01/22/2003 -- Cue the spooky music, Bigfoot.

You may have read about last fall's death of Ray Wallace, 84, retired Pacific Northwest logger. His family claimed Mr. Wallace had created a Bigfoot hoax in 1958 with giant just-for-fun footprints in Humboldt County, Calif. After the posthumous revelation, magazines and papers ran variations of the headline "Bigfoot dies."

But Bigfoot lives. Maybe. Texas Bigfoot Society spokesman Craig Woolheater, a Dallas software developer, says the hoax story "doesn't change anything we're doing." He says most people in the "Bigfoot community" had long regarded Mr. Wallace as a prankster.

Craig believes Bigfoot may be "a flesh-and-blood animal - a very elusive primate." He also thinks most sightings have simple explanations: Someone is playing a trick, someone has misidentified an animal seen in an odd light or someone is "out-and-out lying." But, he says, there's a chance "they saw what they say they saw."

You can file Bigfoot sightings at www.texasbigfoot.com, or by calling 1-877-529-5550 (toll free). The Web site, with reports and other items, got 160,000 hits in 2002, Craig says.

Many local Bigfoot reports come from wooded bottomlands near the Sulphur and Red rivers in northeast Texas. Craig says motion-activated cameras have "gotten some interesting photos. But nothing so definitive that I'm willing to say we've got Bigfoot right here."

Consider this: Most of us don't have a clue about who lives down the street. Do we really know who prowls the soggy bottomlands?

By LARRY POWELL / The Dallas Morning News

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