WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2015
If Bigfoot exists, why isn’t he on Instagram?
That’s how the current argument goes. In our age of ubiquitous, camera-ready smartphones, when we share every mundane moment across social media, surely, someone, somewhere would have snapped a selfie with the big guy by now. How is it that the most convincing “evidence” remains a grainy, 48-year-old film clip that looks suspiciously like a guy in gorilla drag?
The 91 people gathered in a YMCA lodge 68 miles southwest of Buffalo don’t want to hear it. They’ve plunked down $20 apiece to spend an October Saturday in this cabin by the lake, home to the fourth annual Chautauqua Lake Bigfoot Expo. Folks make new friends and renew old acquaintances as they chat and mill about the mess hall, which today serves as an auditorium and convention center of sorts. Many wear buttons that declare I BELIEVE.
A kitchen in back serves pizza and snacks. Vendors hawk all kinds of Bigfoot merch. One draws a crowd with photos of footprints of the day’s star attraction. Stuffed Sasquatches are another popular item. Peter Wiemer, the event’s founder and organizer, is admirably transparent about what inspired him to put on this show: “The entrepreneurial bug,” he concedes. “We’re the only Bigfoot convention in the world available as a video on demand. It’s only $1.99 for four-plus hours from 2012.”
The conventioneers fill rows of folding chairs and listen in rapt attention as a burly man named Steve Kulls — the “Squatch Detective” he calls himself — offers a behind-the-scenes look at how Bigfoot reality shows are made. Another speaker clicks through a PowerPoint presentation on “What to bring while Bigfooting” (thermal imager, audio recorder, headlamp with green or red filter), and how to behave in the woods (“attitude is paramount; keep it professional at all times”).
Other folks have more urgency for being here: They’ve seen Sasquatch, and they want to share their stories and find comfort in a community of witnesses. They convey a deeply felt belief that there is more to the world than we know.
Take Julia Karanasky. A grandmotherly 79-year-old, she still wonders about a noise she heard outside her window more than a decade ago. An intense dream — or was it? — followed, which triggered a search for answers that continues to this day.
Karanasky’s experience occurred about 15 years back, after she moved with her husband to Niagara Falls, N.Y. During the first night in their new home, Karanasky woke to use the bathroom, and heard a growl outside the window, deep and unfamiliar. She sat on the edge of the bed for several minutes until the noise stopped. A few hours later, around 4:30, she had a nightmare as real as life. An enormous, hairy man stood at the same window, peering in. After a few moments, he walked across the front lawn, up a stream and out of sight.
Weeks later, still unsettled by the experience, Karanasky described her dream to a neighbor. “Oh, that’s the Big Man,” the neighbor told her. “Some people call it Bigfoot. He lives there on Tuscarora. We don’t bother him. He doesn’t bother us. He’s been there for years.”
Karanasky concedes that her experience proves nothing, yet she is driven to understand a moment so odd, and so vivid, that it compelled her to be here. “I had no interest in Bigfoot before that,” Karanasky tells me. “But after, I started watching movies and reading books about it. I found out (about) this conference and said, ‘I’ve got to go.’ I like hearing other people’s stories.”
Like the one told by Dave Wargo, 58, who claims he encountered Bigfoot in 1973 and is still struck by the enormity of its excrement. Wargo wears a straw cowboy hat and leans on a cane cut from a tree as he spins a folksy yarn about his experience.
It was 1973, in Lorain County in northern Ohio, when Wargo saw Sasquatch. He was out hunting woodchuck among the soybean farms of his hometown with his dad, brother and a friend. Walking along the railroad tracks, they spotted what they initially thought was a deer. But, as Wargo recollected, it reeked “like the worst homeless person you ever smelled, with a bit of skunk sprayed on.”
He looked through the scope on his rifle, and saw the creature from about 100 yards away. It had charcoal gray hair and didn’t linger long before walking away, down a creek. Wargo and his friends followed, found footprints in the mud that were 6 inches longer and 4 inches wider than Wargo’s size-15 shoe.
The crew spent the rest of that summer tracking “Harry,” as the locals called him, and once found an especially memorable mound of evidence. “It was the biggest poop you ever could see,” Wargo says. “If you look at bear poop, it has hair in it, because they’re licking themselves, like a dog. This poop, it has no hair in it.”
Karanasky, Wargo and others who give testimony seem earnest and truthful, even though their stories share a flaw common to any involving an unverified species: They’re inconclusive and unsubstantiated. They never end with a corpse, or a capture or DNA evidence — or even a photograph.
And so Bigfoot remains on the pulpy edge of popular culture, out there with Area 51 and Elvis sightings. Still, the true believers’ confident retellings pull you in, make you want to believe. Before long, you’re doubting your own common sense, questioning your skepticism. What if...? Could this thing actually exist?
THE SHORT PERSON
Half a world away from the Chautauqua Lake conventioneers, an altogether different bipedal primate is stirring considerable interest. This creature — also hairy, like Sasquatch, but described as being significantly smaller in stature — is believed to live under deep cover in the rainforests of Sumatra, in Indonesia. And according to Loren Coleman, it may be the key to finally unlocking the mystery of Bigfoot.
In his various day jobs, Coleman, 68, was a psychiatric social worker, and the author of “Suicide Clusters” and “The Copycat Effect.” An expert on teen shootings and suicides, he is often called upon to comment on school massacres. Coleman is also one of the world’s leading authorities of cryptozoology, a quasi-scientific field devoted to the study of “hidden” animals, otherwise known as cryptids, and he has taught a popular cryptozoology course at the University of Southern Maine. Cryptozoologists are serious hobbyists who work outside the mainstream, and spend much of their free time and money searching for the likes of the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, Dover Demon, Montauk Monster and, of course, Bigfoot. They collect footprints, conduct wilderness expeditions and interview eyewitnesses.
Coleman’s own quest began at 13, when a TV movie about the Abominable Snowman grabbed him, and instilled a yearning to find what lurks beneath the visible surface. “Even though I knew it was fiction,” he later wrote, “there appeared to be an underlying truth to this tale of an expedition in pursuit of an unknown, hairy upright creature.” As a young man, Coleman would cruise along Route 66, stopping in towns to solicit accounts of the hairy guy, the giant turtle — whatever it was that the people in a given area claimed to have seen.
In 2003, a now-retired Coleman fulfilled a dream held for many years and opened the International Cryptozoology Museum, located on a sidestreet storefront in Portland, Maine. The museum draws approximately 10,000 visitors annually, which represents an explosion of interest from decades ago. According to Coleman, roughly five people in the world identified themselves as cryptozoologists in 1965. Now, conferences routinely draw 800, and Coleman corresponds with thousands of believers, skeptics, journalists and other interested folks.
“I think this new primate species will be found in my lifetime.”
— Loren Coleman
Founder, International Cryptozoology Museum
On an October day, drizzly and thick with the scent of North Atlantic sea air, Coleman leads the way to the museum’s “nonfiction room,” a modest space filled with footprint casts, films of Bigfoot and other artifacts culled from 55 years of impassioned research. Coleman’s hope of further discovery sits in a small glass case in the middle of the room labeled “Classic Animals of Discovery.”
The vitrine displays examples of creatures once only rumored to exist, which were later verified by science. One of those, the Okapi, a fantastical beast that looks like a giraffe fused with a zebra, wasn’t officially identified until its capture in Central Africa, in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1901. Also represented is the Giant Panda, depicted as rare and legendary in ancient Chinese texts, but which existed only as folklore in the Western Hemisphere well into the 19th century, when a hunter presented a skin to a Frenchman. It wasn’t until 1916 that a Westerner first witnessed a Giant Panda, and two decades later when one arrived in America. (Conversely, the Coelacanth, a fish believed to be extinct since the Cretaceous period, until it was discovered in 1938, is also featured.) Cryptozoologists believe it is plausible that, because these species were verified only recently, others might cross over from myth and eventually land in Coleman’s collection. While researching one of his many books on the subject, Coleman identified one he believes will do so: the Orang Pendek.
This potential primate is said to live in the jungles of Sumatra, mostly in and around the 13,000-square-mile Kerinci Seblat National Park. It is 4- to 5-feet tall (Orang Pendek means short person in Indonesian), has dark hair, brawny muscles and walks upright. Reports of sightings, both by locals and Western eyewitnesses, have persisted for at least a century and, in recent years, determined cryptozoologists have produced an uptick in expeditions.
Coleman sees Orang Pendek as a precursor to serious Bigfoot research. “I think this new primate species will be found in my lifetime,” he says. “Once that happens, the floodgates for support of more research on unknown hominoids will open.”
That would mark a new turn in the Bigfoot story, a legend that is much older than America itself. Roughly 1,000 years ago, the Yokuts of the San Joaquin Valley, in present-day central California, drew an 8½-foot tall figure in pictographs, calling him the “Hairy Man.” These depictions looked a lot like later accounts of Bigfoot, and the hirsute fella was pictured with his family. Most fascinating, he was portrayed matter of factly alongside humans, coyotes, beavers, bears, frogs and other animals — in no way was he presented as mythical, mystical or mysterious. Just there.
Hairy Man’s features were similar to figures in stories passed down by Native Americans in far-flung areas. Coleman devotes a section to these early traditions in his 2002 book “Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America,” published by Simon & Schuster. “There is stuff from colonial times — you can read reports — that Native Americans are seeing hairy creatures; they just don’t know what they are,” Coleman says. “Native peoples have different names for it. In the East, most of the Algonquin tribes have different names for ‘Windigo’ (a Bigfootlike creature).”
Encounters persisted for centuries after the Europeans arrived. Coleman uncovered news accounts of a “Wild Man of the Woods” near Ellsburgh, N.Y., in 1818. The journal Scientific American wrote in 1846 about a “monstrous wild man” in the Ozarks. These bad boys were — you guessed it — large, hairy, bipedal and apelike.
The tales continued, some enduring and some debunked, until a California newspaper columnist coined the term Bigfoot in 1958. The name helped trigger an era of heavy pop-culture interest that has never really receded. Nine years later, the most intriguing — and controversial — evidence in the history of the American Bigfoot surfaced, the so-called Patterson-Gimlin film.
Roger Patterson was a Bigfoot enthusiast who wanted to shoot a documentary on the subject. He had already self-published a book, “Do Abominable Snowmen Exist in America?” which some contend discounts the film’s credibility. Patterson rented a 16mm camera, enlisted his friend Bob Gimlin and set out on horseback for Bluff Creek, an area of Northern California known for Bigfoot sightings. You’ve probably seen their footage — shaky and out of focus — which purports to capture a Sasquatch walking in the wilderness. Most notable is the moment when the creature glances over its shoulder and makes eye contact with the camera.
Decades of debate followed. Patterson, who died in 1972, was linked to a Hollywood costume designer who could have helped to create a lifelike gorilla suit, though that was never proven. Gimlin, now 84 and seemingly not prone to exaggeration or histrionics, stands by his eyewitness account.
As with all of these cryptid arguments, you can easily tumble down an Internet rabbit hole and lose yourself trying to untangle the thread. Still, the Patterson-Gimlin takeaway is simple, and it applies to the entire Bigfoot discussion: It might inspire deep skepticism, but it has never been proven true or false enough to end the conversation or to get us any closer to a conclusive pronouncement. That is, unless the discovery of Orang Pendek convinces scientists that Bigfoot is worth sustained and well-funded research. Or so Coleman hopes.
He derives this optimism in part from a group of British adventurers and Cliff Barackman, a host of Animal Planet’s popular series “Finding Bigfoot.” These men have devoted considerable time and resources to finding the Orang Pendek in Sumatra, and returned with compelling evidence — and one firsthand encounter.
“ THERE IS SUCH A THING AS MONSTERS”
In September of 2009, Adam Davies returned to the green jungles of Sumatra. Then a 41-year-old civil servant living in Birmingham, England, Davies had once again used his savings and vacation time to trek through the rainforest, hoping to find Orang Pendek.
Like Loren Coleman, Davies was gripped from a young age by stories of creatures both mythical and real. He is motivated not only by a desire to pin down this mystery, but by a mission borne of personal tragedy. When he was a small child, Davies’ 4-year-old sister died of cancer. Right then, he resolved to spend his limited time on Earth pursuing whatever compelled him. “You never know when you’re going to go, so I wanted to max out on life,” Davies says.
That attitude led him to Sumatra in the late 1990s, after learning of growing interest in the Orang Pendek spearheaded by Debbie Martyr, a program manager for Fauna and Flora International, an international conservation organization based in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1903, FFI is currently involved in 140-plus projects in more than 40 countries. In recent decades, Martyr has overseen a major Sumatran Tiger conservation program, which has slowed the decline of this endangered species and accelerated breeding. For her efforts, she was honored last year by Queen Elizabeth as an MBE, or Member of the Order of the British Empire. In 1996, after hearing convincing accounts of Orang Pendek encounters by locals in Sumatra, and allegedly glimpsing it herself, Martyr approached FFI with a request for research funding.
As Martyr details in a passage that is widely circulated online (she did not respond to interview requests), “It was walking between two trees, vegetation to about hip level. This gorgeous, graceful, very strongly built primate, a big ape, walking out of the legend and into broad daylight, lit up by the sun. If I’d been concealed in undergrowth, I could have said, ‘Well, I saw something.’ But I didn’t see ‘something.’ I saw an Orang Pendek.”
FFI provided Martyr a modest grant of 1,200 pounds for travel and lodging, plus expenses and a Land Rover, according to Mark Rose, the organization’s CEO. “We thought it might be feasible,” Rose says. “Debbie was quite compelling about it.” Martyr spent about two years on the project, which yielded no significant discoveries, before moving on to the tiger initiative. Yet FFI’s very willingness to consider the possibility of Orang Pendek’s existence represented a significant milestone: When Martyr expressed curiosity about the cryptid, this reputable organization did not laugh her out of the room.
Similarly, in 2011 the Guardian published a three-part account of Richard Freeman’s own Orang Pendek expeditions. Freeman has traveled from England to Sumatra with Davies and others, and written books on the subject. It was on that 2009 expedition when Davies found himself back in west-central Sumatra.
Davies and several members of his team were searching for evidence in Kerinci Seblat National Park, when they heard a rustling in the bushes, and split off to investigate. Davies went one way and his colleague Dave Archer went another, along with a local guide named Sahar. Archer and Sahar came upon an Orang Pendek sitting in a forked tree. Archer stopped about 40 yards in front of the creature, dropped to one knee and looked through his scope. He aimed a laser pointer, to help Sahar locate the primate.
Archer had a fleeting moment to gape, and etch the following details into his memory: The Orang Pendek had a wispy beard, dark hair that grew backward on his head, and a bald forehead between his hairline and bushy eyebrows. His arms and shoulders were muscular, with minimal fat. His nose was bulbous on the end, with wide nostrils. He had short, fang-like teeth, and a grimace on his shockingly human-like face.
Archer’s first thought? “There is such a thing as monsters.”
He didn’t even have enough time to pull out his camera. When the Orang Pendek noticed Archer’s laser pointer, it panicked. “It started to breathe heavily,” Archer recalls, his voice rising, excitement palpable through a spotty, transatlantic cell connection. “His eyes started to roll all over the place. His eyes were very scary.”
“A lot of witnesses we spoke with in Sumatra had observed an Orang Pendek in the past six months.”
— Adam Davies
Orang Pendek enthusiast
“Adam!” Archer called, beckoning his friend. But before Davies could run over, the Orang Pendek fled, and the magic moment passed. When the group reconvened, Davies was struck by the profound sight of Sahar weeping.
“Sahar was a tough guy,” Davies says of the guide, who died a year later. Sahar had heard stories of the Orang Pendek from his peers, but had never seen one himself. “After he saw it, he was so disturbed by what he had seen — disturbed in a good way, elation, I think — that he just burst into tears. He cried, and I hugged him. Here I am in the jungle hugging this little Indonesian guy after he’d seen the Orang Pendek. It was surreal.”
Three years later, Davies’ enthusiasm, and the certainty of so many locals, touched Cliff Barackman as he prepped for a 2012 “Finding Bigfoot” episode on the Orang Pendek. The show follows a similar narrative arc for most of its episodes: traveling to an area of rumored cryptid sightings, then investigating. But the trip to Indonesia stuck out. “A lot of the witnesses we spoke with in Sumatra had observed an Orang Pendek in the past six months,” Barackman says. “That hasn’t been true of Sasquatches for the most part. We do find recent witnesses, but a lot of times they’ve seen them a couple of years ago. I started to think, Holy smokes, these farmers are seeing Orang Pendeks kind of a lot.”
The brief television expedition did not lead to a sighting, but Barackman’s visit to the jungle left him riveted. While in Sumatra, he bonded with Davies, who served as an adviser for the episode. Upon his return home to Portland, Ore., Barackman decided to launch the Orang Pendek Project, contracting several locals to investigate reported Orang Pendek sightings. A few have attempted to scam him with crude fake footprints, but Barackman believes he knows the difference between those and the real ones, of which he has collected about 50.
Barackman reiterates the key obstacle — research funding — and draws the link between the Orang Pendek and Bigfoot. “I think (funding) is the key to hairy hominoids worldwide, really — Sasquatches included,” he says. “You have all these amateurs running around doing bad science. Whereas if there was a concerted effort by an institution, I think it would be a done deal before too long.”
Bolstering the case for legitimate Orang Pendek exploration is the 2003 discovery by archaeologists researching Homo sapiens on the Indonesian island of Flores. They were surprised to find skulls, skeletons and tools of a different, previously unverified human species: Homo floriensis, 3½-feet tall and known popularly as the “Hobbit.” This represented a new link on the evolutionary chain. Even more surprising, the Hobbit survived until 12,000 years ago, or nearly 30,000 years past the Neanderthals. As new discoveries — and new insights into who we are — continue into the current century, wouldn’t we further illuminate our own humanity by way of verifiable evidence of Orang Pendek? Or, for that matter, Bigfoot?
“SHOW ME THE BODY”
The Orang Pendek enthusiasts have made impressive headway, according to Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University. “They have collected some interesting forensic evidence,” says Meldrum, whose openness to the existence of cryptids has exposed him to criticism from colleagues. “Adam Davies has a footprint. He is an adventurer, an outdoorsman. I have to admire that.”
Meldrum considers the Orang Pendek plausible, and Bigfoot worthy of exploration, though, from a psychological perspective, he finds it interesting that Westerners are excited about an alleged creature in Sumatra. “It’s always easier to accept the possibility that there is a monster over there, in someone else’s backyard,” he says.
As for the common argument that a cellphone camera would have captured these cryptids by now, if they existed? Meldrum finds that thinking wrongheaded. “There is this attitude that there is no square inch of North America that hasn’t been traveled,” he says. “People don’t realize the extent of the area that remains unoccupied. I’m not saying that the scientific community should recognize the existence of a Sasquatch. But I do think that the scientific community — if it’s true to the principles of scientific exploration — should engage.”
“I’m not saying that the scientific community should recognize the existence of a Sasquatch. But that the scientific community — if it’s true to the principles of scientific exploration — should engage.”
— Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum
Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology, Idaho State University
The entire cryptid issue, from screaming headlines to schlocky reality TV, is presented campily. And that, Meldrum contends, is the fault of science’s closed-mindedness. “These (cryptids) have been dismissed by mainstream anthropologists as mere folklore,” he says. “There are a couple of reasons for that. Science has historically been very conservative. That has served it well to a degree, but there comes a point where that is a handicap. Into the void left by scientists unwilling to engage have stepped the cryptozoologists. They are not scientists. They are amateur enthusiasts. And so the subject has become very tabloid.”
This tabloidy framing characterizes most attempts to explore Bigfoot. The sensationalistic History Channel special, “Bigfoot Captured,” which debuted on Nov. 9, is typical. Meldrum, who appears on the show, took to Facebook to decry the “dramatic liberty” taken by the show’s producers. Or take the National Geographic Channel’s exploration of the Patterson-Gimlin film in 2010. That program follows Bill Munns, identified as “a Bigfoot researcher, computer animator and Hollywood costume designer,” into the home of Roger Patterson’s widow, where he becomes the first person ever to analyze the original film. Previous studies were done on copies of copies, which, as the film degraded, made it harder to examine.
Scrutinizing the original footage frame by frame, Munns makes several interesting points. Employing biomechanical gait analysis, he notes how the Sasquatch bends its knee in a way that would be impossible for a costumed actor to do. It has a long upper leg and short lower leg, a configuration very rare for humans. The distance between footprints would be impossible for a human — let alone one in a bulky costume — to achieve. And then Munns delivers the coup de grâce: blowing up a frame to reveal a rippling thigh muscle that flexes when the creature strides, which would be impossible to fake.
You watch this and find yourself thinking, Hm, Nat Geo is engaging in this discussion; that lends it some credibility. But then the announcer blares with grave urgency, “The results ... are ... stunning!”
Spooky music plays, like some low-rent copy of the “X-Files” theme. Drums bang. The camera cuts quickly to Munns’ bearded face, then away again. Munns concludes that the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film cannot be a human. But by the time we get there, it’s like Ed Wood has hijacked National Geographic. The cheesy style undermines any legitimate points that may have been made.
“Everyone loves a good mystery. Because the longer it persists, perhaps there is some truth to it.”
— Cliff Barackman
Co-host, “Finding Bigfoot”
Hokey production values such as these bolster the case of critics such as Michael Shermer. The executive director of the Skeptics Society, an organization that devotes itself to promoting critical thinking and questioning what it regards as pseudoscience, Shermer is a historian of science and the author of 12 books, including “Why People Believe Weird Things,” and writes a column for Scientific American. He is one of many people turned off by the lack of hard evidence, whether the subject is UFOs, extraterrestrial life or Bigfoot. And it’s a fair point: The topic is full of speculation, white-hot noise and giddy excitement — and completely devoid of verifiable facts.
“Where are all these (cryptids)?” Shermer asks. “You’d need to have some who just died. That got hit by a car. That fell in a mud hole. Where are these? There are none! This indicates that they do not exist. Show me the body, and I will believe.”
There is no body. No pictures, either — at least, none that we can all agree on — and serious questions linger. When ultra-rare species such as snow leopards, pink hippos, black-eyed tree frogs and Vietnamese Saolas are photographed in their natural habitats, why is it that the best evidence of Bigfoot’s existence remains the controversial Patterson-Gimlin film?
But there is also a compelling history of alleged sightings, with common elements across centuries and cultures. Humans, hoping there is more to a world than what they see with their eyes, have chased this enigma since they painted its likeness on cave walls. A millennium later, in an age ruled by science and technology, we still crave discovery. Spend enough time with the believers and you start to think that Bigfoot must either A) be real, or B) tell us something fairly major about ourselves.
“The mystery is really endearing to us,” Cliff Barackman says. “Everyone loves a good mystery, especially one that persists. Because the longer it persists, perhaps there is some truth to it. We may have mastered the planet as far as we know, yet there is so much we don’t know. In a way, it’s almost comforting to know that we don’t know everything yet.”