Posted on 04/16/2009 5:00:49 PM PDT by JoeProBono
After Ray Wallace died in 2002, his children revealed that he had a pair of carved wooden feet he used to stomp around the woods in Northern California, leaving tracks that he claimed belonged to Bigfoot.
The disclosure should have been a blow to Bigfoot hunters everywhere, because Wallace's stories about a huge, hairy humanoid are credited with starting the Bigfoot movement. If Wallace was a practical joker, shouldn't that make those who believe in Bigfoot think twice?
"You're not going to shake these people," Michael McLeod said. "They don't want to admit anything. They still deny Wallace has anything to do with Bigfoot."
McLeod interviewed Wallace before his death and Wallace told him Bigfoot "can throw rocks like a bullet and kill deer and elk three hundred feet away on the run." Wallace played him an album of Bigfoot screams he'd recorded. The album cover, McLeod notes in his new book "Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot," "showed a Bigfoot and a cougar posed together on a log."
McLeod is a writer and documentary filmmaker who worked for KGW(8) in the pre-video days. One of his early assignments was to go to Skamania County, Wash., to interview eyewitnesses to some Bigfoot sightings around Beacon Rock. He figured someone in an ape suit had fooled some otherwise rational people, but later started wondering about the famous Roger Patterson film, shot in Bluff Creek, Calif., very near where Wallace first left his tracks.
Patterson and his famous film -- which includes an image of an insouciant Bigfoot, caught in mid-stride, looking directly at the camera -- is the jumping-off point for McLeod's book. He set out to investigate how Patterson made the film and was captivated by the human side of Bigfoot hunting, the people who obsessed over the creature and made the question of its existence an early example of pseudoscience. People want to believe in something -- the Yeti, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster -- and selectively use evidence to support their belief while ignoring anything that contradicts it.
Skeptics point out that Patterson set out to find and film Bigfoot and did, in broad daylight. McLeod did enough digging to confirm, to his satisfaction, that Patterson's friends in Yakima knew all about his Bigfoot schemes and more than likely one of them wore an ape suit for the movie.
As for Bigfoot "there's never been any evidence, physical or any other kind" to prove its existence, McLeod said. "It's folk art. A lot of people have been mistaken in what they've seen, and others have been faked out."
Put another way, McLeod said "'UFology' is nutzoid, but I'm not entirely dismissive of the possibility of aliens out there somewhere. It's a big universe. But the idea of an 8-foot-tall, 700-pound beast walking through the forests of the Pacific Northwest is ludicrous."
If that’s Patterson, then bigfoot must have been holding the camera.
That looks just like Michelle Obama.
Only less angry looking.
No sleeves
By Jove You’re right!!
It could be Michelle Obama..the creature also has the same butt size.
The part that I found most interesting was his discussion of one cast. Krantz claimed that simply scaling up a human foot would give you a cast that would be all wrong for a creature like a Sasquatch. He claimed that only a half-a-dozen people in the world would know the physiological changes in the foot necessary to support the great weight of such a large biped. He claimed this cast had all the necessary characteristics and was the one that really convinced him of Sasquatch's existence. (He gave me one of the duplicate casts of that print and autographed it.)
It was very interesting discussion. I left his office as a skeptic but less of one than when I went in. For the record, Krantz was convinced that Sasquatch is a relict Gigantopethicus, a giant biped ape of Asia which he thought came across the Bering land bridge.
I was saddened to hear of Krantz' passing. After all the crap he had to take from his colleagues, I was kind of hoping that the existence of Sasquatch would be proven so he could have the last laugh.
Gigantopethicus
...not REAL???... :-(
Say it ain’t so, Joe!
:-(
I knew a guy that worked for the Washington State Fish and Wildlife. They would travel hundreds of miles to get hair samples off a fence, etc. where someone said they saw a bigfoot step over, etc. He said MOST of the time it was identifiable. But every once in awhile not! (I don't recall if they did DNA, and all that stuff on it or not>)
Some believe in Bigfoot because they think there is credible evidence, others because believing feels good and need no evidence.
The first I think are simply in error but all of us are guilty of being so at times but
the second are are fair game for any sort of nonsense that comes along. These scare me.
That’s not a Gigantopethicus, it’s a sloth.
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec18/sloth1.gif
http://arnica.csustan.edu/boty1050/Evolution/sloth_extinct.jpg
/mark
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