Searching For Bigfoot: The Snow Sequence

The Endangered Sasquatch : The Snow Sequence

The "snow sequence" with which "In the Shadow of Bigfoot" concludes, the longest sasquatch footage taken, to date, is certain to elicit more debate than any of Marx's previous films. Filmed in January, 1982, in the Mt. Lassen area, it shows a large male curious to inspect an igloo that Ivan bad built from snow, purposely to draw it into camera range. Then he followed it into the brush, and managed to film it even c1oser, with a shirt pocket movie camera. Its hairy crest erect, it thrashes menacingly in the bushes, knocks the snow off limbs, and then makes a stiff-necked mock attack, half-way toward the photographer, before retreating. When slow-framed, its genitals can be glimpsed. Its eyelids b1ink, and the long winter hair on its face imparts a mock-feline aspect not found in Marx's other Bigfoot pictures. Blown up to the maximum, it resembles the shaggy visage seen in an as yet unpublished snapshot taken through a car window, in Montana, a copy of which was graciously provided to me by Captain Keith Wolverton, of the Cascade County sheriff's office in Great Falls, who is convinced the species exists, on the basis of numerous credible sightings in that area. The motorist was so frightened that Wolverton feels she genuinely photographed "something", and he says for a prankster to wear such a. costume along a Montana superhighway would be suicidal, given the number of gun carriers.

Documenting on film the existence and characteristics of Bigfoot has become a compulsion with Ivan and Peggy, and recently his study of the species' habit patterns has given him greater success than ever in filming it. In March of '84 Professor Krantz told me, "All of the pictures in the world aren’t going to prove its existence; we have got to have some bones:' . -If I had the funds, I’d set up a huge bounty for the first person to bring one in' To journalist Patrick Huyghe (Science Digest, Sept. 1984, p. 96) he said, funds permitting, "he would hire 5 or 10 big-game hunters with an interest in the Sasquatch, each one assigned to an area of the Pacific Northwest, familiar to the hunter", and is convinced they could slay one within five years. Krantz feels this is permissible because "nothing indicates that it's human"--no known tool use, language, or 'being part of a social group."

Ivan doesn't see it that way, although in his frustration at getting his photos taken seriously, I once heard him say that he could be the first to bag one, should he decide to. Despite Ivan's prowess as a game hunter—the couple virtually survive on bear meat--those who have seen him with animals know he is a gentle man. He has enormous respect for the sasquatch, because of his intimate knowledge of its capabilities to elude him.

Unrelenting in his quest, in northern California Ivan recently photographed a mother sasquatch and her snow white (albino?) baby. Strapped for motion picture film, he only had his still camera--which again will raise questions among skeptics. Those who know the couple well can testify to the unlikelihood of Ivan and. Peggy being able to make or to afford having professionally fabricated the authentic costumes and facial disguises needed to fake such variegated, detailed photos and footage as they have taken over the years. Nor have I perceived any indication that the partners in Amazing Horizons. Inc. would have risked such an expensive and unwise investment.

In Ivan's latest pictures--that is. as of this writing, for he is unfatiguing in his efforts--the mother sasquatch's visage, seen close up, resembles a female gorilla with the swollen membranes on each side of its head of an aroused .orangutan. The Circumstances were that, babe in arms, she was circling Ivan and Peggy's camp, late at night, crying and moaning pitifully, as if pleading for something. Ivan's obtained a photo so fine-grained as to show the details of her eyes. They noted she was just '.skin and bones". Just a few weeks later the same all white baby was. photographed being held by a female with ample breasts--obviously young and healthy--Leading Ivan and Peggy to conclude that the mother had died.

Apparently watching over them was a robust young male. Jane Goodall observed that upon the death of the old chimpanzee mother, Flo, custodianship of young Flint became the responsibility of his older siblings, Fifi and Fig an, which offers a. clue to what has happened. There is a notable lack of evidence of pair bonding between sasquatches--just as with orangutans. among which males only accompany females during estrus.

Since the sex of the white haired youngster has not been determined. at my suggestion Peggy and Ivan decided upon "Snowy" as an appropriately androgynous name. Its mother they named '"Sarah" and the suspected older siblings "Sugar" and “Sam”. Shortly afterward Ivan was able to take a series of photos of Sam picking up a large rotten log, lifting it high over his head. and smashing it to earth--apparently to get at the grubs, a ready source of high protein year around and omnipresent in forests.

Ironica11y, Marx's having caught the species on film year after year, makes it difficult to get scientific attention focused upon his photos, as this very circumstance is seized upon by some of his perennial rivals to perpetuate the scorn heaped on his Bossburg footage. Rather, it is a measure of Ivan's ability. After most careful analysis of his efforts, I am persuaded that he is the only Bigfoot investigator able, at this point in time, to know where, when, and how--other than fortuitously--to get sufficiently close to a sasquatch to film it.

Bigfoot encounters are on the increase, although they seldom get reported outside the tabloids, which is part of the problem, as it taints the issue with disrepute, driving away those scientists who should be giving it attention. Assuredly, intelligent as it obviously is, the species is evolving in habit patterns and it may be increasingly risking encounters, by choice or necessity. The Florida Skunk Ape scarcely raises a local eyebrow:

And although sightings have occurred throughout the state, the Venice and Placida areas have registered the most reports. Venice alone had more than 250 sightings in a three-year period. There is no way of knowing how many sightings went unrecorded. Boca Beacon (Boca Grande, Fla.), Vol. 2, No.7 (August, 1981).

Recent, credible reports indicate a sasquatch breeding pool lives in the Green Mountains, Taconics, and perhaps Adirondacks, including a 1984 sighting of a group of four in a New York state swamp, about a two hour drive from where I live. This is not too surprising. as the New York Times, October 18, 1879, carried a detailed and completely credible account of a sighting near Willliamstown, Vermont. The Green Mountain state and the adjacent area of New York have experienced scattered sightings during the 25 years I have resided here. In 1974, as an ethnohistorian and anthropologist teaching in Vermont but native to Spokane, where the topic is much more familiar, I began serious inquiry into the topic, quickly perceiving that, with the exception of Dr. Krantz, none of our colleagues were publishing any genuine research on the subject. I have been able to tape interviews in the Green Mountain area with several credible eyewitnesses, who offer details as to features and movements identical to those heard from eyewitnesses I have talked to in Florida, California, and Washington, and that coincide with reports from many other states and provinces. Several of my interviewees for a time had not told anyone, even their closest relatives, of their experience, out of fear of being ridiculed.

Reports of a Canadian girl assisting a Bigfoot mother in a breech birth, and apparent instances of intercourse and perhaps impregnation of human females titillate the public, but also invite follow-up research. Now, Marx's newest pictures are bound to sharpen the debate, as they bolster the suggestions of Tschernezky, Smolin, and Strasenburg, that the sasquatch may be very similar to Australopithecus robustus and the much larger Australopithecus boisei, a "wet woods dwelling, herbivorous hominid which was crested in both sexes. "(Gordon Strasenburgh, in: The Scientist Looks at Sasquatch (II), Roderick Sprague and Grover Krantz, eds., Moscow, Idaho, 1979). An Australopithecus boisei skull would fit very appropriately within the scalp of any of the Bigfoot images that Ivan Marx has captured on film. Professor Krantz suspects that Gigantopithecus, a huge primate known from fossil jaws and teeth found in China, may be a more likely candidate. "If you change a gorilla to a vertical posture like a human, and make the neck come straight down, one thing you have to do is spread the back of its lower jaw to make room for the neck", and as he demonstrated to Huyghe. "the lower jaw of the Gigantopithecus spreads much more widely than the jaw of the gorilla."(ibid., p. 59). This is precisely what one observes in the skulls of the creatures in Marx’s "shower" and "shooting" sequences.

Most apes are singularly reluctant to get their bodies wet. By contrast, numerous sasquatch sightings report it to be a competent swimmer, even underwater, and habituated to an aquatic diet from tidal zones, streams, lakes, and swamps. Its bipedal stance and pelvic girdle, in the Patterson and Marx films, and particularly the similarity in every respect to male Homo sapiens genitalia, recall Sir Alister Hardy and Elaine Morgan, postulation of an aquatic-adapted hominid in human ancestry (E. Morgan, The Aquatic Ape, New York. 1982). In northern latitudes, possession of an air-trapping pelt such as that of the sea otter or fur seal would have survival value for an anthropoid that frequently entered the water, as it would protect against heat loss and dry off quickly.

The male in Marx’s April shower sequence has fur as lustrous as an otter, whereas Patterson's creature, photographed in October, evinces long hair preparatory for winter;. Marx's "snow sequence" male has a face so hair-protected against the cold as to lose entirely its anthropoid character.

Is the sasquatch a cold-climate, aquatic australopithecine, so successfully adapted to its environment as to survive until our time, avoiding competition with its closest relatives because of its repugnant smell and elusive habits? Ivan Marx has observed that most of the Bigfoot creatures he has filmed seemed to have wet pelts, and that Indians and Eskimos say, and he has found it to be true, '"Bigfoot is always found near a waterway of some sort."

With the exception of orangutans, primates in general are very social. Gorilla and chimpanzee survival depends upon the social unit. A singular feature of sasquatch reports is the rarity of sighting more than one, or of seeing infants. Since most encounters with humans may involve young adults migrating in search of mates, I fear there may be very few breeding pools capable of perpetuation. Dian Fossey is apprehensive that the mountain gorilla may become extinct in the same century in which it was discovered. How much greater the peril or the North American sasquatch!

Study of a surviving variety of australopithecine could shed light on many questions about the underpinnings or human behavior that cannot be answered from the fossil record of our evolution. Ironically, because Bigfoot has received so much inexpert attention in the popular press, anthropology textbooks that even mention sasquatch are rare, much less well-informed. Those who should be sifting and analyzing the abundant--albeit insufficient--evidence that exists seem to be blissful1y ignorant that there is even an issue, so great has been the putdown in some quarters. They seem unacquainted with the worthwhile publications by John Napier, John Green, Roderick Sprague and Grover Krantz. Most recently, Myra Shackley, a Ph.D. in Archaeology at the University of Southampton and for four years head of the laboratory at the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford, published Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma, London, 1983. She sets forth evidence that all three survive. although by no means necessarily the same species. Most importantly, she presents in great detail the results of very competent studies of relict hominids currently being carried out in the Soviet Union and China.

For even more recent details on the latter, see a long article by Christopher S. Wren. "On the Trail of the 'Wild Man' of China.... New York Times, June 5, 1984, p. C1. Since 1981, Hubei Provincial Academy of Sciences has had a "Society for the Survey and Research of the Chinese Wild Man", The Ye Ren, or "wild man”, is reported from twelve other provinces, but four scientific expeditions in search of it have met with approximately the same results as similar "organized" efforts in North America: vivid eyewitness reports of varying credibility, castings of Bigfoot-like footprints, a few hairs, and feces. Matted red hair is the most common color, "although black and white hair has also been reported."

Li Jian, 61 year-old historian and director of the Society (as cited by Wren), tells of an incident in March of 1978 , Rongjiang County, Guizhou Province, which bolsters my previously arrived-at inference that relict hominids would continue to evolve, and could be expected to behave in new ways. A group of hunters warming themselves around a fire had a ‘Ye Ren’ join them. The hunters said they were terrified and pretended to ignore it. As the fire waned, they said, the wild man collected more wood and threw it on the fire. "It means that they are not afraid of fire like other animals…”, Mr. Li said.

Chinese historical references to such beings date from the Chou Dynasty, half a mil1enium B.C. Investigators in every country where relict hominids exist would benefit from an international comparative symposium on their findings. Accounts from China and Russia show that there, as well as here, physical evidence has been lost because of ignorance about its importance. Worse, Shackley and Wren tell of documented atrocities in Russia, Mongolia and China in the not too remote past in which numbers of the creatures have been treated with a cruelty which would send British and American animal protectionists into the streets. Increasing scientific study of the phenomenon in all three countries has lessened the danger of repetition, but Russian and Chinese press treatment of the subject parallels American and official attitudes have become more preservationist and less skeptical.

In the United States, Skamania County, Washington. passed an ordinance in 1969 making “any premeditated, willful and wanton slaying" of a sasquatch a felony, and imposing a fine not to exceed ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment not to exceed five years. In April, 1984, fearful they might have exceeded their jurisdictional authority, the Commissioners made it "a Gross Misdemeanor to wantonly slay Sasquatch" with malice aforethought, the fine a year in jail and a thousand dollar fine, having the effect or making the entire 1,118,000 acre county (which includes Mt. St. Helens) a Bigfoot refuge. Section four of the ordinance dec1ares:

“Should the Skamania County Coroner determine any victim/creature to have been humanoid the Prosecuting Attorney shall pursue the case under existing laws pertaining to homicide. Should the coroner determine the victim to have been an anthropoid the Prosecuting Attorney shall precede under the terms of this ordinance.”

The species is certainly worthy of such protective efforts, limited in scope as they are at present. In 1984 Vermont passed legislation protecting the ichthyosaur-like creature about which scores of reports, annually and over many years (but no actual physical evidence), persuaded officialdom that some enormous and as yet unidentified species of aquatic monster (known as "Champ") lives in Lake Champlain.

If dinosaurs survive as alligators, I see no compelling reason for australopithecine extinction, if an ecological niche in which they could survive were available. North America still has sufficient wilderness areas, albeit scattered, to provide increasingly circumscribed, relatively isolated sustenance for a creature with the sasquatch's observed feeding habits: Leaves (especially alders), pond lily roots, fruits and berries, grubs, dead fish, and occasional small animals. Often reported picking through garbage cans, it generally avoids chicken coops and other property damage that would call down the wrath of its human neighbors in hot pursuit, and around "hot spots" of sightings a kind of non-interfering coexistence is observed to occur.

In over two centuries of historical reports of the hairy creature in North America, there have only rarely been cases resulting in a human fatality, one of them(I852) a case of justified revenge, since the creature had been shot full in the face by the trapper on the previous evening. Green (1978, pp. 335-6) gives scant credence to some vague Alaskan tales, commenting, "Fatalities in seven of 1,600 reports, even if all were true, would hardly be the record of a dangerous animal.” Although sasquatches frequently try to frighten people out of their territory, they are not known to have injured people without provocation. Sexual attraction is another ball of wax, and given the adaptiveness that I have postulated for sasquatch behavior, common sense and discrete diplomacy are called for when in a "hot spot". Dian Fossey's book has much to say about what and what not to do when in the presence of mountain gorillas that would be of utility to prospective students of the sasquatch.

Given the present reluctance of most scientific journals to publish articles on something that the consensus opinion considers rubbish, fancy or fraud, there is considerable difficulty getting detailed color photos into the hands of those specialists who should be pondering the issues raised. This vicious circle merely perpetuates a paradigm riven with cracks. Countless Americans and Canadians who live near sasquatch "hot spots" would be prepared to testify to the contrary.

Capturing a Bigfoot would expose it unduly to stress and possible death from our many human diseases and would not answer many important behavioral questions, unless that individual was successfully induced to becoming an ambassador to others of its kind. Can we be certain that killing just one, for the sake of establishing the species' existence, might not tip the balance against survival of the limited breeding pool in the area from whence it came? Dr. Krantz takes too much power unto Homo sapiens, in being so confident of his opinion to the contrary. His guestimate that a viable breeding population in the Pacific Northwest "might number anywhere from 200 to 2,000" shows how vague he must perforce be. I hold that we do not yet know enough about the species' numbers to decide to slay one, "for the sake of Science".

As much as I disagree with Krantz's approach, I appreciate that it is based on the refusal of other scientists to be satisfied with the bits and pieces of evidence assembled thus far before they will pay serious attention. Meanwhile, he continues to perform very competent research upon the available material--witness his frustrations at getting specialists to look at the very clear dermal ridges and other significant subtleties in footprints of a hairy eight foot individual sighted at 60 yards by a U. S. Forest Service patrolman in the Walla Walla district of Washington State (see photo, Huyghe, op. cit., p. 58). They still look askance at his research unless he can bring them. a tooth or bone. ''Others are scared for their reputations and their jobs," Krantz told Huyghe, "But I prefer honesty to tact, that's one of my character flaws."

There are many who would take up Krantz's challenge to gun down a sasquatch. The Santa Ana Register, March 27, 1984, carried an article by Associated Press writer Jeff Barnard about former Army Rangers sergeant Mart Keller, 33. of Areata, California, who with two companions plans to shoot one using a Smith & Wesson night-vision telescopic sight "being provided by the manufacturer at reduced cost," Says Keller, "If we get a Sasquatch we will have brought to life King Kong." Letters to the Register (April 11 ) were vehement. Wrote Molleen Bert, of Mission Viejo: "How low do we sink whet. we give license to murder? Whether they are beast-like men or man-like beasts, we know that they are a dwindling or endangered species. They are similar to ourselves. They may feel as we feel, love as we love, have families as we do. .., I believe the act this man intends is nothing but murder. He intends to kill an innocent being without justification. I am ashamed to belong to a society that would permit this obscene act against God and Creation. Is there no way to stop this horrible act?

Leonard W. Margules, of Huntington Beach, was of the opinion that "these potential killers need a leash and need it now: Having "read nothing of an authorization for such an expedition." he felt "surely there must be some requirement for one," and urged others "to call and write your representatives to squelch such expeditions: The wisest course would be careful long-term study. under natural conditions. such is "is being done through the courageous dedication of able female ethnologists currently observing other anthropoids. They have provided us with valuable models. In my opinion it is no coincidence that women stand a better chance than men--because of the respective dominance, bearing, body language, eye movements, and even odors of the two sexes in anthropoid societies--of earning the trust of such a wary species. Widely respected holders of doctorates (in fields other than anthropology)- share this opinion, are zealously guarding knowledge of the exact location of bands that could be studied, and feel they could get the financial backing to undertake such an effort for a woman exhibiting the requisite abilities.

Two other promising routes to obtaining the kind of evidence that physical anthropologists demand have resulted from conversations with Ivan Marx about what he learned from Alaskan informants. Native Americans tell him of glaciers where the "Bushmen" (as they call the sasquatch). deposit their dead in crevasses, for entombment. In the same area, a woman in her sixties is by family tradition and physical appearance, the daughter or- a Native American woman impregnated by a "'Bushman". She is married but, as one would expect of a hybrid, barren. I have scholarly connections who possess the skills to retrieve the physical evidence potentially obtainable by both of these avenues of research, but so far have been unable to get the necessary funding.

Given all these circumstances, whether our scientists--and indeed humanity--will recognize the relevance and the challenge that the elusive sasquatch offers to our understanding of Homo sapiens evolution is an unresolved question. It begs a timely answer, for that extraordinary species' numbers may have diminished beyond the point of successful return, unless there is help and protection from its human friends and relatives.

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