From the book "The Best of Sasquatch-Bigfoot" by John Green
Used with permission
The first four chapters of this book deal with significant events in the Sasquatch/Bigfoot investigation in the twenty-first century, but the others are a reprinting, without updating, of two books, "On The Track of the Sasquatch" and "Encounters with Bigfoot," that in various versions have been continuously in print since 1968. Paradoxically, it is the fact that I wrote much of them so long ago that makes them uniquelt relevant in 2004. Although the story is actually much older, reports of outsize humanlike footprints and huge upright-walking animals first attracted attention in 1958 when a cast of a "Bigfoot" print was made and publicized, and became more widely known in 1967 when a man named Roger Patterson took a 16 mm movie purporting to show on of the creatures. In those days such reports made news, but in recent years new evidence for the existence of the Sasquatch is usually ignored by the media. Proof that a bipedal ape shares this continent with humanity is apparently considered so big a story that it can't possibly be true. The headlines now are reserved for stories of the opposite kind, claims of proof that the Bigfoot tracks and the movie were just fakes after all. Not many people were involved in investigations on site either in 1958 or in 1967, and only two people took part in both, the late Bob Titmus and myself. Bob never wrote of his experiences, so my books were the only equivalent of that courtroom staple, the investigator's notes made at the time. At the end of 2002 newspapers and TV networks all over the world had a field day with a yarn that all the footprints were faked by a man who had just died, so Bigfoot was also dead. Even though the story was obvious nonsense its effects will last a long time, stopping witnesses from risking ridicule by making their stories public, and discouraging scientists who might be considering getting involved in the investigation. That fiasco is dealt with in full in a later chapter. As for the movie, attempts to debunk it come along every year or so, usually contradicting each other. It became widely believed in Hollywood that the man who changed the faces of the actors in the "Planet of the Apes" movies also created the creature in the Bigfoot film. He apparently never denied it while he was working, but after he retired he told Sasquatch investigator Bobbie Short, on tape, "I was the best but I wasn't that good!" The prestigious Wildlife Unit of the BBC also took a hand in the debunking game. They succeeded in making themselves look foolish by showing a pitiful attempt at a re-creation of the Patterson movie with a man in an ape suit, and by claiming as proof of fakery a copy of a letter dated after the movie was made which indicated that Roger made money by selling rights to show it. Who wouldn't? Another wing of the BBC had been one of the earliest to ante up. Why anyone would argue that selling something of value proved that it wasn't genuine is hard ot understand. More recently, a book was published in which the author claimed to have found the man who wore the ape suit in the movie, and the man who sold the suit to Roger Patterson. In each case there was no evidence, just one person's story, and the two men described two totally different suits. The man who claimed to have worn the suit said Roger had made it by skinning a dead horse. It was in three pieces and it stunk. The man who claimed to have made the suit said it consisted of six pieces and was made of modern materials. Paradoxically, this silly attempt to prove that Patterson hoaxed his film led to the discovery that the movie itself has always contained proof that it does not show a man in a suit. One of the things that the supposed suit maker is quoted as saying is that the way to make the arms in the suit look longer than human arms is to extend the gloves of the suit on sticks. Many people have noted that the arms of the creature in the film look unusually long, almost as long as its legs. Some, including myself in 1968, have published estimates of their length. No one went on to deal with the question of how human arms could be extended to match the extra length and what such an extension would look like. There is no way to establish for certain if any of the dimensions estimated for the creature in the film are accurate, but what can be established with reasonable accuracy is the length of the creature's legs and arms in relation to one another. From that ratio it is simple to calculate how many inches must be added to the arms of a man of known size in order to make them long enough to fit in the supposed suit. In my own case the answer turned out to be about 10 inches. But in order for the arms to bend at the elbow, which they plainly do in the movie, all of that extra length has to be added to the lower arm. The result, in my case, is about 12 inches of arm above the elbow and 29 inches below it-an obvious monstrosity. The creature in the movie has normal-looking arms. It cannot be a man in a suit! Many issues in the long debate about the movie remain unresolved-what the film speed was, whether a man could duplicate the creature's unusual bent-kneed walk, whether its behavior was normal for an animal, whether the tracks left on the sandbar could have been faked, and so on-but all of them turn out to have been irrelevant to the main issue. My measurements of the film, made 36 years ago, gave the creature arms that were 30 inches from the shoulder to the wrist and legs that were 35 inches from the hip to the ground. My own measurements are about 24 inches from shoulder to wrist and 40 inches from hip to ground. Scientists studying primates use almost identical measurements, the only difference being that they measure to the ankle joint rather than the bottom of the foot, to establish what is called the intermembral index, which is one of the things used to distinguish one primate from another. Gorillas and chimpanzees, with arms longer than their legs, have average indices of 117 and 107 respectively. The average human IM index is around 70. Only the ratios of the measurements matter, actual size makes no difference. Establishing an accurate IM index for the creature in the film is difficult, since no one frame shows all of both the upper and lower limbs at right angles to the camera, but it can be done, in fact a computerized study of the creature's walk done for the TV documentary "Sasquatch, Legend Meets Science" has already done it. Using sophisticated forensic animation software to follow points on the creature's body and limbs as it moves through 116 frames of the movie, the computer was able to produce pictures of its skeleton showing an IM index between 85 and 90. Forensic animator Reuben Steindorf's comment after studying the film was that making it using a man in a suit would require a lot of mechanisms not available in the 1960s. It would have to have been a highly funded project and there would have to have been trailing electric cables attached to the creature somewhere. In short, it couldn't be a man in a suit. A study of a lesser number of frames by Dr. Jeff Meldrum, an anatomy professor at Idaho State University, produced a similar result, and he also noted that besides bending its elbows the figure in the film flexes both its wrists and it fingers, "all but ruling out the possibility that an artificial arm extension could be involved." It will no doubt take a while before the impact of the IM index makes itself felt among primatologists, but they can hardly ignore one of their own standard measurements when it tells them that there really is a giant higher primate to be found in North America.
The Bluff Creek Tracks
By John Green, from the Texas Bigfoot Report
March 1st, 2003
Maybe it's time for a history lesson before the last available witness, which I seem to be, passes on. The tracks that were observed in the Bluff Creek drainage in northern California in the 1950's are not just another set of tracks that can easily be set aside as something tainted by claims of fakery while other tracks are still presumed to be genuine. They are the base layer of the bedrock on which the whole investigation is founded. Their importance goes far beyond the fact that they started the process of bringing the subject to widespread public attention and saddled it with the ridicule-prone name of "Bigfoot." For all the books and websites and investigating organizations this subject has spawned and the huge public following it now has, it still involves only two facts that cannot be contested. One is that thousands of people claim to have encountered huge, hair-covered bipedal primates. The other is that something makes huge, humanlike footprints. Of all the reported encounters, in only one case is there a backing of solid photographic evidence. That evidence comes from Bluff Creek:
Far more tracks have been seen and cast and photographed at Bluff Creek than anywhere else.
Repeated observations of tracks of identifiable individuals have been documented at Bluff Creek far more than anywhere else.
The tracks at Bluff Creek have been investigated more thoroughly and by more people and over a longer period than anywhere else.
More top-quality casts and photographs of tracks have been made at Bluff Creek than anywhere else.
The tracks at Bluff Creek appeared at a time and place when and where there was no knowledge of anything to imitate, circumstances that can never occur again. The Bluff Creek tracks started the life-long quests of Bob Titmus, who found more solid evidence than anyone else, and Roger Patterson, who took the only good movie. Like most British Columbians, I grew up familiar with stories of Sasquatch giants and I had begun to investigate them seriously before Jerry Crew made his famous cast, but it was at Bluff Creek that I first saw that the huge tracks are real, and trying to establish what makes them is what I have been doing ever since. For those whose familiarity with this subject may not go back that far, a few facts: The big tracks started appearing overnight when a construction crew was building a road along the west side of the uninhabited Bluff Creek valley in the summer of 1958. They showed up every few days not just in the loose dirt on the road, but also digging deeply into the harder surface of the steep sidehill at places above the road and below it. After some weeks Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator, got from a taxidermist friend, Bob Titmus, instructions and material to make a cast of one of the prints. A picture of Jerry holding the cast appeared in a newspaper in Eureka, and went out on the wire all over the continent. With it was a story in which the name "Bigfoot" was first published. On seeing the picture in a Canadian newspaper I immediately drove to Bluff Creek to investigate, saw a few old but impressive tracks, talked to Jerry Crew, Bob Titmus and other witnesses and inspected the terrain the tracks traversed, on and off the road. Those tracks were roughly 16 inches long and matched very closely a tracing I had of a cast of one of the tracks found at the scene of a Sasquatch sighting report in British Columbia in 1941. A few weeks later I got a letter from Bob Titmus saying that he and another man had found and cast distinctly different tracks, roughly 15 inches long, on a sandbar in the creek below where the road crew was working. I immediately returned to Bluff Creek and saw for myself that these new tracks were impressed about an inch deep in damp sand packed so hard that my own prints hardly marked it and that they were in a situation where the use of any sort of machinery to make them appeared to be impossible. It is carvings of those tracks, not the 16-inch "Bigfoot" tracks that a nephew of Ray Wallace has displayed in photographs. They are fitted with straps so they can be walked on like snowshoes, but like snowshoes there is no way that human weight could impress them deeply into hard material. In the next year and a half I was back at Bluff Creek several more times, spending about six weeks in all, and saw the 15" tracks in three more locations and also a third type of tracks, about 14" long, in another location east of Bluff Creek. I never saw the 16" track again at Bluff Creek but did see tracks that resembled it farther south at Hyampom in 1963. It was also reported seen frequently in 1963 and 1964 when logging was going on in the Bluff Creek valley, and Roger Patterson made a good cast of it there in 1964. The 15" tracks were also repeatedly seen, and were photographed and cast by a number of people in that period. Sometimes they were accompanied by tracks roughly 13", and Rene Dahinden and I saw those tracks together in three different places at Bluff Creek in 1967, in one instance being able to study hundreds of both tracks. Later in 1967 Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin went to Bluff Creek, because of the tracks Rene and I had seen, and not only got a movie of the creature but watched it making tracks which they later cast. These tracks were also approximately 14". If it is the same as the 14" from years before then there are at least four distinct tracks that have been observed at Bluff Creek, if it is different then there are five. There is also a 12" track usually discounted because it is within human range. For all of these, while they remain recognizable as individuals, there is a considerable range of shapes, toe positions, length of stride, etc., conforming to slopes, obstacles and other influences. Those are the Bluff Creek tracks that I know about. Over the years there were, of course, far more that I didn't see; many other people who investigated them; hundreds who went just to see for themselves after being told about them, and some who reported coming on them far from any road when they were timber cruising or road locating. Ray Wallace is connected to all this in only two ways that have been established. The men who first reported the 16" tracks were his employees, and it was the Bluff Creek events that started him on his long career, mainly after he moved to Washington, of producing and trying to sell crudely-faked track casts and photographs and telling outrageous whoppers about his adventures with "Bigfoots." Ray wasn't around any of the times I went to Bluff Creek and I never met him, but I was told right from the beginning of his reputation as a practical joker and yarn spinner, the latter being was amply confirmed when he phoned me and wrote letters to me over the years. There were people in California, of course, who were sure the footprints had to be faked, and some of them fingered Ray Wallace as the person they "knew" had done it, but I have outlined the massive task that would have been involved, and no evidence was ever brought forward of any way that anyone could have done it.
By John Green, from the Texas Bigfoot Report
March 1st, 2003
Maybe it's time for a history lesson before the last available witness, which I seem to be, passes on. The tracks that were observed in the Bluff Creek drainage in northern California in the 1950's are not just another set of tracks that can easily be set aside as something tainted by claims of fakery while other tracks are still presumed to be genuine. They are the base layer of the bedrock on which the whole investigation is founded. Their importance goes far beyond the fact that they started the process of bringing the subject to widespread public attention and saddled it with the ridicule-prone name of "Bigfoot." For all the books and websites and investigating organizations this subject has spawned and the huge public following it now has, it still involves only two facts that cannot be contested. One is that thousands of people claim to have encountered huge, hair-covered bipedal primates. The other is that something makes huge, humanlike footprints. Of all the reported encounters, in only one case is there a backing of solid photographic evidence. That evidence comes from Bluff Creek:
Far more tracks have been seen and cast and photographed at Bluff Creek than anywhere else.
Repeated observations of tracks of identifiable individuals have been documented at Bluff Creek far more than anywhere else.
The tracks at Bluff Creek have been investigated more thoroughly and by more people and over a longer period than anywhere else.
More top-quality casts and photographs of tracks have been made at Bluff Creek than anywhere else.
The tracks at Bluff Creek appeared at a time and place when and where there was no knowledge of anything to imitate, circumstances that can never occur again. The Bluff Creek tracks started the life-long quests of Bob Titmus, who found more solid evidence than anyone else, and Roger Patterson, who took the only good movie. Like most British Columbians, I grew up familiar with stories of Sasquatch giants and I had begun to investigate them seriously before Jerry Crew made his famous cast, but it was at Bluff Creek that I first saw that the huge tracks are real, and trying to establish what makes them is what I have been doing ever since. For those whose familiarity with this subject may not go back that far, a few facts: The big tracks started appearing overnight when a construction crew was building a road along the west side of the uninhabited Bluff Creek valley in the summer of 1958. They showed up every few days not just in the loose dirt on the road, but also digging deeply into the harder surface of the steep sidehill at places above the road and below it. After some weeks Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator, got from a taxidermist friend, Bob Titmus, instructions and material to make a cast of one of the prints. A picture of Jerry holding the cast appeared in a newspaper in Eureka, and went out on the wire all over the continent. With it was a story in which the name "Bigfoot" was first published. On seeing the picture in a Canadian newspaper I immediately drove to Bluff Creek to investigate, saw a few old but impressive tracks, talked to Jerry Crew, Bob Titmus and other witnesses and inspected the terrain the tracks traversed, on and off the road. Those tracks were roughly 16 inches long and matched very closely a tracing I had of a cast of one of the tracks found at the scene of a Sasquatch sighting report in British Columbia in 1941. A few weeks later I got a letter from Bob Titmus saying that he and another man had found and cast distinctly different tracks, roughly 15 inches long, on a sandbar in the creek below where the road crew was working. I immediately returned to Bluff Creek and saw for myself that these new tracks were impressed about an inch deep in damp sand packed so hard that my own prints hardly marked it and that they were in a situation where the use of any sort of machinery to make them appeared to be impossible. It is carvings of those tracks, not the 16-inch "Bigfoot" tracks that a nephew of Ray Wallace has displayed in photographs. They are fitted with straps so they can be walked on like snowshoes, but like snowshoes there is no way that human weight could impress them deeply into hard material. In the next year and a half I was back at Bluff Creek several more times, spending about six weeks in all, and saw the 15" tracks in three more locations and also a third type of tracks, about 14" long, in another location east of Bluff Creek. I never saw the 16" track again at Bluff Creek but did see tracks that resembled it farther south at Hyampom in 1963. It was also reported seen frequently in 1963 and 1964 when logging was going on in the Bluff Creek valley, and Roger Patterson made a good cast of it there in 1964. The 15" tracks were also repeatedly seen, and were photographed and cast by a number of people in that period. Sometimes they were accompanied by tracks roughly 13", and Rene Dahinden and I saw those tracks together in three different places at Bluff Creek in 1967, in one instance being able to study hundreds of both tracks. Later in 1967 Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin went to Bluff Creek, because of the tracks Rene and I had seen, and not only got a movie of the creature but watched it making tracks which they later cast. These tracks were also approximately 14". If it is the same as the 14" from years before then there are at least four distinct tracks that have been observed at Bluff Creek, if it is different then there are five. There is also a 12" track usually discounted because it is within human range. For all of these, while they remain recognizable as individuals, there is a considerable range of shapes, toe positions, length of stride, etc., conforming to slopes, obstacles and other influences. Those are the Bluff Creek tracks that I know about. Over the years there were, of course, far more that I didn't see; many other people who investigated them; hundreds who went just to see for themselves after being told about them, and some who reported coming on them far from any road when they were timber cruising or road locating. Ray Wallace is connected to all this in only two ways that have been established. The men who first reported the 16" tracks were his employees, and it was the Bluff Creek events that started him on his long career, mainly after he moved to Washington, of producing and trying to sell crudely-faked track casts and photographs and telling outrageous whoppers about his adventures with "Bigfoots." Ray wasn't around any of the times I went to Bluff Creek and I never met him, but I was told right from the beginning of his reputation as a practical joker and yarn spinner, the latter being was amply confirmed when he phoned me and wrote letters to me over the years. There were people in California, of course, who were sure the footprints had to be faked, and some of them fingered Ray Wallace as the person they "knew" had done it, but I have outlined the massive task that would have been involved, and no evidence was ever brought forward of any way that anyone could have done it.
The Bluff Creek Tracks Continued
A magazine publisher in the East, who may not even have known that Ray had moved away before most of the events took place, pronounced a few years ago that the people who investigated at Bluff Creek were blind fools and that Ray had faked all the tracks. He also proclaimed that Ray Wallace had told Roger Patterson just where to go to get his movie. He knew that because Ray wrote and told him so. By accident or design it was this man whose comments were sought by a Seattle reporter when Ray's son announced after his death that Ray had told the family he had done the deed. Maybe Ray did tell them that, but it was a claim he never made in public, so he never risked being called upon to prove that he could do it. And whether the fault lies with Ray or with the next generation, the photographs they displayed indicate members of the Wallace family today don't know what the original "Bigfoot" tracks looked like. It is that sort of "evidence" that started a media storm in which the story grew and twisted until the world was told that not just all of the footprints, but also the Patterson movie, were fakes produced by Ray Wallace. And it is on that basis that people, some of whom even claim to take this subject seriously and continue to accept far less well-tested evidence, are now using the term "the Wallace tracks." They aren't the Wallace tracks, they are the Bluff Creek tracks. Maybe I've lived too long. I don't yet have a grave to roll over in.
Recent Developments
From the book "The Best of Sasquatch-Bigfoot" by John Green
Used with permission
Since "On The Track of the Sasquatch" was last revised there have been huge changes in the overall picture. In the late 60s I was in touch with almost all of the few people who were investigating this subject, and all of us together probably knew of less than 100 sighting reports. After Roger Patterson's film caught public attention a lot more reports began to come to light, until I was recording about 100 sightings or footprint finds each year. Still we always suspected that the great majority of incidents never became generally known because most of the people involved did not know of anywhere to report then without being ridiculed. With the growth of the internet that situation has turned upside down. There are many websites where people are asked to submit such reports, anonymously if they choose. I don't know of anyone who tries to monitor all the sites, but Matt Moneymaker's Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization alone gets at least half a dozen reports a day. A lot of them are obviously from pranksters, and trying to sort out the less-obvious fakes from the genuine information is a major task, but what remains must be more than a thousand reports a year. For a dozen years I worked at getting all the information I had into a computer database and by the spring of 2001 I had worked all the way through my back files and had more than 4,000 entries, but by then it was also obvious that I could no longer keep up with the data that was available on line. The new reports have cleared up one anomaly. From the state of Colorado, with a sea of mountains and a hockey team that displays Bigfoot tracks on the shoulders of its uniforms, I did not record a really substantial report in 40 years. More recently many reports have surfaced there, several of them among the best from anywhere. There is a somewhat similar situation with reference to the province of Alberta, except that most of the new information comes not from the internet but from years of dedicated investigation by Tom Steenburg, author of "The Sasquatch in Alberta" and "Sasquatch: Bigfoot The Continuing Mystery." The most interesting thing about the flood of new information, however, is that the majority of the reports do not come from the traditional areas at all. There are far more reports from east of the Mississippi than there are from the west of the continental divide. I have done enough investigating to satisfy myself that the evidence from the Midwest, East and South is on a par with what I am familiar with in the West, but reports from those areas are not the subject of this book. The other huge change is in the attitude of some of the scientists. For many years Dr. Grover Krantz was the only physical anthropologist willing to gamble his career by publicly being a full participant in the Sasquatch investigation, and there were no zoologists involved at all. The small group that gathered for the first viewing after Roger Patterson got his remarkable movie in the fall of 1967 did not include anyone with scientific credentials. It was a different story in the fall of 2000 when the BFRO organized a group effort at a place called Skookum Meadows east of Mount St. Helens and brought back evidence perhaps equal in importance to the Patterson movie: a huge cast made where a large animal had left limb and heel prints in a mud patch. One of the three men who found the print was a zoologist, Dr. Leroy Fish, and among the five additional people assembled when the cast was being cleared of its coating of dirt I was the only one without a doctor's degree. The impression was found where the men had placed some fruit at night in the middle of a patch of soft mud surrounded by mud that had already dried hard. They were hoping to get footprints if a Sasquatch was attracted to the fruit. When they returned a few hours later the fruit had indeed been disturbed, but instead of footprints what they found was a set of large, shallow depressions showing hair patterns, and a variety of holes were identified as elk and coyote tracks, others were a puzzle. It took a while for the men to come to the conclusion that a Sasquatch had sat down at the edge of the soft mud, leaving the impressions of slightly more than half its buttocks and one thigh plus several prints where it had moved its heel around, and had leaned over onto a forearm as it reached across with the other arm towards the fruit. Successfully casting all of such a large impression would normally have been out of the question, but one of the three men, Rick Noll, was a professional cast maker as well as a long time Sasquatch investigator, and had with him a couple of hundred pounds of exceptionally strong plaster. Using aluminum tent poles for bracing, they made what became know as the "Skookum cast," preserving all the evidence except some apparent scratch marks near the fruit. As with the original impression in the mud, the significance of the cast is not obvious at first glance, except for the humanlike heel shapes sticking up from it. Plainly something large and hair-covered had set itself down in the mud, but there are elk in the area and elk tracks in the cast. Careful examination, however rules out all the common animals. Certainly no part of an elk could match the obvious Achilles tendon of the best heel print. Professor Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University, a physical anthropologist whose special study is the evolution of bipedal walking, took on the job of cleaning up the cast. He spent several days meticulously picking away the dirt adhering to it and in the process collected a lot of pieces of animal hair, but only a very few of them proved to be interesting. The most important thing he was able to do was to determine the location of the joints in the thigh and forearm impressions, which showed the bones to be half again as long as those of a six-foot man. Besides Dr. Meldrum, I am in close touch with two other scientists who are publicly committed to the Sasquatch investigation, zoologists Dr. John Bindernagel and Dr. Henner Fahrenbach. Dr. Bindernagel, with 30 years field experience in many parts of the world, set out to determine if what Sasquatch witnesses reported added up to a believable animal. He found that it did. Further, as noted in his book "North America's Great Ape, the Sasquatch," he learned that some seemingly unlikely behaviors the witnesses described are shared with one or other of the known great apes. Significantly, some of those shared behaviors turned up in Sasquatch reports before they were observed by scientists studying the other apes. Dr. Fahrenbach did a statistical analysis of the footprint dimensions in my computer database and found that when plotted on a graph they form the normal bell curve that would be expected of a species of real animals. He has also specialized in the study of hair, and has found a number of suspected Sasquatch hairs from widely divided locations that don't match hairs from known animals but do match each other. Unfortunately the hairs have so far failed to provide suitable material for DNA identification. Jeff Meldrum had earlier laid to rest a concern felt by some laymen like myself that someday an expert in foot anatomy would demonstrate that supposed Sasquatch tracks showing long toes and those showing short toes could not both be genuine.
Recent Developments continued
Instead, after examining all the track casts and photos he could locate, he determined that not only were the tracks consistent anatomically, they also showed an ability to bend in the middle that human feet (and one-piece wooden feet) do not have. Better yet, he found that the tracks dictated a style of walking different from that of humans, but exactly like that of the creature in the Patterson movie. He has also continued the investigation initiated by Grover Krantz of fingerprint-like skin ridges found on a few footprint casts made in particularly fine material at widely-separated locations. Skin ridges of this sort do not occur on the feet of animals other than primates. They might be considered a non-slip surface for tree-climbers that have no claws. This work recently caught the attention of a police fingerprint expert from Texas, Jimmy Chilcutt, who had made a study of such "dermatoglyphics" on the feet of humans and apes. Thinking he could prove that the footprint casts were faked, he examined them, found that they showed the same unique pattern, and pronounced that they were proof of the existence in North America of an unknown great ape. Also on the scientific front, and ironically at the same time that the media were going ape over the yarn that Bigfoot had died with Ray Wallace, a really important story was published in one newspaper, broadcast one one cable network and totally ignored by everyone else. That story was about prominent figures in zoology and anthropology who are now saying that the Sasquatch evidence deserves serious study. On January 5, 2003, the Denver Post devoted several pages, including half the front page, to stories by Theo Stein, their environment writer, in which he quoted a series of primate experts giving thei stamp of approval:
"As far as I am concerned the existence of hominids of this sort is a very real possibility."-Dr. Jane Goodall, world famous for her studies of chimpanzees
"There have been so many sightings over the years. Even if you throw out 95 percent of them, there ought to be some explanation for the rest. The same goes for some of these tracks."-Dr. George Schaller, director of science for the Wildlife Conservation Society and first scientist to do a major study of wild mountain gorillas
"I think a serious scientific enquiry is definitely warranted:"-Dr. Esteban Sarmiento, primate specialist at the American Museum of Natural History
"I'm not one to pooh-pooh the potential that these large apes may exist:"-Dr. Russel Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and chairman of the Primate Specialist Group
"It's not conclusive, but it's consistent with what you'd expect to see if a giant biped sat down in the mud:"-Dr. Daris Swindler, author of "An Atlas of Primate Gross Anatomy," commenting on the back of a heel and part of the Achilles tendon shown in the Skookum cast
Unlike the Ray Wallace story, this one was not picked up by the Associated Press and no word of it reached readers of other newspapers.
Also in January 2003, the U.S. Discovery Channel aired a one-hour documentary produced by Doug Hajicek of White Wolf Entertainment and titled "Sasquatch, Legend Meets Science." The show included footage of all the people mentioned except Drs. Goodall and Mittermeier. It also called on the expertise of specialists in animation to study the gait of the creature in the Patterson movie, which they determined did indeed have a very non-human way of walking. It was also noted to have a bump that rose and fell on its right thigh which appeared to indicate a type of hernia sometimes suffered by human sprinters.
In the documentary Dr. Swindler went well beyond the statement quoted in the Denver Post, saying: "In my opinion the impression is not made by a deer, a bear or an elk nor was it made artificially. The Skookum body cast is that of an unknown hominoid primate." Like the Post story the documentary was not mentioned by other media, but unlike the story it will continue to be shown on television and is available in other forms.
On Tne Scent Of The Sasquatch
By John Green
It is common knowledge that Sasquatches are reported to have a strong and unpleasant smell-in Florida they are commonly called "skunk apes." It is probably also well known, at least to the readers of newsletters, that strong smells are not always reported; but ia this just because the witnesses were not in a position to smell anything, or because Sasquatches do not always smell bad? To contribute some information for anyone interested in this question, here are the results of an analysis of reports from the western part of North America that I have entered in my computer. In 923 descriptions of supposed Sasquatches, only 72 mention a strong smell. Nine mention a mild smell and eight state specifically that the animals had no smell. Strong smells were mentioned in less than eight percent of reports. This percentage is fairly consistent throughout the American states, percentages being: Washington, 9%; Oregon,11%; California, 8%; and the average for eight other western states, 8.5%. The percentage in Canada is lower. In British Columbia and Alberta strong smells are mentioned in only 4.5% of reports. The number of descriptions involved, 217, would appear to be large enough so that the different percentage may have some significance, but it is hard to imagine what it could be. Absence of a report of a strong smell obviously has no significance if the witness was a good distance away or was inside a building or vehicle. Restricting the survey to reports where it would seem that the witness should have noticed a strong smell if one was present gives the following results.
In contact with the animal: strong smell 5, mild 0, no smell, 5.
Less than 5 feet away, in same air: 0, *2, 3.
Estimated 5 feet away: " " " 4, 1, 4.
Estimated 10 feet away: " " " 5, 1, 14.
Up to 5 feet the percentage of strong smells, in 24 reports, is 37.5%. At 10 feet, in 20 reports, the percentage drops to 25%.
With some animals strong smells are associated only with the adult males. Most Sasquatch reports do not involve any identification of sex, but it is usually assumed that most are males. My files contain only one report in which a Sasquatch is identified as a female and said to have a strong smell.
*A single report, that of Albert Ostman, has a disproportionate effect on the statistics. He claims to have been carried home by an adult male and then to have been close to a young male and a young female. In conversation, although not in his written account, he said that the adult male had a strong smell, the two juveniles mild smells. If his account is left out the number of reports of mild smells drops to seven, and the percentage of strong smells reported in British Columbia drops to 4%.
Witness Activities
By John Green
Prominent figures in any debate as to whether Sasquatch exist are the hunters/trappers/prospectors/etc. who have spent a lifetime in the woods without seeing one of evidence of one. It is a fact that most people involved in these activities do not report having seen anything, but it is also a fact that some do, and that their reports represent a significant proportion of the total. In the 1,340 Western reports in my computer, 1,301 activities by witnesses are identified. Of these 139 were not accidental, in that the witnesses had gone looking for what they had found because someone else, whose activity is not identified, had seen something before them, or, in few cases, because they were specifically "Sasquatch hunting." Of the remaining 1,162 activities, more than 10 percent, 125 witnesses, were hunting; 34 were logging; 23 were prospecting; 10 were trapping, and another 77 were involved in various outdoor occupations. Altogether these account for almost a quarter of all reports. When it comes to finding tracks this group plays an even larger role, accounting for 38 percent of track reports. Their information is significant, also, in that they are more likely than the average witness to have considerable familiarity with wildlife (by a ratio of 17 to 10), and to have made their observation under good conditions of lighting, time and distance (43% compared to 25%). Hunters rank second only to hikers in finding tracks (30 to 36), and to people in cars in reporting sightings (95 to 209). Other commom activities for people reporting sightings include: at home, 85; outside on foot, 72; camping, 65; walking, 61; hiking, 48; fishing, 38; working outdoors, 33; on boats, 26 (plus 14 fishing from boats); logging, 18; prospecting, 17; inside a building, 17; on horseback, 16; flying, 12; on a motorcycle, 11, and playing outside, 9. Obviously there are a lot of different ways these categories can be combined, for instance everyone travelling by motor vehicle, 271, including snowmobiling (9) and on a train (4); or everyone travelling on foot, 182, including jogging (1). There are significant overlaps. People fishing from boats are automatically in two categories, and most hunters, for instance, would be either on foot or in a vehicle. For some reports both categories are specified, but for most only one. Something else to take into account is the number of people who are engaged in each activity. Nowadays many more people travel in vehicles than on foot, and the number of potential witnesses in buildings must be much greater than the number in vehicles. Perhaps statisticians can determine whether or not these figures relate appropriately to what could be expected in encounters with a real animal. I don't have that expertise, but the relationships do seem reasonable to me.
John Green, December 1995
White Bigfoots
By John Green
I have 1,660 Sasquatch sighting reports in the computer in which a color was mentioned. The number of white ones is 77, or 4.63%, or one out of 22. There is an east-west difference. Only 28 white in 846 western reports, 3.31%; 49 in 814 eastern reports, 6.02%. The database doesn't contain any information specific to albinism. I can not recall even one description of a white Sasquatch, or any Sasquatch with either pink or light blue eyes, but the eye color is seldom seen. There is no correlation between northern latitude and the percentage of white Sasquatches. You can't split the data along lines of latitude across the continent because the area involved in the west is considerably farther north than that in the east, but in each case there is a higher percentage of white reports in the southern section than in the northern. In the east, white reports south of the 39'th parallel are 6.45%. North of the 41'st parallel the are 6.3%. In the west white reports are 5.03% south of the 44'th parallel and only 3.6% north of the 46'th parallel. With regard to time of year, the results are curious, maybe even significant. The percentage of white reports in winter is approximately double the percentage in summer, in both sections of the continent. In the east white reports are 13.97% of all reports in winter, 6.08% in summer. In the west white reports are 7% in winter and 3.34% in summer. It should be kept in mind, however, that winter reports are rare, so the numbers ivolved are very small, just 13 white out of 93 reports in the east and 7 out of 100 in the west.
A magazine publisher in the East, who may not even have known that Ray had moved away before most of the events took place, pronounced a few years ago that the people who investigated at Bluff Creek were blind fools and that Ray had faked all the tracks. He also proclaimed that Ray Wallace had told Roger Patterson just where to go to get his movie. He knew that because Ray wrote and told him so. By accident or design it was this man whose comments were sought by a Seattle reporter when Ray's son announced after his death that Ray had told the family he had done the deed. Maybe Ray did tell them that, but it was a claim he never made in public, so he never risked being called upon to prove that he could do it. And whether the fault lies with Ray or with the next generation, the photographs they displayed indicate members of the Wallace family today don't know what the original "Bigfoot" tracks looked like. It is that sort of "evidence" that started a media storm in which the story grew and twisted until the world was told that not just all of the footprints, but also the Patterson movie, were fakes produced by Ray Wallace. And it is on that basis that people, some of whom even claim to take this subject seriously and continue to accept far less well-tested evidence, are now using the term "the Wallace tracks." They aren't the Wallace tracks, they are the Bluff Creek tracks. Maybe I've lived too long. I don't yet have a grave to roll over in.
Recent Developments
From the book "The Best of Sasquatch-Bigfoot" by John Green
Used with permission
Since "On The Track of the Sasquatch" was last revised there have been huge changes in the overall picture. In the late 60s I was in touch with almost all of the few people who were investigating this subject, and all of us together probably knew of less than 100 sighting reports. After Roger Patterson's film caught public attention a lot more reports began to come to light, until I was recording about 100 sightings or footprint finds each year. Still we always suspected that the great majority of incidents never became generally known because most of the people involved did not know of anywhere to report then without being ridiculed. With the growth of the internet that situation has turned upside down. There are many websites where people are asked to submit such reports, anonymously if they choose. I don't know of anyone who tries to monitor all the sites, but Matt Moneymaker's Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization alone gets at least half a dozen reports a day. A lot of them are obviously from pranksters, and trying to sort out the less-obvious fakes from the genuine information is a major task, but what remains must be more than a thousand reports a year. For a dozen years I worked at getting all the information I had into a computer database and by the spring of 2001 I had worked all the way through my back files and had more than 4,000 entries, but by then it was also obvious that I could no longer keep up with the data that was available on line. The new reports have cleared up one anomaly. From the state of Colorado, with a sea of mountains and a hockey team that displays Bigfoot tracks on the shoulders of its uniforms, I did not record a really substantial report in 40 years. More recently many reports have surfaced there, several of them among the best from anywhere. There is a somewhat similar situation with reference to the province of Alberta, except that most of the new information comes not from the internet but from years of dedicated investigation by Tom Steenburg, author of "The Sasquatch in Alberta" and "Sasquatch: Bigfoot The Continuing Mystery." The most interesting thing about the flood of new information, however, is that the majority of the reports do not come from the traditional areas at all. There are far more reports from east of the Mississippi than there are from the west of the continental divide. I have done enough investigating to satisfy myself that the evidence from the Midwest, East and South is on a par with what I am familiar with in the West, but reports from those areas are not the subject of this book. The other huge change is in the attitude of some of the scientists. For many years Dr. Grover Krantz was the only physical anthropologist willing to gamble his career by publicly being a full participant in the Sasquatch investigation, and there were no zoologists involved at all. The small group that gathered for the first viewing after Roger Patterson got his remarkable movie in the fall of 1967 did not include anyone with scientific credentials. It was a different story in the fall of 2000 when the BFRO organized a group effort at a place called Skookum Meadows east of Mount St. Helens and brought back evidence perhaps equal in importance to the Patterson movie: a huge cast made where a large animal had left limb and heel prints in a mud patch. One of the three men who found the print was a zoologist, Dr. Leroy Fish, and among the five additional people assembled when the cast was being cleared of its coating of dirt I was the only one without a doctor's degree. The impression was found where the men had placed some fruit at night in the middle of a patch of soft mud surrounded by mud that had already dried hard. They were hoping to get footprints if a Sasquatch was attracted to the fruit. When they returned a few hours later the fruit had indeed been disturbed, but instead of footprints what they found was a set of large, shallow depressions showing hair patterns, and a variety of holes were identified as elk and coyote tracks, others were a puzzle. It took a while for the men to come to the conclusion that a Sasquatch had sat down at the edge of the soft mud, leaving the impressions of slightly more than half its buttocks and one thigh plus several prints where it had moved its heel around, and had leaned over onto a forearm as it reached across with the other arm towards the fruit. Successfully casting all of such a large impression would normally have been out of the question, but one of the three men, Rick Noll, was a professional cast maker as well as a long time Sasquatch investigator, and had with him a couple of hundred pounds of exceptionally strong plaster. Using aluminum tent poles for bracing, they made what became know as the "Skookum cast," preserving all the evidence except some apparent scratch marks near the fruit. As with the original impression in the mud, the significance of the cast is not obvious at first glance, except for the humanlike heel shapes sticking up from it. Plainly something large and hair-covered had set itself down in the mud, but there are elk in the area and elk tracks in the cast. Careful examination, however rules out all the common animals. Certainly no part of an elk could match the obvious Achilles tendon of the best heel print. Professor Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University, a physical anthropologist whose special study is the evolution of bipedal walking, took on the job of cleaning up the cast. He spent several days meticulously picking away the dirt adhering to it and in the process collected a lot of pieces of animal hair, but only a very few of them proved to be interesting. The most important thing he was able to do was to determine the location of the joints in the thigh and forearm impressions, which showed the bones to be half again as long as those of a six-foot man. Besides Dr. Meldrum, I am in close touch with two other scientists who are publicly committed to the Sasquatch investigation, zoologists Dr. John Bindernagel and Dr. Henner Fahrenbach. Dr. Bindernagel, with 30 years field experience in many parts of the world, set out to determine if what Sasquatch witnesses reported added up to a believable animal. He found that it did. Further, as noted in his book "North America's Great Ape, the Sasquatch," he learned that some seemingly unlikely behaviors the witnesses described are shared with one or other of the known great apes. Significantly, some of those shared behaviors turned up in Sasquatch reports before they were observed by scientists studying the other apes. Dr. Fahrenbach did a statistical analysis of the footprint dimensions in my computer database and found that when plotted on a graph they form the normal bell curve that would be expected of a species of real animals. He has also specialized in the study of hair, and has found a number of suspected Sasquatch hairs from widely divided locations that don't match hairs from known animals but do match each other. Unfortunately the hairs have so far failed to provide suitable material for DNA identification. Jeff Meldrum had earlier laid to rest a concern felt by some laymen like myself that someday an expert in foot anatomy would demonstrate that supposed Sasquatch tracks showing long toes and those showing short toes could not both be genuine.
Recent Developments continued
Instead, after examining all the track casts and photos he could locate, he determined that not only were the tracks consistent anatomically, they also showed an ability to bend in the middle that human feet (and one-piece wooden feet) do not have. Better yet, he found that the tracks dictated a style of walking different from that of humans, but exactly like that of the creature in the Patterson movie. He has also continued the investigation initiated by Grover Krantz of fingerprint-like skin ridges found on a few footprint casts made in particularly fine material at widely-separated locations. Skin ridges of this sort do not occur on the feet of animals other than primates. They might be considered a non-slip surface for tree-climbers that have no claws. This work recently caught the attention of a police fingerprint expert from Texas, Jimmy Chilcutt, who had made a study of such "dermatoglyphics" on the feet of humans and apes. Thinking he could prove that the footprint casts were faked, he examined them, found that they showed the same unique pattern, and pronounced that they were proof of the existence in North America of an unknown great ape. Also on the scientific front, and ironically at the same time that the media were going ape over the yarn that Bigfoot had died with Ray Wallace, a really important story was published in one newspaper, broadcast one one cable network and totally ignored by everyone else. That story was about prominent figures in zoology and anthropology who are now saying that the Sasquatch evidence deserves serious study. On January 5, 2003, the Denver Post devoted several pages, including half the front page, to stories by Theo Stein, their environment writer, in which he quoted a series of primate experts giving thei stamp of approval:
"As far as I am concerned the existence of hominids of this sort is a very real possibility."-Dr. Jane Goodall, world famous for her studies of chimpanzees
"There have been so many sightings over the years. Even if you throw out 95 percent of them, there ought to be some explanation for the rest. The same goes for some of these tracks."-Dr. George Schaller, director of science for the Wildlife Conservation Society and first scientist to do a major study of wild mountain gorillas
"I think a serious scientific enquiry is definitely warranted:"-Dr. Esteban Sarmiento, primate specialist at the American Museum of Natural History
"I'm not one to pooh-pooh the potential that these large apes may exist:"-Dr. Russel Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and chairman of the Primate Specialist Group
"It's not conclusive, but it's consistent with what you'd expect to see if a giant biped sat down in the mud:"-Dr. Daris Swindler, author of "An Atlas of Primate Gross Anatomy," commenting on the back of a heel and part of the Achilles tendon shown in the Skookum cast
Unlike the Ray Wallace story, this one was not picked up by the Associated Press and no word of it reached readers of other newspapers.
Also in January 2003, the U.S. Discovery Channel aired a one-hour documentary produced by Doug Hajicek of White Wolf Entertainment and titled "Sasquatch, Legend Meets Science." The show included footage of all the people mentioned except Drs. Goodall and Mittermeier. It also called on the expertise of specialists in animation to study the gait of the creature in the Patterson movie, which they determined did indeed have a very non-human way of walking. It was also noted to have a bump that rose and fell on its right thigh which appeared to indicate a type of hernia sometimes suffered by human sprinters.
In the documentary Dr. Swindler went well beyond the statement quoted in the Denver Post, saying: "In my opinion the impression is not made by a deer, a bear or an elk nor was it made artificially. The Skookum body cast is that of an unknown hominoid primate." Like the Post story the documentary was not mentioned by other media, but unlike the story it will continue to be shown on television and is available in other forms.
On Tne Scent Of The Sasquatch
By John Green
It is common knowledge that Sasquatches are reported to have a strong and unpleasant smell-in Florida they are commonly called "skunk apes." It is probably also well known, at least to the readers of newsletters, that strong smells are not always reported; but ia this just because the witnesses were not in a position to smell anything, or because Sasquatches do not always smell bad? To contribute some information for anyone interested in this question, here are the results of an analysis of reports from the western part of North America that I have entered in my computer. In 923 descriptions of supposed Sasquatches, only 72 mention a strong smell. Nine mention a mild smell and eight state specifically that the animals had no smell. Strong smells were mentioned in less than eight percent of reports. This percentage is fairly consistent throughout the American states, percentages being: Washington, 9%; Oregon,11%; California, 8%; and the average for eight other western states, 8.5%. The percentage in Canada is lower. In British Columbia and Alberta strong smells are mentioned in only 4.5% of reports. The number of descriptions involved, 217, would appear to be large enough so that the different percentage may have some significance, but it is hard to imagine what it could be. Absence of a report of a strong smell obviously has no significance if the witness was a good distance away or was inside a building or vehicle. Restricting the survey to reports where it would seem that the witness should have noticed a strong smell if one was present gives the following results.
In contact with the animal: strong smell 5, mild 0, no smell, 5.
Less than 5 feet away, in same air: 0, *2, 3.
Estimated 5 feet away: " " " 4, 1, 4.
Estimated 10 feet away: " " " 5, 1, 14.
Up to 5 feet the percentage of strong smells, in 24 reports, is 37.5%. At 10 feet, in 20 reports, the percentage drops to 25%.
With some animals strong smells are associated only with the adult males. Most Sasquatch reports do not involve any identification of sex, but it is usually assumed that most are males. My files contain only one report in which a Sasquatch is identified as a female and said to have a strong smell.
*A single report, that of Albert Ostman, has a disproportionate effect on the statistics. He claims to have been carried home by an adult male and then to have been close to a young male and a young female. In conversation, although not in his written account, he said that the adult male had a strong smell, the two juveniles mild smells. If his account is left out the number of reports of mild smells drops to seven, and the percentage of strong smells reported in British Columbia drops to 4%.
Witness Activities
By John Green
Prominent figures in any debate as to whether Sasquatch exist are the hunters/trappers/prospectors/etc. who have spent a lifetime in the woods without seeing one of evidence of one. It is a fact that most people involved in these activities do not report having seen anything, but it is also a fact that some do, and that their reports represent a significant proportion of the total. In the 1,340 Western reports in my computer, 1,301 activities by witnesses are identified. Of these 139 were not accidental, in that the witnesses had gone looking for what they had found because someone else, whose activity is not identified, had seen something before them, or, in few cases, because they were specifically "Sasquatch hunting." Of the remaining 1,162 activities, more than 10 percent, 125 witnesses, were hunting; 34 were logging; 23 were prospecting; 10 were trapping, and another 77 were involved in various outdoor occupations. Altogether these account for almost a quarter of all reports. When it comes to finding tracks this group plays an even larger role, accounting for 38 percent of track reports. Their information is significant, also, in that they are more likely than the average witness to have considerable familiarity with wildlife (by a ratio of 17 to 10), and to have made their observation under good conditions of lighting, time and distance (43% compared to 25%). Hunters rank second only to hikers in finding tracks (30 to 36), and to people in cars in reporting sightings (95 to 209). Other commom activities for people reporting sightings include: at home, 85; outside on foot, 72; camping, 65; walking, 61; hiking, 48; fishing, 38; working outdoors, 33; on boats, 26 (plus 14 fishing from boats); logging, 18; prospecting, 17; inside a building, 17; on horseback, 16; flying, 12; on a motorcycle, 11, and playing outside, 9. Obviously there are a lot of different ways these categories can be combined, for instance everyone travelling by motor vehicle, 271, including snowmobiling (9) and on a train (4); or everyone travelling on foot, 182, including jogging (1). There are significant overlaps. People fishing from boats are automatically in two categories, and most hunters, for instance, would be either on foot or in a vehicle. For some reports both categories are specified, but for most only one. Something else to take into account is the number of people who are engaged in each activity. Nowadays many more people travel in vehicles than on foot, and the number of potential witnesses in buildings must be much greater than the number in vehicles. Perhaps statisticians can determine whether or not these figures relate appropriately to what could be expected in encounters with a real animal. I don't have that expertise, but the relationships do seem reasonable to me.
John Green, December 1995
White Bigfoots
By John Green
I have 1,660 Sasquatch sighting reports in the computer in which a color was mentioned. The number of white ones is 77, or 4.63%, or one out of 22. There is an east-west difference. Only 28 white in 846 western reports, 3.31%; 49 in 814 eastern reports, 6.02%. The database doesn't contain any information specific to albinism. I can not recall even one description of a white Sasquatch, or any Sasquatch with either pink or light blue eyes, but the eye color is seldom seen. There is no correlation between northern latitude and the percentage of white Sasquatches. You can't split the data along lines of latitude across the continent because the area involved in the west is considerably farther north than that in the east, but in each case there is a higher percentage of white reports in the southern section than in the northern. In the east, white reports south of the 39'th parallel are 6.45%. North of the 41'st parallel the are 6.3%. In the west white reports are 5.03% south of the 44'th parallel and only 3.6% north of the 46'th parallel. With regard to time of year, the results are curious, maybe even significant. The percentage of white reports in winter is approximately double the percentage in summer, in both sections of the continent. In the east white reports are 13.97% of all reports in winter, 6.08% in summer. In the west white reports are 7% in winter and 3.34% in summer. It should be kept in mind, however, that winter reports are rare, so the numbers ivolved are very small, just 13 white out of 93 reports in the east and 7 out of 100 in the west.
| Does Sasquatch Migrate? By John Green There has always been speculation that Sasquatches might migrate with the seasons, so it might be possible to establish that they would be passing certain points at certain times of the year. I have looked for evidence of this in my computer entries in three different ways: Relationship of altitude to the time of the year. Relationship of direction of travel to the time of year. Relationship of location to the time of year. None of these has shown any consistent pattern that would indicate migration. Average altitude of incidents is highest in the summer, which is probably normal for most animals, but it is lowest not in the winter but in the spring, and the difference is less than 400 feet. Since human observers also would tend to be at higher altitudes in warmer weather there is probably no significance in these figures. Direction of travel could be expected to be the most promising indicator, since a migratory pattern would surely be south prior to winter weather, and north when winter is over. Alternatively, near the coast, there could be a movement west in the fall and east in the spring. Unfortunately I have only 126 track reports and 82 sighting reports in which direction of travel is indicated. Even making some of these do double duty (counting "northwest", for instance, as both north and west) the numbers are small. There are 14 northbound reports in spring compared to 9 southbound, which looks a bit promising, but in fall there are 27 northbound and only 20 southbound. In fact 54% of the directions noted were northbound, and if that were statisticially valid all Sasquatches would eventually end up in the Arctic Ocean. The only season when a majority headed south was summer, 25 southbound, 19 northbound. East-west results were similar, with 54% headed west, and the greatest imbalance, 21 west to 13 east, coming in the spring when migration theory would have suggested travel in the opposite direction. Looking at location, there is a complete jumble, with the distances involved probably too small to mean anything even if they were consistent. Perhaps the results could be summed up by noting that if the average latitude and longitude is worked out for reports in each of the four seasons, the locations for all four come within a circle just 30 miles in diameter, which, incidentally, is in Oregon just southeast of Portland. For altitude and direction of travel the study used all the reports containing the relevant information, but for location only reports from British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and the northern half of California were used. Methods used were amateur in the extreme, since I have only rudimentary abilities both statistical analysis and use of the computer, but I am confident that they would have been adequate to show evidence of migratory behavior if there were any.
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