Sasquatch

Frame 352 of a film showing a sasquatch, shot near Bluff Creek, California by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin on October 20, 1967.

The Sasquatch is an ape-like animal which inhabits the remote forested areas of much of North America, especially the Pacific northwest of the United States and Canada. This is reflected in native folklore and a large number of sightings.

Name

The word “sasquatch” is a corruption of se'sxac, which came from the Bitterroot Salish tribe of Western Montana, meaning “wild men”, and the first use of this word can be traced to the research of a school teacher at the Chehalis Indian Reserve in British Columbia named J.W. Burns in the mid-1920s. Burns had collected a large amount of material describing the sasquatch by the Pacific northwest tribes, noting the similarity between the slightly different names used by individual tribes when referring to the "wild men", and then possibly combining them all into one word. The famous modern term bigfoot has been in use since approximately the same time, but received national exposure during the late 1950s, when loggers in northern California county of Humbolt began seeing the large tracks for which they were named.

Evidence

Sightings

Eyewitness accounts describe a large and bipedal creature, standing between 6 and 9 feet tall, and covered completely with course, dark-reddish or brown hair. The ape-like head is said to sit directly upon the shoulders, with no neck visible, and is sometimes crowned with a sagittal crest. An extremely-foul odor has also been described by witnesses, giving the sasquatch the derisive name of skunk ape.

Those accounts closely match Gigantopithecus blacki, an anthropoid ape, believed to be extinct and known only from a few molars and the frontal part of a lower mandible found in southern China. Many scientists, most notably the late anthropologist Dr. Grover Krantz, accept the existence of the sasquatch. Dr. Krantz has stated that despite the lack of a pelvis as evidence, the width of the Gigantopithecus jawbone widened considerably from front to rear, similar to humans and unlike modern apes, creates room for the windpipe to sit within the space of the jaw itself and thus indicating a bipedal stance.

Tracks

The sasquatch has left many tracks in remote areas found by loggers, hikers, and others. The tracks are human in appearance except for size, which if fitted for a shoe would be a size 23-24. Some tracks are also created by hoaxers wearing wooden or rubber fakes, these can usually be detetected but many have been fooled by them. One track found near the town of Bossburg, Washington in 1969 was described by Dr. Krantz as having come from an individual with a deformed or “club” foot; its mate was normal. Other sets have been collected and preserved with intricate dermal ridges and wrinkles as one would expect from a real animal.

Skookum body cast

During the summer of 2000 members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization constructed a fruit-baited “mud trap”, designed to collect tracks; instead the researchers recovered a partial body impression of a “skookum” (sasquatch in the Chinook language) as it laid in the mud to eat. The impression included details of the animal’s hindquarters, ankles, left arm and hair.

Secular Science

Secular science rejects the reliable eyewitness accounts and evidence meticulously colllected by the best of the public. Instead they regard researching the sasquatch as cryptozoology, which includes such creatures as the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland and the Yeti of the Himalayas. Eyewitness accounts are dismissed as either a series of hoaxes or misinterpretations of something else. They also claim that gigantopithecus was a quadruped and not bipedal like the sasquatch. The Skookum body cast is simply dismissed as the the impression of an elk.

Many Scientists often take an approach to cryptozoology which is very similar to their environmental alarmism. This was aptly summed up by Richard Lindzen: "Essentially if whatever you are told is alleged to be supported by 'all scientists,' you don't have to understand [the issue] anymore. You simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief."