by John Zada
There has to be a way to make better sense of the phenomenon: one that doesn’t rely on ready-made positions rooted in unquestioning belief or disbelief; one that moves past the pop-culture veneer and rhetoric of opposing camps and into the more nuanced territory where psychology, culture, history, literature, and indigenous experience overlap. If primeval nature and collective memory are places where the Sasquatch continues to thrive, where better than the Great Bear Rainforest, and its deep-rooted communities, to go in search of it?
* Only 38 percent of the Great Bear Rainforest enjoys full, core protection under the law. The remainder is under stringent management guidelines.
* The Yeti, one of whose original local names was Meh-Teh (Sherpa for “that thing there”), is believed to inhabit the lush mountain valleys of Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, and the Sikkim region of India.
* The 16-mm Patterson-Gimlin film, shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin at Bluff Creek in the mountains of northern California, purports to show, in a roughly one-minute segment, a female Sasquatch (with breasts) quickly walking away into the trees. To this day, analysis of the film and the debate over its authenticity continue ad nauseam. However the footage has yet to be debunked. At the risk of adding one more voice to that cacophony, it’s worth mentioning that the figure’s rippling musculature, unusual body proportions, changing facial expressions, and bizarre gait have led Hollywood special-effects people and scientists specializing in bipedal locomotion to state that the film could not have been faked. See Meldrum, Jeff, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. New York: Forge Books, 2007, Chapters 7 and 8.
* I owned a pair of Bigfoot sneakers, made by the Buster Brown shoe company, which featured a humanoid barefoot sole (for making footprints in the mud) and came with a whistle that mimicked Sasquatch vocalizations.
* Dictators and demagogues often whip crowds into an emotional frenzy using a number of cues and techniques to lock their attention while bombarding them with messages and agendas.
* The Kokanee Glacier is an iconic feature of the Selkirk range. It’s also the namesake of a local beer that has pressed the Sasquatch into service as its corporate mascot. Robert said that if you spent several days camped alone anywhere in that wide radius around the glacier and played the harmonica or broadcast recordings of children playing in a schoolyard, those sounds would draw Sasquatches near and virtually guarantee an encounter. It was an idea he had recently come up with, but had not yet tested.
3
SASQUALOGY
In the half century since big, upright creatures, leaving hundreds of tracks, were seen in the high snowfield on the north side of Mount Everest by a band of British mountaineers, the ye-teh, or yeti, has met with a storm of disapproval from upset scientists around the world. But as with the sasquatch of the vast rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, the case against the existence of the yeti—entirely speculative, and necessarily based on assumptions of foolishness or mendacity in many observers of good reputation—is even less “scientific” than the evidence that it exists.
—Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
In 1963, John Bindernagel, a third-year wildlife biology undergrad at the University of Guelph in southern Ontario, visited his local barbershop. Before taking a seat in the chair, he rummaged through a stack of magazines on a nearby table and pulled out a copy of Argosy—an American men’s magazine that featured “true” adventure stories.
As the barber went to work, Bindernagel flipped through the magazine. Halfway in, something grabbed him: it was a story about a race of undiscovered ape-men that people were claiming to see in the British Columbia wilderness. The author was Ivan T. Sanderson, an eccentric Scottish American biologist, who was making a name for himself investigating mysterious creatures and paranormal subjects. The story, brimming with eyewitness accounts and colorful illustrations of the shaggy creatures, fired Bindernagel’s imagination. New species were being discovered all the time—but an anomalous, unclassified primate in North America promised to be the discovery of the century.
Bindernagel was so taken with the mystery that he decided to bring it up in his wildlife management class a few days later. Raising his hand, he asked his professor what the strange ape-men, seen by people across the Pacific Northwest, could possibly be. He had barely spoken his last words when the lecture hall erupted in peals of laughter. Bindernagel looked on as his fellow students keeled over in convulsions of cackling. The answer, the professor said, stepping in to adjudicate, was simple: Bigfoot was a hoax. With a reproachful glance, he added that the subject wasn’t fit for serious discussion in class, and that it shouldn’t be brought up again.
Rejected by his peers, the angry and embarrassed undergrad resolved to pursue the topic quietly on the side for as long as it took to yield answers. The subject would eventually consume him, becoming his life’s obsession.
In 1998, more than three decades later, Bindernagel, a career wildlife biologist, published a book entitled North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch. In it, he argued that the reported physical and behavioral attributes of Bigfoot are so similar to those of known primates that the creatures are almost certainly an undiscovered species of great ape. It was a deliberate act of demystification reflected in the book’s subtitle: A Wildlife Biologist Looks at the Continent’s Most Misunderstood Large Mammal.
I reached out to Bindernagel, now living in British Columbia, before leaving on my trip. He was thrilled by my interest and invited me to stop in at Courtenay, the laid-back community on the east coast of Vancouver Island, to spend the day with him. Not only would I gain insight into the Sasquatch from the perspective of a scientist working on the subject—there are only a handful of such scientists in the world—but it would also provide access to the mind of a man who, for most of his life, has known the relentless pursuit of a creature that the wider world, including his own colleagues, insists does not exist.
When I pull up to Bindernagel’s home—a small, aging bungalow in a leafy subdivision on the edge of town—both he and his wife are waiting on the front lawn. Bindernagel, who brandishes a toddler’s smile and keeps his hands glued inside his pockets, looks very much the academic, with his wiry gray beard, beige slacks, and denim shirt. Joan, his wife, a petite and innocent-looking blonde, stands by his side, also smiling shyly.
The image and demeanor of the wildlife biologist couldn’t be any further from the monster-hunter stereotype: the outspoken and abrasive alpha male decked out in commando-style bushwhacking gear and battlefield accoutrements. I’d always known that Bindernagel embodied a different archetype. Even so, I was surprised by how polite and deferential he was on the phone. His endearing use of the fading interjections of mid-twentieth-century English, like my goodness, gee whiz, and shucks, only sets him further apart from the pushy gaggle of bounty hunters. But when we shake hands, I catch a flash of stubborn determination and restless agitation rising from beneath the old-fashioned niceties. This is someone questing for a grail.
“I just came back from checking the camera traps,” he says, as we stroll toward his home, referring to the battery-operated digital trail cameras that Sasquatch enthusiasts strap to the trunks of trees in the hope of photographing the creatures by chance. “That’s my latest project. I’ve been getting loads of great images of black bears, deer, and even cougars.”
“No Sasquatches?” I playfully ask.
“They’re a bit more camera shy, as you can imagine,” he says chuckling. “But, gee, you know, we’re just weeks away from the salmon coming in. That’s when the Sasquatch come down from the mountains for that first bit of rich protein after a dry summer.”
We step inside and Bindernagel leads me into his living room, which resembles a flea market. Stacks of books, mounds of paper, and cardboard boxes teeming with knickknacks are heaped on top of retro 1970s furniture. Joan apologizes for the mess, saying they’re in the process of moving.
When I look down, I see assembled neatly on the floor several white plaster-of-Paris cas
ts of gigantic, humanoid footprints—Sasquatch tracks. Most of them are a foot and a half in length, and considerably wide at the sides. Some look very human. Others are more mushroom-like, with splayed toes. They are all unsettling.
Bindernagel takes a step back and gauges my reaction. I pick up a cast, the most intact and symmetrical of the bunch. It’s lean and muscular, with unusually long toes and a slight hourglass shape to it.
“Joan and I came across that one in 1988 during a hike in Strathcona Park, not far from here,” he says. “They’re the only tracks I’ve ever found myself. That one’s sixteen inches.”
I eye the details of the heavy plaster cast as if it were some rare artifact.
“Tracks are the best evidence we have,” he adds, gently taking the cast from my hands and placing it carefully on the ground before I’m finished with it. “People sometimes laugh at us for making these casts. But when it comes to studying other mammals, we biologists depend more on tracks than on sightings.”
“How do you reconcile these tracks with the fact that people have been known to hoax footprints?” I ask.
“I’ll show you,” he says, with confident enthusiasm, picking up another cast, with much shorter toes. “This is one of a series of tracks in which the Sasquatch had a very flexible foot. It would scrunch, or curl, its toes while it walked. You couldn’t fake a track like this.”
I examine the cast. The toes are spread out asymmetrically.
“We have others, similar to this, that show the animal climbing up a steep hill, with its toes moving from track to track—and with little or no heel registering in the soil. In some cases, you’d need to carry hundreds of pounds just to make a deep enough impression in the ground. That’s too big of a job for a hoaxer.”
I’d heard similar arguments. The late Grover S. Krantz, a paleoanthropologist at Washington State University who had researched Sasquatch from the early 1960s until his death in 2002, alleged that some purported Sasquatch tracks revealed a perfect alignment of joints and bones—the same range of anatomical features that reflect the necessary biomechanical redesign of the foot to carry a mass that large. He also showed some tracks that contain dermal ridges: skin patterns on the sole of the foot similar to fingerprints.* Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University and the inheritor of Krantz’s scholarly Sasquatch mantle (including his collection of Bigfoot casts), continues to plug those arguments.
“If this is all so incontrovertible,” I say to Bindernagel, “then why aren’t other scientists looking into this?”
“That’s the $64,000 question,” he says. “The answer: ignorance of the evidence. And it’s also the implication of the evidence—that we’re dealing with an existing mammal. Scientists can’t handle that.”
In full stride Bindernagel picks up another massive plaster cast of the splayed-toe, mushroom-like variety.
“Scientists will look at this track, but then a theoretical problem crops up. How can we have an upright ape in the world? And, of all places, here in North America? To them it’s just a preposterous claim.”
“But maybe it is preposterous,” I suggest. “What if the Sasquatches don’t exist? Where are they? Isn’t that the $64,000 question?”
Bindernagel’s eyebrows furl. “The question no longer is: Does the Sasquatch exist? That one’s been solved. It exists. The question now is: Why is it scientifically taboo?”
My line of questioning has pushed a button. The biologist’s calm, jovial manner transforms into an agitation that becomes personal.
“Do you know that there’s been almost no recognition of my books? The only reason I can live with this is that once the animal is proven, people will ask, ‘Why didn’t we see this coming?’ And I’ll say to them, ‘We did! I wrote about it years before in those books that all of you have ignored!’“
Joan, who is listening with her back to us at the other end of the room, turns to give her husband a commiserating look. Bindernagel shoots her a pained expression before returning his gaze to me. His eyes are now glazed; his chin quivers ever so slightly.
“Look at me. I’m not a young man anymore. I’m seventy-two years old, and the clock is ticking.”
John Bindernagel’s unceasing half-century quest to get the Sasquatch included in the lexicon of North American mammals has been nothing short of an odyssey for personal vindication.
In the years after his humiliation at the university, Bindernagel scoured every library looking for any information about giant ape-men. At first he found no more than a few tongue-in-cheek reports in old newspaper clippings. Pithier material in books about the Abominable Snowman or Yeti of Nepal also fell into his dragnet. But Bigfoot’s cousin in the Himalayas was both too geographically distant and too nebulous in terms of evidence to be of any use to Bindernagel.
When a British Columbian journalist from Harrison Hot Springs named John Green, a pioneering Bigfoot researcher, started publishing serious books on the subject in the late 1960s, Bindernagel found what he was looking for. Green’s encyclopedic tomes—repositories of impeccably researched eyewitness accounts from across the Pacific Northwest—made him realize that the Sasquatch phenomenon was far more prevalent and widespread than he had even imagined. All of this came at a crossroads for the young wildlife biologist. With his graduate work behind him, Bindernagel was now trying to find his specialty in a field in which original research topics were quickly grabbed by the flood of academics coming out of school. One of Bindernagel’s role models, the American field biologist George Schaller, had become famous for his research on the African lion and mountain gorilla. Bindernagel, who was still without expertise on any animal, knew he had to act fast if he wanted to make his mark.
“Here’s George, the first serious biologist to write about large mammals, and I’m thinking: Is there going to be anything left for the rest of us?” Bindernagel recalls. “I was working on the African buffalo at the time, but someone else had made that his niche. I needed something new. And then one day it hit me like a bolt of lightning: I could make the Sasquatch my animal of specialization!”
Bindernagel carried his epiphany with him to Tanzania, where he took a job as a wildlife consultant for the United Nations. There, a group of scientists at the Serengeti Research Institute helped cement his desire to study the reputed animals.
“I raised the subject there. And there was no laughter and no joking. They said, ‘John, if I were you, and I wanted to pursue this back in Canada, I would do such and such.’ These were British, Dutch, and American scientists. They were first class and were unbelievably supportive.”
In 1975, Bindernagel and Joan moved back to Canada, where they set themselves up on the east coast of Vancouver Island. It was an area of frequent Sasquatch reports, and the biologist wanted to be as close as possible to his bounty. But the financial realities of life, including raising a family, meant that the nonpaying research had to play second fiddle to conventional biology gigs. To make ends meet, Bindernagel spent the coming decade piecing together wildlife survey and consultancy jobs, some of them abroad. He spent his off time pounding the pavement in British Columbia to build his dossier of ape-men reports.
“I’d look for eyewitnesses at a dock, at Port Hardy or someplace, and there would be jokes,” he says. “I’d ask: ‘Has anyone here seen a Sasquatch?’ And people would respond: ‘Just my brother-in-law! Ah-ho-ho-ho!’ In those moments I felt it wasn’t working. But once in a while there would be a really good report. And it went on like that for years.”
By the mid-1980s, Bindernagel had assembled a large dossier of firsthand reports from across the province. He’d cut his teeth like the best of the investigators, and was becoming a local authority in the burgeoning field of Sasqualogy. But he was also losing hope that a Bigfoot would ever be brought back from the woods in chains. A physical specimen had still not been produced, and society as a whole seemed no closer to accepting a creature of tabloid farce. For Bindernagel, who was spending his ow
n money with virtually no payback, the Sasquatch began to look more and more like a chimera. As much as he tried to keep his activities hidden from his associates in the scientific community, rumors about his part-time sleuthing had reached the ears of more and more colleagues. People in academia were beginning to talk. Suddenly, Bindernagel’s reputation, credibility, and livelihood all seemed to be on the line. So the biologist did what any self-respecting scientist with a wife and two kids would do in that situation: he shelved the creature. After a solid ten-year run, Bindernagel’s hobby, passion, and would-be career were dead in the water. For the first time in his adult life, he found himself forlorn and rudderless. Everything seemed without purpose.
Then in October 1988, something entirely unexpected happened. Bindernagel and his wife were helping guide a group of seventh-grade girls on an overnight camping trip in nearby Strathcona Provincial Park. During the hike in, one of the girls trailing at the back of the caravan stopped in her tracks with her eyes fixed on the ground beside the trail.
“What’s that?” she shouted, pointing toward a patch of mud. Bindernagel approached to see what was the matter.
“When I got there,” he recalls, “I looked down and—my goodness!—I was beside myself: there was a Sasquatch track!”