Alleged Sasquatch prints are fakes, says Rene Dahinden

An amateur and an academic are arguing over the authenticity of some alleged Sasquatch footprints. The plaster cast prints were obtained last year (1982) shortly after a U.S. Forestry Service employee, Paul Freeman, claimed he saw an ape-like creature in a mountainous forest area near Walla Walla, Washington.
<--Paul Freeman track

The academic, Dr. Grover Krantz, associate professor of anthropology at Washington State University at Pullman, says the prints show skin patterns known as dermal ridges that belong to a higher primate but not an ape or a human.

Krantz is a member of the International Society of Cryptozoology (a group of people interested ln “hidden animals”) that met last fall at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Krantz told a press conference here at that time that the plaster casts “may be the best set of prints of a Sasquatch ever obtained.”

However, the amateur, Vancouver’s veteran Sasquatch hunter Rene Dahinden, believes the prints are fakes telling the audience, “I’ve talked to everyone involved in this thing and I write it off 100 per cent. I’m damn mad about it,” Dahinden said in an interview Wednesday.

Dahinden went to Walla Walla earlier this year and interviewed Krantz, Freeman, a number of U.S. Forestry Service Officials, a game biologist and an experienced tracker with the U.S. Border Patrol named Joel Hardin. He also looked at reports and photographic evidence.

Dahinden said he believes the prints are fakes because: pine needles had been brushed away from inside the tracks; the prints of forestry staff at the scene sunk more deeply into the mud than the alleged Sasquatch; and a dog and horses brought to the area soon after the alleged sighting showed no reaction to smell.

“You can fool people but you can’t fool animals,” said Dahinden. “I don’t have a Ph.D., I just use horse sense when I investigate these things.”

He was also surprised that Krantz had not interviewed tracker Joel Hardin, who first analysed the prints and pronounced them fakes for the U.S. Forestry Service Officials who flew Hardin into the Mill Creek Watershed in the Forestry's private plane from Idaho.

But Krantz, in a telephone interview last week, said he didn’t talk to Hardin because he found some inaccuracies in the tracker’s (Hardin's) report. Krantz vehemently insisted that the prints are genuine.

Krantz continued said: “The top fingerprint experts in the U.S. have looked at them and say they are not faked and they are definitely from a higher primate.”

The debate continues.

The Daily Times/Sun, Thurs, Aug 4, 1983

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