Yay! Another derail to the Giganto diet, Skookum event, and Swindler stuff I'm pursuing!I've seen some interesting ones taken from the air. Have any of those handy?
Powder Mountain? Not handy, but there's a shot in
Meet the Sasquatch and Dahinden's book, I believe. They may be online. Barbara Wasson tried to explain them away as a "jumping animal", but I don't think she said what kind. Hard to imagine, especially after observing wild rabbits so closely recently, that a "jumping animal" could leave such consistant impressions over such a distance.
Those would be cool to see again.Yes, I've often heard these anecdotes (to me they are) of tracks leading up inclines in an inhuman manner and the outlandish explanations for them (the jumping down the hill backwards makes me chuckle). Definitely I'd like to know if there are any available pics.
There's a shot in The Mysterious Monsters, but it looks like a single trackway to me. Ed is seen giving his account of the discovery of the double trackway shortly afterwards. He told me the story some 30 years later as though it had happened yesterday. (He was a county commissioner then.)
An anecdote is a short account of an incident (especially a biographical one). There's nothing in the word to indicate falsehood.
Fair enough but I think when looking at anything that astounds us for which we can't surmise an explanation we would do well to keep in mind the many ingenious and often simple ways we can be fooled regardless our training/education.
Investigators do just that. Your example from Krantz is a good one. The shape gave it away.
"Fake Tracks
According to the critics all Bigfoot tracks are fakes made by hoaxers with a pair of large false feet attached to their shoes. The weight required to make a typical footprint has been estimated at 700 pounds (Krantz 1992). Author/researcher John Green attempted to simulate the depth of Sasquatch footprints while wearing 14½ inch fake feet and carrying a load of 250 pounds (Green 1978), his total weight of 450 pounds was too light to make deep enough impressions in firm wet sand. A kind of mechanical stamping device or footprint machine may be an alternative means of faking tracks...
...but an apparatus capable of delivering a thrust of approximately 800 lb per square foot that can be manhandled over rough and mountainous country puts a strain on one's credulity. (Napier 1974, p.125)
Careful studies of Sasquatch footprints, by geologist Dr Maurice Tripp, found no evidence of the impact ridges that a mechanical device would be expected to leave (Napier 1974).
The huge number of tracks that have been found and the remoteness of the areas where they have been discovered argue against large-scale faking. Some of these tracks extended for distances of three-quarters of a mile up to several miles with thousands of individual footprints. A series of three thousand footprints, each 16 inches long, was found on a logging road in the Cascade Mountains. On another occasion a long line of prints were discovered on Powder Mountain, about 65 miles north of Vancouver, by a man flying low over the mountain in a helicopter. The tracks were 4,800 feet up the mountainside and ran for five miles before disappearing into ice caves at the foot of a glacier (Hunter 1993). With something like 100 million track events having occurred over the last forty years:
...the skeptics must postulate a well-organized team of one thousand people, working full-time, who are spread over all of North America with their greatest concentration in the Pacific Northwest. (Krantz 1992, p.34)
An independent study of a database of 706 track length measurements further supports the contention that there is no evidence of large scale fakery:
The normal distribution argues compellingly against any alternative hypothesis to the existence of the Sasquatch as a cryptic species, in that production of fictitious data over 40 years by hundreds of people independently of each other would have generated a distribution with many peaks. A further factor that supports the authenticity of the data is the fact that foot length, foot width, heel width, and gait are interrelated in a logical and cohesive fashion, a congruence not plausible by pure chance. (Fahrenbach 1998, pp.50-51)
Finally, there is the question of how the fakers manage to produce footprints that are so biologically convincing (Napier 1974, p.125). If they were all the same a hoax would automatically be suspected but Sasquatch footprints vary — some anatomical features are constant, but they are sufficiently different for individuals to be recognised by their footprints."
http://home.clara.net/rfthomas/bf_prints.html
