'Bigfoot' on the Prowl in Canadian North?

June 27, 2001

First there were reports of a steel-clawed "monkey-man" in India, then a 10-year-old "dog boy" in Chile, and now residents of Canada's wilderness are reporting that "Bigfoot," a hairy ape-man, might be on the prowl in northern Ontario, the National Post reported.

Residents of a native Indian reserve 1,000 miles north of Toronto have discovered 14-inch-long footprints, the newspaper said.

"It's definitely not a bear," Abraham Hunter, chief of the 260-member band, told the Post in Monday's editions.

This is not the first Bigfoot report at the reserve. Two elders claim to have spotted the creature 20 years ago, Hunter said, and stories about it have been told for hundreds of years.

"These things happen all the time, but we're surprised because we underestimate the power of imagination and the power of belief," Laurence Kirmayer, director of McGill University's division of social and transcultural psychiatry, told the paper.

Such sightings are typically cultural-specific, he said.

On June 14, a government officer with 31 years of experience also came across an odd-looking track 95 miles east of the reserve, the newspaper said.

"I couldn't explain what it was. I naturally thought it might be Bigfoot because of the shape of it," he told the Post.

Tales of a huge apelike creature are not unusual in Canada. In the western Rocky Mountain regions of British Columbia reports of a mysterious ape-man called Sasquatch — similar to the Yeti of the Himalayas — have existed for generations.

© Reuters

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