This is the last installment of the “Suspects for Sasquatch” series. This time we are looking at the idea that most Bigfoot stories are hoaxes and the idea that Bigfoot originated as a hoax. The other articles in the series are here:
The Likely Suspects for Sasquatch
Sasquatch Suspect #2: Undiscovered Primates
Sasquatch Suspect #3: Relict Humans
We cannot, of course, compare these like we did the other suspects – breaking down habitat, diet, behavior, and appearance. What we can do is look at the origins of the idea of Sasquatch, and some known hoaxes. We can also see if the idea that the overwhelming majority of sightings are hoaxed holds any water. There is physical evidence too. What are the chances that is hoaxed? Let’s see.
The Ray Wallace Hoax
Without a doubt nothing has done more harm to the view of Bigfoots as actual creatures in the eyes of the general public than the Ray Wallace story. I just read an article in the Daily Mail recently that followed the all too familiar pattern of claiming Bigfoot was more or less invented by Ray Wallace in 1958. The Daily Mail article does at least credit indigenous peoples’ traditions.
The truth about Ray Wallace’s involvement in Bigfoot isn’t as straightforward as some would have you believe. Ray Wallace owned a construction company that became known because of workers finding huge footprints at a jobsite in Humboldt County, California. The local newspaper picked up the story and gave the moniker “Bigfoot” to the public for the first time.
A member of the crew – Jerry Crew – is the one who cast the footprint and made the initial report. But Wallace was a known prankster, and the local sheriff accused him of creating the footprints as a hoax (Meldrum, 2006). Wallace denied this and claimed the discovery had actually hurt his business. Still some claim that Wallace had other motives and did in fact hoax the whole thing.
The fact is that Wallace did indeed have someone create wooden feet for him at some point and created hoaxed casts. He also faked some other Bigfoot paraphernalia throughout the years. He claimed he told Roger Patterson where to shoot his infamous film, though there is no evidence to support this outside his claim. There is also the fact that the carved feet provided by the Wallace family do not match the tracks found on the site of the initial incident.
Whether or not Ray Wallace hoaxed the entire original incident, he did not “invent” Bigfoot. He didn’t even come up with the name. The persistence of this story has harmed the study of this legend immensely due to the media carrying the narrative forward. Serious scientists won’t get involved when the first bit of research they do leads them to these accusations.
The truth is that the legend of Bigfoots can be traced much further back, so long as you don’t confine your research to that name for them.
The Chehalis Accounts
J.W. Burns was a teacher and agent assigned to the Chehalis First Nations People in British Columbia during the early 20th century. In 1929 he wrote an article for Maclean’s called “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants”. This is where we get the word sasquatch, believed to be derived from the Chehalis word sasq’ets which is said to mean hairy man.
Sasquatches are said to have been known for centuries among these people. They describe them as hairy, wild people who are twice as big as the normal human. Their lore places them deep in the mountains with them occasionally interacting with people, and some even saying they spoke the Douglas language. We know for sure they had been reported to be seen in these areas for at least twenty years prior to this.
There are numerous other accounts pre-dating the 1950s that I won’t get into here, and lots of other Native American lore that indicates a the presence of this idea for centuries. For this article, though we are focusing on how well the hoax theory holds up. This brief history is just to show a longer lineage of sightings than hoax proponents usually cite.
The Footprint Evidence
Proponents of the hoax theory say that the footprint evidence is faked by people with false feet going around making impressions in the ground. They either then cast the impressions themselves to perpetrate their fabrication, or they allow gullible passers-by to report the finding as genuine. This has certainly happened, and has been uncovered as the origin for accounts numerous times. But all of them? Not even close.
Footprints casts have been examined by experts in the field of anthropology and foot morphology, most notably Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum of Idaho State University. Meldrum has examined numerous tracks and determined them to be from a genuine bipedal animal. Drs. Grover Krantz and John Bindernagel concur with Meldrum.
The clincher for me is the presence of dermal ridges. Fingerprints for the toes are visible on multiple track casts. Jimmy Chilcutt is a fingerprint expert in humans and in other primates and he has analyzed castings and determined them to be genuine as it relates to dermal ridges. Now one could say that with the proliferation of information available today that a diligent hoaxer would know to include this detail in his false foot. However, these details appear in tracks that were cast before anyone ever looked for such a detail. The idea that someone would spend the time and resources to insure that this small detail were present just to pull off a hoax seems improbable to me. I don’t believe most pranksters or fame hungry hucksters would even give this a thought – even today.
Dr. Henner Farenbach published a statistical analysis of footprint evidence in the late 1990s that had intriguing findings on the subject. The most compelling finding was that the lengths of the prints followed a pattern consistent with real creatures. When plotted on a graph the print lengths show a natural peak in median size. Farenbach argued that this would not happen with hoaxes, as the data would be scattered all over the place.
In fact, it seems to me that the likelihood of a footprint with dermal ridges being a hoax is far more improbable than there being an undiscovered species living in the forests of North America.
The Pictures and Videos
Admittedly, most pictures and videos purported to be Bigfoots are too blurry, out of focus, or far away to really know what is pictured. The Patterson-Gimlin Film is thought by a lot of researchers to be the “gold standard” for footage, but even the authenticity of this seminal footage is up for debate. I will say that numerous people have analyzed the footage and concluded it to be of a real creature.
Can videos and photos be faked? Of course, and they have. Today it’s pretty easy to get a suit that would be fairly convincing from a distance and over a short period. However they can’t all be fakes. Skeptics would argue they are all either fake or misidentification of other things. This could be true I suppose, there is a precedent for misidentifications. For example, on an episode of MonsterQuest a photo supposedly showing a Bigfoot was found to be a bird midflight really close to the lens.
I won’t go into analyzing videos or pictures here, but I will include the videos I find most compelling:
The Hair and DNA Evidence
There are many samples of what is supposed to be Bigfoot hair, feces, or other physical evidence. A lot of these samples have been scientifically tested. Most of the time they turn out to be from known animals, and this gives fuel the doubters. But some of them come back as unknown. Meldrum points out in his book that unknown does not mean not real. Science doesn’t have a type specimen for Sasquatch, so there is no record for comparison. Any result of unknown should be encouraging, not discouraging.
Researchers seem to have found some consistencies in hair samples that are purported to be from Bigfoots. In these otherwise unidentifiable samples there is little to no medulla, a feature that distinguishes them from known species.
There are also plenty of DNA results out there have come back as unknown or as primate. Now one could argue that human contamination could cause a primate result, but some of the samples were procured by scientists using proper collection methods. While filming the television show MonsterQuest at Snelgrove Lake in Ontario, Canada, Drs. Jeffrey Meldrum and Curt Nelson collected tissue samples that later tested as primate. Filming for Expedition Bigfoot, Dr. Mireya Mayor collected eDNA that came back as chimpanzee in Kentucky. But then there is Dr. Melba Ketchum.
Perhaps the second most destructive incident in the study of Sasquatch is the Ketchum DNA study. Ketchum, a veterinary scientist, a first gained some notoriety on Destination Truth, where she tested a sample provided by the show that came back as primate. She later started the “Sasquatch Genome Project” and eventually published a paper concluding Sasquatches to be human/ape hybrids.
She had to self-publish, because the study was rejected by mainstream scientific journals. The journal she published, Denovo, only ever had one issue – the one for the Sasquatch Genome Project. A full rundown of the problems can be found on Ars Technica.
But just because this one episode turned out horribly does not mean we can ignore all of the DNA and hair evidence that is compelling. More research and comparison of samples is needed, and it is indeed hard to sift through all of the negatives to get a positive. Hopefully, though, dedicated researchers will perservere and one day be able to bring in more serious scientific analysis.
Conclusion
It’s pretty simple. Yes there have been hoaxes. No, not all reports or evidence are hoaxed. Hoaxes make it harder to gain any sympathy from skeptics, but anyone that wants to do a earnest dive into the subject will find it to be much more complicated than “Oh, yeah, that Wallace guy started that.”
Legends of hairy, upright, man-like beasts have persisted for hundreds of years, and they aren’t likely to go away anytime soon. So while some may want to believe that Bigfoot is simply gullible people being fooled by modern hucksters, the truth cannot be that simple.
