The Ruby Creek Incident
In 1941, near Ruby Creek, British Columbia, a First Nation woman named Jeannie Chapman was terribly frightened when she saw a sasquatch approaching her home. The event made a local newspaper. Sixteen years later journalist John Green began investigating the possibility that North America was home to a Yeti-like ape and he interviewed Chapman, and others, about her sighting. Since her sighting was supported by tracks, he found her account even more instrumental than Roe’s or Ostman’s in convincing him that sasquatch were real.
Green fed zoologist and nature writer Ivan Sanderson his sasquatch accounts. Sanderson, a popular writer and personality of note, was in a position to make the Ruby Creek Incident “go viral” through his connection with national men’s adventure magazines, such as TRUE. Here is Sanderson’s account and investigation of the RBI:
http://www.bigfootencounters.com/classics/ruby.htm
In the way Sanderson portrays it, the incident seems virtually conclusive. Mrs. Chapman is honest. Her sighting was under good conditions: broad daylight, cloudless skies, and of long enough duration (in minutes) and proximity (up to 100 feet) for her to know what she saw. In addition, her husband and others found “enormous humanoid footprints” at the location.
Something to remember: the Ruby Creek Incident occurred in 1941. Sanderson interviewed the Chapmans 18 years later.
Here is Green’s account of the same event:
http://www.bigfoot-lives.com/html/ruby_creek.html
The accounts vary. The biggest discrepancy between the two retellings is where and how long Mrs. Chapman saw the sasquatch. Once she is told an animal is coming down the mountainside, according to Sanderson, “Mrs. Chapman went out to look…” Green says “she looked out the window…” Sanderson has her standing her ground while the sasquatch advanced, even quoting her: she had “much too much time to look at it.” Green suggests she fled almost immediately, through the front door placing the house between her (and her children) and the sasquatch. In other words, she could not see it as she fled, contrary to the retelling by Sanderson.
Green believed her, but with this concern: “I did not consider her story reliable as to detail, particularly as it was not entirely consistent, and I have since read accounts in which she is quoted as having said things which do not agree with some of the things she said to me.”
But her account was backed up by tracks, and that convinced Green.
Did Mrs. Chapman really see a sasquatch? Well, I’m inclined to think see saw a bear. If we view her sighting as literally told, contradictions and all, then she saw a hair covered man. Why do I think she saw a bear?
First, she probably only briefly viewed the animal. She saw a huge, hair covered animal standing on two legs. We know that she had been told (warned) since childhood about the sasquatch, a cultural norm that is the equivalent to “bogie man” stories to scare children for practical reasons. Sasquatch were giant, hairy men. Why didn’t she recognize a bear, if a bear it was? We are familiar with standing bears because of photos, pictures, TV and film. Mrs. Chapman probably had no such familiarity, and may have never seen a bear standing upright.
Secondly, the first person to see the animal, one of Mrs. Chapman’s children, described it as a “big cow.” A “big cow” would better describe a walking bear than a bipedal ape or hairy human.
I’m speculating that she saw a bear and thought it was a sasquatch because she held a strong, superstitious belief in the sasquatch and her brief look at a two-legged animal brought to her mind a real sasquatch.
The bear probably heard the commotion in and near the cabin, and stood on its hind legs to get a better look see. Mrs. Chapman, looking dead on, would not have discerned the bear’s muzzle. We may guess that much of what she later described, such as broad shoulder, were in response to later, leading questions from non-native sasquatch enthusiasts. The bear did what bears do; it broke into a barrel of fish.
What about the tracks? Again, if we accept literal what we have been told, it would be hard to attach them to a bear. However, despite what Green claimed, the tracks don’t look like Bigfoot tracks. He found wonderment in the fact that the Ruby Creek tracing was about the same size as the Crew track casting in California in the 1950’s; however, they don’t look to be from the same type of animal. According to Joshua Blu Buhs, on page 89 of his Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, “Ian MacTaggart, the zoologist with the British Columbia Provincial Museum, had told Green that the Ruby Creek prints were made by a bear, its front and rear tracks overlapping.”
Whatever the case, here is a previous discussion of bear/Bigfoot tracks:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45409
Here is contemporary usage of the Ruby Creek story, oddly mixing up Ivan Sanderson with Ivan Marx:
http://texascryptidhunter.blogspot.com/2010/06/sasquatch-classics-ruby-creek-incident.html
