Bigfoot in Texas?

By Craig Woolheater
Maps comparing river basins, precipitation amounts, and bigfoot sightings in Texas. More information.
Some people think that the Bigfoot phenomenon is strictly a Pacific Northwest occurrence. They would be sadly mistaken. There have been reported sightings in every state in the Union with the exception of Hawaii.
In East Texas, which is where the majority of the reported sightings of Bigfoot occur in the state, there is nearly 12 million acres of forestland. That is equivalent to 12 million football fields. There are four national forests and five state forests in Texas, all located in East Texas, the primary and most important forest area in Texas. The East Texas Pine Belt, or "Piney Woods" as it is commonly called, extends over forty-three counties and accounts for almost all the state's commercial timber. Marion County is smack dab in the Piney Woods.
There has been a long history of sightings in the state of Texas. One of the first in the history books is the strange case of the "The Wild Woman Of The Navidad". This is a story that was recounted in the "Legends of Texas" published by the Texas Folklore Society in 1924. The creature was described as covered in short brown hair and was very fast. She eluded capture because the horses were so afraid of the strange creature that they could not be urged within reach of the lasso. These events occurred in 1837 in the Texas settlements of the lower Navidad. Mysterious barefoot tracks were seen frequently in the area. There are Native American legends dating back hundreds of years that describe tribes of giants that were hair-covered and lived in the woods.
A report that I came across years ago was written up in a Bigfoot newsletter in 1970. It was written by a man from California who shared a barracks in the Army with two soldiers from Longview. He wrote "In or about the year 1965, there was a rash of reports of giant hairy creatures roaming the thickets and back country between Jefferson and Longview, Texas, but nearest to Longview. A man and his little daughter reported it as being a large, black and not a bear. Several head of cattle and a couple of people were supposedly killed by it. Private Jacobs was a member of a posse that hunted the creature when he was a teenager. He told me that he saw the body of one of the murdered persons and that the victim had been torn apart. At the time, he threw his gun back in the car and went home. I can't blame him, he was only 14 or 15 at the time."
We started investigating this case by digging through the newspaper and library archives in Marshall and Jefferson finally finding an article dated September 1st, 1965 that mentions the Marion County Monster Legend. The article was titled "Boy Says For Real Sighting of Monster Renews Marion Legend." The story is about a 13 year old boy who was chased by an ape-like creature while walking home from a friend's house one afternoon. 2 men picked the boy up in a car and drove him home. The boy described it as "about 7 feet tall with thick long black hair all over its body except for the face—the face, stomach and palms of its hands." Marion County Deputy Sheriff George Whatley investigated the scene, but found no evidence of a large animal having been there. A UPI clipping, dated September 20, 1965, from Jefferson, Texas, entitled "Town Fed Up With Monster Hunters" was also found concerning the incident. Sheriff Luke Walker is quoted as being upset by the Bigfoot hunters from three states who had overrun his small northeast-Texas town since a thirteen-year-old boy came running out of the woods three weeks earlier telling of seeing a big, black hairy thing.
Charles DeVore of Karnack, one of our members, started doing some follow up investigation, using the names found in the articles. Sheriff Luke Walker and Deputy George Whatley had both passed away. He went to current Jefferson law officers who were very helpful and directed him to one who worked for Sheriff Luke Walker back in the early 70's. This officer related that he had spent many hours with Sheriff Walker back then talking over events of his career and their was no possibility that any Bigfoot killed anyone around Marion County during the 60's or any other time in Jefferson history. This officer even called several people that he knew that were around back then and none of them knew of any Bigfoot killing.
Next on the list was Dwain Dennis who owned the Jefferson Jimplecute at that time. Charles found him to be in good health and with a very sharp memory. He corroborated the Marshall News Messenger story about the 13-year-old kid who claimed to have been chased by a Bigfoot. He had interviewed the kid himself that day. He related that something had scared him very bad but to this day is not sure what it was. He feels that the tracks that he found were all faked evidence.
He and his wife spent all their spare time for about 6 weeks researching into that story and a few related stories that sprang up from the original. His newspaper articles generated calls from throughout the country and from several foreign countries. Many other stories sprang up in other media and tabloids and got embellished from there. While many people did come to Jefferson to learn more or chase down embellished rumors, or hunt down the imaginary killer Bigfoot, there was no posse organized to hunt it down. All the wild stories were generated by other outlets and totally false. He stated that there were no killings in or around Marion County or Jefferson that could even remotely be blamed on a Bigfoot.
Photo purported to be of the Lake Worth Monster, taken by Allen Plaster. (Click image for larger view.)
Probably the most famous of the Texas reports is the case of the Lake Worth Monster. This case hit the public consciousness in the summer of 1969. While America was caught up in the moon landing, sightings of this hairy creature were being reported in the Greer Island area of Lake Worth in Fort Worth, Texas. The animal was described as being approximately seven feet tall, weighing in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds, covered with white hair and walked upright like a man. It was seen repeatedly throughout the year and during July the area was packed with locals who had witnessed the beast. At one point it was said to have become annoyed at the onlookers and hurled an automobile wheel and tire at them from the distance of five hundred feet. Needless to say, they leapt into their cars and departed the area post haste.
The last sighting of the creature that year was by Charles Buchanan on November 7. He was sleeping in the open bed of his pickup truck and was awakened when his sleeping bag was suddenly grabbed by a creature and was pulled from the truck. He stuffed a bag of chicken in its mouth and it shuffled off into the water and swam towards Greer Island.
This series of events was the impetus of my interest in this field. I was a child of nine years old that summer and my grandparents lived in Fort Worth. They had a boat on Eagle Mountain Lake, which was separated by a dam from Lake Worth. I can still remember seeing the headlines in the Fort Worth Star Telegram about the "Goatman". We spent many a night anchored out in the middle of the lake and my imagination ran rampant with all manner of scenarios of the monster climbing aboard our boat.
That same summer something was going on in the Sulphur River bottoms near Commerce, Texas. Jerry Matlock and Kenneth Wilson saw a creature that they described as about eight feet tall, man-like in posture and covered with brown hair. They went back the next day and found footprints left by the beast. "I put my arm down in one of the prints" Matlock recalled, "and that print was as long as from my elbow to the tips of my outstretched fingers". Our group has recently contacted Mr. Wilson and we are planning to go with him to the site.
There were two separate sightings in the same area in September of 1973, near the town of Peerless. Again they were in the Sulphur River bottoms. Are we beginning to detect a pattern here?
Later that fall, Kenneth Thurman of Paris, Texas had an encounter with what he described as "a hairy bipedal creature over eight feet tall". This occurred 30 miles Northeast of Commerce, Texas. Once again it was not far from the Sulphur River. Mr. Thurman was making butane gas deliveries in a rural community. He stopped the truck and he and a co-worker stepped outside to relieve themselves. They noticed a foul odor in the air. They spotted a long shadow moving toward the back of the truck. Mr. Thurman found himself facing the rapidly approaching creature that was as tall as the butane tanks on the truck. "That thing wasn't four feet from me when I dove into that truck," Thurman said. "Listen, I'm a hunter and I'm not scared of the woods or anything in it, but that thing reached out for me and I was afraid for my life. I don't know what I'd have done if it caught me. It must have come out of the woods from behind the truck. We dove in, threw that truck in gear and took off. Bet it wasn't two seconds from the time I saw that thing until we took off." Thurman got a better look at the creature in the side mirror as he sped off. After making the deliveries, the men had to take the only route back to the highway, the same road they had come in on. Thurman sped through the area and entered the highway.
At this point they saw it for a second time. It was running in the same direction as the truck, 75 yards out in a field. The road curved ahead, but before the creature crossed their path, it ran into the woods. "I was doing about 60 miles per hour and it was outrunning the truck," Thurman said. He reported the incident to his company but he was laughed at.
We received a report from a woman that was traveling to Lake O' The Pines with her husband and daughter. She saw a large, ape-like creature squatting down next to the fence line as they drove past it. The only movement she detected was its head turning to face them as they drove by. Her daughter turned around in the back seat and watched it stand up and run off after they passed it. This took place on a Friday evening in the summer of 1974.
From November of 1974 through August of 1976 there were numerous sightings in the San Antonio area culminating in two sightings near Kelly Air Force Base. A witness saw a seven-foot-tall brown Bigfoot run out of his backyard. A few days later his next-door neighbor saw a three-foot-tall brown creature sitting on her back step. It then ran off on two legs.
The summer of 1976 brought a sighting in Hallsville, Texas where a witness saw a twelve-foot-tall silver-haired Bigfoot shucking corn. A smaller red-tinged female creature accompanied it.
July 6 of 1977, three witnesses saw the "Hawley Him", and it threw rocks at them. This occurred at the Abilene Boys Ranch near Hawley, Texas. The next month, three women saw a Bigfoot on the road near Trinidad, Texas, which borders Cedar Creek Lake. Two weeks later a man saw a seven-foot-tall Bigfoot on a road near Corsicana, which is in the same general area.
In January of 1978, a woman in Sand Hill reported to the Harrison County Sheriff's Department that a Bigfoot growled at her, and was fighting with some dogs in the woods in the community about eight miles west of Marshall on U.S. Hwy. 80.
In June of 1978, in the town of Vidor, Texas, a couple had so many sightings of a Bigfoot around their house that they were forced to move out. August of 1978 brought a flap of activity to the Commerce, Texas area in the vicinity of guess where? The Sulphur River bottoms. On the nineteenth, in broad daylight, a witness saw a Bigfoot cross the road ahead of them and it went across a pasture towards the river. Also that month a witness saw a seven-and-half-foot-tall Bigfoot cross a forty-two foot wide road in three steps while he was driving at night. Two days later on the same road, three boys saw a Bigfoot around midnight.
There have been several reports out of the Woodlawn area. A family out after visiting family on Easter Sunday decided to stop to commune with nature while the husband did a little target practice. After only a few shots, a large animal lunged at them and chased them back to their car. On New Year's Eve 1996 a mother and her son saw a large animal crouched down on the side of the road.
In the fall of 1987, a deer hunter on the southeast side of Benton Lake off Big Cypress Bayou above Caddo Lake observed a large, hair covered animal stand up from a crouched position in one foot of water. The creature did not detect the camouflaged hunter as it turned its head from side to side, walked out of the water and disappeared into the woods.
In January 1992, the Hamilton Herald News printed a lengthy letter by a man that claimed that while driving home from Stephenville late at night with his family, they saw a huge, hairy creature on the riverbank. Here, in part, is what the letter said: "It stood, I would say, approximately seven to eight feet tall, weighing probly (sic) between four to five hundred pounds. Its body was covered with hair. It had long arms that extended down to its knees. Its face looked almost human…It looked at us and growled a low moan, showing four fang-like teeth, two on top, two on the bottom, and the rest flat like humans. Then it hurled over the guard rail and ran off into the night toward the brush along the river banks on the west side…For the record, we were not drunk or doing drugs or anything like that, and we have respectable jobs in this and surrounding towns. We are not crackpots. I thought maybe there are others living here who have had a similar experience and would come forward now that the door is open to talk about it."
It did have that effect on Hilda Lunsford. She wrote the newspaper telling about her experience early one morning in 1985 while driving between Olin and Cranfills Gap. "A huge thing came out on the side of the road and got right in front of the car and stood up on its hind legs and I stopped and locked my doors an the car and waited to see what it was going to do," Ms. Lunsford wrote. "It looked right at me and it had a face of an ape and it was [a] big black something…Yes I was laughed at for telling about it, but every word is true."
On October 5, 1995, Danny Sweeten had an encounter near Cleveland, Texas, forty miles North of Houston. While out surveying some land he was considering buying, he came upon a creature lying on the ground. The animal rose on two legs and ran toward Sweeten. It hit him in the chest and caught him under the chin with its forearm, flipping him over and knocking two teeth loose. He was dazed, but managed to shoot some video as the creature retreated into the woods. He quickly left the area.
Still image taken from video shot by Danny Sweeten. (Click image for larger view.)
Sweeten was harassed by an investigator from a non-existent government agency the man named as the Federal Wildlife Protection Agency. He was told to turn over the tape. Sweeten eventually sold the tape to the television show Strange Universe. The footage was shown on November 3, 1997, along with comments by several well-known Bigfoot researchers. Loren Coleman was interviewed along with Danny Sweeten on Art Bell's radio program Coast to Coast. This is where I first learned of the incident. Luke Gross investigated this case before he and I co-founded the Texas Bigfoot Research Center. His opinion is that this footage is genuine and shows an animal, not a man in a suit.
In November of 1998, two squirrel hunters encountered an eight-foot-tall hair-covered creature near Longview. One of them shot at it 3 times. The creature grunted as if hit, then roared loudly. They ran through the woods, towards one of the hunter's home. It followed them, running upright through the woods, making its own trail to their left, keeping pace with them. They felt that it could have caught them at any time, however it stopped once they reached the clearing near the house. It remained in the wood line, circling the house, roaring and shaking the trees. A pig came up missing that night. The homeowner went out to investigate. He shined his spotlight and saw the creature again, taking another shot at it.
In December of 2001, a deer hunter saw a "7-foot upright stooped ape like figure dark brown in color." This was near Marshall. He observed it for two minutes through his riflescope from a distance of at least 150 yards. He observed it picking up apples that the hunter had put out to attract deer.
We received two reports of sightings in Harleton in 2003. One was an 8-foot Bigfoot crossing Highway 154 in front of a car at the Little Cypress Bayou. The other was repeated activity and sightings at a dog kennel near Harleton.
There is a common denominator to most of the reports listed here: water. All occurred near a lake, river or creek. Many of the encounters took place near the Sulphur River or one of its tributaries. The Sulphur River runs through the city of Commerce and winds its way throughout Northeast Texas. It exits the state of Texas south of Texarkana, near the area where the reports of the Fouke Monster originated. These reports were the basis for the 1970's movie "The Legend of Boggy Creek".
So as is plain to see, when someone says that there are no Bigfoot creatures in Texas, I would clearly have to disagree. If you or someone you know has seen one of these creatures, please contact the Texas Bigfoot Research Center through our website at www.texasbigfoot.com or at the following address:
Texas Bigfoot Research Center
P. O. Box 191711
Dallas, TX 75219
1-877-529-5550 (toll-free)
Discuss this article on the Bigfoot Forums >
References
Bord, Janet and Bord, Colin, The Bigfoot Casebook, Stackpole Books, PA, 1982
Clarke, Sallie Ann, The Lake Worth Monster of Greer Island, Ft. Worth, Texas, author, TX, 1969
Clarke, Sallie Ann, personal correspondence and in-person interview, 1999
Coleman, Loren, Deep in the Heart of Texas, Fate Magazine, OH, February, 1998
Green, John, State and Province Sightings Data, Bobbie Short's website, Bigfoot Encounters
Jackson, Kathy, Sasquatch Watch, Dallas Morning News, TX, February 27, 1992
Jones, Mark and Smith, Teresa Ann, Has Bigfoot moved to Texas?, Fate Magazine, OH, July, 1979
Texas Folklore Society, Legends of Texas, Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, 1924 Courtesy of Bobbie Short
Revision History
This article was originally published on the Texas Bigfoot Research Center's website and is republished here by permission. All rights reserved by the TBRC. On August 22, 2004, this article was revised to reflect a version published in the Jeffersonian.

2003 International Bigfoot Symposium Keynote Address

By John Green
John Green with Bob Gimlin at the Willow Creek Museum in Bluff Creek, CA
Most of you will have noticed that I am not Jane Goodall, and you may well be wondering why I have been asked to fill her spot at this symposium. Well, you are missing the obvious. We have the same initials.
That Dr. Goodall has been unable to keep her commitment to speak here is most unfortunate. Her presence might well have focused the attention of the media on the fact, which they have so far largely succeeded in ignoring, that scientists of world-wide reputation are starting to take a serious look at the evidence that humans are not the only bipedal primates on Earth.
That, in my opinion, is the current development that holds the greatest promise for the future of Bigfoot/sasquatch investigation...
It is by no means just Jane Goodall.
In recent years I have had considerable contact with:
* George Schaller, director of science for the Wildlife Conservation Society
* Esteban Sarmiento, primate specialist at the American Museum of Natural History
* Russel Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and chairman of the world-wide Primate Specialist Group
* Daris Swindler, author of the atlas of comparative anatomy of man and chimpanzee.
All but Dr. Mittermeier have spent time examining the Skookum cast.
All of them are on our side.
They have all stated, all but one of them publicly, that the evidence already accumulated establishes the case for full scientific participation in getting to the bottom of this matter. Dr. Mittermeier told me that he has long considered taking up the hunt himself--and he told Jeff Meldrum that he would not fear being criticized for doing so, because he and his team have already discovered several other unknown primates.
Dr. Swindler, whom I have known for more than 30 years, has appeared in documentaries on this subject in the past as the obligatory skeptical scientist. Now, after careful examination of the best heel print in the Skookum cast, he has expressed the conviction that it is the heel print of a large unknown primate - and he would be here with us today if his health permitted.
With this high-profile support, and with the increasing number of less eminent but fully-qualified zoologists and physical anthropologists who are already participating at their own expense, the time may well be near when scientific institutions with resources and funding will join us in our search.
All that, however, is in the future, and I am really about the past. The number of individuals and groups now participating in the investigation and the amount of information now available on the internet have gone far beyond my ability to monitor, and my own recent efforts have produced nothing worthy of the keynote position that has been assigned to me here.
What I do have is experience, nearly a half century of it, so mainly I will talk about that.
I would like to start with a few words about Bob Titmus.
Those of you who have had a chance to go through the Bigfoot wing of the Willow Creek museum will have noted that most of the items exhibited are his and you have probably made the connection that without him there would be no Bigfoot wing and we wouldn’t be holding this symposium.
What you may not realize is that without Bob Titmus there would have been no magazine articles by Ivan Sanderson, no expeditions funded by Tom Slick, no movie by Roger Patterson, no books by John Green or Grover Krantz or John Bindernagel - and in all probability most of you would never have heard of Bigfoot.
Bob never wrote a book and never sought publicity, so he never became well known, but not even Rene Dahinden dedicated his life to the hunt for Bigfoot to the extent that Bob did, and no one in the 40 years that he was active accomplished anything to compare with what he accomplished.
If you think that statement is extreme, try to think of anyone else whose original materials - not clippings or copies - could form the basis for a substantial museum exhibit. And yet almost all of this is from California. The bulk of his time was spent in British Columbia and the material from the most productive period, when he was able to spend full time in the hunt, was lost when his boat burned and sank while he was on shore.
Bob was a hunter all his life, and was also a master taxidermist, so he knew a lot more about animal sign and animal anatomy than most of us. He also had almost unlimited patience and perseverance, great assets when looking for individual hairs in the underbrush. What’s more, his subconscious mind was tuned to continuously check out animal tracks from a moving car no matter what else had his attention, the way most of us are subconsciously aware of the traffic around us.
From the time in 1958 when his old friend Jerry Crew came back from the Bluff Creek road job with a cast that proved that the huge tracks were not just big bear tracks, Bob devoted all the time he could afford to the search for the track maker.
Initial success came quickly. After only a few weeks he and his friend Ed Patrick, who is here today, found on a sandbar in Bluff Creek slightly smaller tracks of distinctly different shape, proving that “Bigfoot” was not just a freak individual, but a member of a population. The casts that Bob made on that early occasion are on display in the museum, and are still among the best ever made anywhere.
Progress was much slower after that, and a few years later Bob abandoned his beloved taxidermy, selling his business so that he could spend full time in what was then a hot area on the coast of British Columbia. There he suffered back injuries that left him fighting extreme pain for the rest of his life, but he kept up the hunt, including many returns for weeks or months at Bluff Creek. On one of those trips he made his invaluable series of footprint casts from the Patterson film site, and on another he drained a pond to get at what I consider are probably the only genuine hand impressions ever cast.
Another accomplishment, which should have settled this whole matter years ago, was gathering one by one from twigs where he had reason to believe a sasquatch had passed, a set of hairs that were identified by radioimmunoassay as having to be either chimpanzee, gorilla or human.
The eminent scientist who made the identification had previously established by the same method that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to gorillas, a finding since confirmed through DNA, so that identification was as good as saying “it’s something close to all three but not any of them.”
Bob knew they were not human hairs, because there were guard hairs that all tapered to a point, while human guard hairs, all on the head, grow continuously and have cut-off ends.
That they weren’t chimp or gorilla hairs was equally obvious, since they were brown and found on twigs in a California forest. That they were something different from all three could have been established in minutes with a comparison microscope, but the scientist had ground up every hair.
I spent a lot of time with Bob and I could tell stories that you would find a lot more entertaining than what I am actually going to say, but my main role in this investigation, especially in recent years, has been the collection and study of information, and since I have been at it for so long and since I no longer write books, I believe that I should use this opportunity to pass on to you some of what I think I have learned.
Let me stress that I am speaking strictly about just one form of unrecognized bipedal primate, the huge one that makes the enormous footprints in North America. There are others described, particularly in Eurasia, that I don’t pretend to know much about, and those which are a lot smaller presumably have a very different history.
Also I should warn you that some of the things I have to say will be things many of you don’t want to hear, and may refuse to accept. Being, like a lot of sasquatch hunters, a contrary sort of person, I’ll get to that part right away.
First, and foremost, we are not involved in a story that can be shaped to fit our own fantasies, and it is not necessarily one with a happy ending.
Most of us probably started out with a mental image of what these creatures are, but if we aren’t prepared to amend it to fit the facts as we learn them we are not likely to accomplish anything. Most of us also want to believe that our efforts will be beneficial to the sasquatch in the future. I sincerely hope that will be the eventual result, but experience suggests that a disturbing episode will come first.
The evidence is crystal clear that we are dealing with animals, not semi-humans or super-humans. That means that anything that any of us do towards proving that sasquatch exist brings closer the day when zoologists and physical anthropologists will take over from the amateurs.
They will want to study these creatures in every possible way, and some, I expect, will get official permission to collect for dissection not one, but several.
I am, of course, familiar with the argument that we should only study sasquatch the way Dr. Goodall studies chimpanzees, and such methods will certainly be tried. I doubt, however that they will prove to be practical with creatures that are so much more mobile in their home environment than humans, and even if they are practical, they cannot provide all the information that will be wanted.
The anatomy of creatures that walk in much the same way that humans do is going to be studied in detail. To do that effectively will involve dissection, and will require more than one cadaver, because the cuts made while exploring one bodily system destroy the others.
You may consider what I have described so horrifying that it will never be allowed, and attitudes towards animal rights may have changed to the point where that will be the case, but 30 years ago I was shown a freezer full of chimpanzees stacked up like cordwood awaiting dissection for just such a study.
So if your top priority is to make sure that no sasquatch is killed, your most logical course is to do what over the years quite a few like-minded people have already done—drop the whole thing and hope, although of course it won’t happen, that everyone else will do the same.
I call these big creatures sasquatch because that is the name for them where I come from, far older than “Bigfoot”, and not so suggestive that there is only one of them. But why do I call them animals? Not just because of what I have learned about them in the last 46 years, but more because of what scientists have learned during that period about human origins.
Fossil finds have established that more than a million years ago our forbears had already lost the primate’s best natural weapons, fighting teeth. And for evolution to reduce their dental armament until it became no better than our own must have required a similar previous period when those small, slow bipeds had weapons in their hands.
That gives some idea of the almost unimaginable amount of time that human ancestors spent relying more and more on mental adaptions, mastering the use of weapons and tools, precise communication and group co-ordination, in order to survive on the dangerous African plains and become what we are today.
The idea that creatures, which emerged from that time period, equipped with magnificent physical adaptions also acquired mental abilities similar or superior to our own may have romantic appeal but it is evolutionary nonsense.
But they walk upright like us, so they must be our close relatives. Something as unusual as upright bipedalism couldn’t have evolved twice. That is a compelling common-sense argument, but science has recently blown a huge hole in it.
Among the few higher primates known to exist there are two very unusual methods of locomotion, one is upright bipedalism, the other is knuckle walking. We are the only recognized bipeds, but there are two knuckle-walking groups, chimpanzees and gorillas.
Although chimpanzees are far more arboreal than gorillas their feet are very similar, and like gorillas they have special pads for walking on the backs of their fingers.
Common sense says that such odd adaptions must have a common origin, so chimps and gorillas must be each other’s closest relatives. Immune reactions and DNA analysis, however, both say that the chimpanzee’s nearest relative is us.
Knuckle walking, therefore, must have evolved after the gorilla’s ancestors started their own branch of the family tree, and chimpanzees and gorillas must have evolved it separately.
I am not submitting that as proof that humans and sasquatch evolved upright bipedalism separately, but it does prove that it could have happened, and considering that our DNA is almost identical to that of chimpanzees and bonobos, the chance that we are even more closely related to sasquatch seems to me to be a very slim one.
The other thing I have to say that may well upset some of you is this:
There is nothing new about people claiming that they have been able to make detailed observations of sasquatches and know all about their appearance and behavior. People with stories like that have turned up numerous times in the past 45 years, and so far the end result has always been disappointment. If you are involved with such a person, be cautious. I have watched former colleagues get so deeply committed and then so sharply disillusioned that it soured them on the whole subject and they dropped out.
Similarly, there is nothing new about people believing they see or hear or smell evidence of sasquatch presence almost every time they go out in the woods.
But unidentified sounds and smells are just that, unidentified sounds and smells, and shapes found in photographs that could be sasquatches could also not be. There are other agencies besides sasquatch that can take food, make beds of vegetation, break trees and branches, move rocks, pound on things or make interesting depressions in the ground.
There have been cases where people have gone far beyond any reasonable extreme to fool someone with manufactured evidence of sasquatch presence, and also cases where people have gone pretty far to fool themselves. Try not to add to that list.
All of us surely hope that some day some such story will be proved to be true, and at my age I tend to wish very hard that it will happen soon, but my experience offers no reason for optimism. Many years ago I decided that people who saw so much and knew so much were a long way ahead of me, so they had no need of my help and I would just await definite results. I am still waiting.
For anyone hoping to persuade mainstream science to take on this quest and provide the expertise and resources to bring it to a conclusion, episodes of this sort do real harm. Those who take them seriously end up looking foolish, and the prospect of looking foolish is surely one of the main reasons why few of the scientists that we know have an interest in this subject do anything about it, and why there is no financial or institutional support for those that do take it up.
In this respect I have my own cross to bear, the Albert Ostman story. How could we have taken seriously his tale about being carried off in his sleeping bag by a big male sasquatch, being kept corralled in a box canyon with a family that included an old lady, a young male and a younger female, and escaping by getting the old male to swallow a box of snuff?
Albert was a very believable fellow, who handled tough cross-examination with cheerful composure, swore to his story without hesitation, and stuck to it until he died, but I wouldn’t believe him if he were telling it today.
Today, however, he would have easy sources for his descriptions of those four individuals and what they did. When his story came to light, in 1957, the opposite was the case.
Sasquatch were not commonly thought of as completely hair-covered creatures living much the same life as a bear, instead their public image was that of a tribe of giant Indians, hairy only on their heads, who lived in villages, held annual get-togethers on a special mountain, and used signal fires.
His descriptions, so contrary to the media image of his time, have stood up wonderfully well over the years. More than that, he was questioned for hours by Daris Swindler and the veterinarian from the Seattle primate center, and they told me that the physical details and the actions he said he had witnessed all rang true.
Did he actually observe such creatures, in whatever circumstances? There is just his story, with no supporting evidence, and that is unfortunate, because there are elements in his story that would be very significant but are not confirmed by subsequent reports. No one else, to my knowledge, has claimed that the females go out and gather food to bring back to a home place, or that sasquatch sleep in woven blankets of bark and moss, and while there is indeed a widespread assumption that they live in family groups the bulk of evidence suggests, to me at least, that they do not.
Another witness who contributed some unique elements of information did have evidence to show.
Glen Thomas, a logger living in Colton, Oregon, eventually claimed four separate sightings - which is more than enough to set alarm bells ringing - but his first story, of watching a big male sasquatch dig deep into broken rock high up on a mountain ridge to get at hibernating rodents, was backed up by the hole in the rocks, five feet deep, as steep-sided as a well, and obviously beyond human ability to duplicate without machinery.
He also had something to say bearing on the family hypothesis. A female and infant were with the big male and shared in eating the rodents, but Glen noted that the young one was always careful to keep on the other side of its mother from the male.
Glen Thomas did not tell his first story until after the Patterson movie was public knowledge, but another account of exceptionally detailed observations came to light not just before the movie, but before the first “Bigfoot” cast was made in 1958.
William Roe, a man whom I later learned had an established reputation as an accurate observer of wildlife, told of watching a six-foot, very heavy, hair-covered, obviously female creature in a small clearing on a mountain near Tete Jaune Cache, British Columbia. He said it was eating from a bush, not berries, but the leaves. (A full-size copy of a drawing of the animal, made by his daughter at his direction, is on display here.)
The Ostman and Roe stories had a lot to do with my becoming caught up in this investigation so long ago, but there was another that was even more instrumental. That was something that had taken place at Ruby Creek, British Columbia, in 1941. As a sighting report it was nothing special, a women living in an isolated home on an Indian reserve told of seeing a hairy giant approach from the nearby woods. She fled, but a group of men went to investigate and found a series of huge humanlike tracks, which, among other things, indicated that the track maker had stepped casually over a four-foot railway fence.
I was told that story in 1957 by one of the men involved, someone I already knew and respected, and I later spoke with three other people who had seen the tracks. I was also told that a deputy sheriff from Bellingham, Washington, had come to investigate at the time. He had since died, but from his son I obtained a tracing of a footprint cast that he had made.
When I came to this area in 1958 I had that tracing with me, and, as you can see, it is almost a perfect match for a tracing that Bob Titmus had made from Jerry Crew’s “Bigfoot” cast.
Ordinarily at this point I might go on to tell of seeing some old tracks on the Bluff Creek Road on that occasion and of returning to see the second type of tracks found by Bob Titmus, and also of my experiences with Roger Patterson before and after he got his movie. The time to deal with those events, however, is tomorrow afternoon in the panel discussion, with other people who were much more closely involved than I was.
For the first time at any symposium, you will have the opportunity to hear directly from Bob Gimlin, who was with Roger on that fateful day, from Ed Patrick, who was with Bob when they found the new tracks, and from Ed Schellenberg and perhaps others, who were there when the original Bigfoot tracks showed up on the Bluff Creek jobsite.
I have mentioned that the bulk of evidence does not support the hypothesis that sasquatch live in family groups. On what basis do I make that statement?
Well, I wasn’t always the homebody I tend to be today. I won’t bore you with specifics, but I spent many years and traveled many miles stirring up, investigating and recording sighting reports and footprint finds, and I conducted an information exchange involving most of the investigators active at the time.
It certainly didn’t compare with what the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has done in recent years, but it went on a lot longer, and the number of reports that I had on file grew year by year from dozens to hundreds and eventually to thousands. For a while I even tried to keep up with all the information that became available after the internet got going, but that has now grown beyond what I care to attempt.
Every few years I used to go through a complex exercise in trying to analyze the information in those reports, counting tiny symbols entered on big sheets of graph paper, until that became completely impractical. Then, about 10 years ago, I switched to trying to do it with a computer—and I knew nothing about computers.
Sasquatch hunting in the early days used to be stimulating, even exciting at times, occasionally hilarious. Entering thousands of reports in a computer is just a wearisome grind, and many a sad software story is involved before you even get to that stage. I won’t bore you with specifics, but nothing comes easy.
In any event, for the past several years I have had thousands of reports entered, currently just over 4,000, and considerable ability to get answers to questions from them.
For many questions only a minority of the reports contain any answers, but nearly all reports tell how many creatures were involved and their size. Currently out of 3,684 such reports 3,325 list single adults and 171 more than one adult. Small creatures by themselves were reported 111 times, and small creatures with one adult 37 times.
Only 40, or just over one percent of the reports, involve combinations of large and small creatures that may have been families including an adult male and female.
Only 32 of the creatures seen alone were described as adult females, so it seems plain, assuming that sasquatch do exist, that only the adult males normally behave in ways that expose them to a risk of being seen by humans.
That does leave open the possibility that females and young are often present but remain out of sight, however it seems to me beyond reason to elevate that possibility to an assumption. The family of one male, one female and their offspring is, after all, unknown among large higher primates other than man.
It has always been my hope that someone would show up who could write a program that would set the computer, on its own, searching day and night for relationships among the hundreds of items of information until they revealed something unsuspected that would be useful. So far that hasn’t happened, but by less exotic means the computer has provided interesting answers to some frequently asked questions, and has poked holes in some of the things we used to think we knew.
Consider smell, for instance. It seems as if people are always reporting that sasquatch have a terrible smell. In Florida they are even called “skunk apes.” The numbers tell a very different story, at least for western North America. In the spring of 1995, when I had only western entries completed, strong smell was mentioned in only 72 out of 923 descriptions.
Of course in many cases, because of distance or some other reason, there could have been a smell that the witness did not detect, so I checked the few entries where the animal was reported to be 10 feet or less away and not separated from the witness by glass or any other barrier. The result, there were 14 mentions of a strong smell and four of a mild smell, while in 26 encounters there was no smell noticed at all.
We used to speculate whether the lack of smell in some cases, strong smell in others, indicated that sasquatch shared with dogs an inclination to roll in strong-smelling things, but gorilla researcher Dian Fossey has provided a more likely explanation. In her book “Gorillas in the Mist” she refers several times to a powerful “fear odor” produced by adult male gorillas under stress, and notes that they have special glands in their armpits from which the scent is emitted.
As to frequently asked questions, how many times have we heard the challenge, “If these things exist how come hunters (or loggers, or prospectors etc.) never see them?”
(An even more frequent question is “If these things exist how come nobody ever sees them?”, but you don’t need a computer to answer that.)
As to the people whose recreation or occupation regularly takes them into the woods, the answer, of course, is that they do report sightings and they do find tracks.
At the end of 1995 I had 1162 entries of sightings and track finds in which the activity of the witness was noted. Of these, 125 were hunting, 34 logging, 23 prospecting, 10 trapping and 77 involved in other outdoor occupations.
The commonest sighting report, by far, was something seen on or beside a road from a car, and the second most common was something seen outside by a person in a house. Of encounters in the wild, at least a third were by hunters or people working there.
One of the questions that we ourselves tend to ask is whether sasquatch migrate with the seasons, the hope being that they might regularly pass by the same spot at the same time of year. In 1996 I looked at the evidence of the computer entries in three different ways:
* The relationship of altitude to the time of year
* The relationship of direction of travel to the time of year
* The relationship of location to the time of year
None of these showed any consistent pattern that would indicate migration.
Altitudes were highest in summer, but lowest in the spring, not the winter.
Direction of travel was a mishmash of inadequate numbers, but showing a slight majority heading south in the summer and towards the ocean beaches in the spring—the opposite of what the migration hypothesis would suggest.
Latitude and longitude put the center of observations in all four seasons within a circle just 30 miles in diameter.
Considering that the examples I have just given were picked because I thought you might find them the most interesting, you can see that sasquatch hunting by computer is not particularly exhilarating even after the task of doing the entries is completed.
I am glad, however, to have been able to provide data for studies other researchers have done, and perhaps I will be able to do the same for some of you in the future.
I have said that the events at Bluff Creek in the 1950s and 60s can best be dealt with at the panel discussion tomorrow, but there is one aspect that very much involves the present, and perhaps I can dispose of it now.
I am referring to the claim made last year by his family that the late Ray Wallace the contractor on the road construction job where the first “Bigfoot” track was cast, made those footprints by walking around wearing a pair of wooden feet.
Had the first newspaper to carry the story behaved responsibly, and asked the Wallaces to demonstrate that they could duplicate those tracks with the wooden feet that they displayed as proof, that story would never have been printed. Instead it was treated as revealed truth, and it was republished and broadcast all over the world, with some wonderful embellishments.
One newspaper quoted a Wallace nephew saying that Ray had sent younger members of the clan out to make all of the big tracks that have been reported all over the continent. Others took a mention of Ray making movies of his wife in a fur suit and twisted it to include the Patterson movie.
Even the newspaper in Eureka, which had printed the original stories that introduced “Bigfoot” to the world, got on the bandwagon with a yarn about how the publisher at the time had known all along it was a Ray Wallace hoax.
It was a totally irresponsible performance by the media, and frankly a lot of people involved in Bigfoot research weren’t any better. Their reaction might be summed up as: “Okay, Ray Wallace faked the Bluff Creek tracks but we have other tracks that are genuine.”
They didn’t bother to find out, any more than the media did, whether the Wallace claims were true, and seemed perfectly willing to discard as evidence tracks that are the most thoroughly investigated and best authenticated of any that have ever been found.
The current Wallaces actually don’t show any sign of knowing much about the Bluff Creek tracks and may even believe that what they are saying is true, although one of them told Rick Noll that his father never actually said he had faked the tracks, they just grew up knowing he had.
The wooden feet that they showed the media, as you can see in the full-size photos of them on display here, do not match the original “Bigfoot”. They do appear to be attempts to duplicate the casts made by Bob Titmus of the different set of tracks he found on a Bluff Creek sandbar, but one of them is so crudely carved that they would not likely fool anybody.
I expect those feet were just made to see whether tracks could be faked with them, something that probably, like myself, some of you have also tried. The answer, of course, is that you can make passable tracks in flat ground if it is soft enough, but in firm materials or up and down slopes, forget it.
Some of the original tracks were in very firm materials, and some went up and down steep slopes. This museum has had an offer in circulation for several months now of $100,000 for anyone who can show how they could have been faked.
So far there is no sign that any Wallace cares to try for the money, but perhaps they haven’t heard of it. The same editors that swallowed whole their nonsensical story refused to believe a real one. Priding themselves, I suppose, on not falling for a publicity stunt, they gave the $100,000 offer no publicity at all.
Granted that the $100,000 was put up in an attempt to get publicity, since all other attempts to get the media to counteract the damage they had done had failed, but it is a genuine offer. The first person who can demonstrate how the Bluff Creek tracks could have been faked will be paid $100,000. Tomorrow, you when you hear the people who were involved at the time describe what they observed; I think you will agree that there is no cause for concern that the money will ever be claimed.
What is the story about Ray Wallace? I never met him, because he was never around Willow Creek the times I was here, but I was told early on about his reputation as a practical joker, and in later years I got occasional letters and phone calls from him.
According to newspaper stories he was pretty upset in 1958 about people suggesting he had faked the tracks, pointing out, undoubtedly correctly, that the whole thing was interfering with his contract and costing him money.
It wasn’t long, though, until he began to try to get in on the action, telling outlandish tales about his adventures with Bigfoot. He even tried to sell Tom Slick a movie of Bigfoot he that claimed to have taken. I wasn’t there, but I was told that Ray asked for $10,000 and wouldn’t show Tom the film until he had the money.
We had learned by then that Tom could be very gullible at times, but that wasn’t one of the times, so we never knew what would have happened if he had agreed to pay.
We thought then that it was an attempted swindle, but having learned more of Ray’s reputation from people who knew him well and admired him I feel sure now that it would have turned out to be just one of his pranks.
A while later, after he had returned to the area in Washington where he came from, Ray got involved in selling very odd looking footprint casts, supposedly from the Mount Saint Helen’s apes. I never heard that he had casts from Bluff Creek, and I’m sure he never claimed publicly that he had faked the tracks there; because he would certainly have been called on to prove it.
To give you something of the flavor of the man, I’ll quote a couple of passages from of his letters.
In 1961 he wrote to the Klam-ity Kourier, here in Willow Creek, as follows:
Big foot used to be very tame, as I have seen him almost every morning on my way to work… I would sit in my pickup and toss apples out of the window to him. He never did catch an apple but he sure tried. Then as he ate the apples I would have my movie camera clipping off more footage of him… I have talked to several movie companies about selling my movies which would last for three hours. The best offer I’ve had so far is $250,000.
A letter to me in April 1979, included the following:
… everyone says who has heard Big Foots screams in northern California, before all the Big Foots were killed and hauled down the Klamath River in a tug boat and out into the ocean 12 miles to where there was a small ship anchored in international waters and frozen into a block of ice and then transported to Hong Kong and sold, so now there aren’t any more left in northern California, or is there if they are being let out of flying saucers.
Everything Ray did was so transparently bogus that it seemed obvious he was just having fun. It is hard to imagine he expected his yarns to be believed, and although some writers back East swallowed the bait I don’t know of anyone involved in the sasquatch search in the West who took him seriously or felt that he was causing any sort of problem.
Ironically, he didn’t fool people on a grand scale until he wasn’t around to enjoy the joke, and unfortunately when it did happen it did real harm.
We will never know the full extent to which people or projects that could have made valuable contributions in this field have turned away or been turned down because the media fell for this silly story, but we do know of enough examples to establish that the effect will be substantial and long-lasting. Sasquatch hunting, however, has always been three steps forward, two steps back, so we will just take our lumps and carry on, undeterred.
In that vein I would like to close with one of my favorite memories from the days when Rene Dahinden and I were pioneers in this strange pursuit. We had been on a radio phone-in show for a couple of hours, back in 1963, when a man called in and said something like this:
“Don’t you idiots realize that there are two hundred million people in North America and you are the only two who take this stuff seriously.”
I don’t remember the caller’s exact words, but Rene’s reply still rings in my ears:
“Mister, there are two hundred and twenty million people in North America, and every bloody one of them is wrong!”
There may be an extra hundred million of them today, but there are also a lot more of us, and we are making real headway—so carry on.
Discuss this article on the Bigfoot Forums >
Revision History
This article was originally presented at the 2003 International Bigfoot Symposium. It was published on the Bigfoot Information Project website on August 22, 2004. It will also be published in an upcoming issue of the Texas Bigfoot Research Center's newsletter, Texas Bigfoot Report.

Bigfoot Information Project - Dedicated to advancing the understanding and acceptance of North America's great apes

Interview with John Green
By Gerry Matthews
On July 23, 2004, contributor Gerry Matthews interviewed author John Green at his home in Harrison Hot Springs, B.C., Canada. Green's seminal work, "Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us", is widely regarded as the bible of sasquatch writings. It is being reprinted this year and is available from Hancock House Publishers.

John Green
John Green at his home, July 2004
23 July 2004 - Harrison Hot Springs, B.C., Canada
BIP: Every time I come into Harrison, I look up at the mountains around this beautiful lake and I think of the old Indian tales about how the sasquatch used to hold Summer reunions over on Mt Morris and stories of people being chased by the creature. Did you ever set much store in those stories in the early days?
JG: I'm not any kind of expert on Indian information. The culture that we live in is almost unique in making a clear distinction between the real and the unreal. We have to assign everything to one side or the other. Most cultures have not and do not do that, including the culture of the Indians of North America.
BIP: You're referring to how important myths are...?
JG: My whole career in this is trying to answer the question of where this animal fits into reality. This is a question that in the Indian culture hasn't even asked. So information from within that culture doesn't help answer this question.
BIP: When you first came to Harrison, you ran a newspaper here, correct?
JG: Well, in Agassiz.
BIP: In Agassiz. I'm sorry. You knew of J. W. Burns?
JG: He was no longer here. I never met him.
BIP: But you knew of the stories he had told.
JG: I grew up in Vancouver where the stories were familiar.
BIP: You were pretty much a skeptic back in those days?
JG: Yes.
BIP: So what happened? What made you believe-
JG: Well, for one thing, the word "believe" really isn't appropriate. It's used all the time, but it's ridiculous. I encountered what would in any other case be considered solid evidence that there was something to this.
BIP: Was this the set of tracks that were found in Eureka?
JG: No, it was before that. In 1957 Harrison got a lot of publicity by proposing to have a sasquatch hunt during the BC centennial celebration. A fellow who worked for me was talking to the custodian at the high school named Esse Tyfting. This subject had become quite a topic of conversation. This man had seen the tracks at Ruby Creek back in 1941. I knew he was a well respected person so I went and talked to him. He described the tracks and even drew an outline of how he recalled them.
BIP: Unfortunately, there were no casts.
William Roe Sasquatch
Female sasquatch as witnessed by William Roe (sketch by Roe's daughter)
JG: There was a cast. By this time it no longer existed. It had been made by a deputy sheriff who had come up from Bellingham. A man who'd been investigating this. I don't know that much about him, but one of his children did tell us that he had a whole room full of material when he died, so he obviously was seriously investigating it. One of the family gave me a tracing of this cast that matched superficially the drawing that had been made by Esse. It was actually on the floor of a garage that he was building, so of course I didn't have it, but it appeared very similar to the tracing that I received a few months later from the deputy's family.
The other thing is that the local game guide was Jack Kirkman. His wife Martha was a cousin of Mrs. George Chapman who had seen the creature at Ruby Creek. The Kirkman's were friends of ours so I talked about it with them. She had said the experience had pretty well ruined her cousin's life. She had become an alcoholic and it was something she couldn't get over. Then I talked later on to Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, but I hadn't known them previously. It was the association with these two people who I did know, and of course in the newspaper business getting information from people and deciding if it was accurate is part of the job. These people seemed entirely credible. With regard to the footprints, we had contacted other people who had seen them since they required an explanation.
Then there were other accounts that came out because the Vancouver newspapers made a really big thing out of the sasquatch hunt idea. They literally had sasquatch included in their front page index for quite a few weeks. They were generating stories. One of those was a fellow from Vernon who had a sighting up near Flood between Chilliwack and Hope in 1955.
The other was a very detailed description by a fellow up at Tete Jaune Cache by the name of William Roe whom I later learned was in contact with a zoologist about Buffalo and was considered to be a very reliable and informed source. I never met Roe. He was living in Cloverdale at the time the story came out, but he moved to Edmonton very shortly afterward. He did send me a written account of what he had seen and he went to the city hall and had it attested to.
Green and Ostman
John Green and Albert Ostman
BIP: Is that not the same thing Ostman did?
JG: Well, I took the local magistrate to see Ostman.
BIP: That was your idea to have an affidavit?
JG: At that time I thought that this would have some effect in making these things be taken more seriously. Turns out that was not the case so I don't bother doing it anymore.
BIP: We all know that footprints are the main source of evidence of the sasquatch, except for the Skookum Cast, obviously.
JG: I like to look at it in the opposite way. The footprints are real. Indisputably real. They require an explanation.
BIP: As Dahinden said, something's making the goddamn footprints!
JG: Something's making them. Yeah, right. It's getting awfully close to fifty years ago. No explanation for those footprints, other than the existence of an animal with feet like that and sufficient weight, has been presented.
BIP: How many casts do you own?
JG: Oh, I think maybe about 10 or 12.
Bluff Creek Track
Photo by Lyle Laverty of a track left by the Patterson/Gimlin film subject showing a midtarsal break.
BIP: Which is your most impressive cast in your mind?
JG: [Pause] Probably an unusual one from the casts that Bob Titmus made at the Patterson/Gimlin film site. There's a real break in the middle of it. For years we just assumed that it had stepped on a stick, but when Jeff Meldrum was studying the casts, he pointed out very quickly that there is a twig sticking out of the ground right beside it, but this had nothing to do with it. The imprint was made by a foot that bends in a way that human feet don't.
BIP: The midtarsal break?
JG: Yes, the midtarsal break. I just have a plastic copy of the that one, but I think that is the most impressive footprint now that this information has come out.
BIP: I'd like to just touch of a minute or two on the subject of your database. Would you consider yours to be the largest?
JG: No, the BFRO now has a larger one that's growing like a weed. On the other hand, there are so many reports now that I've given up on it.
BFRO Database
The BFRO's online database.
BIP: With the advent of the Internet, I'd imagine reports are flooding in.
JG: At least a half dozen a day on the one site. There's one other thing to say about the BFRO database. You can't access it. If you want to know how many footprints were 16" long, you'd have to go through the whole 8,000 or whatever reports.
BIP: No cross-reference.
JG: Mine's cross-referenced.
BIP: You finally got that done? I remember reading in an interview you did a couple of years ago that you were working on a cross-referenced database.
JG: Yeah, well, it was always cross-referenced, but it was a matter of getting all of the material into it. I have to do it myself. I can't just hire someone and say, "You do it." There's too much double-checking and weighing to be done.
BIP: So yes, the database still exists and yes, you are the one in charge of it? People are wondering whether or not you have someone else taking care of the database for you.
JG: No. The problem now is it's on antique software. The software won't even run properly on anything beyond Windows 98. Well, it'll run, but it will - and I presume this can be corrected - but it only uses half the screen when you use it on Windows XP. You can see a great deal less, so that's not handy at all.
BIP: So it's in a DOS program?
JG: Yeah. It can be converted, but this is not easy either. I haven't done it, but Richard Greenwell and a professor down in Tucson are working with it in some other computer set up. But you see, now it's getting rapidly out of date.
BIP: The technology's not keeping up?
JG: Well, I'm not keeping up. [Laughs]
BIP: Based on the reports that you've amassed over the years, could you speculate why you think sasquatch scares us so much?
JG: It may be just because it's unfamiliar. I don't think that would be my reaction.
BIP: Different people do have different reactions. There are reports where people don't claim to have any fear at all during their encounter.
JG: Well, I'm afraid of cougars but if I saw one I'd probably just tend to watch it.
BIP: But, in the reports you get people who first mention the smell and then a feeling of panic -
JG: There could be a inherited genetic reaction. It's way beyond my expertise. They're talking now about the possibility that sasquatch communicate in ultrasound. That might cause a reaction in us if that turns out to be the case.
BIP: By the same token, based on some reports, it seems possible that they can detect infrared light emissions from camera traps, etc.
JG: Yeah, that's another possibility.
BIP: Hence another reason why there's no photos of Sasquatch.
JG: So far, I'm not aware of any camera trap pictures.
BIP: It's pretty well taken for granted based on reports of people who have had encounters while using a flashlight and such and who have seen the red glare from the eyes that sasquatch could have excellent night vision.
JG: Well, they certainly have some degree of good night vision since they're so active at night. The eye thing is a problem. When you have, as in the case of my database, almost the same number of reports at night as in the daytime and when you consider all the handicaps of the potential observers at night, it seems to me solid evidence that they're far more active at night than in the daytime.
BIP: Couldn't one also say that the great number of sightings around water - lakes, rivers, the seashore - could be explained by the fact that those areas are also where people congregate and so that's where people see them?
JG: Yes, that's certainly a consideration.
BIP: It's not so much that these areas are those where they habitat, but that these are areas where people go and have the opportunity to have an encounter. It's kind of hard to speculate what their habitat is, where they like to travel, what routes they like to use...
JG: We're nowhere near being able to do those things. As I said, it's nearly fifty years we've been trying to find patterns and my approach to it now, and for many years, is that they don't have patterns. If they did, we'd have found them long ago.
BIP: Also, along that line - and this is a bit of a bone of contention with some people who follow this subject - in your opinion is Sasquatch strictly a Northwest phenomenon as opposed to people who think sasquatch runs from Alaska to the Florida panhandle. There have been sightings all over North America .
JG: The sightings everywhere else are just as good as the sightings in the Northwest. This is just where people were first made aware of them.
BIP: There are reports from people who give the creatures human traits and characteristics. There are reports of sasquatch coming the aid of people lost in the forest, sasquatch helping an injured child...
JG: Well, we do have a zoo report of a gorilla doing exactly that. There's no reason to dismiss these out of hand, but on the other hand, there are so few of them that it would just take a very small number of people making things up to account for them.
BIP: There are some who think that a sasquatch should be killed and hopefully soon - just one - to prove that it does exist. Then the governments could enact legislation to protect these creatures. My take on it that there's more than enough land so that sasquatch does not need any kind of Federal protection, at least not for many years. Do you think that there's anything that is endangering sasquatch?
JG: I would say that real estate development in Florida is destroying a significant proportion of the habitat for the Skunk Ape, but overall in the continent, no, they have an immense area with very little human impact.
BIP: I did some figuring of the amount of untouched land in British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska and it is immense compared to the population of those areas. The land is vast.
JG: They don't need it to be untouched anyway.
BIP: How much land does one sasquatch need to roam in?
JG: I don't know.
BIP: Where do people come up with these figures like that?
JG: They're only guesses. I mean, there must be thousands of them to be in all the places they're reported but how many thousands...it's just a guess.
BIP: So it's just guesswork to say these creatures are on the verge extinction?
JG: Oh, that's ridiculous. They're not under any pressure at all. They obviously have never been numerous. It's certainly a possibility that the population was knocked down by the same diseases that wiped out so many of the Indians. They would presumably be susceptible to them just as the great apes are. But as to anything that's happening today causing them to become extinct, you can't make any case for that at all.
BIP: With the advent of the Internet, there's a lot more information about sasquatch available to people today. Does this make it easier to pull off a hoax?
JG: Oh yes, sure.
BIP: In 1970, if you received a report in California of an encounter with a good description of sasquatch followed by another corroborating report a year later from Alaska, wouldn't they validate each other?
JG: Not by 1970, no. The Patterson/Gimlin movie was out by then. In the early days, if you heard of anything, you went there. If you tried to do that today, I mean, forget it. That's exactly what the BFRO is trying to do and there's hundreds of them and they are not able to keep up.
BIP: I guess for every ten stories than come in, you have to make a choice of which one you will investigate.
JG: Well, out of ten there's five you will just write off. "The thing was in my living room." [Laughs] But all that the BFRO guarantees as to the reports on their website, that they actually post for the public, is that one of their investigators has made contact with a person who says, "Yes, I am responsible. This is what happened." There certainly is no possibility of doing a search of the site and investigating the character and history of the witness and all the things we would have gotten involved in in the beginning. You couldn't do it today.
BIP: How about hoaxers in general. Do they do any damage to the public's perception of bigfoot?
JG: Well, the media reaction certainly does. We've gone over the years through a phase where anything about this was news to where anyone who was doing something about it was news to where the only news nowadays is when people claim to have proven it's all a hoax.
BIP: Yes, I was going to ask you about that -
Denver Post Graphic
Graphic from Denver Post article "Bigfoot Believers". Click on the image for a ridiculously large version (GIF, 1.4MB)
JG: Oh, I missed one phase. There was a phase there when any scientist who showed an interest was news. We've now reached the extreme where some of the world's very top people in the relevant fields are very interested and are saying publicly that there should be proper investigation and this is not news. The only thing that's news is that the whole thing has proved to be a fake. The demonstration of that is very clear when this absolute nonsense story about Ray Wallace faking all the foot prints went all around the world in exactly the same time period the Denver Post ran a major article and sidebars on these key scientists who were saying it should be investigated, the Associated Press wouldn't even carry the story. It never went anywhere beyond Denver. To me as a newspaper man, this is absolutely shocking. I tried to contact some of those at Columbia University's long-established graduate school of journalism who keep a tab on the press and the response was, "Nobody here is interested in taking this up." In other words, for 40 years we've been butting our heads against a barrier manned by the scientists saying there can't be any such thing. Now they're stepping away from the ramparts and the media is stepping up to take their place. Absolutely fascinating. The media is seeing to it that this heresy does not get to the public.
BIP: It seems to be the case when you can bet that someone who has bigfoot living up in that attic would get more press than something like the Skookum cast would.
JG: Well...
BIP: They seem to want to relegate this to the tabloids and that's where the story stays.
JG: For example, right now, we have the proof - absolute and indisputable - that the Patterson film is genuine. The newspapers refuse to carry anything of that. It can't be sold so therefore they're not going to be taken in therefore they're not going to run the story. As a result of this silly book where people are claiming that they were involved in making the film we've gone back to looking at the film and realize that, although you can't establish beyond dispute the size of anything, you can establish the relative size of things that are right there in the same film frame. This creature has an intermembral index - the comparison of the length of the arms to the length of the legs - that is totally outside the human range so it cannot be a human in a suit, but it is also totally outside the range of any other known primate of any size at all. Therefore, it has to be an unknown primate. This can only be ignored, it cannot be argued against. All you can do is say, "Well, you can't measure properly on the film." Well, you can't measure precisely, but the different is so slight that it doesn't matter. The human intermembral index is around 70, all of the great apes are over 100, this thing is in the high 80's. The question of the angle of this segment of the arm to the camera and so on, if you look at enough frames, you've got to be able to get to it. And on top of that, we have a forensic animator who worked on the "Legend Meets Science" DVD. He says that they established beyond any question the relative length of where the joints were as the thing was moving and the intermembral index was pretty close to 90. This is a man who says when he was hired to work on the film he took it for granted it was a man in a suit.
BIP: Mr. Long and his book. People have read the book -
JG: Not many people have.
BIP: I haven't read it myself, but those who have say it is a mass of contradictions.
JG: Yes.
BIP: It befuddles your mind at times trying to see how he weighs his information and where he gets his information from and how it's all added together. I wanted to ask you what kind of an effect does this latest attack on the Patterson/Gimlin film have on the bigfoot community in general? Or does it have an effect?
JG: Well...it's very annoying. [Laughs] It would have had a very bad effect if it had been treated in the press the way that the Wallace thing was. Fortunately, that hasn't happened.
BIP: They pretty well ignored The Making of Bigfoot.
JG: Yes, they pretty well have.
BIP: Ignore it and maybe it'll go away.
JG: Well, it pretty much has. There is now an article in the Skeptical Enquirer, but I don't know how much circulation that has. That magazine is linked to the publishers of the book. Of course, the public doesn't know that. Other than that, there's been just minor publicity and a few local TV things. They did get one network TV exposure, but it wasn't favorable to them.
BIP: No, and isn't that amazing. It seems that anything about sasquatch that is picked up by the media is not favorable.
JG: Well, the host on the program is on our side like so many people not prepared to say so.
BIP: The "Four Horseman of the Sasquatch" were yourself, Rene Dahinden, Grover Krantz, and Peter Byrne. Dahinden and Krantz are no longer with us. Who do you see as the up and coming new faces of bigfoot research?
Titmus with tracks
Bob Titmus with casts.
JG: Well, the "Four Horseman" was nonsense from day one and any list would have to start with Bob Titmus. Today there's so many. There was a time when I had some knowledge of nearly anybody who was involved with this, but there's so many people in it now. Certainly, Matt Moneymaker creating the BFRO was terribly important. Certainly Rick Noll has done tremendous work. Jeff Meldrum, obviously, on the scientific end of it, is a star today. Henner Ferenbach has done quite a bit. John Bindernagel is making the links with the behavior of the great apes.
BIP: So there's no shortage of people to take up the flag before it hits the ground?
JG: Oh, heavens no. [Laughs] You know, the "Four Horseman" includes Peter Byrne who's just a well publicized fraud. It's ridiculous.
BIP: I take it you don't have too much contact with Peter Byrne?
JG: No. I saw enough of him 40 years ago.
BIP: Your books On the Track of the Sasquatch and The Year of the Sasquatch, which became Encounters with Bigfoot -
JG: Well, The Year of the Sasquatch was about a specific year. Encounters with Bigfoot is really just a part of the same book. I redid On the Track of the Sasquatch in 1980 and because it would have been too fat to be a saddle-stitched book, I divided it in two. You can also make more money that way. Charge more for two small books than one large one. Of course, people had the option of only buying one. So really, Encounters with Bigfoot is not a separate book. It's just that when I stopped selling books and turned it over to Hancock for which now I'm just an author, he brought out the second one with that title.
BIP: Your book The Best of Sasquatch, are there any new reports added to that one?
JG: No. Well, it isn't in that context. There's several additional short chapters. One is about the intermembral index. One is about other recent developments like the Skookum cast. One is about Ray Wallace. So there is some new material in there. The basic this is you had the Wallace thing that went around the world suddenly make the things that went on in 1958 newly relevant. Otherwise there probably never would have been another printing.
Jerry Crew
Jerry Crew holding a cast made at Bluff Creek in 1958. The tracks found at Bluff Creek and their subsequent media attention caused wide-spread public interest in the creature.
BIP: In 1958 -
JG: That's the bigfoot that Ray Wallace is supposed to have hoaxed.
BIP: In California in Eureka, yes.
JG: You see, I'm now in the situation where I'm the only person alive who investigated both the 'original' bigfoot and the Patterson/Gimlin bigfoot movie. Bob Titmus is gone. Rene Dahinden is gone. There weren't very many of us in the first place. There was only Rene, Bob Titmus and I in 1958 and even Rene wasn't there in '58 because he couldn't cross the border since he wasn't yet a Canadian citizen. I'm the only one who wrote about it.
BIP: This is not my question, but it's a very good question from some someone on the Bigfoot Forums. What is the greatest single piece of evidence that inspires you more than anything to keep on going in your research?
JG: Well, it's not a valid question since nothing of the sort is necessary. It's been interesting and I get a lot of satisfaction out of it so I'm just going to keep on doing it. It's been frustrating, but overall, I'm not in need of inspiration. The solidest evidence is another question. I think you've got to put the film at the top of the list. But then there's the Skookum cast which is very powerful.
BIP: At one time you said if the Skookum cast was investigated by reputable scientists who came to the conclusion that it was authentic, you might be persuaded that a body might not be necessary to prove that the creature exists.
JG: I'm now in the same position with regard to the film. The proof is there in the film. The problem is getting enough scientists to pay attention. The beautiful thing about the film is that it fits perfectly with the scientific method. Replicating the basis for the claim that it is genuine requires only a very little bit of effort once a person is provided a sufficient number frames from the film with which to make their own measurements. Say, "Here you have the dozen best frames from the movie from which to make a comparative estimate of the arms and the legs. What is your estimate?"
BIP: There was some very good work done by a few members of the Bigfoot Forums who did a lot of comparisons, frame by frame -
JG: But they don't have all the frames. Rick Noll and I are working on this right now - use a copy of the film and go through and pick out the frames in which you are best able to make this particular estimate. It won't include the most familiar stretch of the film because the feet are hidden. We don't know at this point whether we're going to find anything that's really good. You have to have, in the same frame, at least a half of the arm and a half of the leg square to the camera. There may not be such a frame. You can certainly have one or the other, but if they're not in the same frame, that adds complications. Fortunately, Patterson's film was taken not from a standing height. He's much closer to being in the mid-point of the creature's height so there's certainly no significant distortion because the arm was taken dead-on and the leg was at an angle. We have to pick out which frames from which you can best make an estimate. They have to be frames that are not digitized. They need to be straight enlargements from the movie so nobody can argue they've been fiddled with in a computer. And, if you're going to get them to - I hope - dozens of people, then you're going to have to have a lot of them. So you're starting to run up a significant cost. There's a lot of money and effort involved in getting people to look at them.
I wanted the Skookum cast to be taken around the continent. We had several good starting points of someone who said yes, they'd like to look at it. The first question was could we get everyone to look at it where it is, but that's very expensive.
Jeff Meldrum and the Skookum cast
Dr. Jeff Meldrum with the Skookum Cast.
Image © 2000 by Richard Noll.
BIP: So Rick Noll is the present caretaker of the cast?
JG: Yeah, but Rick is concerned that it could be destroyed on the highway.
BIP: Which is valid.
JG: I would take the chance, but I'm not him and it's not my cast. At one time it looked as if LeRoy Fish and I would take it around. But he died. So the next thing was to find out if we could make a copy of it. The expertise to do that was to come from Grover Krantz. And he died. It's very difficult to copy because there's all sorts of interlocking elements in it. Traditionally, you just paint many coats of latex and back it with gauze and so on, then peel it off and then you can make another cast with that. But this one would have to be done in many pieces, I expect. Again, I'm no expert. Bob Titmus could have done it. He used to say he could make a plaster cast of an elephant if you were prepared to pay for it. [Laughs] I have found a couple of people who say they can do it, but it's getting pretty obvious that Rick is just scared to have it done.
The biggest problem with seeing the cast for what it is is that it's inversed. That works OK with a footprint cast because you immediately react to it as the bottom of a foot. But this thing is just a bunch of unidentifiable little slopes and valleys with hair imprinted on them. We've learned from experience that it takes a person quite a long time to really get the hang of it. I mean, they had enough trouble when they saw it as an imprint making out what it was. Took them a while to figure it out - they had already stepped on it, fortunately not in a critical place - before they realized what they were dealing with. It would work better, I think, if it was displayed on a wall. When you're looking down at it, your brain can't get away from thinking it's looking at the ground. And you're not. You're looking at the opposite of what you normally see on the ground. So that again makes it impractical to bring a lot of people to look at it. Most of them would take a quick look and go home. But if they've said they would examine it and you've taken it to their lab, it'd be a much cheaper way to do it and a much higher percentage would feel obligated to really examine it, and the main thing, each of them that really took an interest in it would be able to suggest to you other people you should take it to. We don't know who these people are and this way we could have been finding out as we went along. Running up an impressive total and eventually finding 3 or 4 with real clout who could do a paper on it and get it in a prestigious publication. That's a really big problem that all for us face. You can get things published by outfits that are into this sort of thing to start with, but you can't break through with one's that would carry the impact.
Jim Green in rock pit
Photo of 5' 10" Jim Green standing in rock pit that, according to Glen Thomas, was excavated by a sasquatch. Image from On the Track of Sasquatch.
So those two things are those which I would say, if I reinterpreted your question, are the solidest evidence. The other one that needs to be mentioned is Glen Thomas' observation of the thing digging a hole in the rocks. Again, it defies explanation as to how it could have been done other than the way he says he observed. I understand it's fallen in a little since I last saw it but that was only six or seven years ago an it had been there 30 years before that without any change at all. And when I first saw it it was almost new. There was no moss on the rocks which were obviously newly exposed. And it literally - with a lot of projections because we're dealing with slabs of rock - it literally goes straight down. Jim Huken, after he retired as a wildlife biologist, said if there's one of these there should be more and went looking for them and found probably another ten. All those he found were more sloped. But that particular one was shaped more like a well with rocks weighing more than hundred pounds coming out of it. How are you going to do it? The only way a human could do it would be to take the whole hillside apart and rebuild it with a hole in the middle. The other thing is Rene and I phoned Glen Thomas at night, after dark, and asked if he'd show us this thing when we first heard about it. He said sure. So we said would you show it to us tomorrow morning? And he said sure. So we drove all night to Portland so that he had no opportunity whatsoever to set anything up for us. Once we were involved with it and looking at it, it was clear there was no way he could have anyway. He simply couldn't have done it. There's no equipment existing today he could have used. When you get a backhoe in, they make a hell of a big hole. They have to. It's the way they work.
BIP: And anybody who's ever dug a well knows how labor intensive that is and how much time it takes to rock it up again.
JG: And that won't work, you see, because then you've disturbed the moss covered rocks all around. It's going to be obvious you took it all out and put it back again. It's a different situation today, but not when the thing was new. It was only months old at the most when we first saw it.
Of course, almost every set of foot prints also reaches the same criteria that you can't find any way that they could have been faked. Another thing that the paper won't publicize - and it really surprised me - is that there's a $100,000 reward for anyone who can show how the footprints in Bluff Creek back in the 50's and 60's were faked.
BIP: $100,000 is a lot of money.
JG: Yeah, but it's no use if nobody knows about it.
BIP: There should be somebody stepping up to the plate to take a crack at it.
JG: Well, if a lot of people buy the new Best of Bigfoot, it's in there. It may get around. But literally, the newspapers just ignored that. They're so sure it has to be a hoax, I guess, but it's real. It's a real $100,000 for anybody who can do it.
BIP: Who's offering this reward?
Willow Creek - China Flat Museum
The Willow Creek-China Flat Museum.
JG: The museum in Willow Creek.
BIP: I'm sitting here talking to you and I'm thinking, what's it like to be John Green? Your thought of as a kind of "bigfoot royalty".
JG: Not by any means by everybody.
BIP: Not by everybody but by a fair number of people loyal to your thoughts and ideas. At the same time, I'm sure there's other people who say, "Oh, there goes that bigfoot fellow. He writes books about bigfoot." Wink, wink.
JG: You got that one by the wrong end. That sort of thing went on until I wrote a book. As soon as you've done something where you've made money from it, everybody understands. [Laughs]
BIP: Now you're not the hack on the corner, now you're a respected author and businessman!
JG: Yeah. It became obvious when I wrote the book. Suddenly the attitude was noticeably different. I hadn't really realized what the attitude was up until then because nobody was saying anything to my face.
BIP: People who are interested in sasquatch, like myself and the people who are going to be reading this, they invest a lot of their time - some even invest a lot of their money - searching for and researching bigfoot. How do you separate your private life from this? Or do you separate it? Is it intertwined?
JG: I never got into the condition that Rene was in, for instance. I always had a lot of other things going on. I was very fortunate that June was with me when we first saw footprints.
BIP: It helps when the other person understands what you're doing.
JG: We went down to California together with another fellow so she knew it was something real and she met Bob Titmus on that occasion.
BIP: We heard a rumor that you had a membership at the Bigfoot Forums and that you even posted there once or twice.
JG: Yes.
BIP: I think that's some information that a lot of people didn't know. That last question is from Stacy on the Bigfoot Forums. With all of the ups and downs, the joys and heartaches, with still no personal sighting of your own, was it worth it and if you had to do it again, would sasquatch be a part of your life?
JG: [Pause] Sure.
Discuss this article on the Bigfoot Forums >
Revision History
This article was originally published on the Bigfoot Information Project website (bigfootproject.org), August 8, 2004. It has not been revised.

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

By Dr. John Bindernagel
A major factor inhibiting both the dissemination of sasquatch reports and discussion of the subject is its treatment as a regional monster. We have gotten somewhat used to the monster part, but the regional nature of the issue has perhaps not been sufficiently recognized as a deterrent to serious study.
Reports of regional monsters quickly become items of local folklore and, as such, are treated as unscientific and of merely local interest. Thus we have the skunk ape or swamp monkey of Florida, the brush ape of Missouri, the Fouke monster of southwest Arkansas, and the grassman of Ohio. The list goes on and there are many I don't know about.
I was faced with this situation in 1996 when, writing my book, I came across excellent eyewitness descriptions of the sasquatch gait. The gracefulness of the gait was described by eyewitnesses in different words but all of which added up to the same smooth, graceful, ground-eating, long-striding two-footed walk. What was distressing to me what that one of the best descriptions came not from traditional sasquatch range in the Pacific Northwest, but from Ohio, in the American midwest. At that time I, like many investigators residing and working in "traditional" sasquatch range in the Pacific Northwest, tended to look somewhat askance at midwestern and eastern reports. I had fallen prey to the conditioning that is very prevalent: the sasquatch or bigfoot, if it was accepted at all, was considered to be restricted to the Pacific Northwest. This region is perceived as the only area of North America sufficiently forested and undeveloped to support a population of this species without it's members being commonly observed.
For me it was the accurate descriptions of the sasquatch gait in Ohio reports which started me thinking seriously that observers elsewhere in North America were describing the same animal as that reported more commonly here in the northwest. This led to further research regarding the possibility of widespread distribution of the sasquatch in North America. When I was exposed to some eyewitness drawings based on sightings by eyewitnesses in Ohio and Ontario (Canada), my interest was heightened. The newsletters of Don Keating of Newcomerstown, Ohio also contained some reports which were remarkable for their similarity to reports collected here in western North America.
In 1998, I traveled to Ohio to speak at a bigfoot conference organized by Don Keating and was able to spend some time in the area. During this trip I became convinced of the validity of the plaster casts of tracks collected there. I also could see for myself how a large mammal such as the sasquatch could easily exist in the extensive undeveloped tracts of land rich with potential food in the form of squirrels, rabbits, grouse, wild turkeys, etc in addition to the rich vegetation of the area.
Also in 1998, I visited investigators Wayne King and Art Cappa in Michigan.and was similarly impressed with their material and reports. These investigators had convincing reports and track casts which were consistent with material from the west. Art Cappa in particular had cast a number of sasquatch tracks from Michigan and Indiana and kindly allowed me to photograph them.
Photographs and casts of sasquatch tracks from the American midwest (Michigan) and central and eastern Canada(Manitoba and Ontario), and southern US (eastern Texas) appear on the Tracks page. Eyewitness drawings from Ohio, Manitoba, and Ontario (see Sightings) show remaekable consistency with those from British Columbia, Washington, and Alberta.
Around this time I began following up sasquatch reports in Ontario (the province in which I grew up, and continue to visit at least once a year). I was able to photograph the excellent cast made by a high school student in June, 1977. This cast illustrates an anatomical feature of the sasquatch foot occasionally observed by others. This is the relatively straight line across the base of the toes, a situation which differs from the human foot in which this line slopes towards the little toe at the outside of the foot. (This feature shows up the track cast in Texas by researcher Rand Trusty.)
In 1998 I visited northern Manitoba where I heard sasquatch reports firsthand from several eyewitnesses. In the spring of 2001, I spent 2 weeks in Manitoba and heard an additional 26 reports.
In 2001, I was invited to address the first Conference hosted by the Texas Bigfoot Society. It was held in Jefferson, in northeast Texas. My wife, Joan, and I spent most of September touring western, southwestern and south central US as part of the travel to and from the conference.
Whereas many people see the extensive coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest as great wildlife habitat, I, as a wildlife biologist, am aware that the richest wildlife habitats in this region are the small pockets of deciduous forest. Recognizing the much higher value of deciduous forest as wildlife habitat, I have less trouble accepting the presence of sasquatches in Central and eastern Canada, and the midwestern, eastern and southern US. Home ranges for a large mammal in such habitat would likely be smaller than that required in the less productive coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. (Having said that, there is one area of the Pacific Northwest that is very productive indeed. That is the coast with its rich shellfish resources.)
In 2000, I spent several days recording sasquatch reports by state and county from John Green's files. I subsequently mapped these reports to get a continental picture of the distribution of reports. I am currently attempting to publish the results. Despite shortcomings in the data, they show a number of things.
A map of western North America shows that:
(1) most reports do indeed come from provinces and states on the Pacific coast (northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia.)
(2) There is a band of states and provinces just interior to the west coast states and provinces which also has high numbers of reports. These states and provinces include Alberta, Idaho, and Montana.
(3) States and provinces interior to these two bands tend to have fewer reports.
(4) Remarkably to some of us, there is another part of North America, the US midwest and east, in which some states have numbers of sasquatch reports high enough to be comparable with some states and provinces in the Pacific Northwest. These states are Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Adjacent to and near these states are other states and provinces with relatively high numbers of reports: Michigan, New York, Manitoba. Somewhat by itself in southeastern US is Florida with a larger number of reports.
(5) Just as remarkable is the fact that almost every state east of the great plains has significant numbers of sasquatch reports. Texas is interesting in that most sasquatch reports from this state are from the well-wooded, well-watered eastern part, as opposed to the west Texas dry country which most people envision when they think of that state.In general terms these data support John Green's hypothesis that areas with over 20 inches of rainfall have more reports than areas with less rainfall. Very dry areas have very few reports indeed.