Bigfoot legend endures with persistent sightings in U.S.

Press, 23 September 1987, Page 28

Bigfoot legend endures with persistent sightings in U.S.

By

CHRISTOPHER HANSON

NZPA-Reuter Cougar, Washington

They are said to walk on two legs, leaving huge bare footprints that dwarf the largest human boot They are reported to be more than two metres tall, up to 350 kg, enormously strong and covered in fur.

According to legend, these rare monsters lurk in remote forests of the U.S. Pacific North-west. American Indians called them Sasquatch.

White settlers coined the term, Bigfoot By any name they have captured the public imagination and stirred continuing argument between scoffers and believers.

A Hollywood film, “Harry and the Hendersons,” tells of a Bigfoot captured by a Seattle family. Sceptics dismiss

Sasquatch stories as myth and say that if Bigfoot were real, one surely would have been captured by now. “There is no question that it’s folklore, like fairies, ghosts and witches,” said Professor Alan Dundes, of the anthropology department of the University of California. But amateur investigators and even some anthropologists — 13 per cent, according to a recent survey of scientists — believe Bigfoot may well exist as a hidden species of a sub-human primate that has survived for millions of years. Among other evidence, the believers cite thousands of huge footprints found in the forests, and film of a supposed Sasquatch shot in a remote northern California area.

There have been so many Sasquatch reports in the wilderness of southwest Washington state that two areas near Mount St Helens volcano, not far from the town of Cougar, are named Ape Canyon and Ape Caves. Skamania County, which surrounds those sites, has passed a law making it illegal to kill a Bigfoot

Now have come the first "sightings” in an urban area with reports from the Seattle suburb of Bellevue. Residents on Bellevue’s Eastgate Drive, not far from a wooded ravine, told Reuters they saw huge tracks in the snow last year, .one set measuring over 50cm.

“It was like a human foot, but the length!” said Gladys Totland, who lives in the neighbourhood. Two residents also say they saw huge hairy creatures near their houses in 1981. Joe Downham said he saw a big, brown, furry creature standing on its hind legs peering into a neighbour’s window one moonlight night It was joined by a smaUer black one and howled — “one continuous rising and falling note, very mournful, very loud.” The two then strode into the night he said.

Rubye Pang told Reuters she saw a big, black, two-legged animal pushing on her sliding glass door one night It scared her dogs, which cowered in a closet and dug a deep hole in her yard, she said. Sceptics say such eye-

witness reports must have a mundane explanation rmisidentification of a real animal, perhaps, or a hoax. They say that one man recently admitted creating at least eight sets of fake “bigfeet” in the Washington woods. But some experts , insist certain footprints are genuine, and so deep they could only have been made by a heavy beast “These footprints tell us it is a high primate, not a human,” said a Washington State University anthropologist, Grover Krantz, an expert on primates who is convinced Bigfoot exists. Krantz told Reuters he is studying 38cm footprints found in a wooded area near the WashingtonOregon border after a United States Forest Service worker reported seeing a huge, gorilla-like creature. Plaster casts of the prints showed they had distinct skin ridges that Krantz said would be “almost impossible even for the best hieroglyphics expert to fake.” In spite of Krantz’s analysis, even some Bigfoot believers doubt the authenticity of those particular prints. But a University of

Idaho anthropologist, Roderick Sprague, said in an interview: "Based on the written evidence, there is something out there.” •

A University of Wyoming anthropologist, George Gifi, said he had studied hundreds of Sasquatch reports and found there were “larger tracks and larger reported sightings as we move from south to north.”

That was consistent with zoological law, he said, because members of a species are larger as one moves away from the Equator. GUI said the pattern suggested some Bigfoot reports were true unless they were part of a “grandiose hoax” perpetrated over thousands of miles with careful attention to size.

Krantz and GiU speculate Bigfoot could be a surviving species assumed extinct and known as Gigantopithecus. Fossil remains of this big primate have been discovered in Asia.

Film of a purported Sasquatch, made by a Bigfoot hunter in California in 1967, shows a big, hairy creature lumbering through the woods and peering back at the photo-

grapher. Paul Kurtz, a philosopher at the State University of New York who chairs the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal, said it looked like a man in a monkey suit

But GUI said, “It didn't look like a hoax at aU. It looked how I’d expect a living Gigantopithecus to look.”

Ed McLarney, former editor of Skamania’s "Pioneer” weekly news- i ? paper, says he Interviewed many people who ? reported viewing ape-like creatures in their headlights or seeing huge foot- ; prints.

“Everyone can’t be drunk or crazy,” he said,: adding he too scoffed untu he personally tracked huge prints for miles and q' decided, “There’s no way anyone could have pho- .’• ?£ neyed this up.”

But Dundes, the University of California scholar, said the desire to believe in Bigfoot was a "psycho- $ logical projection of the . ? primitive — the wild ; : -|k man” lurking in civilised people. , «