is it because of some subconscious desire to hang on to what little mystery remains in the modern, frontierless, scientific world? "The search for the Sasquatch is a lot like looking for the Holy Grail," says Dahinden. "Except it is performed by very unholy people." Perhaps they are not unholy, just confused.