Bigfoot
Encounters.com
SCREAMS
IN THE NIGHT
The
search for Bigfoot is as old as the hills, but in the remote forests of far
northern California, trackers of the elusive -- or mythical -- creature are
up to some new tricks....
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer - Sunday, January 24, 1999
We're parked on a patch of gravel high up in the Six Rivers National Forest,
on top of Jawbone Ridge, surrounded by dense, green forest covering hillsides
that plunge steeply into canyons. It is so utterly quiet up here that if you
listen carefully you're sure the wailing, mournful cry of Bigfoot will come
tearing up the mountainside.
From the cab of his pickup truck, John Freitas takes out a camera, a tape
recorder and a pair of binoculars and sets them within easy reach in the pickup's
bed. Near the tailgate is a huge outdoor speaker, much like the ones you see
suspended from the tiers of baseball stadiums.
Freitas fiddles with the tape deck in the truck's dashboard, and then suddenly
the speaker booms forth with an eerie wail. `Aaarrrrrgggghhhh,'' the voice
screams for several seconds, arcing from low to high then low, a bit like
an air raid siren, and then again, in a higher pitch, ``Aaaaaaiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.''
Freitas shuts down the tape and listens carefully, waiting for a response.
Silence. More silence. We look around, video camera at the ready. Come out,
come out, wherever you are.
``The theory,'' he says, nodding at the speaker, ``is that if there's another
'Squatch in this area, this will attract him.'' This is the hunt for
Bigfoot -- the legendary Sasquatch, as he was known in the old Salish tribal
language of British Columbia, where locals say he has been seen frequently.
John Freitas may well be typical of the new breed of Bigfoot hunter that seems
to be emerging in the never-ending search for the phantom ape of North America.
Undaunted by the occasional snicker or rolling of eyes from his friends or
co-workers, Freitas, like any good police investigator, is methodical and
practical and willing to go looking for something about which precious little
evidence even exists.
Over the past few years,
the hunt for Bigfoot has exploded in a frenzy of high technology. New high-tech
detection equipment abounds, dangling from trees all over the United States
-- Starlight nightscopes, motion detectors hooked up to infrared still and
video cameras, FM wireless transmitters dangling from fir trees and transmitting
to tape decks up to two miles away.
-- -- --
In his bedroom at a cabin Freitas rents deep in the forest are a video cassette
recorder, a three-foot-long telephoto lens, nightvision Starlight binoculars
and a recycled siren switchbox from a patrol car, used to amplify the screams
on his tapes. And that's just the stuff in the field. At home and in offices
across the country, the Internet has spawned a myriad of Web sites that have
brought a sense of order and organization to a subject that for years has
been disparate, fractured and, given the heated arguments over whether Bigfoot
even exists, fractious in the extreme.
And there is still a smattering of oldstyle Bigfoot information: At the Bigfoot
museum in Willow Creek, where Al Hodgson is the curator, nearly two dozen
plaster casts of footprints seen in the Northern California wilderness are
on display in glass cases. The best part of Hodgson's display is the collection
of footprint casts donated by the estate of Bob Titmus, one of the most experienced
Bigfoot trackers. On the Six Rivers mountaintop with Freitas, though,
all that counts is whether the elusive man-ape will answer these calls. The
tapes were recorded in 1994 in a mountainous rural area of eastern Ohio by
Matthew Moneymaker, a 33-year-old software engineer from Southern California
who is also a longtime Bigfoot tracker. Moneymaker said there have been numerous
sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures in that Appalachian area of Ohio, near
Pennsylvania. Moneymaker played the tapes for three scientists, including
a zoologist who specializes in wildlife, and ``they all said it was something
really unusual'' and could not identify the sounds. In the world of Bigfoot,
that means it bore no resemblance to any identifiable mammal, and it was just
what Freitas needed in the form of aural bait. Freitas is a 43-year-old former
police officer who now works as a welfare fraud investigator for Del Norte
County. He latched onto Bigfoot as a teenager 30 years ago when he first saw
the famous film -- made in 1967 by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin -- of
a supposed Bigfoot slogging across a sandbar on Bluff Creek, about 40 miles
south of where we are waiting for Bigfoot to come out and see us. `I've heard
the screams from here,'' he says, pointing to a clump of trees, where there
is a distinct dark shadow --could it be? -- ``and from over there'' -- by
another stand of fir. ``Once, the screams lasted for five days, and it didn't
sound like anger or pain. It was more like, `I'm here. Where are you?' I just
want to prove it exists or doesn't exist.''
By legend or by fact, what they are seeing in the forest is a North American
perennial, a phenomenon that has created a steady and devoted set of aficionados
who insist that Bigfoot is real -- elusive and rarely seen, but real. The
same kind of animal/man has been spotted in Asia, where he is known as the
Yeti, but in the United States he is known by the more colloquial name ``Bigfoot.''
---- --
For years, the study of Bigfoot has been pretty informal -- based on sightings
or footprints, stories have crept into newspapers, and family letters have
passed Bigfoot down through the generations. Few academic professionals --
anthropologists, zoologists, wildlife biologists -- have the time or inclination
to make Bigfoot their life's work, and so the chore of cataloging the various
Bigfoot incidents has fallen to lay people who are doing it out of curiosity
and passion, squeezing it into their otherwise normal lives.
Over the past 40 years, there have been reports of as many as 5,000 sightings.
Footprints allegedly made by the big mammal range from 10 or 12 inches long
to more than 20 inches long -- hence the sobriquet, Bigfoot, said to have
been coined by logging road crews and popularized by a writer for the old
Humboldt Times in 1958. This is what Bigfoot appears to be, by the various
accounts: a big, hairy apelike mammal that walks on two feet. Bigfoot creatures
(cognoscenti rarely use the plural ``Bigfeet'') are thought to range from
6 feet to 10 feet tall and weigh anywhere from 500 to 800 pounds. One study
estimated Bigfoot weighs nearly one ton, but that, anthropologists say, is
wild exaggeration.
Now, however, there is some consistency developing in the search for Bigfoot,
particularly on the Internet. For example, Moneymaker has created the
Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) and its inevitable Web site
(www.moneymaker.org/BFRO/),
that purports to have one of the largest geographic databases of sightings
in the world.
`We get most of the reports that are coming out,'' Moneymaker said the other
day. The organization has already cataloged and put on its Web site an incident
last fall, when two men on a hunting trip (hunting animals, not Bigfoot) say
they saw Bigfoot near Hayfork in Trinity County. They said he left tracks
six inches wide and 20 inches long.
The BFRO database has sightings or other Bigfoot experiences from every state
in the country save Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii and Rhode Island. What the
sightings have in common is an enormous and powerful rush of emotion from
the people reporting sudden encounters. Consider this one, from an unnamed
young woman who says she saw Bigfoot off a road between Oroville and Marysville:
At the time, Kim and I were riding Appaloosas. My horse was a big horse....
I'm a big kid. When I turned around in my saddle, I was eye to eye with it.
It was about 25 to 30 yards away, in an English walnut orchard. It was covered
in black hair. Thick, powerful legs and torso. Strong shoulders. Not really
long arms. What I was drawn to, though, was the eyes. Like shining caramel
brown. The eyes just held me there. The horse was going nuts, turning around
and trying to buck. So I was busy keeping the horse in line. I knew, though,
that if this thing wanted to kill me, it could have ... Its head had a slight
cone shape to it. It was an animal of raw power.
`I will never forget the eyes and what it did. It finally turned around, gave
me one more look and started to stride off ... it took big strides.'' The
woman's encounter was similar to the one experienced by Trinie Inong, a 15-year-old
sophomore at Hoopa Valley High School, in the town of Hoopa, deep in the Six
Rivers National Forest east of Eureka. In 1996, she said in an interview earlier
this month, she and her cousin Elizabeth were near where Pecwan Creek runs
into the Klamath River. It was at the time of her Yurok tribe's ceremonial
jump dance, and as she and Elizabeth walked along the river, ``We spotted
Bigfoot, straight across from us, about 80 or a hundred feet away. He was
tall, almost 9 feet, maybe, and his shoulders were hunched over.'' `He walked
like a big, hefty guy, and we were looking at him, and then, Oh my God! he
stopped and looked at us. Elizabeth took off running. She was freaked out.
I stood there and got another look to make sure we were seeing this correctly.
My uncle said he was probably coming by to pay his respects.'' Native American
tribes have known about Bigfoot for centuries -- Sasquatch is simply another
and welcome part of their culture. `Everybody who grew up around here knows
about Bigfoot,'' said hris Peters, director of the Seventh Generation Fund,
an Arcata nonprofit group that gives money to Native American activities.
``The legend goes way back and has always been there. He is the one that hollers
on the ridge and has lived in the back country since time immemorial.
`You talk to the people up in Del Norte and Humboldt and Siskiyou, and you'll
find that five out of 10 are convinced it's out there,'' Peters said. ``But
the rational Euro-American mind, which is a kind way of saying white person,
doesn't understand things that are metaphysical, things with the ability to
come into a physical being and then fade back into a metaphysical world.''
In the rational world of science, however, there is rarely room for the metaphysical,
and so the few scientists who think Bigfoot is worthy of serious study --
anthropologist Grover Krantz, anatomist Jeff Meldrum, for example -- are kind
of a lonely bunch, plodding patiently through decades of sightings and footprints
while most of the world scoffs at the phenomenon.
`We're way past the fact that it exists, but the general public is stuck at
the level of whether it exists,'' says John Bindernagel, a Canadian wildlife
biologist who has studied Bigfoot since 1963 and has just published a book,
`North America's Great Ape: Sasquatch.'' ``We are really conditioned to see
this animal as a hoax or a joke or merely mythical. It has not been a safe
thing to do to treat it as a serious topic.'' Privately, some scientists even
worry that their outspoken views on Bigfoot can harm their chances for tenure.
`I accept it as a real animal,'' says Krantz, who is now 67 and has written
about Bigfoot for more than 20 years from his post as professor of anthropology
at Washington State University in Pullman. ``As to where we are now, we get
more sightings, more footprints and more arguments between skeptics and true
believers. The logjam will be broken by bringing in a specimen.''
Asked if Bigfoot exists, Meldrum, who teaches anatomy and evolutionary morphology
at Idaho State University, says, ``I don't like to respond to a question about
that. I'd rather say that on careful consideration, there is a reasonable
probability that this creature does, in fact, exist. It's naive of some of
my colleagues to dismiss this out of hand.''
---- --
The real conundrum, Bigfoot people say, is that scientists, who are extremely
qualified to examine the mystery more thoroughly, tend to ignore it. The slack
is taken up by hundreds of people who are less qualified but far more enthusiastic.
The end result, some say, is a lot of wheel-spinning by amateurs. `The scientific
community is not aware of the extent of evidence that has been gathered, and
they think it's all nonsense,'' says ecologist J. Richard Greenwell, secretary
of the International Society of Cryptozoology, a Tucson clearinghouse for
evidence about purported animals whose existence has never been officially
verified. ``The scientists don't want to invest the time in it, so they don't
inform themselves of the evidence as it comes in. So unfortunately a whole
slew of amateurs have taken it on themselves to do this. It's very unscholarly
and unscientific, and there's a lot of backstabbing.''
`We don't claim it exists,'' Greenwell says of the creature, ``but we are
claiming there is sufficient good evidence to warrant scientists investing
time and effort.'' The problem, however, is convincing scientists that they
should be doing this. In 1981, the scholarly journal Current Anthropology
surveyed 300 North American physical anthropologists and found that only 12
percent of them believed that Bigfoot was a ``living animal, still unknown
to science.'' The rest thought Bigfoot reports came from either sightings
of ``ordinary animals (that had been) misidentified'' or ``imagination, hoaxes,
myths.'' `I don't see any reason to believe that those figures have changed
(over the years),'' says Matt Cartmill, a Duke University anthropologist who
is president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. ``You
really need to have a specimen to believe in the organism. Absence doesn't
prove it doesn't exist, but in the absence of living or dead specimens or
bones, or something distinctive and not capable of being faked or mistaken,
I think most people's attitude in the profession is that there is no need
to believe the organism exists.''
Nonetheless, there may be some minds opening up in the professional world
of science. At Yale, anthropologist David Daegling says: ``It's an interesting
field, and there are strong personalities on both sides.'' Daegling has been
making a detailed study of the controversial Patterson-Gimlin film taken on
Oct. 20, 1967. The film shows a big hairy mammal walking upright across a
sandbar. Experts say this few seconds of 16mm film is to the Bigfoot legend
what the Abraham Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy's murder is to
assassinations. And some say it is a hoax, although nobody has ever come up
with evidence to prove it. `When you look at the film, the first impression
is that something weird is going on,'' Daegling said of the Patterson-Gimlin
film the other day. ``It's hard to put your finger on. There's a different
kind of flow (of body motion) that struck people as significant. And people
were unable to find the kind of seams that would be on a suit. This was not
some guy in a dime-store gorilla costume.''
On the other hand, Daegling said, ``it's not possible to declare that, based
on the film, this is a real Bigfoot. What is a real Bigfoot? I don't know.
There are two possibilities: an animal unknown to science, something 7 feet
tall that we're managing to miss. Or it's a pretty clever hoax pulled off
in 1967.''
`If there's a population of these things running around, doesn't it make sense
that just once, somebody would have run into one with a car or shot one? There
are stories of people shooting them, but the body is always missing.''
`There's a difference between a rare occurrence and something that never happened,''
Daegling said. ``It's very unlikely to stumble on the carcass of a bear or
a bone from a bear, which is different from saying you never expect to run
into carcasses or bones.''
`I was in Montana doing research and just by dumb luck, in 20 days of wandering
the landscape, I came across the skull of a black bear, just sitting there,
right on the forest floor. ``The argument of the advocates that is most strained,
and the thing they need to come to grips with is not that we rarely find Sasquatch
bones, it's that we never find them. Not once have we come across a bone.''
---- --
So, as John Green, the dean of Bigfoot writers, says, ``It doesn't go anywhere
until someone brings in a body or a piece of a body.'' Green, a retired 71-year-old
newspaperman who lives in Vancouver, is the man every other Bigfoot expert
says you should talk to if you want to learn about this subject. In 1978,
he published, ``Sasquatch, the Apes Among Us.'' He knows from Bigfoot.
`In the end, you have two facts that can't be challenged,'' he says. ``First,
something is making enormous humanlike footprints, and it's been going on
for a long time over a big area. Footprints are real. Something real is there
to make them. Second, you have thousands of people in North America who describe
seeing a giant apelike creature that walks upright. And those people do exist.
So either you have an animal or you don't.'' ``If you have an animal, it explains
both phenomena. If you don't have an animal, these footprints must be of human
manufacture and there must be a reason why. Either people all over the world
have been faking big footprints and telling stories about hairy giants, or
you have an unknown animal closely related to humans. Either way, it's significant.''
He pauses for a moment, then reminisces about searching for Bigfoot near Bluff
Creek decades ago, a time when I saw well over 1,000 prints. When you're looking
at them, you don't have any other theory than that something walked there.
This is what hooked me on it.'' And what now, after more than 30 years of
chasing Bigfoot? Green reflects for a moment. `I will almost certainly die
without it being solved, as has happened to so many of my friends, '' he says.
`But I don't regret the time I spent on it.''
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle
Scanned to text by Bobbie Short