Sasquatch’s First Discovery Generation At Trail’s End
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 26th, 2012
The Year 2012 marks some anniversaries of the passing of various significant people in Bigfoot field investigations and Sasquatch studies. Roger Patterson died 40 years ago. Grover Krantz died 10 years ago. Two men in the same generation shall always be linked. By all reports, both men first started thinking about Bigfoot in the early 1960s.
One cryptic date ties Roger Patterson and Grover Krantz together. And it is not October 20th.
Roger Patterson (above) was born in Wall, South Dakota, on February 14, 1933 (not in 1926, as noted in some bios). He died of cancer (Hodgkin’s disease) on January 15, 1972.
Patterson’s death occurred, in the scheme of things, only a short time after the October 20, 1967, filming of an alleged female Bigfoot (Oh-Mah) at Bluff Creek, California. Bob Gimlin had just had his birthday two days before, on October 18th. Krantz would have almost been 25.
In 1971, Grover Krantz, at 39, received his doctorate. Grover, now a Ph. D., began to share his serious thoughts about Sasquatch. Patterson’s death, the next year, occurred when Roger was 38 (since he had not turned 39 yet, in February).
Krantz spent over 30 years defending the footage that was filmed by the hand of Patterson before he died.
Few have reflected on the temporal fact that it was on Patterson’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, in 2002, that Grover Krantz (born November 5, 1931) died from lung cancer. That was ten years ago.
A whole generation of Bigfoot researchers is coming to the end of their lives, and we are rapidly losing a legacy of experiences and history that sweeps back decades.
As we recall, yet again, some round number anniversaries, let us pause to remember these two gentlemen, Patterson and Krantz.
Sadly, the initial “discovery generation” of Bigfoot investigators is rapidly coming to the end of their fieldwork.
Grover Krantz and John Green, during Skookum cast examination, 2000. Photo by Jeffrey Lemley.
Igor Burstsev, on left, is shown with John Green and Rene’ Dahinden’s wife, Wanja Twan, in April 2011. Below Igor and John, also at the Sasquatch Summit, in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, April 2011. Photos by Brad Pennock, Believe It Tour team photographer.
Roger W. Morgan, recent photo.
Peter Byrne, recent photo.
“Bigfoot elder” Al Hodgson with Roger Patterson’s book. Photo by Steven Streufert, 2010.
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.
They will always live in our hearts.
And on video thanks to shows like IN SEARCH OF and UNSOLVED MYSTERIES and some of those old documentary films. Whatever we may think of the quality of those shows and films they DID preserve these legendary researchers on film and videotape so they can be seen and heard by new generations.
Forty years ago in the same year 1972 two more prominent persons passed away: Dr. Prof. Boris Porshnev, a founder of Hominology as a branch of science, and Dr. Prof. Alexandr Mashkovtsev, Porshnev’s assistant in field work, having started the broad researchers in Caucasus and Zana’s case there in early 1960s. Both were the members of the Commission on the question of Snowman under the USSR Academy of Scienses in 1958-59 and Pamir expedition of 1958 for searching Snowman.
Both Porshnev and Mashkovtsev were not doubt that Patterson’s film was genuine, and Porshnev was that very scientist who approved the publication of an article about that film in Russian magazine Znanie – sila (Knoledge is Power) and commented it positively.