The calls started at around eight pm, all
from motorists driving down a specific segment
of an Oregon highway.
At first the police assumed they were being
pranked, but then the sheer volume of calls
told them that something was definitely out
there.
Each panicked driver that called relayed the
exact same story- something massive, much
bigger than a bear, was running alongside
the freeway.
The creature stood well over seven feet tall,
ran on two legs, and appeared to be panicked.
One couple described the creature as roaring
and clearly terrified of the traffic rushing
by.
As driver after driver flooded local police
lines, cruisers were immediately dispatched.
Sadly, by the time they arrived the creature
had already plunged back into the deep woods
of Oregon's forests.
As the American population expands and pushes
ever deeper into pristine and untouched forests
that still span the North American continent,
bigfoot sightings continue to increase on
a nearly year by year basis.
While many of these are clearly hoaxes, and
many more are misidentifications, the sheer
volume of eyewitness sightings is enough to
give any rational thinker pause- could all
of these sightings of the legendary creature
truly be pure fabrications or accidental misidentifications?
While once considered nothing more than a
folk tale or outright hoax, the growing evidence
for a population of Sasquatch on the North
American continent has begun to lure in serious
scientific experts, and a great number of
these are becoming increasingly convinced
after reviewing available evidence that something
does indeed stalk the woods of the American
continent.
One of the most obvious, and the first, pieces
of evidence of the sasquatch phenomenon are
footprints found in nearly all climates and
environments across North America.
The creature now known as Bigfoot got its
name from reports of mysterious footprints
found at a construction site in California,
and the name has stuck ever since.
A name, which is well earned, as the footprints
are quite massive, ranging an average of 18
inches in length!
Yet the bigfoot community would be rocked
when in 2002 one of the construction workers
who discovered the footprints, Ray Wallace,
admitted to faking the prints.
Not only that, but he had faked prints in
many other areas of the country using his
custom-made wooden 'big feet' that he simply
strapped into and then stomped around in.
The entire phenomenon appeared to be dead,
clearly a hoax from the start... and yet,
this was far from the truth.
Wallace's work sites throughout his lifetime
were plotted out by researchers, which helped
debunk many suspected sightings.
Yet there was still a major problem- while
Wallace was actively hoaxing, prints were
appearing hundreds, even thousands of miles
away.
And what's more, Wallace's prints were not
the first to be discovered, they were simply
the first to draw national attention in such
a large way.
In fact, Bigfoot sightings and footprints
have been reported since the dawn of the American
nation, and Native Americans have long believed
in and reported on the existence of the creature,
claiming that they have lived alongside it
for thousands of years.
But perhaps this is all folklore, though it
would still be difficult to explain why people
on the other side of the country started hoaxing
bigfoot tracks at the exact same time as Wallace.
If these tracks are indeed all fake, then
these hoaxers are far more sophisticated than
anyone ever suspected.
Dr. Jeff Meldrum has long spoken on the specific
qualities of bigfoot tracks, and as the associate
professor of anatomy and anthropology, as
well as the adjunct associate professor of
the department of anthropology at Idaho State
College, he is well qualified to speak on
the subject.
Meldrum is an expert on foot morphology and
most importantly, on locomotion in primates.
Dr. Meldrum understands how primate feet are
shaped by evolution, and how this affects
their locomotion, and while initially skeptical
of the phenomenon, his investigation into
hundreds of casts has now convinced him: there
is a possibility of an unidentified large
primate in the American forests.
Dr. Meldrum's conclusion is derived from several
common qualities found amongst the footprint
casts he considers to be authentic.
The first is the identification of dermal
ridges, these are patterns in the skin that
are similar to that on your finger tips, and
while drying plaster can sometimes form impressions
that seem like dermal ridges, it is not a
common phenomenon.
The second piece of evidence is the presence
of a midtarsal break, identified by the way
that the footprint is created on the ground
as the creature moves.
This is a feature common to apes but not found
in humans, and is caused by the foot actually
bending before an ape takes its next stride.
Next is the spacing of the footprints themselves,
which is often in excess of three feet.
By measuring the space between footprints,
the gait, or walk, of a creature can be measured,
and time and again this figure comes up to
such a superhuman value that it would be extremely
biologically difficult, and sometimes impossible
for a human to hoax.
But Dr. Meldrum is far from the only professional
expert who believes in the possibility of
a large, unidentified ape.
Police fingerprint technician Jimmy Chilcutt
became interested in the phenomenon after
watching a Bigfoot documentary, when in his
own words, he was shocked at the appearance
of primate identifying characteristics in
the plaster casts such as dermal ridges.
This discovery propelled him to look into
the phenomenon using his specialized technical
knowledge as a fingerprint forensics specialist,
and he became convinced that while some tracks
were fake, others misidentified, a large enough
body of them existed that pointed at the possibility
of a large primate.
If every bigfoot track is being created by
hoaxers, then clearly the real mystery here
is why an army of primate anatomy and locomotion
experts have been pranking the nation for
decades.
Perhaps the most famous, and controversial,
piece of evidence however is the Patterson-Gimlin
film, which purports to show the clearest
footage yet of a large bipedal animal walking
across a dry riverbed in northern california.
According to Robert Patterson, the man who
shot the film, he and his friend, Robert Gimlim,
came across the creature while on horseback
trying to gather evidence for the existence
of Bigfoot.
Despite noticing the men, the creature simply
moved off in a brisk, wide gait, looking back
at them several times.
Robertson, who was shocked at the appearance
of the creature, took about twenty seconds
to get his panicked horse under control, hop
off the saddle, and grab his camera, leaving
most of the encounter unfilmed.
Since that fateful day in 1967, the film has
been repeatedly inspected, dissected, and
reconstructed by scientists the world over
in a bid to discover if the film is real,
or a hoax.
While several people have come forward to
claim they were the man in the costume, studies
of the film have time and again indicated
that the subject may have been a real biological
creature.
One of the most damning pieces of evidence
used by skeptics to debunk the film is a completely
unsubstantiated rumor that the bigfoot costume
used in the film was designed by legendary
makeup artist John Chambers, who created the
costumes for Planet of the Apes.
Yet these rumors are exactly that- hand-me-down
stories that can't even be authentically traced
back to Chambers himself making that statement.
They also beg several key, common-sense questions,
the most prominent of which is simply: why
in the world would an Academy Award winning
makeup artist create a costume for a completely
unknown former rodeo clown to fake a bigfoot
film with?
And secondly, why would he create a costume
that is visibly far more advanced than anything
Hollywood would use for the next four decades,
and then never recreate that work on a professional
film?
In determining the validity of the costume
claim, film analysis has focused on gathering
painstaking detail of the creature frame by
frame as it moves, and this analysis shows
that as the creature in the film moves, entire
muscle groups can be seen to also move on
the creature's body.
This is simply too far outside the realm of
possibility for 1967 costume technology, and
actuated artificial muscles wouldn't be incorporated
into Hollywood costumes for decades to come.
The only possibility for the suit to clearly
show these well-defined muscle movements is
for the suit wearer to have the suit physically
worn right next to his own body, meaning that
the person in the costume would have had to
been truly a massive individual- far outside
the physical limits of most human beings and
well outside those of anyone who has claimed
to be the man in the costume.
Famously, Disney Executive Ken Peterson was
quoted as saying that Disney technicians would
be unable to recreate a suit so realistic,
and if his technicians couldn't recreate it
then how would an unknown like Patterson have
done so in the first place.
Universal Studio special effects technicians
upon being shown the film recently concluded
that they could possibly try and fake it,
but they would have to create a brand new
suit using artificial muscles, and then find
an actor who could be trained to walk in the
extremely peculiar way the creature in the
film moves.
Yet the creature's movement reveals even more
interesting details that hint at the authenticity
of the footage.
Notably, primate and human locomotion experts
have worked to painstakingly recreate the
gait of the creature with human subjects,
and have found that while the creature's gait
doesn't resemble any known primate, it is
also extremely unlike that of a human and
instead seems to sit somewhere in between
the two.
While the gait has been successfully recreated
with a professional athlete in a laboratory
setting, even the researchers responsible
for the study admitted that it was an extremely
uncomfortable, unnatural movement that would
be difficult to maintain for long periods
of time.
Dmitry Donskoy, head of the Department of
Biomechanics at the USSR Central Institute
of Physical Culture, agreed with the results
of the recreation decades before it even happened,
noting that the creature's movements were
too natural and confident, while also unnatural
for a human, for it to have been easily faked.
Consider the rocky, uneven ground that the
event took place in and it speaks even more
to the difficulty in hoaxing such movements.
Even more damning for the hypothesis that
the creature is just a man in a suit, is that
a computer reconstruction of the anatomy of
the creature, using known locations of the
creature's joints, shows that the creature
has a far longer torso than legs, well outside
the natural range of any human.
Even skeptical reviews of the film have fallen
far short of declaring it a hoax, with most
studies simply noting that the creature's
true identity cannot be determined, which
is more than a fair statement for footage
shot on 16mm film from such great distance.
Sadly, no hard evidence of the creature exists,
which begs the question of how such a prominent
woodland figure could exist and leave behind
zero hard evidence.
Many believe that the creature is more intelligent
than a normal primate, and believe that they
may show some level of care for their dead,
perhaps secreting them away in caves or other
locations as a form or a very primitive burial
rite.
What is known is that the natural state of
North American forests can actually work to
decompose even bones and scatter them wide
enough as to make their discovery difficult,
if not impossible- especially if Bigfoot is
a primate with a very low population.
The low population theory is supported by
much of the evidence gathered on the creature,
with some estimates ranging at a population
of only a few thousand across North America.
Animals like Bengal Tigers are very much real,
and have an even lower population count thanks
to hunting by humans.
They too rarely if ever leave remains to be
discovered by humans, despite their environment
being located mostly inside of the most populated
country in the world: India.
If we were to judge the existence of Bengal
Tigers by the same standard we use on Bigfoot,
well, the scientific community would have
very little actual evidence of their existence.
Many Bigfoot researchers believe that the
creature not only has a very low population,
but one that is actively being made extinct
by human activity.
These massive bipedal creatures, if they exist,
would require a substantial range to support
their massive caloric requirements, and while
studies have shown that there does in fact
exist enough subsistence in American forests
to meet these requirements, the range of a
family group of these creatures would have
to be extremely large.
With human encroachment into the wilds of
North America,and activities like the damming
of rivers interrupting fish supplies, these
elusive North American great apes may perhaps
truly be our most intelligent relatives, but
are surely on the way to complete extinction.
Sadly, they may fade away entirely before
their existence is conclusively proven, though
perhaps sometime in the future remains may
be discovered that show that once, a great
ape truly did stalk the American wilds.
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