Articles and Papers

Will the real Bigfoot please stand up?

Is this photo the evidence of Bigfoot we've been waiting for? Bob Rickard dons his woodsman kit and heads, cautiously, into the wilderness to find out.

Imagine hiking along a ridge in Washington State's Snoqualmie National Forest. You hear "loud splashing noises" to your far left and investigate. From a high bank, you look down into a swampy lagoon and see, just 25-30 yards (23-27m) away, a hulking Sasquatch. What would you do?

Smile please: One of the 14 photos snapped by an anonymous forest ranger, supposedly of a Bigfoot in Wild Creek.

The hiker in this case — a forest patrol officer from Tacoma, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job — had the presence of mind to take some 35mm photos. His close encounter of the hairy kind took place in the area of Wild Creek, in the foothills of Mount Rainier at about 2pm on 11 July 1995.

He called Cliff Crook of Bothell, also in Washington State, who is the director of a Sasquatch-monitoring group called Bigfoot Central. The real Bigfoot Central is Crook's dining-room table, somewhere beneath piles of maps, letters and sighting reports, from which he co-edits the newsletter Bigfoot Traits.

Plaster caster: Cliff Crook with one of the hundreds of footprint casts in his collection, takes some 20 calls a week about Bigfoot.

Crook's interest in Bigfoot began with a close encounter in 1956, although he swears he heard one scream in the woods in 1949, when he was seven years old. In the summer of 1956, he was 16 and camping in woods near Duvall with three friends. Their dog ran, barking, into a nearby swamp and was picked up by something huge and hurled back at them. The boys threw sticks and brands from the fire at the dark shape. "We heard a horrendous sound. It was a language, a voice," he told Seattle News-Tribune columnist CR Roberts. "Not a language we knew. 'Ee-gor lar-gor.' Deep and heavy." A giant, hair-covered creature approached them from the swamp and the boys' courage gave out. They ran, barefoot, all the way home.

Since then Crook's life has taken a number of twists but always returns to searching for Bigfoot. Aided by his wife Carol, he founded Bigfoot Central in 1982, and has advised on many films — including Harry and the Hendersons — and TV documentaries. Out of some 20 phone calls a week, "perhaps three report a sighting". Over the years Crook noticed a pattern to the "true" sightings — and this he considers his main contribution to Bigfoot research — they correlate with lunar phases, falling within the few days either side of a full moon, as did the Wild Creek encounter. He believes that there is a small population of perhaps 200 Bigfoot creatures in the Pacific Northwest and that, every year, they have a kind of "tribal gathering" in the Olympic Mountains.

"There was a time when I wanted to prove (Bigfoot's existence) to everybody." Now, after a 40-year relationship with the phenomenon that seems to matter less. In contrast to the desire of his colleagues — like Peter Byrne and Grover Krantz — to kill or biopsy a specimen, he says: "It should be left in peace in the forest."

When the anonymous forest ranger contacted him, Crook listened to his story, as he had listened to the experiences of other witnesses many times before — only in this case the ranger mentioned 14 photographs. Crook bought them for $1,600, convinced that the beast in the photos was familiar. "This is the creature that walked up to my campfire in 1956," he said.

Close scrutiny: Anthropologist Dr Grover Krantz (left) and tracker Cliff Crook examine the Wild Creek Bigfoot photo at Bigfoot Central.

As news of the photos spread, Cliff Crook held a public press briefing at his Bothell HQ on 9 December 1995, to satisfy the mounting interest. In attendance was Dr Krantz, who teaches anthropology at Washington State University. Krantz declared to the reporters: "There's no way to be sure, but they look pretty good. That's all I can say." Others are more sceptical alleging — without prior examination it must be said — that the photo was some kind of computer graphics image composite. One photography 'expert' claimed to have found tiny diamond-shapes indicative of digital imaging, but according to Crook, the man was examining a laser-copied print, not an original. That in my estimation, should immediately disqualify him as an expert," he said. "To date, other photography 'experts' have examined the prints and negatives for signs of imaging, seams and alteration," says Crook, but none have been found.

Eight of the ranger's 14 photos were dark — he used a 50mm lens but fleeting clouds blocked sun — and the rest seem to be variations on the best one. Crook points out the peculiarly low position of the creature's head relative to its huge shoulders, explaining it as a peculiarity of perspective as the photographer looked down at the creature. That explanation doesn't quite ring true to me — it seems clear that the head is set deeply between the shoulders, which pile up like the Cascades behind it. The face is looking directly at the camera, as if the creature had paused before abandoning the idea of charging up the bank at the ranger. (Would you have paused to take 14 snaps under those circumstances?). It is difficult to explain the relative immobility of the creature during the time the camera viewpoint moves horizontally - it is as if it was a model in a clever set. Let's hope an expert eye can settle the matter before too long.

That rather emotionless face is intriguing. It resembles the classic reconstruction of a Neanderthal or Australopithecus hominid — and its position recalls the fabulous denizens of Africa known to mediaeval cartographers as Blemmyes, whose faces fronted their chests. (Coincidentally, this headless race had companions called Sciapods, who hopped on one very big foot.)

Born slippy: The hulking shadow of the alleged Bigfoot stands, seemingly motionless, in the water. Is this the original lar-gor monster?

In the near-200-year history of Bigfoot sightings, descriptions of this type are rare and quite different from the Patterson-type Bigfoot, which clearly had a neck. The closest description to the creature in this photo — the very model for it, a cynic might say — was given by a hunter to a Californian newspaper in 1870. In the autumn of 1869, he had been hunting in woods near Grayson, California, when a creature came into his camp and scattered his fire. "[It] stood fully 5ft high, disproportionately broad and square at the fore shoulders, with arms of great length. The legs were very short and the body long. The head was small [..] and appeared to be set upon shoulders without a neck. The whole was covered with dark brown and cinnamon coloured hair, quite long on some parts, that on the head standing in a shock and growing close down to the eyes." [Janet & Colin Bord. Bigfoot Casebook, Granada, 1982; p22.]

The newspapers of this period frequently published outrageous tales and `true accounts' to relieve the tedium and amuse their readers. Sadly many products of period 'liars' clubs' have become established as 'fact' in today's mythology of the paranormal. Perhaps this story of an encounter with a primitive man in 1869 was one such fabrication that, in turn, inspired a modern hoaxer to take Crook for an expensive ride. On the other hand, if it was a true account — and as the Bords pointed out, it is relatively uncontaminated by today's standards — perhaps remnants of an ancient hominid race did survive into the 19th century. Furthermore , if the forest ranger's photos are genuine, perhaps they have continued to the present day in their wilderness. However, I'm not holding my breath waiting for that confirmation.

Cliff Crook, though has no such doubts. He told me that on 5 May 1996, the ranger took him and a few others to the very spot in Wild Creek and they even located the gnawed stump that can be seen in the photo. According to their calculations the creature must have been nearly 8ft (2.5m) tall. Crook has been back to the site several times since, most recently in August. "The evidence is in," he says with a quiet but infectious confidence.

From: Fortean Times [FT93], December 1996.