From the book "The Best of Sasquatch-Bigfoot" by John Green
Used with permission
Since "On The Track of the Sasquatch" was last revised there have been huge changes in the overall picture. In the late 60s I was in touch with almost all of the few people who were investigating this subject, and all of us together probably knew of less than 100 sighting reports. After Roger Patterson's film caught public attention a lot more reports began to come to light, until I was recording about 100 sightings or footprint finds each year. Still we always suspected that the great majority of incidents never became generally known because most of the people involved did not know of anywhere to report then without being ridiculed. With the growth of the internet that situation has turned upside down. There are many websites where people are asked to submit such reports, anonymously if they choose. I don't know of anyone who tries to monitor all the sites, but Matt Moneymaker's Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization alone gets at least half a dozen reports a day. A lot of them are obviously from pranksters, and trying to sort out the less-obvious fakes from the genuine information is a major task, but what remains must be more than a thousand reports a year. For a dozen years I worked at getting all the information I had into a computer database and by the spring of 2001 I had worked all the way through my back files and had more than 4,000 entries, but by then it was also obvious that I could no longer keep up with the data that was available on line. The new reports have cleared up one anomaly. From the state of Colorado, with a sea of mountains and a hockey team that displays Bigfoot tracks on the shoulders of its uniforms, I did not record a really substantial report in 40 years. More recently many reports have surfaced there, several of them among the best from anywhere. There is a somewhat similar situation with reference to the province of Alberta, except that most of the new information comes not from the internet but from years of dedicated investigation by Tom Steenburg, author of "The Sasquatch in Alberta" and "Sasquatch: Bigfoot The Continuing Mystery." The most interesting thing about the flood of new information, however, is that the majority of the reports do not come from the traditional areas at all. There are far more reports from east of the Mississippi than there are from the west of the continental divide. I have done enough investigating to satisfy myself that the evidence from the Midwest, East and South is on a par with what I am familiar with in the West, but reports from those areas are not the subject of this book. The other huge change is in the attitude of some of the scientists. For many years Dr. Grover Krantz was the only physical anthropologist willing to gamble his career by publicly being a full participant in the Sasquatch investigation, and there were no zoologists involved at all. The small group that gathered for the first viewing after Roger Patterson got his remarkable movie in the fall of 1967 did not include anyone with scientific credentials. It was a different story in the fall of 2000 when the BFRO organized a group effort at a place called Skookum Meadows east of Mount St. Helens and brought back evidence perhaps equal in importance to the Patterson movie: a huge cast made where a large animal had left limb and heel prints in a mud patch. One of the three men who found the print was a zoologist, Dr. Leroy Fish, and among the five additional people assembled when the cast was being cleared of its coating of dirt I was the only one without a doctor's degree. The impression was found where the men had placed some fruit at night in the middle of a patch of soft mud surrounded by mud that had already dried hard. They were hoping to get footprints if a Sasquatch was attracted to the fruit. When they returned a few hours later the fruit had indeed been disturbed, but instead of footprints what they found was a set of large, shallow depressions showing hair patterns, and a variety of holes were identified as elk and coyote tracks, others were a puzzle. It took a while for the men to come to the conclusion that a Sasquatch had sat down at the edge of the soft mud, leaving the impressions of slightly more than half its buttocks and one thigh plus several prints where it had moved its heel around, and had leaned over onto a forearm as it reached across with the other arm towards the fruit. Successfully casting all of such a large impression would normally have been out of the question, but one of the three men, Rick Noll, was a professional cast maker as well as a long time Sasquatch investigator, and had with him a couple of hundred pounds of exceptionally strong plaster. Using aluminum tent poles for bracing, they made what became know as the "Skookum cast," preserving all the evidence except some apparent scratch marks near the fruit. As with the original impression in the mud, the significance of the cast is not obvious at first glance, except for the humanlike heel shapes sticking up from it. Plainly something large and hair-covered had set itself down in the mud, but there are elk in the area and elk tracks in the cast. Careful examination, however rules out all the common animals. Certainly no part of an elk could match the obvious Achilles tendon of the best heel print. Professor Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University, a physical anthropologist whose special study is the evolution of bipedal walking, took on the job of cleaning up the cast. He spent several days meticulously picking away the dirt adhering to it and in the process collected a lot of pieces of animal hair, but only a very few of them proved to be interesting. The most important thing he was able to do was to determine the location of the joints in the thigh and forearm impressions, which showed the bones to be half again as long as those of a six-foot man. Besides Dr. Meldrum, I am in close touch with two other scientists who are publicly committed to the Sasquatch investigation, zoologists Dr. John Bindernagel and Dr. Henner Fahrenbach. Dr. Bindernagel, with 30 years field experience in many parts of the world, set out to determine if what Sasquatch witnesses reported added up to a believable animal. He found that it did. Further, as noted in his book "North America's Great Ape, the Sasquatch," he learned that some seemingly unlikely behaviors the witnesses described are shared with one or other of the known great apes. Significantly, some of those shared behaviors turned up in Sasquatch reports before they were observed by scientists studying the other apes. Dr. Fahrenbach did a statistical analysis of the footprint dimensions in my computer database and found that when plotted on a graph they form the normal bell curve that would be expected of a species of real animals. He has also specialized in the study of hair, and has found a number of suspected Sasquatch hairs from widely divided locations that don't match hairs from known animals but do match each other. Unfortunately the hairs have so far failed to provide suitable material for DNA identification. Jeff Meldrum had earlier laid to rest a concern felt by some laymen like myself that someday an expert in foot anatomy would demonstrate that supposed Sasquatch tracks showing long toes and those showing short toes could not both be genuine.