What Scientists Can Do: The Real Bigfoot

The Real Bigfoot and Genuine Bigfoot Tracks
Part 10: What Scientists Can Do, The Real Bigfoot, and Notes
by Mark A. Hall

When scientists take up the study of Bigfoot reports, they might first rescue the neglected and misplaced bones already in museum collections. The field studies, so often considered to be science at work in the wild, need to be better prepared for than past efforts. Searching streams for tracks failed. Camping out and waiting for all the native wildlife to come to you has also failed. A lot of research should be done before spending more time on safari.

A carefully prepared dossier on Sasquatch/Bigfoot needs to be created. My advice is to review the records from South America to Alaska. Also dip into the records from China, India, and Nepal to isolate what can be found to indicate the presence of the Neo-Giants. Study the tracks and throw out the hoaxes. Isolate those sightings and records that indicate the real Bigfoot, the creatures in the Neo-Giant group. Plot their appearances. Look for their habits and their relationship to food choices and food sources. Consider their relationships to vegetation, both for food for trees for concealment.

Make the most of the films so far obtained that are not fake. Put all this knowledge into any plans executed in the field in search of more evidence. Some day a dead body could turn up if we are prepared to preserve it, which we now are not. Above all, a change in attitude will help Bigfoot seekers. We should not put more effort into obtaining a “specimen.” We should stop thinking that a dead Bigfoot is essential to progress. We should seek observation of them and contact with them.

When someone goes back to examine the Greenland find of 1926, they will be astonished. They will be asking themselves if it can be that easy to make such a discovery. All it will take is simply to extract those bones from storage and submit them to decent modern testing. Yes, some people will not want to admit that such a thing was overlooked. There will even be opposition by people who prefer the status quo or have staked a position in denying the importance of Homo gardarensis. But those who give the evidence a fair and modern examination will win the argument eventually. More bones and other evidence will turn up as further support. And knowledge will be advanced.

The same holds true for the pursuit of Patterson’s Bigfoot. While the course will be difficult, knowledge will be advanced. It will happen in spite of hoaxing that has occurred and will occur in the future. This will play out in a process that began almost a century ago when John W. Burns realized that something important was going on around him in British Columbia. In the middle of the twentieth century more people joined in the quest. John Green, Rene Dahinden, Ivan Sanderson, and then many more spent their own time and personal resources to organize, however imperfectly, the emerging history of Bigfoot in North America.

There are other advanced primates at large in North America other than the Neo-Giant. They are just as important and equally interesting for human beings to get to know. We can approach them in a similar fashion to that suggested here for the Bigfoot/Sasquatch. We should all be ready to be surprised by how much has been going on all around us for the past two centuries. These creatures have not gone undetected but rather they have been constantly detected while no one has done much about them.

It is true that the pursuit of Bigfoot/Sasquatch has been hampered by hoaxing. From 1912 to 1953 the field of physical anthropology was hampered by the Piltdown hoax. That did not stop people from looking for genuine fossils. The search for the living products of primate evolution will not stop either. Those remarkable people are expressing mankind’s unquenchable curiosity to understand the world around us, even when the enigmas are clever and trying to avoid our grasp.

1. The validity of the inscription has been detailed in Scandinavian Studies for Spring 2001 and is discussed in Wonders Vol. 7, pages 91-93.
2. John Green, 7 January 2003, post to [email protected].
3. Loren Coleman, 6 and 8 December 2002, posts to [email protected].
4. London Times on a large hairy man captured at Lake of the Woods, Manitoba.
5.. Mark A. Hall, “Encounters with True Giants (1829-1994),” Wonders 4:63-79 (September 1995).
6. David W. Belisle, American Family Robinson, or The Adventures of a Family Lost in the Great Desert of the West (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1854).
“They now had a chance to examine the powerful creature at leisure. He was entirely naked, with a perfect human form and face, but was perfectly covered with hair, except the forehead, eyelids, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet. They were surprised to see that the skin, where it was protected from the sun by the hair, was white and fair as their own. He was powerfully built, full six feet high, and uttered no sound that approached the pronunciation of words; a succession of growls, snarls, and yells, were all the sounds he uttered, and these approached, when accompanied by his efforts to release himself, the terrific, nearer than anything they had ever heard.” (p. 207)
7. Mark A. Hall, Living Fossils: The Survival of Homo gardarensis, Neandertal Man, and Homo erectus (Wilmington, NC: Mark A Hall Publications, 1999), 17-18.
8. Diamond Jenness, “Myths of the Carrier Indians of British Columbia,” Journal of American Folklore 47:221 (1934).
9. John Green, Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (Seattle: Hancock House, 1978); and Don Hunter with Rene Dahinden, Sasquatch (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973).
10. Mark A. Hall, The Yeti, Bigfoot & True Giants (Wilmington, NC: Mark A. Hall Publications, 1994, 1997).
11. Hall, Living Fossils, 9, 27.
12. Hall, Yeti, 95-105.
13. Hall, Living Fossils, 20.
14. Mark A. Hall, “Stories of ‘Bigfoot’ in Iowa During 1978 as Drawn from Newspaper Sources,” The Minnesota Archaeologist 38(1):2-17 (February 1979).
15. Larry Hagedon, 28 April 2001, post to [email protected]. Also posts on 19 April and 29 April 2001.
16. Hall. Living Fossils, 7, 23-25.
17. Loren Coleman, “Was the First ‘Bigfoot’ a Hoax?” Anomalist No 2, 1995, 8-27.
18. Grover Krantz, Big Footprints (Boulder, CO: Johnson, 1992), 32-47.
19. Green, Sasquatch: Apes Among Us, 160-8.
20. Hall, Living Fossils, 23-24; and Wonders Vol. 7, page 85..
21. Marge Davenport reprinted in Roger Patterson, Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? (Yakima, WA: Franklin Press, 1966), 82-3.
22. Hall, Living Fossils, 23-25.
23. Coleman, “Was the First,” 19.
24. Coleman, “Was the First,” 18, 20.
25. William Overend, “Bigfoot Legend Engenders a Feud,” Los Angeles Times, 4 June 1982.
26 David Carkhuff, “Bigfoot Feat,” Blue Mountain Eagle (John Day, Oregon), 25 December 2002.
27. Rant Mullens, letter to editor, Frontier Times, October-November 1979, 4-5.
28. Associated Press, Seattle Times, 9 December 2002.
29. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 7 March 1976, p.3a.
30. Overend, “Bigfoot Legend.”
31. Carkhuff, “Bigfoot Feat.”
32. Elwood D. Baumann, Bigfoot: America’s Abominable Snowman (NY: Franklin Watts, 1975),
33. Sanderson, Abominable Snowmen, 131-2; Patterson, Do Abominable Snowmen, 38, 40-42; Baumann, Bigfoot, 8-11.
34. The same tracks measured at 15 inches long are noted in John Green, The Sasquatch File (Agassiz, BC: Cheam, 1973), 22, as having been found and cast on 2 Nov 1958, 16 Aug 1959, 30 Aug 1959, and 1 Nov 1959 along Bluff Creek.
35. Humboldt Times, 14 Oct 1958, in Patterson, Do Abominable Snowmen, 38. 40.
36. Overend, “Bigfoot Legend.”
37. Krantz, Big Footprints, 33.
38. Marian T. Place, Bigfoot All Over the Country (NY: Dodd, Mead, 1978).
39. Ivan T. Sanderson, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come To Life (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1961).
40. John Green’s On the Track of the Sasquatch, (Agassiz, BC: Cheam, 1969), ii, 45 and Sasquatch: Apes Among Us, 77; John Napier Bigfoot (NY: Dutton, 1973), plate 13; Elwood Baumann, Bigfoot, 2, 5; Hunter and Dahinden, Sasquatch, on the sixth page of plates; Kenneth Wylie, Bigfoot: A Personal Inquiry into a Phenomenon (NY: Viking, 1980).
41. Peter Byrne, The Search for Bigfoot (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, 1975).
42. Steve M. Matthes, Brave and Other Stories (privately published by Vera Orton Matthes, San Francisco, CA, 1988), 285-94.
43. Associated Press, “The Confessions of a Colville Sasquatch,” Seattle Times, 1 April 1971,
44. Mark A. Hall, “Contemporary Stories of ‘Taku-He’ or ‘Bigfoot ‘ in South Dakota as Drawn from Newspaper Accounts,” The Minnesota Archaeologist 37(2): 63-78 (May 1978).
45. Hall, The Yeti, 51-59.
46. Richard Boeth and Elaine Sciolino, “Bigfoot is Back,” Newsweek, 31 Oct 1977.
47. Patterson, Do Abominable Snowmen. 39.
48. Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide (NY: Avon, 1999). [This book has since been republished with a new introduction, corrections, and new index, in 2006, as The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates.
49. Benjamin Radford, “Bigfoot at 50,” Skeptical Inquirer 26(2): 29-34, March-April 2002.
50. Georgia: Hall, “Encounters,”; Pennsylvania: Hall, Living Fossils, 56-59; “Jacko”: Sanderson, Abominable Snowmen, 25-28; and Krantz, Big Footprints, 202-4.
51. Hall, Living Fossils, 33-37, 60-62.
52. Matt Moneymaker in Bigfoot Co-Op, December 1993 ; B. Ann Slate and Alan Berry, Bigfoot (NY: Bantam Books, 1976), 160-5; Hall, Yeti, 93, 100-1.
53. Gordon Slovut, “Old Skulls Have State Expert Scratching Head,” Minneapolis Star, 12 July 1972.
54. Associated Press dispatch from Ely, Minn., 12 July 1972.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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