Sean C. Morgan
Bigfoot researchers get a lot of questions from the public throughout the year, so they were happy to get together over the weekend and hang out at Cascadia State Park with like-minded folks last weekend to compare notes and share stories.
Some 20 to 30 people attended the annual campout, said Western Bigfoot Society Vice President Pattie Reinhold, who hosted the event with her husband, Bob. This is the second year the group has met at the state park after the annual campout was put on hiatus after the event in 2007 held at Longbow Organizational Camp.
“Since Ray (Crowe, director of the WBS), came out of retirement, it’s kind of business as usual,” she said.
Some of the participants aren’t particularly interested in proving the existence of Bigfoot. They know what they’ve seen, and they’re studying it. They may enjoy a break from answering questions and listening to skeptics’ criticisms and arguments, but they’re happy to take a few minutes to relate their experiences and research anyway.
Among visitors to Sweet Home was Thom Cantrall, a writer and Bigfoot researcher from Kennewick, Wash., who considers the best proof for Bigfoot to be the intermembral index, a ratio used to compare limb proportions. In one of his books, he displays images of what costumed arm extenders and what different IM ratios look like on different primates.
The IM ratio is the first thing Cantrall said he looks at when he sees an image of Bigfoot. He said some 95 percent of those images on the web are fakes, but many are real, including the famous and controversial Patterson Gimlin film from 1967. A recreation in a BBC documentary, which attempted to recreate the original segment.
The anatomical proportions in the Patterson Gimlin film show the Bigfoot is not a human in a costume, Cantrall said.
The proportions in the documentary’s “Bigfoot” were clearly off, Cantrall said. The creature turned its head at the neck, while the Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot must turn its shoulders with its head.
Cantrall said he has been researching Bigfoot since 1958 following the “Jerry Crew” incident,” in which a bulldozer operator arrived for work on road construction near Bluff Creek in Humboldt County, Calif., to find huge tracks around the work site. He made a cast of one of them and took it to the local newspaper office.
“I grew up in that area,” Cantrall said.
Writer Ron Morehead of Yosemite, Calif., who has been researching Bigfoot for more than 40 years, was also at the Cascadia camp. He and Al Berry recorded what are called the “Sierra Sounds,” which indicate language among the Bigfoot, in the 1970s.
Several Bigfoot came around Morehead’s camp in a remote area in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he said.
“We didn’t know what it was,” Morehead said. “We thought it was a bear.”
But they didn’t find bear sign. Instead, it began an interaction with Bigfoot lasting between two and three years, and Morehead began recording the sounds. The Sierra recordings were studied at the University of Wyoming in 1978. A cryptolinguist got hold of the recordings in 2008 and discovered a language in the vocalizations, he said.
“I believe them to be sentient, self-aware,” Morehead said. “They’re like a people. There’s more to them than even that. There’s kind of an enigma associated with these things.”
Morehead’s latest research took him to Peru earlier this year where he found unusual large crested skulls, one in a museum.
“When you see this stuff firsthand, that kind of changes things for you,” Morehead said.
Cascadia State Park is the location of at least one Bigfoot report, and Leann McCoy of Beaverton believes she heard one last year while camped out when she heard sloshing sounds in the South Santiam River.
“I first saw one when I was 3 1/2 years old,” McCoy said. That was in Tillamook. She believes she has a connection to them and has had many Bigfoot experiences throughout her life. ‘They’ve shown to me several times.”
David Rodriguez of Springfield said he has had multiple encounters too.
He saw his first one in the Yosemite area just after high school, he said. He and his roommate would go to Los Angeles during the weekends. Driving home late one night, he came around a curve at 35 mph and lit up a Bigfoot coming off a hillside. His pickup had all of the aftermarket lighting on it.
“I was in shock,” Rodriguez said. Previously, he had found the Patterson Gimlin film intriguing. Since then, he’s encountered Bigfoot three times, mostly when hunting deer and elk.
The most significant sighting was six years ago, he said. He was hunting in the Cascades and made his last stop for the day at a clearcut.
“I heard something coming through the timber,” Rodriguez said. It was about 300 yards away on a beeline for the trail out of the area.
“He knew which way I had to go out,” Rodriguez said. “He stopped right on that trail. For the first few minutes, I took stock and assessed my options.”
He didn’t have many, and it was getting dark, Rodriguez said. He didn’t want to confront the Bigfoot. “I realized I can’t just stay here all night because more would show up. He was not happy.”
The trail was bordered by old growth on one side and reprod on the other, Rodriguez said. It had an understory of brambles and blackberries. He started out. About 60 feet from the Bigfoot, he and his dog went down into a 15-foot gully. He told his dog to run. He had to get out quickly.
He came up out of the gully and saw the Bigfoot on the side of the trail, Rodriguez said. “It was very intimidating.”
He approached the Bigfoot and started talking to him, Rodriguez said. Rodriguez was shaking. His dog was shaking. He kept telling the Bigfoot he just wanted to go home. The Bigfoot just turned his body.
“Once we got past him, the pace picked up,” Rodriguez said.
The incident scared Rodriguez, and he didn’t venture into that area again for two years. He talked himself into going into the woods elsewhere, but he didn’t want to return to that place.
When he did return, within 15 minutes he heard noises, movement and branches breaking.
“I let out a howl I once heard,” Rodriguez said, and he heard a loud “howl off the other way.”
He kind of viewed the response as a welcome back, he said.
He believes that other hunters might have started shooting at the Bigfoot, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to shoot one, and he believes the Bigfoot respected that and that they can sense when someone means them harm.
Coming up next, Cantrall said, is a meeting of the International Society for Primal People at 7 p.m. on July 20 at the Home Restaurant in Silverton. The public is invited to attend.