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        "For more than a century, people have been saying that a huge, 
        hairy primitive human roams the unmapped mountains of the Northwest. Here 
        is the first tangible evidence that Bigfoot or Sasquatch really exists!"           
      "First 
        Photos of Bigfoot, California's Legendary  
"Abominable Snowman"  
        by Ivan T. Sanderson 
        Sanderson was heavily credentialed, see his bio at the bottom...
         
      At three-thirty p.m. 
        on the twentieth of October last year, two young men, Roger Patterson 
        and Bob Gimlin were "packing" it on horseback into one of the 
        last remaining great wilderness areas, northeast of Eureka, California.  Their 
        saddlebags contained, on one side, rifles and grub and, on the other, 
        ready-loaded movie and still cameras and other equipment. They were following 
        a creek, which had been washed out two years ago in the terrible floods 
        that devastated most of northern California.  
         
        This was some twenty miles 
        beyond the end of an access road for logging and about thirty-five miles 
        in from the nearest and only blacktop road in this vast, as yet not fully 
        mapped area of National Forest. I have been up this Bluff Creek and, as 
        a botanist; I can tell you that it is rugged-four layers or tiers of trees, 
        the tallest up to 200 feet, and dense undergrowth. Also, the terrain goes 
        up and down a gigantic saw tooth. 
         
        Roger and Bob rounded a sharp bend in the sandy arroyo of the creek. Then 
        it happened. 
        The horses reared suddenly in alarm and threw both the riders. Luckily, 
        Roger fell off to the right and, being an experienced horseman, disengaged 
        himself and grabbed his camera. Why? Because he had spotted what had turned 
        their horses into mad broncos. About 100 feet ahead, on the other side 
        of the creek bed, there was a huge, hairy creature that walked like a 
        man. 
        The way Roger described it to me would not, I am afraid, make much sense 
        to you; but then, Roger had been hunting this sort of creature for many 
        years. What he actually said was: "Gosh darn it, Ivan, right there 
        was a Bigfoot. And, fer pity's sakes, she was a female! Just wait till 
        you see the film." 
         
        Roger is a North-westerner and he does not waste words, but what he does 
        say, I listen to. This is what he told me: "On the other side of 
        the creek, back up against the trees, there was a sort of man-creature 
        that we estimated later, by measuring some logs that appear in the film, 
        to have been about seven feet tall.
        Both Bob and I estimate--and this 
        pretty well matched what others told us from examination of the depth 
        to which her tracks sank into hard sand--that she would weigh about three 
        hundred and fifty pounds. She was covered with short, shiny, black hair, 
        even her big, droopy breasts. She seemed to have a sort of peak on the 
        back of her head, but whether this was longer hair or not I don't know.        Anyhow, hair came right down her forehead to meet her eyebrows, if she 
        had any; and it came right up to just under her cheekbones. And--oh, get 
        this-she had no neck! What I mean is, the bottom of her head just seemed 
        to broaden out onto and into her wide, muscular shoulders. I don't think 
        you'll see it in the film, but she walked like a big man in no hurry, 
        and the soles of her feet were definitely light in color." 
         
        This last bit got me, as I have seen really black-skinned Melanesians 
        with pale pink palms and soles. I don't want to sound facetious, but this 
        whole thing gets "hairier and hairier," as you will see in a 
        moment. 
         
        Roger did something then that I have never known any professional photographers 
        to do, even if his camera was loaded with the right film, he had the cap 
        off the lens, the thing set at the right F stop and so on. He started 
        running, handholding his Kodak sixteen-mm loaded with Kodachrome film, 
        trying to focus on this "creature." What he got was just about 
        what any amateur would get in such circumstances. But then he got a real 
        break.  
         
        As Roger put it: "She was just swinging along as the first part of 
        my film shows but, all of a sudden, she just stopped dead and looked around 
        at me.  She 
        wasn't scared a bit. Fact is, I don't think she was scared of me, and 
        the only thing I can think of is that the clicking of my camera was new 
        to her." 
 "Okay," I said. "Tell me this, Roger--the hunting season 
        was on, wasn't it?" "You're darned shooting right it was," 
        Bob Gimlin chimed in. "And out that way, anything moving with fur 
        on it is liable to get shot."         
         
         But 
        actually, there just aren't any hunters way up there, twenty miles beyond 
        the only road, known as the Bluff Creek access. Could it be that this 
        Mrs. Bigfoot knew all about guns but was puzzled by the whirring of a 
        small movie camera? And another thing: everybody who says they have been 
        close to one of these creatures or has found one of their "beds" 
        has stressed the ghastly, nauseating stink they exude and leave behind. 
        Was this what really scared the horses or did the horses scare the "Adorable 
        Woodsman," which is my name for the lady? 
      (While we referred 
        to this in the title as the "Abominable Snowman" for purposes 
        of quick identification, the Bigfoot or Sasquatch, zoologically, has nothing 
        to do with the Himalayan Abominable Snowman known for centuries in Asia 
        and first brought to the attention of the western world in 1921. Our lady 
        is a form of primitive, full-furred human. The Yeti, or Abominable Snowman 
        of the Himalayas is some sort of giant, rock-climbing ape, in my opinion, 
        and that of Professor Carleton S. Coon. The Yeti footprints found have 
        an opposed big toe, almost like a hand. The Bigfoot has an unopposed toe, 
        such as is seen only on human-type creatures.) 
         
        While Roger took the film, Bob got the horses calmed down and then rode 
        over the creek. Roger was running again after the Bigfoot, still handholding 
        his movie camera. Despite the logs and trash on the route she took-and 
        it was not even a game trail-he got sortie parting shots which turned 
        out to be of particular interest to the scientists. But we will come to 
        that later. 
         
         At 
        that point, I asked Bob - because he was then what is called "the 
        back-up man," which means that he was now close enough to see Roger 
        clearly.'' Just what was Roger doing?"        "He was running like hell, jumping them logs and going up into the 
        real thick bush." "Did you see her, too?" "Yeah, Ivan, 
        but 'way ahead and really taking off for the hills." 
         
        This brought me up sharp, because I had by that time viewed their film 
        (and half a dozen out-takes, blown up, in full color as transparencies, 
        which I had examined under strong magnifying lenses on an illuminated 
        shadow-box several times and projected by three different projectors). 
        In every case, the creature was--at standard speed for photogs (twenty-four 
        frames per sec) -as Roger said; at first the thing just ambling along, 
        swinging her rather long arms, not running scared, and even stopping for 
        a brief look-see over her shoulder as it were; then ambling on again into 
        the deep woods ....Yet here was the back-up man saying that she had "taken 
        off for the hills." Roger, however, backed up his back-up man unprompted. 
         
        "When she got around the corner and into the real heavy stuff [timber 
        and underbrush] she did take off--running, I mean--because, when we lost 
        her tracks on pine needles after tracking her for about three and a-half 
        miles, we took plaster casts of her tracks. Now, down by the creek, in 
        the sand, where we first spotted her, her stride was from forty to forty-two 
        inches from the back of the heel on the left side to the back of the right 
        heel ahead; but when she got really going,  she 
        left tracks that measured sixty-five inches from back heel to back heel. 
         
        Man, she was running just like you and I do!" "Why 'she'?" 
        I asked Roger. "Well, Ivan, let's run that film through again, and 
        you tell me, as a trained zoologist, if that thing has pendulous breasts 
        or not." 
         
        We ran the film again, slowly, and we had a stop-and-hold device on the 
        projector by which we can hold any frame without fear of burning it. This 
        we did and, so help me, there are definitely large, pendant breasts fully 
        covered with short, black hair. No ape (or monkey) is known to have had 
        any such development of the female mammary glands. Human beings, on the other hand, do -- frequently. 
         
        Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin actually had nothing much more to add. 
        They presented us, both newsmen and scientists, with this film for appraisal. 
        'We viewed it, and our findings follow. But, for my money, these young 
        men, after six years of sensible effort, have turned up with the first 
        bit of (possibly) concrete evidence for something that, however fantastic 
        it may sound, has been going on for years, both in this country and Canada-and 
        a lot of other places in the world, like Russia, for instance. So let 
        me get down to a proper analysis from both a scientific anti journalistic 
        point of view. 
         
        Before I do this, however; I want to say that, in this day of technology, 
        anything can be a hoax. But elaborate hoaxes cost a lot of money, and 
        if they are to fool scientists and the like, they also require plenty 
        of knowledge. Anyway, here's what we did to verify and check it out: I 
        have known Roger Patterson by correspondence [or about six years. He tells 
        me--and this flatters me to hell-that he got interested in this business 
        from reading a book I published in 1961, entitled, "Snowmen-Legend 
        Come to Life," (Chilton), which was a compendium of all I had 
        been able to find in published form on this subject up to that date. I, 
        myself, had been researching it since 1930. During this work, I found 
        that the British had first become cognizant of the matter in Asia in 1921, 
        and quite by mistake. However, as I went back in history, I discovered 
        that just such hairy, primitive, non-tribalized humanlike creatures have 
        been reported by scholars of various cultures and in literature for centuries 
        from almost all over the world. Thus, what Roger Patterson anti Bob Gimlin 
        achieved is not just an isolated incident. It fits a pattern, and precisely. 
        But what happened next? 
         
        Well, these young men had the sense to get their film carefully processed, 
        under guard, a copy made, and the original locked up in a vault so that 
        it could not be scratched, stolen or destroyed. Then they went to the 
        one group of people who really know about "faking" things--especially 
        like "King Kong," "apemen" and other phony monsters-namely, 
        Universal Pictures in Hollywood. There they met Dale Sheets, head of the 
        Documentary Film Department, and top technicians in what is called the 
        Special Effects Department, who are the men who have actually made such 
        things for the movies. 
         
        They asked the technicians, in effect: "Look at this strip of film, 
        fellows, and then tell us if you could reproduce that for us." 
         
"No," the experts answered. "Maybe if you allotted a couple 
        of million bucks, we could try, but we'd have to invent a whole set of 
        new, artificial muscles; get a gorilla's skin and train an actor to walk 
        like that. It might be done, but off hand, we'd say it would be nearly 
        impossible." 
         
        So then Bob and Roger applied to various groups of American scientists 
        out west. None were seriously interested. There were, however, two Canadians 
        who had also been looking into this matter in their country, where the 
        creatures have been named Sasquatches (suss-kwatches). These Canadians, 
        Mr. John Green, a newspaper publisher of Harrison Lakes, British Columbia, 
        and Rene Dahinden, originally a Swiss mountaineer but for the past two 
        decades a government forestry officer for the Canadian government, flew 
        down to Yakima, Washington, and invited Roger, Bob, and Roger's brother 
        in-law, Al De Atley, to come up to British Columbia and give a group of 
        scientists there a showing. 
         
        They did, in Vancouver. At this meeting, there were, in addition to Dr. 
        Ian McTaggart-Cowan, Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of British 
        Columbia, who is the province's leading zoologist, a dozen or so scientists, 
        including Don Abbott, an anthropologist with the Provincial Museum in 
        Victoria. 
         
        Most of the scientists admitted in print that, though they had come to 
        the meeting skeptics, they had left somewhat shaken. 
         
        Here's how they stated their reactions in the Vancouver Province next 
      day: 
       "Dr. McTaggart-Cowan 
        summed up the more cautious opinions when he said: "The more a thing 
        deviates from the known, the better the proof of its existence must be." 
         
"Don Abbott spoke for the dozen or more scientists who appeared remarkably 
        dose to being convinced: "'It is about as hard to believe the film 
        is faked as it is to admit that such a creature really lives. If there's 
        a chance to follow up scientifically, my curiosity is built to the point 
        where I'd want to go along with it." "'Like most scientists, 
        however, I'm not ready to put my reputation on the line until something 
        concrete shows up-something like bones or a skull.' 
         
"Frank Beebe, well-known Vancouver naturalist and provincial museum 
        illustrator, commented: 
"I'm not convinced, but I think the film is genuine. And if I were 
        out in the mountains and I saw a thing like tiffs one, I wouldn't shoot 
        it. I'd be too afraid of how human it would look under the fur." 
         
"From a scientific standpoint, one of the hardest [acts to go against 
        is that there is no evidence anywhere in the western hemisphere of primate 
        (ape, monkey) evolution-and the creature in the film is definitely a primate." 
      Beebe's objection, 
        however, was typical of those given by other "experts" who ventured 
        out of their own specialties to comment. Since I know something about 
        primates and about geography, I brought this matter to the attention of 
        Dr. Joseph T. Wraight, who happens to be the Chief Geographer of the U.S. 
        Coast and Geodetic Survey. His statement appears in detail elsewhere in 
        this magazine, but may I sum it up here by saying that the distinguished 
        Dr. Wraight--whose doctorate, by the way, is in Human Ecology--responded 
        in effect, "Bunk!" to this last objection. 
         
        One leading American weekly appeared to have been sufficiently impressed 
        by the film to fly Roger, Bob and Al, with their film (and out-takes from 
        same, blown up) to New York to hear their story straight. Armed with the 
        film and these statements, the three landed in New York and gave me a 
        buzz. I was with them in two hours. And then the "jazz" began! 
         
        Every time we called upon anybody, we were asked for "further confirmation." It was not easy, but we got it, step by step. But after a week of spending 
        other peoples' money, the boys, as I call them - though they are all married 
        and fathers-got a really rude, flat and, in my opinion. senseless turn-down. 
        So that's why the story I am writing is in these pages. 
         
        The boys have not asked anybody for a single cent for what they've got. 
        All they wanted was to be reimbursed for their out of-pocket expenses. 
        (This has been done.) For the rest, they need sufficient funds to mount 
        a properly equipped and trained small group to go into this or another 
        wilderness area for a full year to stage a real hunt for a Bigfoot--captured 
        alive or on film--or else at least for a skull or other physical evidence. 
         
        The most common question asked me about these Bigfoot (of California) 
        and the similar Sasquatches of Canada is: "Why has nobody ever seen 
        one?"  
         
        The answer to this is that they have, and by the hundreds, 
        and for a hundred years (let alone the earlier sightings by local Indians). 
        One is even alleged to have been captured on the transCanada railroad's 
        tracks in 1884; to have been examined by medical men and held in captivity 
        for some time. It was even mentioned in official dispatches to the Crown 
      by the (then) Colonial Governor of British Columbia. 
       Further, I personally 
        took an extended trip in 1959 to the West, covering just about every area 
        from Alaska to California and even the Canadian Northwest Territories 
        interviewing several dozen people who said they had encountered these 
        creatures. All my findings up to 1961 went into my book, mentioned earlier. 
        Since then, however, further reports have continued to stream in at a 
        minimum of once a month.  
      Meantime, eight groups 
        that I know of went into the field, apart from Roger Patterson and Bob 
        Gimlin, and I know that the last have several scores of interviews on 
        tape with other witnesses. What is more, none other than Dr. Vladimir 
        Markotic, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Calgary, 
        Alberta made two trips to the same area and assessed the current reports 
        two years ago 
      The next most common 
        question from non-zoologists that is, is usually: "Why, if there 
        are so many of these big creatures running around haven't we ever found 
        a single bone of one?" 
         
        My answer is simply to go and ask any game warden, real woodsman or professional 
        animal collector if he has ever found the dead body or even a bone of 
        any wild animal--except along roads, of course, or if killed by man. I 
        never have, in forty years, in five continents! No. Nature takes care 
        of her own and damned fast too. But there is another point here. These 
        creatures are apparently not even tribalized. In fact they seem to be 
        lone hunters or gatherers, forming only small family parties that break 
        up as soon as the youngsters can get along on their own. Unlike the next 
        stage up the ladder to people, they do not seem bury their dead. If they 
        did, we might have stumbled across their ritual burial grounds, even in 
        caves - though such are rarities - where they are reported to live.  
       Then, there is another 
        very prevalent notion: Almost everybody except zoologists-and even many 
        of them--seems to believe that no big, new animals could still remain 
        undiscovered. This is a complete fallacy. First, despite all the howls 
        about our population explosion, more than half the land surface of the 
        earth has not yet been mapped or for the most part even penetrated. Further, 
        the world's second bulkiest land animal--Cotton's wide-lipped rhinoceros 
        - was not found until 1910 and the forest giraffe or okapi until 1911, 
        and the giant sable antelope until 1929. Then there is the kouprey, the 
        second largest ox, found in Indochina in 1956, and, of course, the Coelacanth 
        fish in 1938, thought to have been extinct for some 70,000,000 years. 
        I might add that two herds, numbering 400 and 300 head respectively, of 
        forest bison-believed to have existed in not too pure a form in only one 
        national park in Canada-turned up in 1960 only eighty miles from the new 
        road going to Great Bear Lake. 
         
        [The Komodo dragon, which is the largest known reptile, wasn't discovered 
        until 1912. The mountain gorilla, an ape species peculiar to Africa, was 
        a native legend for centuries--just like Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman--but 
        he wasn't established as a real creature by scientists until 1901.. .editor's 
        note] 
      The other most asked 
        question comes from the zoologists and professional anthropologists. It 
        is really twofold: (1) How could such a creature be in the North American 
        continent, because not one single bone or tooth of any true monkey (as 
        opposed to the South American monkeys, which are quite different) and 
        much less an ape, has ever found here? This is true, but then the same 
        people turn right around and state that (2) our Bigfoot, the Oh-mah and 
        Sasquatches are hominids, meaning on the human branch of our old family 
        tree. This I find to be completely ridiculous and totally unscientific. 
        Let me explain. 
         
        First, let us leave "monkeys" of all kinds out of it, and concentrate 
        on what scientists call the pongids (or apes) and the hominids (or man-types). 
        True, no ape has turned up on this continent; and I'm not surprised because 
        they are tropical animals and, although there have been mild, temperate 
        times in the Bering Sea and the Aleutians, they had no reason to go meandering 
        all the way up there and over here. The hominids, on the other hand, were 
        represented by several types that lived in cold climates, even up to the 
        ice front, in the case of the Neanderthalers; what is more, hominids in 
        the form of what we call humans (i.e. Homo sapiens)--such as our American 
        Indians, and later the Eskimos--seem to have been able to get here over 
        the land bridge, or the ice bridge at least, according to all the professional 
        scientists. So, may I ask, why is it so all-fired impossible for earlier 
        human types to have done the same? Also, would some anthropologist please 
        explain how our brown bears, elk, moose and so on got over here from northeast 
        Asia where they originated? 
      You can't have it 
        both ways. Either these things are apes or they're manlike creatures. 
        Everybody says they look like men (even if dressed in "monkey suits"). 
        Men have gotten here, but the apes have not. Isn't this exactly what the 
        true scientists have been saying all along? 
      Bob and Roger feel 
        that these creatures are definitely human--or at least what scientists 
        call hominid. They may be the last of their race, or subspecies, or other 
        species of us "people." And Bob and Roger want them "conserved," or at least given a chance. Above all, they don't want mobs armed with 
        high-powered, automatic rifles barging in by the thousands and driving 
        the already overworked and understaffed sheriffs, local and state police 
        out of their minds. 
         
        Another point: The Minister for Recreation of the Canadian Cabinet, Mr. 
        Kenneth Kiernan, has expressed sincere interest in these efforts. So also 
        has our Secretary of the Interior, the Honorable Stewart Udall. The conservation 
        angle to all this is serious enough, but there are other angles that we 
        will not go into at this time. 
         
        Now comes the end of the story. 
        The leading news media--but not the working press, I should stress--treated 
        this whole thing as an uproarious joke. But one of our leading picture 
        magazines showed genuine interest and arranged for the films and out-takes 
        to be shown to representatives of the departments of zoology and anthropology 
        at the American Museum of Natural History. Once again, as in Canada, the 
        press wire services were on hand but were informed--in closed session, 
        I am told--by these experts that the whole thing was nothing but a colossal 
        hoax. The exact expression used by their spokesperson being, as reported 
        to me, "not kosher!" And the reason is alleged to have been 
        simply that such a creature as depicted was impossible. 
         
        The use of this term would, in this case, seem to imply that while considered 
        a hoax, it was short of a fraud; but, if the creature depicted is impossible, 
        then, for my money, it can only be a man-made thing and thus an outright 
        fraudulent design. I have failed to receive any suggestions for a third 
        alternative. This is manifestly a most unsatisfactory situation. Furthermore, 
        their verdict pronounced upon the pictures was handed down so fast that 
        no time could have been given for a proper, thorough and truly scientific 
        examination of the pictures to have been made. Finally, the existence 
        of such a creature is not impossible. 
         
        So, we, --ARGOSY 
        that is - decided to do something practical. We did. It took time, patience 
        and real co-operation from several other leading scientists.  
         
        This is what we did: First, our publisher, Mr. Harry Steeger, picked up 
        the tab for the film and pictures, so that Bob and Roger and Al could 
        get home for a couple of days for Thanksgiving. Next, I and my friend 
        and partner, Desmond Slattery, drove down to Washington, D.C., where we 
        set up a showing of the film and out-takes and blowups of all kinds. Then 
        ARGOSY editor Milt Machlin flew down with the film, and brought his son 
        Jason along, since he is a budding photographer-and an electronics wizard 
        as well, in that he ran two tape recorders at different speeds for five 
      solid hours. We then assembled the following persons: 
       (1) Mr. N. O. Wood, 
        Jr., Director of Management Operations for the U.S. Department of Interior, 
        representing the Honorable Secretary of that Department, Stewart Udall, 
        on his written request to us. 
       (2) Dr. A. Joseph 
        Wraight, Chief Geographer, U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (currently of 
        the U.S. Department of Commerce), also a human ecologist. 
         
        (3) Dr. John R. Napier, D.Sc., Director Primate Biology Program, The Smithsonian 
        Institution. World-known expert on human, ape and 'monkey musculature, 
        movement, and the anatomy of their hands and feet. 
       (4) Dr. Vladimir 
        Markotic, Associate Professor of Archeology at the University of Calgary, 
        Alberta, Canada. Also a physical anthropologist. 
         
        (5) Dr. Allan Bryan, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, 
        Edmonton, Canada. 
         
        Also present were several of us on "the other side of the fence--let 
        me call them the journalists or newsboys, or what you want. In addition 
        to Des Slattery and Milt Machlin and myself, there was present Tom Allen, 
        currently writer and editor on the editorial staff of The National Geographic 
        Society. Tom has been a working newsman all his life; for seven years 
        a feature writer and editor of the Sunday New York Daily News, then managing 
        editor of Chilton Books of Philadelphia. 
      During a four-hour 
        session, the films and stills were shown; examined under high magnification, 
        challenged, questioned, argued about and studied. The scientists did not 
        agree on all points. They did not even all see exactly the same details 
        in the often hard-to-read blowups. But after careful scrutiny over a period 
        of hours, not one voiced the suspicion that there was a vague possibility 
        that someone with enormous funds, a strange, undecipherable motivation, 
        a disregard for life and limb and an enormous knowledge of anatomy, physiology, 
        photography and human psychology , might have been clever enough to set 
        up a hoax good enough to fool the top experts in their field. 
       In addition, in a 
        separate screening, the film was shown to Dr. Osman Hill, head of the 
        Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University. Dr. Hill 
        said, among other things: "All I can say is that if this was a masquerade, 
        it was extremely well done and effective." He also expressed the 
        feeling that this evidence was strong enough to induce some group to mount 
        an expedition to search for further evidence. 
         
        So what's the next step? At this point, everything clearly indicates the 
        need for a major expedition with helicopters, two-way radios and possibly 
        dogs to set on the trail of the next Bigfoot seen, though I've heard dogs 
        usually run the other way when they get a whiff of the Bigfoot's spoor. 
         
        I can guarantee one thing for myself and ARGOSY Magazine. This story is 
        definitely to be continued - - 
         
© Ivan T. Sanderson  
        Argosy Magazine, February 1968 
        Article courtesy of Tom Cousino;  
        Color photographs/article courtesy Chris Murphy and Rene Dahinden 1998  
        - --- 
         
        THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW 
        Here are the 
        views of three men, acknowledged to be top experts in their respective 
        fields concerning the remarkable creature shown on these pages 
      Dr. A. Joseph Wraight, 
        Chief Geographer, U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. 
      The presence of large, 
        hairy human like creatures in North and Central America, often referred 
        to as Sasquatch, appears very logical when the physiographic history of 
        the northern part of this continent is considered. The statement often 
        made that monkeylike creatures were never developed in North America may 
        easily be discounted, for these creatures are more humanlike than apelike 
        and they apparently migrated here, rather than representing the product 
        of indigenous evolution. The recent physiographic history of the polar 
        edges of North America reveals that the land migration of these creatures 
        from Asia to America is a distinct and logical possibility. 
        The compelling reason for this distinct possibility is that a land bridge 
        between Asia and North America is known to have existed several times 
        within the last million years, at various intervals during the Pleistocene 
        or Ice Age.... The land bridges, both on the north and south sides of 
        the Bering Sea, were admirably suitable for migrations several times during 
        the Ice Age.  
       It appears, then, 
        that these hairy, humanlike creatures, sometimes called Sasquatch, could 
        easily have migrated to North America at several times during the Ice 
        Age. This is particularly plausible when it is considered that conditions 
        were mild in that area when the land bridges existed. These creatures 
        could have then found conditions along the way similar to their Asian 
        mountain habitat and could naturally have migrated across the bridges. 
        - --- 
      Dr. John R. Napier 
         
        Director of Primate Biology Program, Smithsonian Institution 
      "First: I observed 
        nothing that, on scientific grounds, would point conclusively to a hoax." 
      "I am satisfied 
        that the walk of the creature shown in the film was consistent with the 
        bipedal striding gait of man (except in the action of the feet, which 
        were not visible). I have two reservations that are both subjective: First, 
        the slow cadence of the walk and the fluidity of the bodily movements, 
        particularly the arms, struck me as exaggerated -- almost self-conscious 
        in comparison with modern man; second, my impression was that the subject 
        was male, in spite of the contrary evidence of heavy, pendulous breast. 
        The bodily proportions of the creature, as far as could be seen, appeared 
        to be within normal limits for man. The appearance of the high crest on 
        top of the skull is unknown in man, but given a creature as heavily built 
        as the subject, such a biomechanical adaptation to an exclusively fibrous 
        raw vegetable diet is not impossible. The presence of this crest, which 
        occurs only in male non-human primates, such as the gorilla and the orangutan, 
        tends to strengthen my belief that this creature is a male. Finally, it 
        might be supposed that a creature with a heavy head, heavy jaw and musculature 
        and a massive upper body would have a center of gravity placed at a higher 
        level than in man. The position of the center of gravity modifies the 
        gait and the easy stride shown in the film is not in harmony with a high 
        center of gravity. Some of the questions I have raised might be solved 
        by a scientific frame-by-frame analysis of the gait and body proportions, 
        and a study of the joint angulations and limb displacements. This should 
        be done. The opinions I have expressed on this remarkable film are those 
        of an expert witness, rather than a member of a jury." 
        - --- 
      Dr. Osman Hill 
        Director of Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University 
       ..."The creature 
        portrayed is a primate and clearly hominid rather than pongid. Its erect 
        attitude in locomotion, the gait, stride and manner of that locomotion, 
        as well as the relative proportions of pelvic to pectoral limb are all 
        manifestly human, together with the great development of the mammary glands. 
        This does not, of course, preclude the possibility that it is indeed a 
        homo sapiens masquerading as a hairy "giant." 
         
        ... "All I can say, at this stage, is that if this was a masquerade, 
        it was extremely well done and effective." "Without tangible 
        evidence in the form of skeletal parts, a cast of the dentition or similar 
        physical material, I cannot pronounce beyond this group· However, 
        the most interesting evidence they have so painstakingly produced should 
        serve to stimulate the formation of a truly scientific expedition to the 
        area, with the object of obtaining the required physical data."
         
               Article Courtesy Tom 
      Cousino,California  
      Color cover courtesy 
        Chris Murphy, Canada
         
        PGFilm cuts with special permission 
        from  
        the late 
        Rene Dahinden, 1999 
        - --- 
      Sanderson, Ivan Terrence. Husband to Alma - (1911-1973)  
            Sanderson received degrees with honors in geology, zoology and botany and headed six expeditions in all  
            parts of the world for such groups as the British museum, Cambridge and London Universities, the Linnaean  
            Societies of London and the Chicago Natural History Museum. He was the author of many books; one, "Animal Treasures" was a Book Of The Month selection in 1937. Others include “The Hairy Primitives of Ancient Europe” 1967, "Caribbean Treasure,"  "Animals Nobody Knows," "Living treasure," "Animal Tales," "How to Know 
            American Mammals, "  "The Monkey Kingdom," and "Living Mammals of the World.” The Abominable Snowmen, Legend  
        Come to Life” written in 1961 and countless 
        articles for various publications and Argosy Magazine where 
        he was ‘science editor.'  
      - ---  
                          
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