How come Ryerson never gets a mention here?
""Of course the whole thing seems crazy," he (Dahinden) admits, speaking in a heavy Swiss accent and puffing methodically on a cigarillo. "An 800-pound, half-human creature walking around practically in our backyards? But you can't just turn your back on the facts. Take those tracks I was looking down at last week. . ."
The tracks in question had been discovered late this summer by Bud Ryerson, a building contractor, in California's Bluff Creek area between Reading and Eureka. Imbedded in the soft dirt of a logging road, they looked much like the prints of flat footed human beings — except that some were 15 inches long and seven inches wide.
In describing his find to Seattle, Ryerson spoke over a radio phone from his road building camp in Bluff Creek. "I'd seen similar tracks before, but never in this quantity," he said. "There were more than 1,000 of them, and the different sizes suggested they were made by at least three separate creatures. Their depth indicated they weighed more than 500 pounds. Whatever it was that made them had picked up some of my crates containing tractor parts. These crates weigh about 50 pounds, and the creatures had carried them several hundred yards into the brush before dropping them."
Alarmed because his equipment had been disturbed, Ryerson called in a sheriff's deputy who found large fingerprints on the cases, but, unfortunately, the prints proved too smudged to be conclusive. Meanwhile, Ryerson had also called John Green, the publisher of a British Columbia newspaper called the Agassiz-Harrison Advance, who is one of the continent's foremost believers in Sasquatches. Green, in turn, informed Dahinden, who talked the Vancouver Sun into chartering a small plane to take both men to Bluff Creek.
Arriving the day after the tracks were discovered, Dahinden took one look at them and telephoned the Provincial Museum in Victoria. Convinced that the tracks were no simple hoax, the museum authorities promptly dispatched Donald C. Abbott, the Provincial anthropologist, to study them scientifically.
"Those prints were not made by any known animals. That leaves only two possibilities. Either someone is pulling one of the most complicated stunts ever, or the prints were made by a large bipedal primate that has never been described before."Abbott frankly concedes that what he saw when he got there shook him. "I was laughing at the whole idea all the way down," he remarks. "Now I don't think it's a subject for mirth anymore. You realize that a scientist could ruin his reputation by going out on a limb and saying the creatures exist. So I won't say I believe in them, but I am genuinely puzzled."
One of the most perplexing aspects of the prints was their clear indication that whatever made them had a five-foot stride. Taking all possibilities into account, the Sasquatch hunters briefly wondered whether a practical joker on stilts might have been responsible, but a stilt walker, they concluded, would have had to carry about a quarter-ton of weight to have made such impressions.
Furthermore, the tracks went up high grounds that a stilt walker could never have negotiated. "Those prints," says Abbott, "were not made by any known animals. That leaves only two possibilities. Either someone is pulling one of the most complicated stunts ever, or the prints were made by a large bipedal primate that has never been described before. Both alternatives are close to being impossible." Abbott's report to his superiors led to a change of heart that Dahinden has been trying to achieve for a decade. At last the Provincial Government officials admitted to he possibility that the Sasquatches really exist. Shortly after the Bluff Creek finding, he recreation minister of British Columbia, Kenneth Kiernan, went further, and announced that the Provincial Museum was seeking all tangible Sasquatch evidence."
http://www.rfthomas.clara.net/papers/halpin.html
(I think I was on TBFF too long. I think I'm seeing orbs. No, those are smilies. Never mind.)
