Looking for Mr Big

Ross Crockford

So far, John Bindernagel and the rest of the Sasquatch hunters have only a few footprints and the famous Patterson film to show for their efforts. But the search continues...

I wouldn't want to suggest to Mike MacDonald that he's crazy. A heavy knife hangs from his belt. His shaved head is wrapped in a kerchief, pirate-style. One of his substantial forearms is adorned with an anchor tatoo that reads "Heroes are Made, not Born." MacDonald is a 28-year-old steelworker from Hamilton, as big as a TV wrestler, and with a booming, foghorn voice to match. He tells me he's just entered a though-guy contest, a fight with a thousand-dollar purse. He needs the money. For two months he's been living on an island in the middle of a lake in British Columbia, and his food is running out. He needs to get back there. He's on a mission.

He's convinced he encountered a Sasquatch. Now he's determined to capture one. Since he was a kid, MacDonald tells me, he's been fascinated by stories about the Sasquatch — the tall, ape-like beast that is said to roam the forests of the Pacific Northwest. So when he took a vacation in the summer of 1996, he decided to explore B.C.'s Harrison Lake region, a territory of granite peaks and thick forests about two hours east of Vancouver — and a famous hotbed of Sasquatch encounters. Some locals told him that a few years earlier, a guy had been chased off an island on Harrison Lake by a Sasquatch. MacDonald got a canoe, paddled 30 kilometres out to the island, and set up camp. "And I hit paydirt," he tells me. "Right off the bat."

The first night, about three in the morning, he was awakened by a pounding outside his tent. "It was stamping its feet, ramming its leg right into the ground. I could almost hear its ligaments moving and its knee crunching and the hair brisling — it was so real. It was a huge creature. It was breathing heavy and panting, like a sprinter — haauugghh, haauugghh. Monster-like. Then it stopped. I grabbed my bear mace, and I ran." MacDonald came back to the tent later and looked around with a flashlight. He found some big footprints. No animal. But it was enough to convince him to stay on the island for the rest of his vacation. Then he quit his job in Hamilton, cashed in his RRSPs, and moved to the island full time. Now his campsite's wired to a bank of floodlights, and he's got a video camera so he can snare the creature on tape if it ever returns. "You got to get out and confront it," MacDonald says. "Who knows, it could kill you. But I'm going to take that chance, like no one else has ever done before. I'm going to be the biggest news in Sasquatch history."

Like I said, I wouldn't want to suggest to Mike MacDonald that he's crazy. But if he is, he shouldn't worry. He's got plenty of company.

MacDonald tells me his story during a break at the International Sasquatch Symposium, a conference held in June at Vancouver's H.R. MacMillan Planetarium. Milling around the building are several hundred Sasquatch devotees. Tweed-jacketed academics. New Age visionaries. Eyeglassed nerds like you'd find at a Star Trek convention — which seems appropriate, since someone in the auditorium is delivering a lecture on the "Sasquatch-UFO connection." Several TV crews are on hand, including one from the BBC. There are souvenirs for sale: $20 sketches of the Sasquatch, $15 samples of hair, $88 plaster casts of giant footprints. The existence of the Sasquatch may be in doubt, but interest in the creature is clearly alive and well.

For thousands of years, people have told stories about man-like monsters that roam the wilderness. There is the Yeti, the "Abominable Snowman" of the Himalayas, and similar beasts have been described in Russia, China, Central America and Australia. Though apes have apparently never lived on this continent, many aboriginal peoples of North America have legends about giant, ape-like creatures. So do the Salish natives of Harrison Lake. The word Sasquatch, in fact, is an English version of Saskehavas — the name the Salish have for the "big people" they believe live in the surrounding woods.

Few have followed the tales of the Sasquatch with more interest than Harrison Lake writer John Green. He got hooked in 1957 when he was working for a local newspaper, and started coming upon reports of ape-like beasts from all over B.C. In 1898, the Vancouver Province reported that railway workers near the town of Yahk temporarily captured an "ape boy" covered with black hair. A prospector announced that in 1927 he'd been held captive by a family of Sasquatches near the Toba Inlet. In 1941, a mother and two children at Ruby Creek told police they had been terrorized by an eight-foot humanoid creature; police later found big footprints around the family's cabin. Now 70, Green has collected over 3,000 of these reports. And dozens more keep coming in every year.

"This is a phenomenon which certainly needs some research," he argues. If the Sasquatch exists, its discovery would overturn everything we know about anthropology. If the Sasquatch is a hoax, then it is part of a fraud taking place all over the world. If all the people seeing Sasquatches are mistaken, then some type of mass hysteria is taking place that needs to be explained. Green says scientists have avoided these questions, and abandoned their responsibility to find the truth. That pursuit is left to Sasquatch investigators such as himself.

Green doesn't like anyone suggesting that he and the other researchers "believe" in the Sasquatch. "We're the people who investigate and deal with the information," he replies. "It's the people who dismiss it who are acting out of belief. They don't know what they've been rejecting."

"There are a lot of stories and a lot of legends", says Tom Sewid. "But we're talking about a living form. They are just like a black bear or a raven. They are not from the spirit world."

Sewid is a Kwagiluth native fisherman from Village Island, B.C. He tells the symposium audience that one night in 1994, he was moored about 250 feet of the island when he heard a "whistling, chirping noise" and caught wind of a "big stink." He turned a spotlight on the beach. "It wasn't a bear," he says. "It was Bukwas."

Bukwas is his people's name for the Sasquatch. Sewid says he had the creature in the spotlight for several minutes as it crashed through the bushes and walked along the shore. He was the only one who saw it, but he doesn't have any doubt about his experience, or that more creatures are out there. "Places where there are no people," he advises. "That's where you'll find them."

Unfortunately, if the Sasquatch is an animal, it doesn't leave behind much solid proof. No Sasquatch bones or bodies have ever been found, so as far as many scientists are concerned, it doesn't exist. But that doesn't bother John Bindernagel, a Vancouver Island wildlife biologist. He's so sure something's out there that he's taken a year off from his job, doing environmental assessments for the B.C. government, to write North America's Great Ape: the Sasquatch, a book describing the creature's behaviour and eating and mating habits.

"I find that the more confidently you talk, the more people are convinced that you might actually be on to something," says Bindernagel. "And I'm very confident. I feel as far as existence, this is not a problem. The reports seem perfectly adequate to me, and the evidence."

Bindernagel, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, says he's been interested in the Sasquatch for some time: in the '60s, he recalls, he brought it up during an undergrad biology class and got laughed out the room. He'd more or less forgotten about the beast until 1988, when he was hiking in Vancouver Island's Strathcona Park and came upon a huge set of footprints, each one about 16 inches long and 7 inches wide. He made plaster casts of the tracks, and started speaking at schools and fish and game clubs, asking whether anyone had seen the beast. He's documented 45 sightings on the Island since then. (One of those witnesses was supposed to come to the symposium, but he didn't show. "A lot of people who've seen Sasquatch have marital trouble," Bindernagel explains.)

Bindernagel argues that the footprints alone are proof that Sasquatch exists. There are hundreds of reports from across North America of big tracks, and many of them were found in snowfields and forests, far from hiking trails, so it's unlikely they were put there by hoaxers. Often the stride between the prints is too long for a human, Bindernagel says, and the compression is too deep for someone to make without carrying hundreds of kilos on their back.

Sceptics reply that these people, in their enthusiasm to find a Sasquatch, have simply misidentified old bear tracks. The sceptics want more convincing evidence. So to get it, Bindernagel's constructed a camera trap — a device that uses a pressure pad on the ground to trigger a flash camera. He's mounted 10 of these on trees around Vancouver Island, in the hope of snapping a picture of a Sasquatch as it lumbers past. No luck yet. "What we are getting are a lot of deer," reports Bindernagel.

The most famous images of a purported Sasquatch were taken by Roger Patterson on October 20, 1967. Patterson, a former rodeo cowboy, was riding along Bluff Creek in northern California when his horse reared. Patterson had a movie camera with him, and he got two minutes of film of a Sasquatch striding along the creek and into the bush. Investigators showed it to scientists: no one was willing to call it a hoax. Hollywood special-effects people said at the time that it would have been impossible for them to create a costume with the kind of muscular detail that appears in the film. If it was faked, no one has confessed to it. Patterson is now deceased, and the Sasquatch isn't talking.

Now the Patterson film is being studied closely again. One speaker at the symposium is Jeff Glickman, the executive director of the North American Science Institute, a centre in Oregon that has poured donations from wealthy eccentrics into all sorts of gadgetry for Sasquatch research. (To get its own photos, for example, the Institute has installed three solar-powered video cameras and military-grade sensors in the Oregon woods, which are monitored via a satellite uplink.) The Institute's big project is a computer analysis of the Patterson film: for two years Glickman has been going over it, frame by frame, comparing the posture and gait of the creature in it to those of real apes. This research, he says, will confirm once and for all that the Patterson film is authentic.

Other investigators doubt many scientists will care. Thomas Steenburg says arguments about whether or not the Sasquatch exists will end only when somebody shoots one — a position that has earned him some angry phone calls from animal lovers. Steenburg, a hunter from Calgary who wears safari gear, says that when he goes into the woods, he always packs a .30-06 rifle. "We need hard physical evidence," he says. "And evidence, in the world of science, is a body."

Listening to all this, in the last row of the auditorium, sits a flannel-shirted guy with a complexion as red and weathered as a winter apple. This is René Dahinden, the most dedicated of all the Sasquatch hunters. But if he saw one, he wouldn't shoot it. "The uproar would be so big," he says, "someone would go and blow you away."

Besides, Dahinden's not necessarily convinced that the creature exists. The key pieces of evidence are the Patterson film and a few of the footprints, he says; he doesn't give heed to many eyewitness reports because "anybody can tell you any old thing." What drives him crazy is that sceptical older investigators such as himself are disappearing from the field. They're being replaced by mystics, X-Files refugees, and gullible academics who regard every story and footprint as absolute proof. "Ph.D., far as I'm concerned, means 'Please Help, Demented'," says Dahinden. His rivals claim he's gone a bit mad himself because of his job, recycling lead pellets fired from skeet rifles at the Vancouver Gun Club. But Dahinden figures he's justified in telling other Sasquatch hunters off. He's spent more time looking for the Sasquatch than anyone else.

Not long after he moved to B.C. from his native Switzerland in 1953, Dahinden heard a story on the radio about the Yeti. Someone told him there was something similar here. So he started travelling around the province, working in various places, asking locals what they'd seen and poking into archives, and gradually he became convinced that something was happening that needed to be explained.

"I spent thousands of nights out there. Never saw hide nor hair of any damn thing. I only saw one cougar in all that time. There are times I got really down in the dumps. But for some reason or another, I kept at it. It's fascinating. All these people I've met. All these incredible situations."

Dahinden, now 66, has also become a celebrity. A character was modelled after him for the 1980s movie Harry and the Hendersons, about a Sasquatch that becomes a house pet, and last year, he was featured in TV commercials for B.C.'s Kokanee beer, which uses the Sasquatch as its mascot. But Dahinden says there's a down side to the attention: as the popularity of the creature has increased, so have the number of frauds and lunatics making claims about it, destroying what little scientific credibility Sasquatch research once enjoyed. "The Sasquatch is not the problem," he says, "it's the people who are involved with it."

And outlandish stories do indeed turn up at the symposium. One guy from Utah claims he's encountered the creature on nine separate occasions. Skip Frombach, an electronics repairman from Seattle, says that in 1989 he was chased for a mile down a steep slope by a 10-foot creature that ripped trees and boulders out of his way, "like something out of a Tasmanian Devil cartoon." Frombach's told this story before — to Seattle TV news, Britain's Channel 4 network, and NBC's Unsolved Mysteries. "It is incredible," he admits. "But I don't have to convince anybody. The only person that needed convincing was me — and I am convinced."

The strangest account, however, comes from Jack Lapseritis, a holistic therapist from Tucson, Arizona. According to Lapseritis, no Sasquatch has ever been caught because they are "paraphysical, interdimensional nature people" brought here by UFOs millions of years ago when their planet was destroyed. He knows this, he says, because he regularly telepathically communicates with the creatures, who have asked him to tell his fellow earthlings to stop destroying the environment.

"With my ongoing telepathic contacts, I've found 69 different people who have had different combinations of experiences similar to myself — that is, the Bigfoot-ET-telepathic-UFO connection," says Lasperitis. "If I'm crazy, there's a tremendous number of educated people out there who are crazy too."

After hearing a number of these stories, I seek out Dale and Barry Beyerstein, brothers who teach, respectively, philosophy at Vancouver's Langara College and psychology at Simon Fraser University. Both are members of the Society of B.C. Skeptics, and they've been sitting in on the symposium.

The Beyersteins don't dismiss the possibility that the Sasquatch might exist. After all, animal species are still being discovered, even today. But they do think the Sasquatch is pretty unlikely, considering that, despite the thousands of "sightings," not a single piece of solid evidence has turned up.

Still, some of these sightings are incredibly detailed. I ask them how they would explain Skip Frombach's "Tasmanian Devil account?"

"Obviously I don't believe the story," Barry Beyerstein tells me, "but what the answer is would require a whole lot of digging into just who these people are."

"People who reject all of this often assume that witnesses are fools or frauds," he continues. "They're not necessarily either. As human beings, perceptually, cognitively, the way our memory works, we can fool ourselves — sober, intelligent, honest, well-educated people, just as easily as people who are none of the above."

Beyerstein also works in Simon Fraser's Brain Behaviour Lab. He explains that the area of the brain that analyzes what we see and hear is the same place where we generate dreams and memories. If at first we can't make sense of what we are perceiving, then something from dream or memory fills in the blanks, and embellishes it so we can make sense of it. Usually, he says, the first thing to come to mind is what is in our culture, and — thanks to folklore, tabloid newspapers and now beer commercials — that includes the Sasquatch.

"It's a pretty compelling myth," adds brother Dale.

Later on, I run into Mike MacDonald, the guy with the knife and the tattoo. Maybe the Beyersteins' theory applies to Macdonald, I think. He'd heard stories about the Sasquatch, and he was in a place where he believed he might encounter one. Something happened that he couldn't explain, and he jumped to an obvious conclusion. Like I said, I wouldn't want to suggest that he's crazy.

I'm about to ask him what he thinks of the theory, but before I can, he hands me a brochure, inviting people to come join him on his expedition. "I'm not coming out of the bush until I've captured a Sasquatch," he tells me.

I decide not to ask him about the Beyersteins' theory. Instead, I give him my card, and tell him to call me when he's got something. One day, maybe, I'll hear from him.

From: Outdoor Canada, March 1998.