This refers to the tracks found by Jerry Crews, not Patterson and Gimlin, but it gives an idea of the conditions in which some of these trackways have been found.
"$100,000.00 for BIGFOOT TRACKS
One hundred thousand dollars is being offered by the Willow Creek China Flat Museum for anyone who can demonstrate how the “Bigfoot†tracks that were observed in the Bluff Creek valley in northern California in 1958 and later could have been made by a human or humans.
This offer is genuine. It is not a joke or a publicity stunt.
The money has been arranged for, and the first person or group who can meet the conditions of the offer will receive it. Everyone should understand, however, that the conditions are not easy.
The offer is a direct result of recent publicity which has created a perception that the Bluff Creek tracks were just a hoax carried out by practical joker walking around wearing a large pair of carved wooden feet, but it is not meant as a challenge to the people who originated that story, who may well be perfectly sincere .
The offer also is not a prize for technological achievement, such as being the first to build an effective footprint-stamping machine. It relates entirely to the question of whether the real tracks which brought the “Bigfoot†phenomenon to public attention could have been made by humans
under the real conditions of the times and the places in which they appeared.
The museum has casts of some of the tracks concerned, a few of them copies but mainly originals, available for inspection. It also has some related photographs, and published accounts of what was done and observed in connection with the tracks. There are also people still available for consultation who studied the tracks when they were made.
A formal document setting out the requirements to qualify for the award will take time to prepare, but a successful applicant will have to be able to make flat-footed, humanlike tracks with more than twice the area of human feet and longer-than-human strides which do the following:
1) Traverse a variety of terrains, including climbing, descending and crossing steep slopes covered with underbrush;
2) Show variations of shape and toe position and stride accommodating to the terrain;
3) Sink into firm ground to far greater depth than human footprints specifically as much as an inch deep in hard sand where human prints barely penetrate at all;
4) Leave hard objects in the ground, such as stones, sticking up above the rest of the track.
The applicant will also have to be able to make these tracks under the following conditions, although not all in combination: 1) In the dark, hundreds in a single night; 2) In places where it is impossible to bring any vehicle or other machine or any equipment except what humans or animals could carry; 3) Without doing anything to attract the notice of people a few
hundred yards away.
Interested parties may contact the museum president, Jo Ann Hereford, phone 530-629-3726;
e-mail:
josie@cwo.com
Media contact concerning this offer is John Green, phone 604-796-3206;
e-mail:
jgreens@shaw.ca"
Like James Randi's, the money has never been safer.
