September 27, 2012

The Science of Sasquatch

The sasquatch is just waiting to be discovered in B.C., but too few want to admit or investigate it, says a Vancouver Island wildlife biologist and author John Bindernagel.
Photograph by: Lyle Stafford, Times Colonist

Excerpts from an article in the Times Colonist:

The sasquatch is just waiting to be discovered in B.C., but too few want to admit or investigate it, says a Vancouver Island wildlife biologist and author.

“And we have what has to be the best sasquatch habitat anywhere on the planet right here on the B.C. coast,” said Courtenay’s John Bindernagel, author of the 2010 book The Discovery of the Sasquatch.

“The question for me is no longer ‘Does the sasquatch exist or not?’ but ‘Why has the existence of the sasquatch been resisted for so long?’ ” Bindernagel said.

Now 70, he believes enough sightings, tracks and other evidence of the large ape-like sasquatch — Coast Salish for hairy man — have been collected to provide evidence of the creature’s existence in B.C. and North America.

Bindernagel has collected casts of massive, human-like tracks from Strathcona Provincial Park and even heard a “whoo, whoo, whoop” call. It’s similar to a chimpanzee’s call in Uganda, but he believes it is a sasquatch calling out for its own kind.

Bindernagel comes to the investigation of the sasquatch as a scientist. He studied at the University of Guelph and the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in wildlife biology. He has worked in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, teaching, conducting research, surveys and preparing and implementing wildlife management plans and conservation measures before returning to Vancouver Island, where he worked as a consultant.

The Discovery of the Sasquatch is Bindernagel’s second book on the subject and the most scholarly in its approach. Even he admits his first book, North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch, was undertaken with a hobbyist’s approach to the subject.

But the first book attracted the interest of some of the world’s best-known biologists, including chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall. And after its publication, Bindernagel said something unusual started to happen: People began contacting him with reports of sightings. But before they even began to talk with him, they wanted to know one thing.

“They would ask, ‘Are you serious about this?’ ” said Bindernagel. “That was always the question — ‘Are you serious about this?’
“I had to say, ‘Yeah, obviously I am.’ ”

So he began to collect their reports. Bindernagel also began to collect and document details of other reported sightings and bring them together, looking for patterns or repeated details.

But he started to run into what he calls a roadblock of “prevailing knowledge.” Too many scientists were unwilling to look at evidence from various sightings. They refused to give much credence to the plaster casts of tracks. “We can’t get our papers accepted at professional conferences, so our colleagues have remained ignorant of the evidence,” Bindernagel said.

“The scientific gatekeepers keep saying, ‘No, no, no, having Bigfoot on our agenda would taint our whole conference.’ ”

So in his latest book, he attempts to take a scholarly approach, reviewing and summarizing the existing evidence. He also tries to put it in the context of scientists’ approach to “the discovery process.”

Read the entire article: The battle to find sasquatch

Filed under Bigfoot, Bigfoot Report, Cryptotourism, Cryptozoology, Evidence, Men in Cryptozoology, Sasquatch