Sasquatch

[JETZcorp]

I wrote a paper for English first semester. Got the highest grade in the class, too. I just thought I'd post this and see what the reaction is. This paper was originally in MLA citation format, but I've changed it to Wikipedia's format, because it's just better. It's a long read, so get comfortable. I recommend some microwaved popcorn, or maybe a bowl of sliced fruit.

A young boy pulled his motorcycle to the side of the dirt road to relieve his bowels. When he finished, he looked up and saw a man silhouetted against the Oregon sunset. The man appears to be looking back at where the boy had shut the motorcycle off, though he had coasted beyond where the man was looking. Something wasn’t right about this man. There were no telltale sleeves apparent at his wrists, and he had no collar, no hat, no shoes, and no backpack indicative of a hiker. This man also looked gigantic, not like a fat man but more like a massive tower of muscle. As the boy watched, the creature seemed to lose interest and walked out of view and was never seen again[1]. Could this, perhaps, have been the legendary Bigfoot? By the way, the young boy was my dad.

Four-hundred credible sightings are reported every year across North America [2] and hundreds more are surely kept secret, but what are they really seeing? Most sightings report a manlike creature ranging from perhaps five-and-a-half to seven feet tall with apelike facial features. Colors range from black to reddish brown and they have been seen doing everything from grabbing at fish to watching people from behind trees. Sometimes, they are reported to have a distinctive foul odor which has been attributed, in jest, to the pants of the person witnessing the creature. Most sightings are of males, but female and child Sasquatches have also been seen, sometimes in small groups.

Let’s be clear, eyewitness reports and anecdotes are not enough to prove the Sasquatch to science, just as they don’t prove mermaids. In order to convince the scientific community that something exists, evidence needs to be produced that can be observed and documented by serious professional scientists. Eyewitness observations can’t be repeated and were almost never made by credible scientists. The reader should remain objective about the existence of Sasquatches and examine the evidence presented with a neutral eye. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

My position is that the hard evidence supports the existence of Sasquatch. In spite of the assertions, and I do mean assertions, made by most skeptics who have spoken on the matter, there is a wealth of convincing evidence available to the public at large. Whether the evidence is derived from the fields of physical anthropology, biomechanics, or even crime-scene investigation, we may now infer that sasquatches, in all probability, exist.

This is a bold claim, and we can expect to be asked what our “most convincing” evidence is. The late Dr. Grover Krantz wrote that, “The most tangible evidence of the Sasquatch that is currently available consists of footprints. This evidence may be preserved in the form of photographs and/or plaster casts…” [3 (pg16)]. To claim that these prints have any veracity, we must first establish what it is about them that cannot be practically faked.

Let’s start by examining what we know about Sasquatch feet from the prints we have. Though obviously larger than our own, they appear “roughly human in design” which would make sense for a bipedal primate, which is an accepted description of humans [3 (pg17)]. However, there are notable differences that show up with sharp consistency. The prints are “disproportionately wide” and “have no longitudinal arch” and thus are not likely to be copies of human feet, unless the theoretical hoaxers all share the same ineptitude at their occupation [3 (pg52)]. The ankle also appears to be located further forward on the foot, closer to the middle than our own, presumably to more efficiently bear the weight of the creature. We can see this pattern in known primates and the values for Sasquatch fit with its proposed weight and stature.

Now let me introduce the king of the tracks, affectionately known as “Cripple Foot.” An extensive set of tracks were found in the Blue Mountains of Washington where one foot seemed to be in healthy condition while the other was bent at a crazy angle with toes splayed oddly and two large bulges on one side. The most obvious objection to hoaxing in this case is that you’d need an outright strange fellow to come up with some fake tracks that look like they’ve been whacked with a baseball bat. Krantz, being a physical anthropologist, determined that the injuries were consistent with a somewhat human-like foot structure, and the displaced bones were a major factor in determining Sasquatch ankle positioning. The two bulges line up with gaps between bones in the foot that would have swollen up and callused over, adding to the difficulty one would face in a hoaxing. This is but a scratch upon the surface, and all this requires a rather detailed knowledge of human and primate foot anatomy [3 (pg57)]. Cripple Foot is the most graphic manifestation of footprint evidence, and the rest are understandably more subtle.

Enter Jimmy Chilcutt, retired fingerprint expert who has done fingerprint work for various police departments, the FBI, and the DEA. Chilcutt’s testimony has condemned men to prison, so he is accustomed to taking his work very seriously [1]. Chilcutt journeyed to Idaho State University in 2000 to examine some Sasquatch tracks which were said to show fiction ridges, which the "fingerprints" of your hands and feet [4]. In the line of his professional career, Chilcutt had gained expertise not only in human ridges but in other great apes as well. It is safe to say that less than ten men in the solar system are in a better position to speak authoritatively on possible Sasquatch friction ridge patterns. He noted that they did not follow horizontal flow of human ridges or the diagonal pattern of apes, but rather ran lengthwise along the foot. He even noted inward-curving indications of scarring in the prints. Chilcutt examined over 100 samples and found these features in prints recovered twenty years and 700 miles apart. He summarized that in his professional opinion, there is a yet-unknown Great Ape in North America. “This may come as a shock to some people,” Chilcutt said, “But I stake my reputation on it” [5].

Chilcutt was not the first expert to analyze such ridges. Grover Krantz previously interviewed experts from Washington, Oregon, California, Wyoming, Colorado, British Columbia, Kansas, Ontario, England, China, and even the Soviet Union, with verdicts ranging from “interesting” to “there is no doubt” [3 (pg71)]. One police expert, Benny Kling, examined apparent sweat pores in the casts and judged that such detail and consistency would be next to impossible to devise, engrave, and transfer to the ground [3 (pg77)].

All this is fine and good, but most will still presume this can all be faked somehow. Let’s ignore for the moment the difficulties associated with attaining such quality of evidence and focus on the quantity. Considering the frankly unimaginable vastness in which Sasquatches are said to inhabit, there must be a huge number of prints laid down for every one found, taking note that such prints are often found in places not accessible even on a motorcycle (trust me on that one.) Krantz figures that a hoaxing organization would need to employ approximately 1000 men working full-time forty-hour weeks, year round. Such work would require about 25 grand per year per person, which gives you an annual budget of twenty-five-million dollars in wages alone, not to mention the highly sophisticated mechanical feet that would be required to even approach the intricate detail that has been observed. To presume that no one in such an organization has made a confession or mistake is preposterous in the highest degree. Of course, the alternative is that the hoaxers are all individuals acting independently, but this hypothesis fails to account for the consistency found in the more convincing specimens, and implies more like 100,000 weekend hoaxers [3 (pg34)].

If the footprints were largely hoaxed, one would expect to note erratic statistics among their dimensions. One Dr. Fahrenbach examined the statistical data on Sasquatch footprints, including length, width, and the ratios thereof. Normally in nature, we could expect to see a graph of these represented in a bell curve, indicating greater incidence of more common characteristics. If the prints were primarily generated artificially, we would expect erratic statistics. Sure enough, the data lies in a bell-curve pattern, indicating a real species with a natural degree of genetic variation [5].

After examining some (and I do mean “some”) of the evidence behind the footprints, it’s time to look at the single most famous and controversial video ever collected on the subject: the Patterson-Gimlin film. The story starts in 1967 with Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin riding horses around Bluff Creek, CA looking to make a Sasquatch documentary film, when suddenly, they find a Sasquatch! Patterson films the creature as it walks briskly away, giving Gimlin a nasty look before it disappears into the woods. All this raises alarm bells in the minds of skeptics, as well it should. It does seem rather convenient that Patterson would just happen to find a Sasquatch and happen to film it when he just happened to be making a film about it. Then again, take a second to consider who would be most likely to actually find such a beast. After all, you’re more likely to find your keys by looking for them than by meandering about the neighborhood.

Regardless of the circumstances, if it can be shown that the subject of the film wasn’t a human, then it obviously must be something else! Unless someone wants to tell me that they filmed a bear, there’s only one other plausible hypothesis for what could have been filmed, and that is an authentic, living Sasquatch. We are able to make this claim only because the creature in the film resembles the description provided in the most credible eyewitness accounts. Though practically useless on their own, these accounts define our very notion of what a Sasquatch is. If it turns out that the subject was not a human nor a Sasquatch, then you can rest assured that the definition of Sasquatch will have changed profoundly.

Let’s establish some of the easier facts before we tackle the more technical stuff. First off is size, Krantz estimates that the creature would stand about 6’6” or about 6’0” when walking (everyone is shorter when they walk, and the Sasquatch gait emphasizes this trait). We can suppose a weight of 500lbs with some volume calculations based on the known height in conjunction with other derived dimensions and the known approximate density of primate flesh. This figure agrees with the ratio of depth and surface-area of the footprints found at the scene. Perhaps the most striking feature of this particular creature is the rather large pendulous breast action. Like Cripple Foot, only a strange fellow would make a Sasquatch costume with boobs, particularly ones that flop about realistically. To put it another way, I've never seen any such boobage on a monkey suit during Halloween.

As it would happen, the gait of the creature is quite distinctly different from that of humans. Take a few steps across the floor when you get a chance and take note of what your legs are doing. Now let’s examine the film subject [6]. The Patterson creature (sometimes referred to as ‘Patty’) never locks its knees in the human manner and its legs remain significantly bent during the whole duration of the stride, to keep the proportionately larger foot above the ground. While humans spend about 2% of their stride-time with both feet on the ground, the creature’s feet are on the ground simultaneously for a whopping 20% [3 (pg116)]. If someone really invented all this, they would really have had to be thorough in their knowledge of weight and its effect on biomechanics.
The most compelling observations, to me at least, are the dimensions of the film creature. Of course, all Americans know that 6’6” and 500lbs isn’t exactly outside human limits [7]. It thus makes sense to simply call Patty a big dude in a suit, no problem. But wait, even at 6’6” a human has to be quite obese to achieve 500lbs, and very obese people walk with short, stiff-legged strides completely unlike those seen in the film. Additionally, this creature does not have the shape of an obese man, but is instead very wide and very muscular, with visible muscular movement under the fur, as can be witnessed in big bears. As it would happen, no human of appropriate height has shoulders wide enough to be the creature in the film. This means that the arms of the supposed suit must have been moved about by sticks or something controlled by the guy inside. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the fingers can be seen to flex between frames 61 and 72! All this is simply too complex to be a suit, and the only logical answer remaining is that the creature was, indeed, a real Sasquatch [3 (pg118)].

Of course, at this point, readers will be wondering just how we can know it’s too complex to be a suit. After all, Hollywood has been able to churn out some unbelievable special effects, even in 1967. Thinking similarly, Sasquatch researcher John Green asked Disney Studios (that's right, THE Disney Studios) how they would go about making a film like this, without the use of a real Sasquatch, of course. The answer was that they would not be able to duplicate it with all of their facilities [3 (pg121)]. How, then, could a rodeo rider and rancher like Patterson manage to pull this off, when a world-leading special effects studio could not? As you may have concluded on your own already, he couldn’t.

The Sasquatch proposition now has another gauntlet to face, the gauntlet of evolution. As with any new species, a place has to be found for the Sasquatch. If we can’t find anything that a Sasquatch might have evolved from, we must begin to seriously reconsider all the other evidence. On the other hand, if we managed to prove 100% that Sasquatches existed (eg. having one in a zoo), but couldn’t find a place for it in evolution, the intelligent design people would have a field day, and we don’t want that to happen, do we?

Multiple theories have been proposed for the origin of the Sasquatch species, varying in credibility from the perfectly acceptable to the clinically insane. There is little reason to have any tolerance for the ‘lunatic fringe’ who claim that Bigfoot is in cahoots with the Martians or that it was the result of Soviet experiments with mating humans and Gorillas, or any of that garbage. People like those are largely responsible for the widespread, unwarranted dismissal of the subject in the scientific community, but I digress.

That said, there are four hypotheses that have at least some credibility, and only two of those are seriously plausible. Neandertal man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) has been proposed as a possibility, but there would have to be a great deal of evolutionary backtracking and what we might consider "downgrades" in order to become a Sasquatch. Neandertals were already exploiting the "human niche," which is quite different from the one Sasquatches are said to occupy. Further, Neandertals lived so recently that there simply wasn’t the time for all this change to take place, so we can rather safely dismiss this hypothesis [3 (pg185)]. Homo erectus is the next candidate, but it faces the same issues as the Neandertal, though to a lesser degree. While more plausible, we have better candidates to discuss.
Number three on our list is Australopithecus robustus. It is thought that a similar creature, Australopithecus africanus, is what we humans (and the Neandertals) evolved from, and the Australopithecines lived plenty long ago to account for the necessary changes that would result in a Sasquatch. A small problem arises in that Australopithecus lived some considerable distance from North America, and was quite a lot smaller than Sasquatches. Though this is still within the bounds of reason, we have an even closer match to examine [3 (pg188)].

This brings us to the real contender, the 800lb Sasquatch in the room, so to speak. Its name is Gigantopithecus blacki, and fossil teeth and jaws have been found in various locations around Southeast Asia. To quote Krantz’ article in Northwest Anthropological Research Notes, “It would weigh about 800lb and stand perhaps 8ft tall, on legs and feet of roughly human proportions and stout design. It would be covered with normal primate hair and have a Gorilla-like face.” Sound familiar? Why, this beast can practically be called a bloody Sasquatch as it is! In fact, the thesis Krantz was putting forward in that article was that we actually have enough information now to just go ahead and call the Sasquatch a living population of Gigantopithecus. Indeed, if we can tell what kind of dinosaur made certain footprints, it makes sense that we can classify this creature by footprints, even if they happen to be slightly newer than their prehistoric counterparts. Gigantopithecus would even have had an easy time getting over here, its great size, and layer of fur being ideal for a trip across the former arctic land-bridge into North America. To be fair, however, more recent evidence points to a more Gorilla-like stance for Gigantopithecus, though there is still adequate time for the necessary changes to occur.

So now, imagine yourself in a courtroom, on the jury stand. The evidence has been presented, and it’s now your time to choose. The defendant is Sasquatch, the crime is existence. Is the defendant guilty? I’m the one sitting the juror chair next to you, and I’m voting that Sasquatch, a.k.a. “Bigfoot” is guilty as charged.

This metaphor is, of course, excessively cute. If that scenario was true, Sasquatch would have been accepted long ago. Indeed, the dermal ridge evidence from Jimmy Chilcutt alone would be enough to sentence Sasquatch to five lifetimes of hard acceptance without chance of parole. Science, though, is not as easy to convince as a mere court of law. It takes a lot more evidence to declare the running speed of a Tyrannosaurus than it does to put a man on Death Row.

Even with everything that we have seen today, acceptance will not be granted until someone actually finds a Sasquatch body (or part of one) and brings it in. Even though the scientific community may not accept Sasquatch quite yet, we can still judge the probability that it exists, and from what I’ve seen, that probability is quite high. Remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We’ve seen the evidence for Sasquatch, and I think it’s safe to say that the hoaxing theory is now the extraordinary one. Do the skeptics have the extraordinary evidence for that? I think not.

Citations:

[1] Barrett, Paul. Personal Interview. 25 Oct 2008.
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBnxM4fqawU
[3] Krantz, Grover S. Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence. Boulder: Hancock House, 1999.
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3152468.stm
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-1K6fp ... re=related
[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ByWc5hT ... re=related
[7] Radford, Benjamin. “Bigfoot at 50: Evaluating a Half-Century of Bigfoot Evidence.” Skeptical Inquirer Mar. 2002: 29-34.

[gordy]

i seem to recall watching a documentary on sasquatch at one point on national geographic, and it mentioned the dermal ridges you mention above,
within said documentary, a person was able to create a large mould with said dermal ridges by creating a model foot and then pressing dermal ridges from various apes etc. onto the model

[JETZcorp]

It is possible to create a print that appears anatomically accurate and in line with other prints. Creating a whole bunch of such prints all over the Western US and Canada over the course of the greater part of a century is a lot more difficult. Granted, though, most prints don't come with such detail because of the properties of the soil. For example, most dry dirt roads aren't going to leave such detail because the bits of dirt are too large. Even if that detail is created, it is obliterated very quickly by the kinds of wind we don't even notice most of the time. Most of the prints that have that kind of detail were taken from the Blue Mountains, which get this gooey, miserable mud that that leaves deep and detailed tracks of whatever goes by (bears, bigfoot, YZ450F, etc.)

[gordy]

im curious as to find out when the so called anatomically correct prints were found mainly, and when the ones within the standard deviation were found,
as, i would think, a bit more universality to the legend and the so called "dimensions" of this beast would be achieved as the legend is propagated, and especially with the advancement of technology and access to information. i mean, if the "believers" are able to find and agree on some kind of agreed size, wouldnt it be safe to assume the "hoaxers" would also have such information?

[gordy]

sorry if my last post was a bit hard to understand, just read through it then and it seems to be a bit too "flow of conciousness", like reading t.s. elliot (minus the creative genius of course, lol)

[ddmx]

Take this next bit of information for what it's worth...skeptics please refrain from posting replies to it.

My father and I, both acclaimed bigfoot experts of many years, are almost 100% certain there is a bigfoot passing through our property, and most likely nesting within it during the day. We have 12 acres of woods, live in a rural setting, and the surrounding properties are mainly woods. We live on a hilltop with a creek running through our property. During the middle of summer, june, july, august, sept even, we have had many "encounters" as you may call it. We have heard the whole 9 yards, screams sounding like they come from an adult female, knocking on trees roughly 3 times, loud roars that send your hair raising, everything. We also had this creature walk across my motocross track, in which we found a footprint spanning 18 inches. There are numerous small trees bent over and stuck back into the ground marking trails, and also that overall eerie feeling you get when something is wrong. A couple of years ago even, we proceeded to take a walk into the woods after dark, 5 people. Everyone started getting a feeling of being watched, and low and behold we had 4 larger sized rocks thrown at us landing very close nearby as if saying leave at once. Also, while camping a couple months ago me and two friends had my dog in the tent. We woke up at about 2 in the morning to a very bad odor. My dog, over the course of 5 minutes slowly circled around the inside of the tent coming full circle, as if being able to track something that was circling around then tent. All very interesting things, and many more actually of when my father was a kid in the same house, but just figured I'd share for all of you interested in the tale.

[Voutare]

That's kind of sketchy. I've never had any encounters with bigfoot, but I have been hammered walking through the woods at 2 in the morning, and hearing fischer cats scream. That is scary as all hell. If you don't know what a Fischer cat scream sounds like, you don't want to.

[DJ99X]

WTF, those Fischer cats are freaky lookin

[yzmxer608]

Theres at least one around where I hunt. I know my Uncle and dad has seen it before. I never have though.

[ddmx]

Yeah, a bobcat does make a sound similar to a girl screaming, thing is, no known "fischer cats" or bobcats where I live...

[dearnhardtfan7]

I guess I could share my experience. My motocross track runs throught the woods on my uncle's property. The land is old coal strip mining land so there are caves and holes and cliffs, the whole 9 yards if you will. I was out walking the track with a pair of cutters just cutting all of the briars and small limbs and such back when I all of a sudden got the same strange feeling. Now my track is probably about 300 yards from my house as the crow flies, and probably 3 quarters of a mile on the tar and gravel road. I had driven my truck out and parked it in our start area and wouldn't you know that I was on the other side of a very large pine thicket from my truck. I started feeling that strange feeling of something being around, so I stopped just to see if I could hear anything. I didn't hear anything so I decided I would just work my way around the track and back to the truck and head back to the house. Probably no more than a minute after I started walking, I started hearing the sound of leaves crunching and twigs snapping coming from in the pine thicket. Of course this sent my heart to about 400 beats per minute. I stopped walking and whatever I was hearing kept going. I was trying to tell which way it was going but couldn't figure it out. About 30 seconds after I had stopped walking, I heard the thing start running. Now I'm about to panic, and it sounded like the thing was coming straight at me. I didn't want to take off running for fear of getting chased down and eat by a lion or bear or something (although we don't actually have either of those where I live but still) or since I still had the cutters in my hand, possibly tripping and falling on them. I still for the life of me could not see anything in the thicket because as the name states it was horribly thick in there. All of a sudden about 10 yards ahead of me a doe came bursting out of the thicket across the track and down the hill. When it came out I literally jumped/fell backwards onto my ass and thought I was going to have a heart attack. Once I realized that the doe was going away from me and I was ok, I realized that here I was a 21 year old male, and I had actually pissed myself in fear. This all happend about a month ago, and I know I'm probably gonna hear some shit about it, but hey I figured I would share my harrowing tale.

[yzmxer608]

Good to hear it was only a doe, don't really have to worry about those chasing you like the bucks. They pretty much only do that if it's in the rut though, which is coming up I think.

[Voutare]

That's hilarious.


Last deer season, I was going out in the woods, it was about 5:30 in the morning or so, going to my usual spot (about 100 yards from a clearing, near a bunch of apple trees), and I was walking through, minding my own buisness, and out of nowhere a partridge takes off from right under my feet. I jumped so high in the air, that I'm pretty sure I set a new vertical record. :/


Then I was thinking to myself, I just got scared by one of the tastiest birds there is.

[ddmx]

Lol, the ad at the bottom of the screen has a picture of bigfoot on a caution sign...haha

[Wilmx829]

Cool stories guys! Down here in Louisiana, I've heard of a thing called "Swamp Monster" but I've never had any experiences with that. They did a monster quest episode on it though.

btw, I heard some Fisher cat screams on the internet, doesn't sound that bad.