| Bigfoot
Encounters Searching for Bigfoot Elusive Sasquatch still scares up believers By Steve Schmidt
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| October 30, 1999 |
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You know, Sasquatch. The Ape Beast. Omah, as some Indians call him. Qah-lin-me. Matlox. The Hairy Humanoid. The Earth Chewbacca. Pie grande. He-Who-Looks-Like-Some-Guy-in-a-Gorilla-Suit. 'big foot.' On this same patch of dirt a year ago, on this same mountain ridge near the Oregon border, an auto mechanic from Redding swore he spotted the creature. The sighting was reported to the state Department of Fish and Game. "I would say
to those people who don't believe me to go to Mud Springs and spend the
night there," Tim Ford told a reporter with The Redding Record Searchlight.
"They would be traumatized." * Hundreds of people in the West -- mechanics, teachers, lumberjacks, shopkeepers -- have reported seeing Bigfoot, or some sort of elusive man-ape, over the last century. The sightings tend to increase in the fall. * American Indians in the Pacific Northwest have told Sasquatch stories for generations. * Scores of alleged Bigfoot tracks -- bigger than any bear's -- have been found in forests and along riverbeds. Some are clearly fake; other prints go on for miles and are inexplicable curiosities. * The hunt for Bigfoot has gone high-tech. The Internet crackles with the latest sightings and searches. * Al Hodgson has a
question. Hodgson
used to run a general store in the tiny town of Willow Creek. At 76, he's
no wild-eyed believer. He's more a reluctant convert to the idea of a
Sasquatch. "I
have to believe it's true," says the mild-mannered Navy vet. "If
it isn't, you've got hundreds of people who are carrying out a hoax who
don't even know each other. Outside the museum is a 15-foot-tall redwood statue of the creature, carved with a chain saw. Inside is one of the sweetest treasure troves you'll find on the subject: Nearly two dozen plaster casts of footprints, written records of Bigfoot sightings, a new research center for trackers eager to chew over the latest twists in their hunt. For the moment, the center sits empty. Hodgson, one of the museum's curators, wants it to become a base for serious scholarship. Few academics, however, take Sasquatch seriously. Slaves to scienceand reason, they insist on hard, irrefutable proof. A Bigfoot corpse.A leg bone. Something. But starting in the 1960s, Hodgson saw what he saw -- and don't try totell him otherwise. He says he saw giant footprints in the dirt and snow that would makeMichael Jordan's look shrimpy. He talked to those who said they had spotted Bigfoot, and saw fear on their faces. In 1967, Hodgson ran into an acquaintance, Roger Patterson. Patterson and a friend claimed they had just filmed a giant ape-beast striding along a creek bed. To believers, the grainy footage -- known as the infamous Patterson-Gimlin film -- shows what looks like a giant, hairy biped with pendulous breasts and an awkward step. To skeptics, it looks like a guy in a gorilla suit. Hodgson is a believer. Patterson, to the day he died, was apparently a believer. But I needed something more. I needed an eyewitness I could look in the eye. I needed Granny's Snack Shack. Hodgson and I drove to the heart of Willow Creek and he introduced me to a woman in a yellow apron and a bonnet: Darlene Mesunas, proprietor of Granny's Snack Shack. The sandwich shop is inside a Unocal 76 station, not far from the Bigfoot Rafting Co., Bigfoot Chevron and the Bigfoot Golf and Country Club. Mesunas, who is in her 60s, isn't eager to talk, especially to some reporter. When she tells the story of what happened to her as a little girl, people look at her funny. She reluctantly does anyway. The scene is a lonely backcountry road near Willow Creek. It's a sunny afternoon in the late 1940s. Mesunas is 11 years old. "I was coming back down a road when I heard the horse in our corral kicking and making all kinds of noise. It kind of scared me. Then I saw this big thing going across the road. This great big thing just walked across the road and into the bushes ... I had never seen anything like it. I ran home and told my mother. I said, 'Mom, it's a great big gorilla or ape or something.' ... It smelled like rotten eggs." It wasn't a bear, she knows that much. But knowing how people react to her story, she's not quite willing to declare it Bigfoot either. Many believe there's not one Bigfoot, but Bigfeet, an elusive species of ape-beasts squirreled away in the vast forests from British Columbia to California. The idea seems less outlandish when you consider that new species are discovered all the time. Scientists didn't know about the Okapi or giant panda a century ago. Even so, you'd think somebody would have found a skeleton or at least a Bigfoot skull by now. Not necessarily, says John Freitas, noting that bones and other organic material quickly decompose in the dank forests of the Pacific Northwest. If anyone can sniff out a hoax, it should be 44-year-old Freitas. The former police officer is a welfare fraud investigator for Del Norte County. At night, he uses his detective skills deep in the Klamath Mountains, hoping to pick up the trail of the beast. The day after our stop in Willow Creek, the photographer and I join him. I sit shotgun in Freitas' pickup as he wheels up a dirt road near the town of Gasquet. He brakes on the lip of a secluded valley and switches on a 400-watt audio system, playing an eerie wail that echoes for miles. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH-HH." Then again. And again. Freitas sets out the aural bait a couple of times a week, hoping to flush out Bigfoot. He says it's the sound of a Sasquatch-type creature recorded in 1994 in rural Ohio. It hasn't worked. Not yet anyway. But he and other trackers believe they're inching closer. "I'm 99.9 percent sure that the creature exists," he says. Freitas also checks out Northern California sightings reported to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, a group run by fellow tracker Matt Moneymaker. Freitas believes that some of the Sasquatch sightings are legitimate. But some reports stretch reason, he says. Sometimes alleged eyewitnesses will claim they saw Bigfoot drop to earth in a spaceship. Yeah, right, Freitas tells himself. But he believes the truth is out there, if you look hard enough. Many trackers find hair in the woods that they say defies analysis. Others find swaths of trees with broken high branches, suggesting that a Bigfoot loped through the area. Freitas dreams of the day when he comes face to face with one. And when that happens, he already knows what he'll do: run, as fast as possible, toward the beast, with a camcorder running, to finally prove that the great spook story of the West is true. "Every day," he says, "we're getting closer." I'm at Mud Springs and it's 4:47 a.m. and I'm writing in my notebook that this whole Blair Bigfoot Project thing has been a bust. I was promised Bigfoot. All I've got is a sore back from lying in a tent and a nasty case of halitosis. Like I ever really expected to see 'Foot in the first place. I'm turning over and getting some sleep. I'm ... turning ... over ... and ... getting ... some ... sleep .. There's this annoying
noise outside. A constant rustling sound. It's probably the wind hitting
a flap of the tent. I wish it would stop, whatever it is. Height: 6 to 12 ft.
Sources: "The
Field Guide to North American Monsters," by W. Haden Blackman and "Sasquatch/Bigfoot"
by Don Hunter with René Dahinden;
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