Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  To a profound extent, Bigfoot lore stands or falls on Roe. If true, Roe’s story remains among the most detailed and informative close-range sightings of an undiscovered primate. If Roe invented his creature, however, then a very dark shadow falls over all the reports that parrot his description—which is to say, most of the cases in the Bigfoot database. In particular, the famous footage shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, in which an apparent Sasquatch walks across a dry riverbed, depends utterly on Roe’s veracity. Patterson wrote about Roe’s story in 1966 and the next year filmed a virtually identical encounter with a virtually identical creature—right down to the heels-first gait, hairy breasts, and unhurried look over the shoulder while walking away from the filmmaker. If Roe was a hoaxer, it follows that the Patterson–Gimlin film must also be a hoax.

  With so much riding on Roe’s sighting, I assumed that a great deal would be known about Roe. After all, Bigfoot writers have promoted this encounter for more than fifty years. Looking into the case for a magazine feature in 2004,33 I soon noticed that all the sources seem to rely exclusively on the statement that Roe sent to Green (or, worse, on secondhand sources who relied on Green).

  It began to dawn on me: no cryptozoologist had ever met Roe.

  Could that really be right? I contacted Green, the Bigfooter who made Roe’s famous “sworn statement” part of history, and asked him directly: Did any researcher ever personally speak to William Roe or look him in the eye? Did anyone make an attempt to meet with him? Is anything substantial known about his character or background?

  Nope. According to Green, “By the time I wanted to talk to him he had moved to Alberta. I don’t know who may have spoken to him in person.”34 Nor did any researcher visit the site of Roe’s alleged sighting. “At a later stage we would certainly have wanted to question Roe in person, and to go to the site with him,” Green told me, “but by the time I was writing a book he was dead.”35 I asked cryptozoology author John Kirk (head of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club) for confirmation. Kirk answered, “I am unaware of anyone who met him…. Green did not ever meet Roe nor did any researcher I know.”

  It is hardly the fault of Bigfoot proponents that Roe passed away. And yet it remains bizarre that one of history’s most-cited Sasquatch witnesses was never once questioned by anyone. Worse, virtually nothing is known about the circumstances of Roe’s story (was he even in the area at the time the story takes place?) or how it first came to be told. As Green conceded (discussing Roe’s story and another from the same period), “There was no one else involved with whom they could be checked, and no records from the time and place where they were supposed to have happened.”36 Worse, Green was unable to find anyone who had heard Roe’s story before the media circus surrounding the Harrison Hot Springs “Sasquatch hunt” in 1957.37 Roe alleged that his sighting had occurred two years earlier, but that is nothing more than a bald assertion. We are asked to believe that he saw a Sasquatch, said nothing to anyone for two years, and then took his improbable tale to the press—after the publicity started.

  Hearing or reading this original press version, Green was inspired to write to Roe. Roe then provided Green with his “sworn statement”—the only version of his story that history preserves. Does Roe’s later “sworn” version match his original telling? No one knows. Green was unable to tell me where he first encountered Roe’s tale (or what Roe said at that time): “Sorry, I wasn’t keeping records in those days.”38 Kirk wrote to me that Roe’s story or stories are “believed to have been in the Province and Sun” newspapers “in 1957 prior to August”—or possibly on the radio.39 Unfortunately, despite long searches through the microfilm archives for both newspapers, I have been unable to locate Roe’s original lost account.

  For all its influence, the Roe case is ultimately a story told by an unknown figure, for unknown reasons, under unknown circumstances. Because there is absolutely nothing to corroborate this story, a great deal of ink has been spilled in arguing that Roe’s “sworn statement” renders the account reliable. As a Canadian, I am amused by early cryptozoology author Ivan Sanderson’s goofy pitch that “while ‘sworn statements’ may not cut too much ice in this country [United States], they mean a very great deal in Canada and other parts of the British Empire. Canadians have an intense respect for the law.”40 (I am reminded of filmmaker Michael Moore’s hilarious suggestion in Bowling for Columbine that Canadians do not lock their doors.) Of course, this argument is just silly. People lie in all countries—sometimes for no very good reason, and sometimes under oath. Criminal justice would be much simpler if “swearing” guaranteed truthfulness, but sadly it does not. That’s why lawyers cross-examine witnesses in courtrooms, try to gauge their reactions, and compare their testimony with other evidence. No one did that with Roe. We have no idea whether his story was consistent from telling to telling. In fact, we do not even know what William Roe looked like.41

  Raymond Wallace: The Bluff Creek Tracks

  As the Canadian film and music industries know all too well, it is one thing to top the charts in Canada and another to achieve cross-border success. For all the press that the Harrison Hot Springs “Sasquatch hunt” received in 1957, the legend retained a quaint Canadian flavor until the following year. In 1958, in the region surrounding Bluff Creek, California, the Sasquatch—re-branded Bigfoot—became a break-out American hit.

  It started slowly. In the early spring, some giant footprints showed up at a work site of a road construction contractor named Raymond Wallace.42 These tracks were fake. As summer wore on into autumn, more giant footprints appeared, again at a Wallace work site. They were cast in plaster (by Wallace’s employee Jerry Crew), becoming the most famous “real” Bigfoot tracks of all time. Then Wallace personally faked further Bigfoot tracks late in the year—and remained a Bigfoot prankster for the rest of his life.

  If that sequence brings you up short, I can sympathize fully. And yet, the tracks from Wallace’s Bluff Creek work site are fiercely and universally defended by Bigfoot authors. John Green insists, “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.”43

  The story unfolded like this. When bulldozer operator Jerry Crew arrived at the Bluff Creek work site on August 27, 1958, he was annoyed to find giant footprints stamped around his machine. Crew took them for a prank. After that, Ivan Sanderson relates, “nothing further happened for almost a month; then once again these monstrous Bigfeet appeared again overnight around the equipment…. About that time, Mr. Ray Wallace, the contractor, returned from a business trip.”44 New tracks were appearing regularly at the beginning of October. “Every morning we find his footprints in the fresh earth we’ve moved the day before,” Crew said.45 On October 3, Crew made a plaster cast of one of the footprints. Then, taking this cast to the local newspaper, he made history. Throughout California, headlines trumpeted the mystery of “Bigfoot.”

  Within days, suspicion fell on Wallace. The local newspaper reported on October 14 that a deputy had spoken to Wallace and that “the sheriff’s office had sent word to Ray Wallace … to come in and explain the ‘joke.’”46 Wallace denied having made the prints, but the sheriff’s suspicion was well placed. After Wallace’s death in 2002, his family revealed one of the sets of strap-on wooden feet that Wallace had used for his track hoaxing. This particular set does not match the tracks that Crew cast in plaster, but it does closely match other tracks found in the area that year. Loren Coleman affirms forthrightly, “Yes, Wallace appears to have placed prank footprints near some of his work sites from 1958 through the 1960s.”47 Nor was that the beginning or the end of Wallace’s Bigfoot-related mischief. “Ray Wallace lived a life of hoaxing, stretching the truth, and pranks,” Coleman explains. “It was happening before Blu
ff Creek, 1958, and after.”48

  The Wallace family’s announcement in 2002 set the cat among the pigeons. It exposed a deep weakness in the case for Bigfoot: a known Bigfoot prankster had his fingerprints all over a truly central Bigfoot case, and no one was talking about it. Worse, Wallace’s hoaxing had been known from the earliest days. He was suspected immediately as the creator of the tracks found at his work sites; his status as a hoaxer was confirmed two years later when he claimed to have captured a live Sasquatch. Offering to sell the creature to Bigfoot researchers for $1 million, he dragged out the negotiations for weeks—only to “release” the creature. (Incidentally, Wallace claimed that the captured Sasquatch would eat nothing except 100-pound bags of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes.)49 For decades afterward, Wallace continued to produce fake tracks, make headlines, and pester Bigfooters with outlandish tall tales. “Bigfoot used to be very tame,” claimed Wallace in one typical yarn, “as I have seen him almost every morning on the way to work. I would sit in my pickup and toss apples out of the window to him. He never did catch an apple but he sure tried.”50

  Bigfoot researchers knew not only that Wallace was a prankster and that the tracks cast by Crew were found on Wallace’s work site, but also that the major source of testimony about the monster allegedly throwing around heavy equipment at the site was Wallace’s brother. Crew himself was Wallace’s employee—as were, coincidentally, the two men who claimed to have seen a 10-foot-tall Bigfoot just days later! As the local newspaper noted, “Tracks in the dusty road were identical with those seen in the construction area,” except in one strategic respect: the new incident allegedly took place in a neighboring county. Just one day after reporting that the sheriff of Humboldt County wanted to question Wallace, the front-page headline read, “Eye-Witnesses See Bigfoot: Humboldt Sheriff’s Office Has No Jurisdiction in Footprint Case.”51

  Wallace was powerfully implicated in the Bluff Creek tracks all along, and yet somehow books discussed the case for decades without shining the spotlight on him. As one critical journalist put it, “Bigfooters dodge the subject of Ray Wallace—it’s their dirty little secret, and the fewer questions raised about his involvement at Bluff Creek, the better.”52 Indeed, as David Daegling pointed out, pivotal books by John Green and Grover Krantz “fail to even acknowledge that Ray Wallace existed.” According to Daegling, “Green and Krantz are generally meticulous in keeping track of details of events and persons, so it seems very unlikely that the omission of Wallace is a mere oversight.”53 If so, Daegling’s view of this “whitewash” is scathing: for investigators to “simply opt not to disclose the contextual information of evidence when it is crucial for deciding the legitimacy of particular data” is “lying by omission.”54

  While Wallace’s silly antics must have infuriated serious proponents, their silence was destined to backfire. In the 1990s, Strange Magazine editor Mark Chorvinsky began to pointedly ask why Wallace had been “excluded from, or downplayed in, most of the official Bigfoot histories?”55 When Wallace’s family came forward with a set of his wooden feet for making tracks, they ended the long silence once and for all. Headlines worldwide proclaimed “the death of Bigfoot.”

  Forced to confront the issue, Bigfoot investigators hastened to argue that Wallace’s connection to the footprints is a red herring. Many scornfully pointed out that the tracks cast by Crew do not match the wooden feet that the Wallace family had shown to the press. Calling this objection “insipid,” Daegling noted that “Wallace’s family maintains he had not one, but several sets of bogus feet.”56 Besides, the wooden feet revealed by the family are a perfect match to many of the other early Bluff Creek tracks.57 “Wallace did not hoax the Jerry Crew footprint finds of 1958,” in Loren Coleman’s opinion, “but Wallace certainly left other prints that were not authentic, around Bluff Creek, which have ended up in Bigfoot books.”58 This contaminated database is a significant practical problem, as Coleman has continued to emphasize: “The databases of various Sasquatch researchers continue to contain examples of Ray Wallace’s fakery. Because of this, the collections throw off the summary statistics and general analyses of Bigfoot track information.”59

  Nonetheless, few Bigfoot proponents seem concerned. Some have denied the problem altogether: “To even consider that Wallace, or anyone else for that matter, could produce convincing sasquatch footprints with a piece of carved wood is absurd.”60 Others argue that skeptics have the story backward. According to Green, the wooden feet revealed by the Wallace family are forgeries based on genuine Bluff Creek Sasquatch tracks. Noting that Wallace’s wooden feet do, in fact, match some of the tracks found at Bluff Creek in 1958, Green concludes that “presumably they were made in imitation of those casts.”61 Readers will be forgiven if they find their patience strained by this degree of special pleading.

  All of this is damning, not only to the case for Bigfoot, but also to the integrity of the search. If cryptozoology is to achieve its scientific aspirations, it cannot afford to be precious about even its own “bedrock” cases or to be unduly deferential to figures respected in the cryptozoological subculture. Coleman has ventured the opinion that the failure of Bigfooters to acknowledge the depth of the problems posed by the fake Wallace tracks is “due to the godlike status given to John Green and Jeff Meldrum,” with people “afraid to speak up” in challenge to the positions taken by those prominent figures. Whatever the social forces at play, the result is as Coleman describes: “There remain bad apples in the Bigfoot baskets and they are contaminating the entire analytic apple pie. That is scientifically significant.”62 It certainly is. But how do we put it right? At the very least, we must acknowledge that the footprints cast by Jerry Crew and the other Bluff Creek tracks are contaminated by their close association with a habitual hoaxer and must be quarantined from the database of Bigfoot evidence. Indeed, I would say that they are radioactive—an almost certain hoax. (The clincher, in my view, is the level of coincidence that we are asked to accept: giant footprints found first at one Wallace work site and then at another Wallace work site, and Wallace employees later spot Bigfoot at a third location.)

  As Wallace’s son put it to reporters, “Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died.” Given the pivotal importance of the Bluff Creek tracks, I cannot help but think that he was right.

  Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin: The Bigfoot Film

  On October 20, 1967, cowboys named Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin rode into the California woods to film Bigfoot. And then they promptly did.

  Shot on a bright autumn day at Bluff Creek in northern California—the same region where giant tracks at Ray Wallace’s construction site had launched the legend of “Bigfoot” a few years earlier—the shaky, hand-held 16-mm film shows a furry, bipedal figure striding confidently across a gravel sand bar. Alleged to be a female Sasquatch (inferred from what appear to be heavy breasts on the figure’s torso), this bulky-looking creature passes behind horizontal logs, low bushes, trees, and debris. As it walks away, it looks back, hauntingly, toward the filmmaker (figure 2.3).

  When enthusiasts, skeptics, or mainstream journalists turn their attention to the Sasquatch, they almost invariably refer to the Patterson–Gimlin film as the “most important” evidence for Bigfoot. In social terms, this is true. The film is an enduring icon that keeps the question of the reality of Bigfoot alive in the public imagination and unifies the subculture of Bigfoot advocates. For many, it is an emotional powder keg: visceral, saw-it-with-my-own-eyes proof that Bigfoot exists.

  As practical evidence for an undiscovered ape, however, the Patterson–Gimlin film is a dead end. I am going to say something that will be unpopular on both sides of the debate: no one knows whether the film depicts a real Sasquatch or a man in a gorilla suit. Moreover, after decades of argument and analysis, there is no sign that the issue can be resolved unless one of three things emerges: a live or dead Sasquatch, powerful new documentary or physical evidence that exposes the film as a hoax (such as the suit itself),63
or a confession from co-witness Bob Gimlin.

  Figure 2.3 The famous still from the Roger Patterson–Bob Gimlin film of Bigfoot. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)

  This is not an entirely traditional view of the case. Through decades of deadlocked argument, passionate voices on both sides have insisted that conclusive evidence is available, if only the other side would really look at the film. Indeed, many have claimed that the film itself is the only relevant line of evidence to pursue when considering the film’s authenticity. “Ignore the human element,” urged original investigator René Dahinden.64 According to John Green, a friend of Patterson’s and another of the first people to view the film, “The character of the person holding the camera has little bearing on whether a film is genuine, you have to study the film itself.”65

  This sounds fair, but it does not help to determine the truth. The film is a Rorschach inkblot. For skeptics, the creature obviously is a man in a gorilla suit. For believers, the creature plainly appears nonhuman. And while one might hope that analyses by qualified anthropologists would resolve the impasse, this has not turned out to be the case.

  Consider the contrasting opinions of anthropologists John Napier and Grover Krantz. Both thought that the Sasquatch was a real animal, but their anthropological expertise brought them to diametrically opposed conclusions regarding the Patterson–Gimlin film. According to Napier, “There is little doubt that the scientific evidence taken collectively points to a hoax of some kind. The creature shown in the film does not stand up well to functional analysis.”66 Krantz argued the exact opposite: “No matter how the Patterson film is analyzed, its legitimacy has been repeatedly supported. The size and shape cannot be duplicated by a man, its weight and movements correspond with each other and equally rule out a human subject; its anatomical details are just too good.”67