Cryptomundo
for Bigfoot, Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents and More

This publication, the RHI, and its editor, are indebted to the curiosity, commitment, and generosity of John Green. After spending over 50 years in pursuit of the sasquatch question, it was John who encouraged this editor to undertake the creation of this journal, and who personally invested in its realization. It was John’s example of persistently laying this subject before the scientific community, of challenging individual academics to objectively engage the apparent evidence, that in large measure inspired this editor to commit to establishing a scholarly venue dedicated to the investigation and discussion of evidence for sasquatch and other relict hominoids. John had a journalist’s knack for facts and a statesman’s skill for logically and eloquently articulating a compelling argument. His accumulated data base established a baseline from which an informed profile of the sasquatch could be inferred. His instructive books were instrumental in promoting a matter-of-fact consideration of the subject. He played a key role in establishing the collection of original casts and other artifacts at the Willow Creek – China Flats Museum. He truly established a pragmatic foundation to the investigation of sasquatch, from which serious researchers and investigators now operate.

John’s insight and perspectives are best expressed in his own words. Therefore, in addition to a biographical sketch provided by cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, this tribute includes three previously unpublished discourses delivered by John, two of them presented before scientific bodies, i.e. The International Society for Cryptozoology, and the Society for Scientific Exploration, the third at the opening of the new wing of the Willow Creek – China Flats Museum, dedicated to Bigfoot.

The following remarks were delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, held in Kalispell, MT, in 2003.

Some of you may have noticed that I am not a young man. Once upon a time I was. It is more than 60 years since I first encountered information about what is now known as Bigfoot years since I began to investigate the phenomenon, and about 46 years since I began a campaign to have it subjected to scientific exploration.

On the face of it this organization and this subject should be a perfect fit. I doubt that there exists any anomaly of as much potential scientific importance that has been so determinedly ignored by the world of science.

I understand, however, that most of you are not likely to have paid any attention to it, so with apologies to those who have I am going to begin at the beginning.

In British Columbia, where I grew up, stories about hairy forest giants, known there as sasquatch, have been widely publicized since the 1920s. I don’t remember a time when I was not aware of them, but like most city dwellers I considered them to be tall tales, and indeed to some extent they were.

The picture painted of the sasquatch in those days was of a race of giant Indians, hairy but in some depictions only in the fashion of the hippies of a later generation. They were said to live in villages, speak Indian languages, communicate with signal fires on the mountains, wrestle with grizzly bears and kidnap Indian girls for nefarious purposes.

Then, after a decade of experience on city newspapers, I bought a small weekly paper in the area where many of the sasquatch stories originated, and in 1957 I was quite abruptly confronted with the fact that people I have come to respect took the sasquatch very seriously indeed.

The stories I then heard were not myths or legends, but first-hand accounts of inspecting giant, human-like tracks, or close observations of huge, bipedal, hair-covered creatures that looked more like upright apes than humans.

In one case I was told that a deputy sheriff from Bellingham, Washington, had cast one print from a series of 16-inch bipedal tracks that had been made by something so heavy that it crushed potatoes in the ground.

At the time I thought that was surely stretching the truth, and perhaps it was, but I have since read that large bears can do the same. In any case it turned out that the deputy was real, although he had since died and the cast had been broken.

His son gave me a tracing of the cast, and told me that his father had researched sasquatch reports for years and had accumulated a great deal of material, but they had not kept it.

Note that the tracing, which is on display here, has been in my possession since 1957, the year before a man named Ray Wallace supposedly started making all the Bigfoot tracks in the world, and that the 16-inch footprints had been observed, investigated, measured and cast in 1941, sixteen years earlier.

Further investigation quickly established that a number of people had done considerable research into the subject in the past, although none were doing so currently and that there had been some very well-publicized incidents in British Columbia around the end of the 19th century, and in Washington State in 1924.

In the fall of 1958, when newspapers pictured a cast of a 16-inch footprint from a dirt road under construction in the Bluff Creek valley in northwest California, I drove there to see for myself.

All the recent tracks had been destroyed by the time I got there, but some old ones were still impressive, and I met a taxidermist named Bob Titmus who had studied fresh tracks and had become completely convinced that they were genuine, made by some giant human or animal.

A few weeks later I got a letter from Bob saying that he and another man had found perfect tracks of a second individual, an inch shorter than those of the original Bigfoot and of a distinctly different shape, and that these tracks were not in dirt on the road but at the bottom of the steep, brush-covered side hill, in a hard-packed sandbar beside the creek.

I made a second trip to California, and this time what I saw changed the course of my life. Where those huge tracks sank an inch in the ground my boot prints hardly showed at all.

Tremendous weight was obviously required to make the tracks and the location was such that we could see no possible way that machinery could have been used there undetected.

Copies of casts of two of those tracks are on display here, along with a picture taken on another occasion showing a deep track on a different Bluff Creek sandbar with a boot print beside it hardly discernible.

I was a newspaperman, not any sort of scientist, so I took my information to the zoology department at the University of British Columbia, expecting that they would be enthusiastic to take over the investigation of something of such obvious importance in their field. What a joke.

The department head’s response was a condescending explanation of how the tracks of a bear’s hind feet can overlap his front feet, making imprints of the shape I described.

A cast of just such an imprint is on display. There is a resemblance in general shape, but on examination it would fool nobody.

Disappointments like that are something I have become used to in the subsequent 46 years, but otherwise the experience has been rewarding. Good footprints are not reported very often, but they turn up once in a while, and in 1967, I was notified about, and able to examine, hundreds of them made by two individuals on another road under construction in the Bluff Creek area.

An original cast from each of those prints is on display as well as some photographs of them. Clearly the larger track is that of the same individual that made the tracks Bob Titmus found in 1958, and other people have made casts and photographs of that individual’s tracks at other times and places.
In the nine year since I had first seen that tracks and others who had taken up the investigation had accumulated, often on tape, dozens of accounts by people who claimed to have seen one or more huge, hair-covered bipeds suitable to make such tracks, and in the autumn of 1967, one of those investigators, Roger Patterson, got lucky. He not only saw a sasquatch, he took 16-millimeter footage of it walking across yet another Bluff Creek sandbar.

Since 1967, hardly a year has passed without someone announcing that they have proved the Patterson movie a hoax. I have kept no record of all the people who are supposed to have made the hairy suit, or worn it. The stories contradict each other every which way, and you can be sure there will be a different one along next year and another the year after that. What I do have is a lot of first-hand knowledge about the people and circumstances involved.

I knew Roger Patterson quite well before he got the movie, and I had considerable contact with him afterwards. He may not have had an unblemished reputation in his community, but he was entirely sincere in his efforts in the sasquatch search, and he had neither the skills to attempt fake such a creature nor the money to hire anyone who did.