Canadian Sasquatch Article

[From “CBC News”. May, 5/ 2005.]

How is it possible for people to believe that we share the planet with huge creatures that have somehow managed to remain largely hidden for generations, despite intensive searches for the existence of even a single example?

Call it gullibility. Call it wishful thinking. Call it the desire for tourist dollars. But those sketchy eyewitness accounts from people who sound believable and those few fuzzy photos and jerky film clips have combined to create a critical mass of cosmic goo that has given a kind of life to some legendary inhabitants of land and sea.

These unknown beasts know no boundaries – ape-like hominids from North America, Asia and Africa; sea serpents from Scotland to Canada; giant snakes from South America – the list is long and colorful.

Believers point to the 20th-century discovery of such real creatures as the Komodo dragon monitor lizard or the Coelacanth, a two-meter long fish thought to have been extinct for millions of years, as proof that it is still possible for creatures to evade discovery in the modern world. But that, of course, does not constitute proof that all the beasts of myth and legend are real. Just how does one prove that something doesn’t exist? And so the search for that most elusive of quarries goes on.

Here then, a brief field guide to the most famous of the unproven, with special emphasis on Canada’s cryptids – the shy creatures that have engaged the public imagination despite (or perhaps because of) the skepticism and denials of the experts.

Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Yeti

Some believe this to be a female Sasquatch in northern California, seen in this frame, taken from footage by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in 1967. (AP Photo/Sasquatch Research Project, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin)Throughout the last century, there have been many reported sightings in the Pacific Northwest of a tall, hairy, ape-like creature that walks on two legs. Some reports describe groups of Sasquatches foraging for berries, some say it knows how to swim, whistle, verbalize, and even scream. Invariably, it is described as shy.

According to one account, the term Sasquatch comes from a Chehalis word meaning Wildman and was coined by a teacher in British Columbia in the 1920s. The Sasquatch name is usually applied to sightings in Canada, especially B.C. – but Bigfoot/Sasquatch researchers often use the terms interchangeably.

Bigfoot researchers have analyzed feces and hair samples supposedly left by the mysterious creatures. Giant footprints yield calculations about the creature’s weight and size (almost three meters tall and 150 to 325 kg).

But a picture, as they say, is worth a thousand stories.

The most famous evidence cited by Sasquatch/Bigfoot believers is a 16-mm film shot in northern California in 1967. It shows a hairy, apelike creature (supposedly a female) walking across a field as she looks over her right shoulder. Believers insist their analysis proves its not a guy in a gorilla suit.

In April 2005, a car ferry operator in Norway House, Man., shot three minutes of video of a big, black figure moving on the opposite side of the river. He said the creature was massive. The video is, to say the least, indistinct.

Other jurisdictions claim their own versions of Bigfoot/Sasquatch. The Texas Bigfoot Research Center chronicles a history of sightings going back to 1924. And then there’s Momo,Missouri Monster and the woman in Michigan who said her black eye was the product of an attack from a ?huge, dark, hairy creature.?

Legends of Yeti (also known as the Abominable Snowman) have floated around the Himalayan villages of Nepal and Tibet for generations. Some sightings have the creature with dark hair, like the Bigfoot. Others describe a man-sized, reddish-brown creature. Yeti apparently like yak meat. Believers insist they’re really not that abominable.

WCSRO, 2006.