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''Sasquatch Is Real!'' Forest Love Slave Tells All! (Cont.)
THERE ARE THREE POSSIBLE REACTIONS to the idea of Bigfoot. Sit anybody down to watch the Patterson film—the grainy 16mm clip of a man-beast loping across a meadow in northern California in 1967, which is to serious 'squatchers what the Zapruder film is to JFK-assassination buffs—and they will inevitably respond: A: Bigfoot lives! B: That's a guy in a gorilla suit. C: I'm intrigued yet unconvinced. Most BFRO members can be classified as a Type A. Most reasonable folks are Type Bs. I'm a Type C. On the Night of the Screech, the BFRO convoy consisted of two four-wheel-drive SUVs and eight guys outfitted with night-vision scopes, million-candlepower spotlights, digital cameras, GPS units, and infrared videocams. But all these pieces of hardware were mere accoutrements to the garment worn by every man in the field: belief. Belief that an eight-foot-tall ape weighing 800 pounds is alive and well and galumphing through the forests of North America. That's the heart of the heart of the Bigfoot obsession—because as long as we never find him, he'll always be out there, and we can keep believing. It's a strangely comforting thought for your average 'squatch hunter, and kind of addictive. After hanging around in the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, waiting expectantly for a cry, a sighting, anything—I want to believe, too. Founded in 1995 by Matt Moneymaker, a 36-year-old Orange County, California, information technology consultant and lifelong Sasquatch enthusiast, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization claims 30 top "curators" (experienced Bigfooters who interview witnesses, examine fresh evidence, and debate the finer points of Sasquatch theory) and more than 300 "investigators" (junior associates who help with the fieldwork). The BFRO has no home base other than its Web site (www.bfro.net), but its members—a majority of whom hail from British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, and California—have access to the most sophisticated, password-protected Bigfoot database on the Internet. "I look for people with education and perseverance," says Moneymaker, whose own interest in Bigfoot was kindled by watching many episodes of In Search Of... in the 1970s. "Our members tend to be people with backgrounds in science, anthropology, law, law enforcement, journalism, people who've worked with government agencies. What we want is an ability to look at evidence and be able to pick out various possible explanations." The natural question to ask these guys, then, is this: Thirty-five years after the Patterson film, are we any closer to bagging Bigfoot? To which the leading minds of the BFRO answer: Behold the Skookum Cast! For Bigfoot hunters, the exciting thing about the Skookum Cast is that it's not just a footprint, but parts of a whole body. A heel. A forearm. Half a buttock. That's right—Bigfoot's ass! During a September 2000 hunt in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, down around Mount St. Helens, members of the BFRO baited a marshy plain known as Skookum Meadow with apples and melon—the idea being that the omnivorous giant hairy ape of legend might come out for a succulent bite of rotting fruit. They returned the next morning to find a crazy quilt of prints and a few apples gone. LeRoy Fish recognized coyote paws and elk hooves but couldn't identify a set of suspiciously anthropoid forearm, heel, and butt imprints. After spending eight hours scratching their heads and pouring plaster—a regulation component of every 'squatch hunter's field kit—the BFRO boys came away with perhaps the most important Bigfoot find in 30 years. Word of the Skookum Cast got out, and for the first time since the Patterson film, important mainstream scientists pricked up their ears. Over the past year, a group of them—including Esteban Sarmiento, a functional anatomist at the American Museum of Natural History; Daris Swindler, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Washington; and George Schaller, world-renowned biologist, conservationist, and author—ventured to the Pacific Northwest to give the cast thorough scrutiny. The results of their critique will be revealed in a documentary titled Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, which is slated to air in November on the Discovery Channel. "I'm a doubting Thomas when it comes to Sasquatch," says Swindler. "But I've looked at the cast twice now, and the imprints are certainly not of an elk or bear or anything we know of." For the BFRO and other seekers of Sasquatch, this is a hell of a break—and not a moment too soon. The Skookum Cast has entered the fray just as Bigfoot culture is experiencing a generational tide change. After a 50-year chase, the men who count as the Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery have either retired to their Barcaloungers or passed on. Seventy-year-old Rene Dahinden, a Swiss-born Canadian tracker, ended his days living out of a dumpy trailer on the edge of a rifle range near Vancouver, where he made a living repackaging spent buckshot. ("I wish I had me one of them $100,000 houses," Dahinden reportedly once said. "Because then I could sell it and do more Sasquatchin'.") He died last year. Peter Byrne, the 77-year-old Irish dandy who cut his teeth on Himalayan yeti expeditions in the 1950s, took a hiatus from Sasquatch hunting in 1997 after his last big pursuit, the Oregon-based Bigfoot Research Project, produced no significant breakthroughs. John Green, the 75-year-old Bigfoot archivist and author of the seminal volumes Year of the Sasquatch, On the Track of the Sasquatch, and Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, has ceased to catalog new reports. And Grover Krantz, the curmudgeonly Washington State University anthropologist and author of Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch—and the guy who gave the chase its first scientific imprimatur—passed away this winter at the age of 70, his quest to prove the existence of Bigfoot unfulfilled. Now, into the vacuum left by the Four Horsemen rushes a new generation of hunters bent on solving the mystery.
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