Do Hidden Creatures Live in the Pacific Northwest?
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on January 30th, 2015
The lack of skeletal remains of Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest is readily explainable, said Jeff Meldrum, an Idaho State University anthropology professor, in Richland Thursday night.
His talk at the annual meeting of the Columbia Basin Badger Club — “Do hidden creatures live in the Pacific Northwest?” — attracted a sold-out crowd of 130 people, a record number for the club.
He’s taken a look at what he believes is the scientific DNA and forensic evidence gathered on Sasquatch in his book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.
But if Sasquatch exists, wouldn’t skeletal remains be found and wouldn’t the population be so small that it would go extinct, he was asked after he gave his presentation.
He estimated that Sasquatch might have a range of 1,000 square miles. Such beings, when reports are received around the globe, tend to live in areas with 16 to 18 inches of rainfall annually, he said.
That means there could be 60 to 100 in the state of Washington and 2,000 to 3,000 in all of North America. That’s enough for a sustainable population, he said.
The population of mountain gorillas in Africa dropped down to less than 200 and survived, he said.
It’s possible they have a social organization like the orangutan where the male patrols a large area. Evidence suggests they may forage individually, and when evidence of multiple Sasquatch are found, they are usually a female and offspring, he said.
They are apparently long-lived — maybe living to 50 or 60 years old — and are at the top of their food chain. When they die, it would likely be a natural death, and they would secrete themselves away, he said.
In the wet coniferous soils of the places they might live, any remains not chewed up by animals would disintegrate quickly in the soil.
How many of those in the room had ever found bones from creatures that were far more common, he asked. A bear skull? A wolverine skull? No hands went up.
Much of hist talk was devoted to comparing the footprints from possible Sasquatch and similar creatures, found in areas ranging from near Walla Walla to Asia.
He finds similarities in the oversize footprints — 17 1/2 inches long in one example — gathered on opposite sides of the globe from different researchers in different decades.
They include a horizontal line across the footprints that at first glance may look like a break across the cast. He interprets it to mean that the feet of Sasquatch flex, unlike the more rigid human foot.
Meldrum’s research extends to other hominoids, including the ebu gogo of Flores, Indonesia. Locals say small ape-like people lived there before they were hunted to extinction, with the last of them driven into a cave and suffocated within the last few hundred years.
Meldrum says he has a grant and is seeking permission to excavate the the cave.
Meldrum maintains a website called The Relic Hominoid Inquiry.
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Dr. Meldrum makes excellent points covering the aspects of Bigfoot possibility. Yet there is an issue that I find with the remains of large animals being rarely encountered in the wild. As a boy, I camped in the Adirondacks of New York State for 2 weeks every summer. We would come across remains of all types including; deer, bears and all manner of leftovers if you will. While walking my dogs in the nearby state park where I live, it is not unusual to see remains of animals off the paths, in the brush and often near the water. Once while panning gold for in Maine, I came across a moose carcass lying partly in a shallow river. If you’re observant, you can find animal remains just about anywhere the animals are. This brings us to the Bigfoot remains or lack there of dilemma. The statement that animal remains are hard to find in the wild just isn’t true, but if Bigfoot is a higher primate of some kind and indeed does possess even a rudimentary social order of some sort, than the hiding or even burial of corpses is certainly possible. That no remains have turned up so far might add credence to this theory. If in fact Bigfoot actually does exist, then I think that the only way a body is going to be obtained will be by a shooting or vehicular strike…unfortunately.
The fact that no credible clear game trail camera images as yet bothers me much more than having no remains being found because if you look at trail camera pictures and videos on say YouTube, you can see all manner of animals – including humans – doing all kinds of things that they should or shouldn’t be doing. The idea that Bigfoot can somehow escape or evade all trail and game cameras everywhere while all other animals in the area can’t, is a little hard to accept.
cryptokellie:
How many sets of human remains did you come across back then? There is a simple reason why: humans bury their loved ones. The same could account for the extreme paucity of Bigfoot remains (as in zero).
Your distress at the lack of game camera photos of Bigfoots are likely explainable thusly: THEY KNOW WHERE THE CAMERAS ARE LOCATED, and understand what they are for. It’s highly likely they watched the game cams being installed! From a safe and skeptical distance, too!
highly doubt you’d be able to find remains of a bigfoot.
i mean… they can’t even find a living one moving around.
a dead one? the forrest would probably consume the remains… didn’t they show that experiment on one of the TV shows?
within a few days all there was left was a pile of bones and it was done.
not sure on the burying… its an assumption at this point… could be true, could not be true.
we don’t have enough data to make that decision yet.
but sounds plausible..
who knows?
same for knowing where the cameras are.
it sounds good… plausible… but you have no way of validating that…
Goodfoot You seem to be saying that Bigfoot if it does exist has the same level of intelligence as a human. If it is some form of primate I seriously doubt it would know what a game cam is. Even if they watched them being installed I doubt they would know what they were for. Even if was some kind of throwback from the stone age it wouldn’t know what a game cam was and would most likely be curious enough to come up to it and investigate.
We seem to have a cryptozoological disconnect. On the one hand, we say we have no Bigfoot remains, and on the other we have hundreds of reports of giant humanoid skeletons being found in North America for almost two centuries. Seems logical, assuming both sightings are true (I know, big assumption), that they are possibly related. Put another way, maybe we are already in possession of Bigfoot remains, and just don’t know it.
There are several examples of various species that were reduced to very small population sizes, most, if not all, due to human actions (i.e., overhunting, habitat lost), but have rebounded from those small populations. I agree with that 2,000 to 3,000 could be a sustainable population size, at least for several centuries or perhaps even several thousands of years. With species that has a long lifespan and can reproduce multiple times throughout that life, what exactly constitutes a minimal viable population is not a simple question to answer.
As for finding bodies, a very small population could simply be the reason. I know many people say they find deer, elk, and/or bears when they are out in the wilderness, but most of these species have estimated populations in the high hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions, and in the case of the white-tailed deer, tens of millions. Finding their remains is not a statistically significant event. I’d more surprised to hear someone say they have spent hundreds of hours outdoors and never see a deer carcass.
There are reported values for birth rates and mortality rates for some of the great apes, and if those were applied to a hypothetical Sasquatch population of 3,000, the result may very well be only one or two hundred deaths a year, spread across the Pacific Northwest area of around a million square kilometers (depends on the definition of the PNW, including British Columbia increases it greatly).
Something else I had meant to include.
How many people have come across cougar remains? If so, how many remains?
I haven’t seen too many people say they’ve found such. Cougars have a low population number in North America, I believe around 24,000 to 30,000. If cougar remains are rarely found, how much rarer would the remains of a species with a tenth of the population be?
How often are remains of the great apes found in their natural environment?