Bigfoot Persists
WILLOW CREEK, Calif. - Here on the doorstep of the Pacific Northwest,
trees grow tall and mystery runs deep. For generations, the dark gorges
have yielded lumber, and a legend.
Willow Creek is a vortex of Bigfoot lore. This is where the discovery of
jumbo footprints attributed to the oversized and doggedly undiscovered
man-ape first captivated America nearly a half century ago. Years later, a
classic film snippet caught a purported Bigfoot nearby. The one-time
logging town long ago adopted the beast as civic emblem and tourist draw.
With so much at stake, the claims of Ray Wallace's clan landed like a gut
punch.
Wallace, a road builder and inveterate prankster, died late last year at
84. After the funeral, his survivors let loose a startling secret: Their
father used a set of carved alder-wood feet to stomp the footprints that
his work crew found north of Willow Creek in 1958. The whole thing was a
hoax, his kin declared. Ray Wallace was Bigfoot, and Bigfoot was dead.
Not so fast. Wallace's passing coincided with a quiet ripple of curiosity
in the scientific community, where Sasquatch had long been derided as a
fuzzy-headed myth best suited to the supermarket tabloid rack.
Some well-regarded scientists now say the possibility that the giant
primate exists deserves a serious look. A brave few lay odds that Bigfoot
could be real, among them renowned chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, who
is expected at a Sasquatch summit this September in Willow Creek.
George Schaller, a pioneer in gorilla research and director of
international science for the Wildlife Conservation Society, is a Bigfoot
skeptic but says the giant ape cannot be dismissed as fantasy or folklore
without a thorough scientific inquiry.
Finding the animal "would reshape our thinking of the status of humans on
this earth," Schaller said. "People write it off as a hoax or myth. I
don't think that's fair."
Bigfoot tales have been the stuff of everyday conversation in Willow Creek
for decades.
The town, barely five blocks long, is cradled in a valley carved by the
Trinity River, 30 miles east of Eureka. Puffs of clouds hug woodsy
hillsides. With industrial logging gone belly up, the hamlet (pop. 1,500)
long ago hitched its fortunes to sightseeing, fishing, rafting - and
Bigfoot.
It was 30 miles north in the remote expanse of the Six Rivers National
Forest that Bigfoot tracks were spotted 45 years ago near Bluff Creek.
Jerry Crew, a tractor operator for Wallace, returned to town with a
plaster of Paris cast of a whopper footprint. Jaws dropped, the news media
pounced and the hunt was on.
Tom Slick, a Texas oilman and adventurer, hired a team of hunters and
outdoorsmen to find the creature in 1960, the same year Sir Edmund Hillary
conducted his celebrated Himalayan search for Bigfoot's putative cousin,
the Yeti. Both came up empty.
The wild lands north of Willow Creek also produced the most hotly debated
piece of Bigfoot memorabilia - the jerky, one-minute film of a hulking
figure striding up a dry riverbed, shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson, a
rodeo cowboy and part-time Sasquatch sleuth. The 16-millimeter film,
brushed off by doubters as a man in a monkey suit, has yet to be proven
fake.
"Bigfoot has become a part of our culture," said Jo Ann Hereford,
president of the Willow Creek-China Flat Museum, a repository for Bigfoot
artifacts and lore. Hereford considers herself a skeptic. But, she adds
with a wink, "I firmly believe in the economic value of Bigfoot."
Sasquatch's capitalist imprint here is impossible to miss.
There is the Bigfoot Country Club and Bigfoot Lumber, Bigfoot Rafting and
the Bigfoot Motel. A local cafe features the Bigfoot Burger and Chocolate
Bigfoot doughnut (both are big and, of course, shaped like a foot). The
weekly newspaper features the hairy hominoid on its masthead. Highway 299,
the main drag through town, is the Bigfoot Scenic Byway.
Out front of the museum, a wood carving of the creature, nearly two
stories tall, beckons the curious. Inside, the Bigfoot wing's curator, Al
Hodgson, says many who believe in the beast - or at least in its
possibility - were rankled when Wallace's clan tried to blow up the
Bigfoot legend.
Museum docents struck back by offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who
could demonstrate that the scores of footprints discovered in 1958 were
fraudulent.
Bigfoot devotees say it can't be done. Wood-carved feet can't sink deep
enough, they say, can't produce the dermal ridges - the tiny lines on a
footprint - and shifting toe positions, step by step, that make many of
the plaster casts so tantalizing. "There's $100,000 that says it's
impossible to hoax," said John Green, a retired journalist, longtime
Bigfoot researcher and author.
Reports of ape-like behemoths predate Wallace by generations. A race of
huge hairy giants has long been part of American Indian lore, and settlers
in Northern California talked of it as far back as the 1880s. Teddy
Roosevelt related a Bigfoot yarn in his 1890 book "The Wilderness Hunter,"
telling of a Northwest trapper thought slain by a huge man-beast.
Hodgson, who ran Willow Creek's general store for decades, once counted
himself among the doubters. But then two trusted friends confessed to
frightening forest encounters with a huge bipedal ape. "It is a hard thing
to swallow," said Hodgson, 79. "But I absolutely believe these folks were
telling me the truth."
On the town's sidewalks, not everyone shares his conviction.
Curt Benson, 67, spent a lifetime in the woods stringing power lines and
figures Bigfoot is simply good-natured poppycock. "If I were a businessman
like Al Hodgson, everything I saw would be a Bigfoot."
A bushy-bearded carpenter named Tim Bauer joked that most folks consider
Bigfoot to be "one of my cousins."
But Bauer turned deadly earnest when he told of hearing a howl up by his
place near Fish Lake. He figures it was Bigfoot. "It's like a screaming
child that's been burned," he said. "Sends chills up your spine."
On any weekend, the backwoods of Humboldt and Del Norte counties are alive
with amateur sleuths. Some are quite sophisticated, using infrared scopes
and blasting taped howls - ostensibly those of a Bigfoot - over
loudspeakers into the woods.
But academia has been slow to embrace Bigfoot as a subject worth serious
scrutiny.
Robert Michael Pyle, a biologist and writer who turned a Guggenheim grant
into the book "Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide," says the
simple act of studying Sasquatch takes guts. Academics who open their
minds to the possibility of Bigfoot "run a real risk of being ostracized,"
Pyle said. "It becomes a practical thing to avoid the topic."
The late Grover Krantz, a Washington State University anthropologist, was
for years academia's highest-profile Bigfoot researcher. He spent nights
driving lonely Pacific Northwest back roads, rifle by his side, in search
of the creature. Krantz believed shooting a Bigfoot was the surest way to
turn myth into reality. For years he struggled before finally winning
tenure, promotions and respect, Pyle said. "He was almost a Shakespearean
tragic figure."
One of Krantz's few proteges is Jeff Meldrum, an associate professor of
anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University.
Meldrum is a respected scientist, a serious fellow who specializes in the
evolution of primate locomotion. He said he has put up with "thinly veiled
expressions of incredulity" from colleagues since he began looking into
Bigfoot in 1996. In the academic world, where you either publish or
perish, a Bigfoot paper doesn't stand much chance with the scientific
journals, Meldrum said. "But to offhandedly brush this aside as a myth is
not very scientific."
He is increasingly convinced such an animal may exist, swayed in
particular by eyewitness accounts and plaster-cast imprints that have
emerged from the woods over the decades. Many of the footprints are fake,
he said, but scores look to be genuine. Meldrum said a few provocative
hair samples have failed to produce usable DNA, but can't be matched to
any known animal.
Patterson's 1967 film also intrigues Meldrum. As the creature tromps off,
its muscles bulge, long arms swing, legs move in a high-step gait that
Meldrum suggests evolved to avoid the woody debris of the forest floor. It
also appears female, prompting Meldrum to ask: "Who is going to add
breasts to a monkey suit?"
Skeptics say most Bigfoot evidence can be explained away. Many of the
whopper footprints are really tracks left by bears that overstepped their
front paw mark. Some recorded Bigfoot howls are the screech of the barred
owl, said Bruce Marcot, a Portland wildlife ecologist. Sightings prove
nothing: As any criminal court judge knows, eyewitness testimony is often
unreliable.
What's needed, all agree, is a specimen, dead or alive. But no skeletal
remains have been produced, let alone a body. Peter S. Rodman, a
University of California Davis primate expert, says he will remain dubious
"until Bigfoot walks in the door."
As for Ray Wallace, he's shrugged off as yesterday's news. Old-timers knew
him as a joker, and Bigfoot researchers - while insisting that the 1958
footprints were real - say Wallace became a purveyor of tall tales, phony
movies and laughable photographs. When he died, they say, the media blew
the story, making Wallace the father of Bigfoot, even though the legend -
and sightings - preceded him by at least a century.
In death, Ray Wallace "finally became a celebrity" said Michael Brady of
Willow Creek.
Brady conceded that he's never seen the creature. But he doesn't doubt
Bigfoot for a second.
"There's just too much proof," Brady said, standing halfway between the
Bigfoot Hotel and Bigfoot museum along the Bigfoot Scenic Byway. "Ask
anyone around here."