John Green, ‘Mr. Sasquatch,’ Leaves Big Shoes to Fill

John Green did not believe in sasquatches.

This was the first thing Green told me when I met him in 2009, for an interview at his home in Agassiz, British Columbia. He had a big, uncluttered wooden desk in the corner of his living room, with a map of the Pacific Northwest tacked to the wall beside it. He sat behind the desk and folded his hands in front of him and, before I could ask him a question, told me that people like him were called believers, but they weren’t. “We’re investigators.”

John Green, father of five, grandfather of 13, reporter, publisher, sailor, politician, active local citizen — and world-renowned sasquatch investigator — died May 28, 2016, at the age of 89.

He did a lot of things in his life, but the part of it he spent earnestly and doggedly trying to answer the question of whether sasquatches existed is what makes him particularly remarkable.

In his search for evidence, Green became entwined in a cast of mid-century characters — millionaire playboys, big game hunters and zealots — worthy of a Wes Anderson film.

But he wrote the history of the sasquatch as much as he was a part of it. Through his research and writing, he brought the story of the mysterious ape-like creature to the wider world with an air of respect and seriousness. He excavated historic and contemporary accounts from ordinary individuals who’d had mystifying and unsettling, even supernatural experiences in the forests, valleys and coastlines of this wild province.

Bridging the fringe and academia

Green was born in Vancouver in 1927. His father, Howard, was a long-time Conservative MP for Vancouver; his mother Marion was one of the first women to graduate from UBC’s agriculture program. After graduating from UBC himself, Green got a master’s in journalism from Columbia, took a post with the Globe and Mail, did a stint in the Navy, and eventually settled in Agassiz with his wife June, where he ran the Agassiz-Harrison Advance newspaper.

Green was vaguely familiar with the sasquatch growing up, but it was at home in Agassiz, around 1957, that Green heard a story that sparked his passion.

A woman named Jeannie Chapman, a relative of a friend of his, claimed to have seen a sasquatch on her property near Ruby Creek in the Fraser Valley. It was seven or eight feet tall, she guessed, and covered in dark brown hair except for the face. It came down the hill and advanced towards her cabin; she took a blanket to shield her children, and, in a huddle, they backed away and then ran in the opposite direction.

Green interviewed Chapman along with several men who’d visited the property afterwards and saw huge footprints tracked around the cabin and back up the hill. These weren’t the “Indian legends” depicted in the newspapers and tabloids of his youth. These were people Green knew, with serious and detailed stories, who’d all seen the same physical evidence.