From the book "The Best of Sasquatch-Bigfoot" by John Green
Used with permission
The first four chapters of this book deal with significant events in the Sasquatch/Bigfoot investigation in the twenty-first century, but the others are a reprinting, without updating, of two books, "On The Track of the Sasquatch" and "Encounters with Bigfoot," that in various versions have been continuously in print since 1968. Paradoxically, it is the fact that I wrote much of them so long ago that makes them uniquelt relevant in 2004. Although the story is actually much older, reports of outsize humanlike footprints and huge upright-walking animals first attracted attention in 1958 when a cast of a "Bigfoot" print was made and publicized, and became more widely known in 1967 when a man named Roger Patterson took a 16 mm movie purporting to show on of the creatures. In those days such reports made news, but in recent years new evidence for the existence of the Sasquatch is usually ignored by the media. Proof that a bipedal ape shares this continent with humanity is apparently considered so big a story that it can't possibly be true. The headlines now are reserved for stories of the opposite kind, claims of proof that the Bigfoot tracks and the movie were just fakes after all. Not many people were involved in investigations on site either in 1958 or in 1967, and only two people took part in both, the late Bob Titmus and myself. Bob never wrote of his experiences, so my books were the only equivalent of that courtroom staple, the investigator's notes made at the time. At the end of 2002 newspapers and TV networks all over the world had a field day with a yarn that all the footprints were faked by a man who had just died, so Bigfoot was also dead. Even though the story was obvious nonsense its effects will last a long time, stopping witnesses from risking ridicule by making their stories public, and discouraging scientists who might be considering getting involved in the investigation. That fiasco is dealt with in full in a later chapter. As for the movie, attempts to debunk it come along every year or so, usually contradicting each other. It became widely believed in Hollywood that the man who changed the faces of the actors in the "Planet of the Apes" movies also created the creature in the Bigfoot film. He apparently never denied it while he was working, but after he retired he told Sasquatch investigator Bobbie Short, on tape, "I was the best but I wasn't that good!" The prestigious Wildlife Unit of the BBC also took a hand in the debunking game. They succeeded in making themselves look foolish by showing a pitiful attempt at a re-creation of the Patterson movie with a man in an ape suit, and by claiming as proof of fakery a copy of a letter dated after the movie was made which indicated that Roger made money by selling rights to show it. Who wouldn't? Another wing of the BBC had been one of the earliest to ante up. Why anyone would argue that selling something of value proved that it wasn't genuine is hard ot understand. More recently, a book was published in which the author claimed to have found the man who wore the ape suit in the movie, and the man who sold the suit to Roger Patterson. In each case there was no evidence, just one person's story, and the two men described two totally different suits. The man who claimed to have worn the suit said Roger had made it by skinning a dead horse. It was in three pieces and it stunk. The man who claimed to have made the suit said it consisted of six pieces and was made of modern materials. Paradoxically, this silly attempt to prove that Patterson hoaxed his film led to the discovery that the movie itself has always contained proof that it does not show a man in a suit. One of the things that the supposed suit maker is quoted as saying is that the way to make the arms in the suit look longer than human arms is to extend the gloves of the suit on sticks. Many people have noted that the arms of the creature in the film look unusually long, almost as long as its legs. Some, including myself in 1968, have published estimates of their length. No one went on to deal with the question of how human arms could be extended to match the extra length and what such an extension would look like. There is no way to establish for certain if any of the dimensions estimated for the creature in the film are accurate, but what can be established with reasonable accuracy is the length of the creature's legs and arms in relation to one another. From that ratio it is simple to calculate how many inches must be added to the arms of a man of known size in order to make them long enough to fit in the supposed suit. In my own case the answer turned out to be about 10 inches. But in order for the arms to bend at the elbow, which they plainly do in the movie, all of that extra length has to be added to the lower arm. The result, in my case, is about 12 inches of arm above the elbow and 29 inches below it-an obvious monstrosity. The creature in the movie has normal-looking arms. It cannot be a man in a suit! Many issues in the long debate about the movie remain unresolved-what the film speed was, whether a man could duplicate the creature's unusual bent-kneed walk, whether its behavior was normal for an animal, whether the tracks left on the sandbar could have been faked, and so on-but all of them turn out to have been irrelevant to the main issue. My measurements of the film, made 36 years ago, gave the creature arms that were 30 inches from the shoulder to the wrist and legs that were 35 inches from the hip to the ground. My own measurements are about 24 inches from shoulder to wrist and 40 inches from hip to ground. Scientists studying primates use almost identical measurements, the only difference being that they measure to the ankle joint rather than the bottom of the foot, to establish what is called the intermembral index, which is one of the things used to distinguish one primate from another. Gorillas and chimpanzees, with arms longer than their legs, have average indices of 117 and 107 respectively. The average human IM index is around 70. Only the ratios of the measurements matter, actual size makes no difference. Establishing an accurate IM index for the creature in the film is difficult, since no one frame shows all of both the upper and lower limbs at right angles to the camera, but it can be done, in fact a computerized study of the creature's walk done for the TV documentary "Sasquatch, Legend Meets Science" has already done it. Using sophisticated forensic animation software to follow points on the creature's body and limbs as it moves through 116 frames of the movie, the computer was able to produce pictures of its skeleton showing an IM index between 85 and 90. Forensic animator Reuben Steindorf's comment after studying the film was that making it using a man in a suit would require a lot of mechanisms not available in the 1960s. It would have to have been a highly funded project and there would have to have been trailing electric cables attached to the creature somewhere. In short, it couldn't be a man in a suit. A study of a lesser number of frames by Dr. Jeff Meldrum, an anatomy professor at Idaho State University, produced a similar result, and he also noted that besides bending its elbows the figure in the film flexes both its wrists and it fingers, "all but ruling out the possibility that an artificial arm extension could be involved." It will no doubt take a while before the impact of the IM index makes itself felt among primatologists, but they can hardly ignore one of their own standard measurements when it tells them that there really is a giant higher primate to be found in North America.