Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  Eyewitness descriptions are wildly, outrageously variable; without type specimens, there is no way to determine which (if any) descriptions are accurate. For example, many Sasquatch witnesses have reported seeing creatures of heights that strain belief. Bigfooters reject such cases, based on little more than personal incredulity. As John Green noted, “From time to time someone will claim to have seen something like a Sasquatch that was 10 feet tall, or 12, or 14, but everyone just assumes they are mistaken.”115 Indeed, some witnesses report even taller creatures, but the assumption that they are mistaken seems hard to justify within a cryptozoological framework. Isn’t a priori rejection of eyewitness testimony the sin of the close-minded “scoftics”?116 Why reject firsthand accounts of 15-foot monsters while accepting 7-foot monsters on the strength of the same type of eyewitness evidence? Green reflected uneasily on this tendency: “Eight feet tall seems to be about right for a monster. It’s big enough to be impressive, but not so big as to cause much controversy…. It would be comfortable, therefore, if one could assume that a full-grown Sasquatch is eight feet tall and leave it at that. For years, that’s about what has been done.”117

  Cryptozoologists are really backed into a corner here. On the one hand, such reports seem self-evidently silly. On the other, the entire point of cryptozoology is that eyewitness testimony about unlikely creatures should not be rejected on the basis of a priori implausibility. How do cryptozoologists deal with this problem? Badly. Most just take it for granted that common sense can eliminate most bad data. Green notes that “trying to sort out the less-obvious fakes from the genuine information is a major task,”118 but the situation is much grimmer. Without hard evidence (such as confessions), Bigfooters have no means to confirm that bad data is bad. What if Bigfoot really is made of titanium, as has been suggested?119 No one can prove otherwise.

  Sounding weird is not in itself evidence that a report is inaccurate; if it were, why bother with cryptozoology in the first place? And if eyewitness accounts are filtered through the preconceptions of the pro-Sasquatch subculture, how can we extract a composite picture of Bigfoot from the artificially selected database that remains?

  Eyewitness Accounts

  In any event, the fact remains: thousands of people say that they have seen Bigfoot. Everyone agrees that many of those witnesses are sincere. What did they see in the woods?

  Many of these cases will never be solved. I have gone along with the convention of referring to the totality of eyewitness reports as a “database,” but this conceals the deep chaos of the eyewitness record. Collected by amateurs over decades, encounter anecdotes are extraordinarily variable. This frustrates attempts to construct a composite Bigfoot or extract useful statistical information.

  To begin with, many reports are fragmentary. Musing in 1970 about the possibility of doing statistical analyses of eyewitness reports, John Green was all too aware that the information in his physical card file, “cannot be considered very accurate, since many cards say no more than ‘John Doe reported to have seen Sasquatch,’ with no definite time or place or description and considerable room to question whether anyone actually saw anything.”120 Grover Krantz noted further obstacles to such analyses, since available reports “include vague descriptions, uncertain locations, erroneous observations, and some hoaxes—and we generally do not know which of the reports are tainted in these ways.”121

  Worse, as we have discussed, eyewitness reports are variable and diverge often from the popular, canonical Bigfoot. Some accounts feature Sasquatches with huge pointed ears, complex markings, or heights over 12 feet tall. Bigfoot is reported in many colors, at many sizes, with many diverging anatomies. In some reports, Bigfoot can speak human languages. And, although this is systematically downplayed in the mainstream Bigfoot literature, it is very common for witnesses to claim that Bigfoot has paranormal features and abilities, such as eyes that literally glow, psychic powers, or flying saucer–type vehicles.122

  John Napier was hopeful that composite Sasquatch data could be useful under certain restricted circumstances, but he was not naive. Noting that “the reports of solid citizens can be as false as the ramblings of the town drunk,”123 Napier gave a warning that should echo throughout Bigfoot research and throughout cryptozoology: “Eyewitness accounts offer considerable problems of interpretation. Individually they can probably be ignored; who knows under what conditions of exhaustion, mental stress, alcoholism or drug addiction, etc., the sighting was made? Was the eyewitness … hallucinated, fooled or simply lying through his teeth? There is no certain way of telling what factors were influencing his judgment.”124

  Misidentification Errors

  One fundamental problem with eyewitness tales of Bigfoot encounters is that people make up stories. Another, even larger problem is that people make mistakes. As Grover Krantz noted, “With enough imagination almost any object of about the right size and shape can be seen as a sasquatch.”125

  Krantz was right about that. I know because I have seen it happen. I was a shepherd for about ten years, working in the remote wilderness along the British Columbia side of the Alaska panhandle. We used crews of three people to herd flocks of 1,500 sheep on tree plantations (as a brush-removal tool for silviculture). One day, I returned to the flock to find shepherds Jill Carrier and Jolene Shepherd (a much remarked-on coincidence, that surname) talking excitedly. “While you were gone,” they began, laughing a little nervously, “we, uh, saw a Sasquatch.” They hastened to add that they were, well, pretty sure that it was a tall stump. After all, it stood still for a very long time, and half-burned stumps and broken logs are everywhere on overgrown clear-cuts in British Columbia. Such logging debris (slash) can look like anything. A Sasquatch is a perfectly predictable occasional illusion, although this time it was especially compelling. The women laughed, confessing that they could have sworn that the Sasquatch turned its head to follow them.

  I will not keep you in suspense. It was indeed a stump. (We were able to examine it later.) But the illusion from the original vantage point was very powerful. Even staring right at it, we could not be sure that it was not a Sasquatch. If we had not had the chance to check it out, this sighting could well have become a strong case for the existence of Bigfoot. Think of it: an extended, broad-daylight sighting by multiple witnesses, all of them experienced outdoor professionals. And memory is collaborative and malleable. If we had left the plantation at the end of the summer believing that we had seen a Sasquatch, our memories of the event would have “improved” over time.

  Nor are stumps the only source of misidentification errors. All skeptical discussions of Bigfoot note that the creature looks very much like a person and even more like a bear (figure 2.5). Moreover, the bulk of Sasquatch sightings come from bear habitat (and all Sasquatch sightings come, by definition, from human habitat). In 2009, a paper in the Journal of Biogeography found that Sasquatch distribution is essentially identical to black bear distribution. “Although it is possible that Sasquatch and U[rsus] americanus share such remarkably similar bioclimatic requirements,” the authors note wryly, “we nonetheless suspect that many Bigfoot sightings are, in fact, of black bears.”126

  A typical response from Bigfoot enthusiasts is to simply deny that there is a compelling resemblance. “While we cannot discount these possibilities in some cases,” wrote Christopher Murphy, “the difference between sasquatch, bears, and hikers are very obvious.”127 John Bindernagel similarly asserted, “Although it has been suggested that both black bears and grizzly bears are regularly misidentified as sasquatches, I would suggest that this occurs only rarely and is most unlikely in the case of sightings or encounters lasting more than one or two seconds.”128 Often, an illustration compares these “usual suspects” with an artist’s conception of a Sasquatch—under the brightly lit, unobstructed, close-up conditions of a police lineup.

  Figure 2.5 Two brown bears spar in Alaska. (Photograph by Dave Menke; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

  Some Bigfooters
argue that bears are a poor fit on the grounds that it is anatomically impossible for bears to walk more than a few steps on their hind legs. I’ll happily concede that extended upright walks are unusual for bears, but such walking behavior can occur in nature. I have seen video footage of an adult black bear striding along confidently on her hind legs for periods of twelve seconds (an eternity during a high-adrenaline Bigfoot sighting), and the effect is heart-stoppingly Sasquatch-like.129

  But this is somewhat beside the point. Bigfoot sightings happen out in the world, where viewing conditions are never perfect and direct comparisons are not possible. Even if we were to grant that humans, bears, and Sasquatch look dissimilar, the simple fact remains: people make whoppingly huge misidentification errors all the time.

  This was certainly the case during my shepherding career. It’s not that my colleagues and I were poor observers. Quite the opposite. From dawn to dusk, a shepherd’s primary job is to see everything: if 1 sheep out of 1,500 has a sore foot or is about to jump over a dangerous log, it’s the shepherd’s job to notice it. We were highly experienced with the terrain, wildlife, and observing conditions. But we still made misidentification errors. The reason is that we saw a tremendous number of things, all of them under variable real-world conditions.

  We had no end of close encounters with wildlife, from wolves to grouse to moose to grizzlies. Added to those were thousands of sheep sightings per minute, plus our wide-ranging guardian dogs, plus our co-workers and herding dogs, plus a vast unknown number of trees, bushes, stumps, and logs. As the number of seeing events continued to increase, the relatively rare errors began to accumulate. Some of them were doozies. For example, several times I watched “grizzly bears,” only to have them morph into sheep before my eyes. The opposite was also true: several times the object I initially identified as a sheep or a group of sheep turned out to be a grizzly or black bear. Likewise, seeing stumps as bears was so common that we gave this illusion a (not very imaginative) name. “Nah, just a stump-bear,” we would say. (And sometimes we were wrong about that, too.)

  In one memorable instance, Shepherd was napping in the bushes beside the sheep as they snoozed and ruminated. She was awakened by a small commotion (such catnaps are a one-ear-open sort of affair) and looked around to see a strange dog on the far side of the resting flock. Not stopping to wonder what a domestic dog would be doing in the remote wilderness, she charged through the bushes toward it, yelling and waving a stick. She burst through the brush … and stopped. Towering over her, almost close enough to touch, three grizzly bears (a mother and two grown cubs) stood up in surprise.

  Mistakes are predictable—for anyone who goes into the wilderness. Viewing conditions vary and are never ideal. The time of day, the season, the surrounding foliage, the weather, and human variables (sleepiness, experience, expectation, fear, eyesight, and so on) all conspire to reduce people’s reliability as witnesses. As long as humans are fallible to even a tiny degree, this is just a numbers game. Over sufficient time, a large enough number of observations will lead to dramatic errors. Millions of people see animals in North America every year: deer flashing across a highway, bears scavenging at a dump, an unidentified shape moving among the trees. Given that everyone in North American is exposed to the idea that Bigfoot might exist, the vast total number of animal sightings virtually guarantees that tales about encounters with Sasquatches will emerge—even in a world without Sasquatches.

  Footprints

  This brings us to the evidence that led to the very word “Bigfoot” (figure 2.6). Giant footprints are found throughout North America (and, indeed, throughout the world). Without that persuasive trace evidence, John Green mused, the Sasquatch could be chalked up to legends, lies, and hallucinations: “But none of these easy explanations can be applied to holes in the ground. Something has to make them.”130

  For cartoonishly clear giant footprints, there are only two explanations: human hoaxers and genuine Sasquatches. But many vaguer tracks amount to wishful thinking. Green conceded early on that many supposed tracks are purely in the eye of the beholder: “I have learned that people can see clear prints that to me are completely shapeless. They can see toes that I can’t see at all.”131 Based on this, he surmised that the record of footprint finds was already contaminated with “a lot” of unverified, mistaken tracks.

  But there are also a lot of the bold, unmistakable cookie cutter–type Bigfoot tracks. All sources agree on two key points regarding such footprints: they can be hoaxed, and they routinely are. The hopes of Bigfoot proponents are thus pinned on a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” argument. “It doesn’t matter if 10 per cent of these reports are mistaken, or 50 per cent of them, or 90 per cent of them,” Green argued. “If Sasquatches are to be wished back into the books on mythology, every last one of these reports has to be wrong.”132

  Figure 2.6 A normal-size man’s foot compared with a cast of an alleged Bigfoot footprint found in Bluff Creek, California, in 1967, after the shooting of the Patterson–Gimlin film. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)

  But is there good reason to suppose that any such tracks are authentic? Bigfooters cite the consistency of footprints in support of their authenticity, but this argument does not follow at all. Consistency need not imply authenticity when independent hoaxers can draw on the same readily available pop culture. We should expect some consistency whether or not there are Sasquatches. Worse, Bigfoot tracks are not very consistent. As Benjamin Radford has pointed out, “Most alleged Bigfoot tracks have five toes, but some casts show creatures with two, three, four, or even six toes.”133 Footprints can be anything from 4 to 27 inches long (and even greater whoppers are sometimes reported). Some are as narrow as 3 inches; some as wide as 13 inches.134 With such staggering discrepancies, we can infer with confidence that many tracks must necessarily be hoaxes. But which ones? And is there some genuine residue left over, as proponents believe?

  Again, we confront the chronic problem: the lack of a type specimen. To evaluate Sasquatch tracks, we need to look an actual Sasquatch foot. Who is to say that real Sasquatch feet do not have three toes? Perhaps five-toed footprints are always a sure sign of a hoax. As it stands, we have no way to know. The authenticity of new maybe-bogus tracks cannot be determined by comparing them with old maybe-bogus tracks.

  To his credit, pro-Sasquatch anthropologist Grover Krantz boldly underlined this need for a standard: “There is no point in trying to weigh the pros and cons of the less-than-obvious specimens unless and until both ends of the scale, fake and real, are established beyond a reasonable doubt.”135 And yet, this was a smaller admission than it appears because Krantz believed that he had a reliable standard. He claimed that he could “recognize real sasquatch tracks” using two diagnostic clues. This would be remarkable if true—certainly, he would be the only scientist on Earth known to have such a technique. Unfortunately, his “useful method for spotting fakes” is difficult to evaluate. According to Krantz, “I have told these traits to no one and have never written them down.” It is easy to understand why Krantz would have wanted to keep his sure-fire forgery-detection method out of the hands of hoaxers, but as his fellow anthropologist David Daegling observed, “In so doing, Krantz could make no legitimate scientific claims. His proposed criteria for pronouncing tracks genuine could not be tested or evaluated by his peers or anyone else.”136 And by the one criterion on which Krantz’s secret authentication system can be assessed—the ability to detect fraudulent tracks—it can be judged a failure. When a bogus track was sent to Krantz to test his system, he falsely concluded that it was authentic.137

  Given both the absence of a type specimen and the demonstrable fact that footprints are often faked, the scientific value of Bigfoot tracks is very limited.

  Hair and DNA

  For many considering Bigfoot for the first time, the solution seems obvious: Why not test Bigfoot’s hair or DNA? Samples of possible Sasquatch hair, scat, and fluids have bee
n collected fairly often. As it turns out, many promising samples have been analyzed by experts or even sequenced for DNA.

  To date, they have all been a bust. This is disappointing, but it is not the end of the bad news. It seems that testing hair would be unable to solve the mystery even if Bigfooters were to discover samples of genuine Sasquatch hair. It is the same type-specimen problem that plagues footprint evidence and eyewitness reports: no one has any idea what Sasquatch hair would look like. When hair experts examine an unknown sample of hair, the procedure is simplicity itself: they first look at it under a microscope and then painstakingly compare the characteristics of the unknown sample with those of known samples and try to find a match. However, as John Green succinctly put it, “when no collection contains known Sasquatch hairs there is no way to prove that the hair you find comes from a Sasquatch. At best you will only be unable to prove that it didn’t.”138

  Some Bigfoot enthusiasts are encouraged when a sample cannot be identified, as though this failure implies that the hair comes from an unknown animal. This conclusion is premature and improbable. As Grover Krantz explained, “Hair characteristics vary on different parts of the same animal, and no comparative collection exists of all types of hair of all mammals. A hair that is unlike anything in a North American collection might be from the armpit of a bear or from an escaped llama.”139 So even in theory, the prospects for hair analysis are grim. Until “hair is pulled directly from a sasquatch body by a qualified analyst,” Jeff Meldrum agrees, the best-case scenario is a dead end: “any hair truly originating from a sasquatch would necessarily languish in the indeterminate category.”140