Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  In some circumstances, however, field biologists require what they call voucher specimens. The initial scientific description of a taxon (species or variety) is a formal procedure; the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) insists on designation of a type specimen, a kind of yardstick against which all future examples of the taxon can be gauged. Voucher specimens are also required for proof that a species has been found out of its known range and for some teaching and research purposes. More and more we find ways of representing organisms with photos, models, or field notes, yet for some needs only an example will suffice.

  People who oppose collecting are often surprised to learn that the small numbers of specimens taken by scientists have a negligible impact on populations—certainly nowhere near that of hunting, fishing, roadkills, bug zappers, pesticides, or habitat development—and collecting can contribute immensely to conservation. As the raw material of biogeography (plant and animal distribution studies), collections enable us to characterize where living things occur and where they don’t—and then to question why they don’t live where one would expect. Applied biogeography has led to more direct habitat conservation measures than any other process has. Without museum and amateur collectors, we would lack the necessary data to assess conservation needs. If sight records progressively replace specimens for this function, all the better. But especially for invertebrates, we are so far from classifying and being able to recognize most of the species (that is, most of life on earth) that to end collecting tomorrow would darken the prospects for preserving biodiversity.

  So when Grover Krantz calls for taking a specimen of Bigfoot, he is not being bloodthirsty. As a scientist he is keenly aware of the role of anthropological artifacts and biological specimens. He firmly believes that a single body will establish the existence of the species and lead to its instant protection and permanent conservation, and that these considerations justify its killing.

  To what extent is he right? Krantz, in Big Footprints, explains the attitude of many scientists as “I’ll see it when I believe it.” In other words, their minds (and eyes) are closed to unlikely possibilities. This, he says, is exactly the view faced by the discoverers of Pithecanthropus and Australopithecus, now considered major players in the ancestry of humankind. Northwest Anthropological Research Notes, in response to prods from John Green and others, decided to “welcome . . . any reasonably scientific paper dealing with the sasquatch phenomenon.” Subsequently, in that journal, Krantz proposed the official naming of Bigfoot, using casts of footprints as the requisite type specimen. Concurring with the suggestions of John Green in 1968 and Yerkes Primate Center Director Geoffrey Bourne in 1975, he concluded that Bigfoot is congeneric with the giant fossil ape Gigantopithecus blacki. Krantz erected the name G. canadensis for Bigfoot, reserving the possibility of changing it to Giganthropus canadensis if G. blacki turns out to have been a knuckle-walker instead of erectly bipedal like Bigfoot.

  There is precedent for the naming of cryptids. In 1975 Sir Peter Scott, the distinguished wildfowl artist and conservationist, with Robert Rines, applied the name Nessiteras rhombopteryx to the Loch Ness monster in the journal Nature. The “Ness-marvel diamond-fin” description was based on impressive underwater photographs obtained by Rines’s Academy of Applied Science of Boston, the same outfit that supports Peter Byrne’s Bigfoot Research Project. Although a famous old photo of Nessie has recently been disclosed as a hoax, the AAS sonargrams have not been discredited. Sir Peter’s action was criticized as wishful and premature and also praised for its prescience. His purpose was to promote the saurian’s conservation. In 1976 Byrne followed suit by informally proposing adoption of the Linnaean name Homo nocturnus for Bigfoot-like creatures. In the absence of a type specimen or formal scientific description, this name must remain invalid, what the ICZN terms a nomen nudum.

  So if Bigfoot has already been classified, why do we need a specimen? Because the world has not been quick to embrace Krantz’s (or Scott’s) description; most of the scientific establishment maintains an attitude of outright disdain or utter indifference. After the fact, Krantz’s paper might be recognized for its priority in zoological nomenclature; but in the meantime, in the monolithic eye of Science, Bigfoot remains in the realm of mermaids, Minotaurs, and unicorns. And conservation too takes the subject of hairy monsters in vain. So until there’s a specimen, there will be no name, no page in the textbooks and field guides, no slot in the Forest Plan alongside owls and martens and salmon and cedars and chinquapins and butterflies.

  Byrne and others who don’t want to see even one Bigfoot killed argue that the animal will be recognized and protected if it is reliably sighted, with good films and multiple witnesses as articles of proof or, at most, with blood samples taken from a tranquilized animal. Krantz replies that if the authorities won’t accept the Patterson film and footprints with dermal ridges they are not likely to accept anything but a body.

  Assuming that there would be value to science and perhaps to the species if an example were collected, three questions arise: (1) how to catch one, (2) what to do with the specimen, and

  (3) what ethical issues must be dealt with, both before and after the fact. I’ll consider these seemingly contradictory questions in that order, since in my opinion the last is the most important.

  All the hunters have their own programs and schemes for catching a Sasquatch. Grover Krantz has effectively discounted the effectiveness of most of these in advance. Plans for trapping, tranquilizing, and heat-seeking the giants all have big flaws. What’s left is the blunt hunt, with or without guns.

  Robert W. Morgan mounted a colorful search on the slopes of Mount St. Helens well before its 1980 eruption. A local source remembered Morgan as five foot six, bald, with a goatee and piercing blue eyes. His American Yeti Expedition 1970 included an archaeologist, a cinematographer, and several young men and women, some with degrees in biology. They are supposed to have tracked the beast in forest and cave with jeeps, night-vision devices, psychics, and, at one point, a nude female volunteer as “bait,” though this detail creeps into accounts of many hunts and is probably always apocryphal.

  The expedition was cosponsored by a Florida agent, a film company, and the National Wildlife Federation. George Harrison, managing editor of National Wildlife, went along and later wrote about it for the magazine. Morgan’s plan was to capture a Bigfoot and fly it to Washington, D.C., for study. “Upon completion of the research,” wrote Harrison, “Morgan intends to have the creature flown back to the Pacific Northwest and released unharmed in its native wilderness haunts.”

  The expedition spent fifty thousand dollars and found several sets of tracks not uniformly accepted as genuine before dissolving in disarray and allegations of hoaxing. A local Native American described the outing as “more Hollywood than science” and said his family was “haunted” by Morgan’s crew. “There are two ways of dealing with the hunters,” he told me, “and they’re both wrong. One, don’t talk, and they won’t leave you alone, thinking you know something; two, talk and the tabloids get you.”

  A different but equally ineffectual approach centered on a paramilitary Bigfoot cadre based in Vancouver, Washington. As Ray Crowe told me, members of this group held ranks and called their leader “El Capitan.” They went forth in big-wheeled trucks, armed with assault rifles, spotlights, and camouflage. God knows what all they shot, but it wasn’t Bigfoot.

  Such weirdnesses might not represent the mainstream (if “Bigfoot mainstream” is not an oxymoron), but there are certainly lots of guys with guns out in the woods looking for giants. They are all hopeful of the result predicted by a veteran Bigfoot hunter in Kentucky, where the local ridge-dwellers call the animals “wild woolly bullies.” Quoted by Marian Place in Bigfoot All Over the Country, James Vincent said that the backwoods people “hear them stomping along the ridgetops, and hear them screeching. These folks think the same as I do. Bigfoot is a very curious animal. One day
this curiosity is going to get one killed.”

  And that, essentially, is a conclusion devoutly to be wished for, according to Grover Krantz. “If I could come up with the money,” he told Washington magazine writer Michael Schmelzer, “I would hire a team of expert trackers and hunters and send them off into the mountains with very specific instructions: Bring me a Sasquatch, dead or alive.”

  Suppose Grover, or anyone, got his Sasquatch—then what? As he rightly suggested in his visceral presentation at Harrison Hot Springs, anyone who succeeds in the hunt or finds a roadkill will have to face this challenge. “There would be several gallons of blood,” he said, “one heck of a mess.”

  Krantz divided this “nasty little problem” into a number of questions. How would you handle the specimen? Who would you trust to help you? How would you transport a rotting, stinking mass of that magnitude? Where would you take it to authenticate the find and establish your interest in it? What would you get from it? How would you protect it from being taken or appropriated? What legal threats would you face? What would you do about general harassment from the media? Would there be danger from pro-lifers? How should you pursue your legal rights?

  Each of these questions, he feels, presents a major obstacle. You could hardly move the corpse by yourself, so you’d have to decide what parts to take. Any assistance would mean competition. Do you try for a refrigerated truck, and if so, would it be usable again? Fame and fortune, which might be the chief rewards, are easy to understand, stemming from straight selfishness. There might also be product endorsements for the discoverer; newspaper, magazine, and book receipts; and sales of body parts—but the negative impact on your life might cancel the benefits. (Krantz spoke with a soft irony that many listeners missed altogether.)

  You would need to protect your find from theft by competitors, government confiscation, bears, coyotes, ravens, vultures, other scavengers, and the timber companies (who might try to destroy any sign of it). Everyone would want a piece of the action, not to mention the body—the media, the museums, the government, the “best of the Jane Goodall clones,” who, Krantz feels, would be eager to study the creature.

  Krantz thinks the Skamania County ordinance would not apply, since it proscribes “wantonly killing” Bigfoot, and scientific collecting is not wanton. As for other authorities, he says, your action would be to all intents and purposes “like killing a unicorn”—they can’t prosecute you for something whose existence they don’t recognize. He thinks the timber companies might try to buy a scientific opinion that the animal was human, in which case the Endangered Species Act would not apply and its killer would be a murderer. “Some nuts will almost certainly come forward to charge the successful hunter with murder,” Krantz said, and they might try to prosecute. And failing that, to persecute. He wouldn’t put it past the animal rightists to levy a Salman Rushdie–style fatwa on the killer of Bigfoot, and he evinced some concern that the discoverer might be subject to the same sort of hysteria that abortion doctors have had to face from murderous pro-lifers.

  I asked Grover what he thought about keeping the specimen in liquid, the way invertebrates are preserved. Wouldn’t it be easier to store and transport in alcohol, like Lord Nelson shipped home from Trafalgar in rum? The tallest gorilla ever held in captivity (Baltimore Jack, six foot three) is preserved in formaldehyde at Arizona State University. Krantz didn’t think much of my idea. His own plan would be to get the skin and the head and whatever else proved possible. He knows he would be criticized, no matter how he approached it, for damaging or leaving important materials; and he would ask his critics just how they would deal secretly with an unidentified half-ton primate. The important thing, he believes, would be to have a specimen.

  After a Bigfoot evening at Portland Community College, put on by enthusiast Richard (Rip) Lyttle, several of us were chatting over Chinese food and beer. Peter Byrne was there, along with Rip, Ray Crowe, and Jim Hewkin. I said, “Right, gentlemen. One of us has a road-killed baby Bigfoot in our trunk. What do we do about it?” Around the table eyes flashed with a mixture of mirth and earnestness. I got the feeling that no one, friendly as they were, would trust anyone else there enough to let them in on the find. Byrne assumed an authoritative and cryptic air and simply said, “We have a plan.” In fact, as I later learned, the Bigfoot Research Project does have a detailed (and secret) plan, not only for dealing with the carcass of an unfortunate victim but also for detecting a living beast to make a nonviolent “find.”

  −−

  Plans and rationales aside, when it comes to killing a Sasquatch, we are entering the darkest of all the several divides that I considered during my days with Bigfoot. In short, since we proscribe the killing of humans, what about hominids, or hominoids? We have proved ourselves capable of truly bestial acts against creatures with whom we share most of our DNA, namely the chimps and gorillas, and in many cases we call it legal. But we define them as belonging to the Pongidae, the great apes, along with orangutans and gibbons. This seems to give us the distance we need to kill without feeling great moral distress.

  The familial division between humans (Hominidae) and great apes (Pongidae) is an artificial distinction. Orangs and gibbons split off earlier, most agree, and the family Pongidae makes some sense for them. But if we separate Homo from Gorilla and Pan (chimpanzees) at the familial level, we ought also to split lions from tigers, foxes from wolves, ducks from geese, giving each group its own family. I asked Krantz what he thought of the hominid/pongid division. He said the traditional split makes sense from the standpoint of morphology (form) and common sense, but the phylogenetic (evolutionary) reality was certainly that humans and other apes, except perhaps orangs, belong in a single family. This expanded sense of the Hominidae raises serious ethical issues.

  Krantz is not oblivious to these. He thinks Sasquatch deserves the same consideration we give the great apes—implicitly, general protection but not immunity from killing when it is judged to be in the interest of the commonweal. He believes that Bigfoot is not human, based on the animal’s apparent nonusage of tools, a major criterion of humanity among anthropologists (though muddier now, with Jane Goodall’s discovery that chimps are tool users). He feels the creature probably is no more intelligent than the other great apes. And if he is mistaken, he told me, and Sasquatch belongs in the genus Homo, then the need to know it and protect it is that much greater.

  Before I knew Krantz, I had assumed that this lanky, broody, and sarcastically witty man was so invested in proving Bigfoot’s existence that he was desperate to vindicate his name and willing to take any means toward that end. Some have called him a Bigfoot butcher. That characterization, I found in talking with him, is far from the mark. He maintains that he is otherwise content in his career and can take Bigfoot or leave it. Of course, since he is human, proof would be very sweet for him indeed. But he does not seem obsessed.

  “Sasquatch,” Krantz has written, “is not the most important subject in the world . . . [It] may well be the most important of . . . unproven animals because it is probably our closest living relative. Still, it is not human, and there are millions of real people in this world who need help far more desperately than the sasquatch does.”

  In a short conclusion to Big Footprints, entitled “Keeping It in Perspective,” Krantz suggests that a Bigfoot specimen will cause a dust storm among a few government officials and lumber barons, will ruffle both the creationists and evolutionists, and the “news media will have a hey-day and will badger every participant so much that they will wish (at least for the moment) that it had never happened.” His own prestige will get a blip, not much more, and then “life will go on, almost as if nothing had happened.”

  I asked Krantz what misgivings he’d have about killing “our closest living relative.” Far from cavalier, he paused and gave me a thoughtful response that I took as both ingenuous and expressive of the conundrums involved here: “If the time comes when I have t
he choice of shooting or not, it will be the most difficult decision I have ever been faced with. And,” he went on, “however I decide to act, I will regret it for the rest of my life.”

  −−

  Not all of the Bigfoot hunters express such compunction. Danny Perez’s bibliography, Big Footnotes, is dedicated to “the first woman or man to collect a Sasquatch.” A September 18, 1994, Associated Press story lionized an Idaho man named Ralph Squires. “When he enters Sasquatch’s mind,” said the AP, “his senses heighten, he feels a harmony within, and he’s in tune with everything around him.” Everything, that is, except Bigfoot. “Squires intends to kill the first Bigfoot he encounters, saying that the mystery needs to be solved.” Pictured smug and ready to go in camouflage, with night-vision goggles and an elephant gun, Squires said, “I hunt hard, I hunt the wind . . . All of a sudden Bigfoot’ll be there, and I’ll be ready for the challenge of my life.”

  Even otherwise peaceful men find their principles stretched when they contemplate such a treasure as the first Bigfoot. In hindsight some wish they had fired when they had the chance. When Patterson and Gimlin encountered the famous subject of their film at Bluff Creek, they both were carrying high-powered rifles. They had agreed not to shoot unless absolutely necessary, a point on which Patterson was adamant. Gimlin, covering Patterson as the filmmaker ran after the beast, never came close to shooting; later he wished he had. And in a 1992 letter to me, Peter Byrne wrote, “I still think of Patterson, dying, sitting in a chair in the sun in his back garden in Yakima, a skeleton of a man (Hodgkin’s disease) saying to me . . . ‘You know, we should have shot that thing; then people would have believed us.’” Only near death, unvindicated, did Roger Patterson reluctantly change his mind.