July 5, 2010

Should Bigfoot Be Killed To Prove They Exist?

Charles Berlin’s cartoon gives another side of the story. Who is hunting whom?

Let’s look at it from their point of view. Maybe they want to kill humans to prove we exist to their clans?

Okay, maybe that’s farfetched, but let me just put it out there. Bigfoot will not be proven without a body. A living body. A dead body. Not a body part. Not a DNA sample. Not a fecal sample. Labs have their share of those with their “inconclusive results” and “near human” findings.

The type specimen is needed.

No two ways around it. The zoological proof of the actual existence of Bigfoot pivots on a body being found, a living animal being captured, or, yes, a specimen being killed.

But should the hunters be looking over their shoulders too?

Is the scenario here a two-way street?

People want to talk about this issue. Let’s talk about it again.

Individuals are out there with guns. Hunters, farmers and soldiers have said they’ve killed Bigfoot but were afraid Sasquatch was “too close to human” and they would be charged with murder.

Folks show up on radio shows and talk about buried bodies, but no one has shown anyone a body. Most of those shows are based on hoaxes.

Even the Minnesota Iceman body is no more available today than the two bodies that the Bugs’ map do not show from their alleged burial site in Texas. Nor has the buried baby Bigfoot from the Carter Farm been found. Stories, no results.

Where are the bodies? And I don’t mean the dead Bigfoot alone.

Where are the dead human bodies that Bigfoot have killed? Are Bigfoot out there killing humans who are hunting them? Or is this merely a rural legend turning into a urban myth?

Let’s look at the record for both situations….

Our hairy hominoids have a long history of “missed chances”….In 1784 The Times (of London) reported that a group of Lake of the Woods, Manitoba Native Canadians captured a “huge, manlike, hair-covered creature.” But no record exists of what happened to the body. In 1898, in Honduras, Edward Jonathan Hoyt killed a “five-foot creature of the ape family.” But the body was not kept. In 1913, a group of Chinese hunters wounded and captured a hairy, man-like creature, known to the local Tibetans by a name meaning “snowman.” The creature was kept captive in Patang, Sinkiang, until it died five months later. It was described as having a black monkey-like face, and being covered with silvery yellow hair several inches long. Again, no records remain of what became of the body.

And the missed chances continue. The “wild man” captured in the Caucasus in December 1941 (see page 92) was eventually killed and no one knows what happened to the body. In 1954, Colonel K. N. Rana, director of the Nepal Bureau of Mines, reported to the Daily Mail Expedition that Nepalese tribesmen had twice captured Yetis. One prisoner was a baby, but information had reached him too late to follow up. The other incident involved the capture of a male Yeti by tribes people who tied it up and were journeying back with it from the mountains. But when the creature refused to eat and died, they abandoned the carcass, not realizing it would be as valuable dead as alive. Later, no one could relocate the body. The one carcass that did turn up, the Minnesota Iceman in 1968 (see page 54), was quickly replaced by a model–and has been under a cloud of doubt ever since.

There are also numerous reports that Bigfoot and its kin have been shot and killed. Researcher John Green reports that at least five Sasquatch have reportedly been killed in North America, anthropologist Grover Krantz mentions another case, and former hunter Peter Byrne once investigated stories of a dead Bigfoot in British Columbia, but all reports have been extremely vague and no body has ever been produced. And in Mongolia two Wildmen were reportedly shot by a patrol during the border skirmishes between the Russians and the Japanese in 1939. And again, the body vanished.

The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates, pages 160-161, (NY: Anomalist Books, 2006).

But what of the reports of people being killed? Where’s the proof there?

Why is this issue a hot topic on radio and within Bigfoot studies? That’s easy, of course, as “death sells.” So let’s go deeper, behind the stories.

Is there any foundation to these “Bigfoot kills people” accounts? In North America, the “evidence” mostly boils down to vague “wilderness” stories.

For instance, here are three examples:

(1) There are the tales from the Nahanni Valley, NWT, Canada, the so-called “Headless Valley,” of the supposed killings of prospectors by the hairy Bushmen, a local name for Sasquatch or surviving Neandertals.

(2) The Yosemite Valley is named after a shadowy group of “people” that pursued the Indians that lived in the valley. The Miwok word yohemiti is tied to their characterizations of their elusive enemies and it means, “Some among them are killers.”

(3) The famed story from Theodore Roosevelt’s The Wilderness Hunter, published in 1890. During the mid-1800s, two hunters, one named Baumann, were camping in the Bitterroot Mountains, on the other side of the Rockies from Yosemite, when they were visited by something that left giant footprints. Then at midnight they saw, in the fire’s light, a huge upright form and smelled it, too.

The next morning, Baumann went to check traps, while his mate packed up. When Baumann returned, he found his friend’s neck broken and four great fang marks in his throat. Roosevelt added, “The footprints of the unknown beast, printed deep in the soft soil, told the whole story… his monstrous assailant, which must have been lurking in the woods, waiting for a chance to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently up from behind, walking with long noiseless steps and seemingly still on two legs…. It had not eaten the body, but apparently had romped and gamboled around it in uncouth and ferocious glee, occasionally rolling it over and over; and had then fled back into the soundless depths of the woods.”

Was Roosevelt’s humanized monster really a Bigfoot or merely an angry grizzly? The Wilderness Hunter tale has joined the Sasquatch literature, nevertheless.

In my writings, I’ve talked of how aggressive Eastern Bigfoot seem to be against dogs. Then I discuss humans being killed:

John Green collected cases of Bigfoot killing dogs, too, but he has only five accounts, other than the Baumann story, of people being killed by alleged Sasquatch. All are second-hand stories. Two from the 1970s came to him from an investigator in Alaska, who told of Bigfoot attacking men living on boats in the Yukon River. Though their dogs drove off the hairy giant, the men later died.

The Bigfoot Bulletin of October 31, 1970, published by California researcher George Haas, carried a fantastic letter from an army trainee named Nick E. Campbell at Fort Ord, California. He related that two Texas National Guard privates, one of them a minister, had told him that at Longview where they lived, there were reports from about 1965 of a giant hairy creature roaming the back country between there and Jefferson, Texas. They said that the creature had reportedly killed a couple of people. Reverend Royal Jacobs told him that as a teenager he was a member of a posse that hunted the creature and he had seen the body of a person the creature had torn apart.

Reports like this are difficult to confirm. One is my files is a UPI clipping, dated September 20, 1965, from Jefferson, Texas, entitled “Town Fed Up With Monster Hunters.” Sheriff Luke Walker is quoted as being upset by the Bigfoot hunters from three states who had overrun his small northeast Texas town since a 13 year old boy came running out of the woods three weeks earlier telling of seeing a big, black hairy thing.

Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, pages 181-182, (NY: Paraview Pocket – Simon and Schuster, 2003).

Rumors exist around the world, like these, too.

These bipedal, six-foot-tall creatures with stubby noses are well known to the highland minorities of Vietnam and Laos, and called by many names, including nguoi rung, which means “Forest People.” The nguoi rung have been known to occasionally kill or kidnap humans and take them back to their caves.

The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates, page 122, (NY: Anomalist Books, 2006).

Look, I’ve been absolutely straightforward in the past: I’m against killing a Bigfoot. But I’m only one person, and the time seems right for a full airing on this here. Let’s discuss an issue that is on the backburner of most Bigfoot exchanges and in the minds of most Bigfooters.

What do you think regarding this two-sided issue?

Filed under Bigfoot, Conspiracies, Cryptomundo Exclusive, CryptoZoo News, Forensic Science, Sasquatch