February 12, 2006

The Ray Wallace Debate

Part I

Ray Wallace continues to be the bone of contention in Bigfoot studies. It is time to expunge the databases of his negative contributions, and look at the real evidence for Sasquatch more clearly. It goes beyond a West versus East struggle, despite what some writers would have your believe.

In Cryptomundo, over at “Wooly Booger’s Bigfoot Report,” you can find the final segment of John Green’s talk at Willow Creek in 2003. Sorry to say this, but some boneheaded comments of John Green’s are repeated therein.

First off, to answer those readers of this blog who appear to think I’m beating up on John Green every time I mention we disagree about something, let me be clear, once again.

John and I have been correspondents (remember letters?) since the early 1960s, and colleagues, associates, and friends early on. We continue to be friends today. Just because I don’t take everything he says as gospel doesn’t mean I don’t like or respect him. I enjoy that honest level of mutual admiration and intellectual challenging that occurs among most of the more mature people in Sasquatch studies.

Finally, for those that missed it, my 2003 book, Bigfoot! is dedicated to John Green.

I don’t expect to lessen the debate, but the personalized comments about some imagined hatred between John and me can be thrown out with the trash, right away. I look forward to a healthy discussion here on the merits of John’s case versus mine.

Now on to John’s statements on Ray Wallace. Once again, I find John has placed himself into a remarkably stark “black” and “white” conundrum. Green feels Wallace was a prankster, but he didn’t leave fake footprints in California. Green feels that you either are with him or not a good Bigfoot researcher, if you are not, on this one.

First, some basics: Ray Wallace, 84, did die on November 26, 2002. I did mention his death first to Steve Young of the Seattle Times. And, despite the media attempts to say Wallace gave a “death bed confession,” the reality is that his relatives did come clean about the fakery Ray Wallace conducted. The rest is, well, history.

I wrote almost immediately, in 2002:

Why is the testimony of an admitted liar, now being feted by a skeptical magician as the truth, having the newspapers believe it all? The media mixing of the lies and rumors with a few facts in the Wallace story is pushing this one to the edge. This is Ray Wallace’s ultimate hoax and bitter seed.

But let’s read carefully John Green’s words here:

Everything Ray did was so transparently bogus that it seemed obvious he was just having fun. It is hard to imagine he expected his yarns to be believed, and although some writers back East swallowed the bait I don’t know of anyone involved in the Sasquatch search in the West who took him seriously or felt that he was causing any sort of problem.

Of course, initially, it was a newspaper writer in Seattle, and many other newspaper writers from the West, who should have known better, who blew this tale out of proportion. The myth-making of the incorrect kind began in the West, not the East.

But John wants to make this a divisive debate by putting the West Coast (everyone that allegedly “knows” Sasquatch/Bigfoot) up against “some writers back East.” For those that want names, John has, in the recent past, lumped the radical debunkers such as Mark Chorvinsky, the intellectual skeptics such as Ben Radford and David Daegling, and the Bigfoot supporters such as Mark A. Hall and myself, all together. Please, God save the Queen, heaven help me from that room full of people. That’s like me putting a certain internet stalker, a couple Sasquatch psychics, and John in the same ski lift together for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver!

Next, in a light-hearted matter, we are told by John to believe the fact that Ray Wallace was a fun-loving trickster. John supports that claim, but draws a line at Bluff Creek. And the surrounding mountains, it seems. Why can John have it both ways? Why does John believe Ray Wallace was a prankster but not see that Wallace’s mischief would have extended to planted footprints?

Yes, some of us, since the mid-1990s, have been questioning Ray Wallace’s role in the events at Bluff Creek in 1958, when the Wallace Construction Company was building the road. But John has set up this division between “knowing” Wallace was just having good ole boy fun and those people who “swallowed the bait” because we questioned what this “fun” might have resulted in, at Bluff Creek and elsewhere. But, of course, I and others like Mark Hall, have never said, since Wallace died, that Wallace made the original “Bigfoot” prints or was responsible for the Jerry Crew cast.

Due to the fact we do have the actual fake wooden feet now, why shouldn’t Wallace’s every action, motives, and products be examined?

Green once wrote a newspaper hoax in the field, but that doesn’t mean he remained a hoaxer. As John has said a few times, and wrote me anew in 2003: “I did not start collecting Sasquatch information until 1957. Prior to that all I did was include a made-up Sasquatch story in a 1955 April Fool edition of my paper. I never met William Roe, although I wrote to him later on and he sent met the drawing and a sworn statement.”

The difference between Green and Wallace is obvious. Green planted his Sasquatch hoax momentarily and moved on, to reality, after Ruby Creek. Ray Wallace lived a life of hoaxing, stretching the truth, and pranks. It was happening before Bluff Creek, 1958, and after. Why shouldn’t an open-minded examination of all the “fingerprints” that Wallace left on the landscape of Bigfootery be revealed?

John Green said during his 2003 talk:

The wooden feet that they [the Wallace family] showed the media, as you can see in the full-size photos of them on display here, do not match the original “Bigfoot”. They do appear to be attempts to duplicate the casts made by Bob Titmus of the different set of tracks he found on a Bluff Creek sandbar, but one of them is so crudely carved that they would not likely fool anybody.

Mark Hall, myself, and others who are re-investigating the Wallace material, since Wallace’s death, clearly note a difference between the Jerry Crew Bluff Creek Bigfoot tracks and the Wallace fakes. But the Wallace fakes are there and visible in the books, claimed to be real tracks. They still exist in the Bigfoot database and they need to be thrown out as bad data.

See the photos here, and you will begin to start noticing something. Some of the Wallace fakes have a distinctive square hallux and more indications. Look in the books, look at the casts, shown by Ivan Sanderson, Tom Slick, and John Green, as “real.” They are Wallace fakes.

Loren Coleman, London Fortean Times conference talk: Jerry Crew cast, Ray Wallace wooden foot fake, Bob Titmus cast. Fakery afoot?

The evidence is mounting for a more “gray” attitude to exist here, as the years reveal that Ray Wallace did leave bad data in the mix. Bigfoot exists, but then, so did Ray Wallace.

Some bits of the puzzle are beginning to make sense:

The Bluff Creek tracks, found by Steve Matthes in 1960, match the carved fake feet being shown by Ray Wallace’s relatives to the media in late 2002.
Matthes, an experienced tracker hired by Tom Slick, says these tracks are the reason he got out of hunting Bigfoot in 1960. (Source: Steve M. Matthes, Brave and Other Stories. Carlotta, CA: Vera O. Matthes, 1988, from chapter entitled “The Great Hoax,” specifically page 289.)

John Auman, 71, of Glenoma, Washington State, “who worked in the northern California forests with the late Ray Wallace says the 16-inch footprints Wallace made — using big, wooden feet strapped to his boots — weren’t a prank at all…[Auman] remembers the tracks as a theft deterrent, not just a joke…the big footprints scared off vandals who’d been coming to worksites and stealing fuel, batteries, engines — whatever wasn’t nailed down.” (Source: Seattle Times, December 9, 2002.)

Jim Rakoz, 71, of Battle Ground, Washington State, died September 13, 2004. His wife, Jean Rakoz remembered “her husband and his logging friends swapping stories of enduring Washington legends. In his hometown of Toledo, he helped spread the Bigfoot myth, laying Sasquatch tracks with the Wallace brothers.” (Source: The Columbian, September 18, 2004.)

To be continued, in Part II.

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