Sasquatch in the Yukon

It’s amazing to me sometimes how the media will seize on a story that really is no big deal. It is patently obvious that a lot of media types don’t do enough research before they write a story. Here’s an example. There are so many sasquatch research groups out there that I have lost track of many of them. I belong to several such as the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club (BCSCC), Cryptosafari, Westcoast Sasquatch, and The Texas Bigfoot Research Center.

I was really quite amazed that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation decided to make a big deal recently about a nice enough guy starting a sasquatch organization in the Yukon. We have tons of sasquatch researchers in Canada and quite a few like the Western Canada Sasquatch Researchers Organization (WCSRO). In fact, Red Grossinger, who started the Sasquatch Yukon organization is actually working with WCSRO according to Sean Viala who heads that group.

According to the article Mr. Grossinger said he started the group after residents of Teslin in the Yukon had a series of encounters with a “bushman” last year. Grossinger said that the incident made it clear to him that sasquatch researchers in southern Canada knew nothing about the many sightings in Yukon. Well, I’m sorry to contradict Mr. Grossinger, but quite a few of us do and have been collecting reports from there for over a decade.

In fact, we have had reports since 1990 of a creature from the Carmacks area which describe a creature called the Beaver Eater which we have not yet eliminated the possibility that it might be a sasquatch.

I personally collected my first clear sasquatch sighting from Yukon in 1991 when Eugene Field from Electric City, Washington sent me a report of his sighting of a sasquatch walking across the Alaska Highway in plain view of Mr. Field. The creature was in excess of seven feet tall and seemed totally nonchalant about the presence of Mr. Field and his wife approaching the hominid in their car. Mr. Field could see its tracks in the snow as the sasquatch walked off into the distance, but I can’t recall if he measured them.

Myself and other southerners (we are actually Western Canadians) like Thomas Steenburg avidly followed the Teslin sighting reports of last year long before the supposed ‘sasquatch hair’ – it turned out to be buffalo – was found. So it is a little disappointing to see the media fail to contact any of the Canadian sasquatch groups to see if any of us had actually looked into the matter of the Yukon sasquatch/bushman before making it look like we did not have a clue that sasquatch was alive and well in that territory.

While few of us have ventured to the Yukon to investigate sightings there, it is not because there is a lack of interest, but is actually due to two factors:

1) Most of us respect provincial boundaries and don’t go traipsing into someone else’s backyard unless we are invited or if the local groups shows no interest in following up.

2) It is pretty expensive to fly up there and then one has to arrange accommodations, vehicles and food as well. We just don’t have the money to do that in another territory when we have to budget carefully to carry out research in our own provinces “down south”.

I wish Mr. Grossinger and his team every success up north and nothing would gratify me more than a Yukon researcher being the first to find evidence of sasquatch in his/her own province.

John Kirk About John Kirk
One of the founders of the BCSCC, John Kirk has enjoyed a varied and exciting career path. Both a print and broadcast journalist, John Kirk has in recent years been at the forefront of much of the BCSCC’s expeditions, investigations and publishing. John has been particularly interested in the phenomenon of unknown aquatic cryptids around the world and is the author of In the Domain of the Lake Monsters (Key Porter Books, 1998). In addition to his interest in freshwater cryptids, John has been keenly interested in investigating the possible existence of sasquatch and other bipedal hominids of the world, and in particular, the Yeren of China. John is also chairman of the Crypto Safari organization, which specializes in sending teams of investigators to remote parts of the world to search for animals as yet unidentified by science. John travelled with a Crypto Safari team to Cameroon and northern Republic of Congo to interview witnesses among the Baka pygmies and Bantu bushmen who have sighted a large unknown animal that bears more than a superficial resemblance to a dinosaur. Since 1996, John Kirk has been editor and publisher of the BCSCC Quarterly which is the flagship publication of the BCSCC. In demand at conferences, seminars, lectures and on television and radio programs, John has spoken all over North America and has appeared in programs on NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, TLC, Discovery, CBC, CTV and the BBC. In his personal life John spends much time studying the histories of Scottish Clans and is himself the president of the Clan Kirk Society. John is also an avid soccer enthusiast and player.

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