The sasquatch is just waiting to be discovered in B.C., but too few want to admit or investigate it, says a Vancouver Island wildlife biologist and author.And we have what has to be the best sasquatch habitat anywhere on the planet right here on the B.C. coast, said Courtenays John Bindernagel, author of the 2010 book The Discovery of the Sasquatch.The question for me is no longer Does the sasquatch exist or not? but Why has the existence of the sasquatch been resisted for so long? Bindernagel said.Now 70, he believes enough sightings, tracks and other evidence of the large ape-like sasquatch Coast Salish for hairy man have been collected to provide evidence of the creatures existence in B.C. and North America. Bindernagel has collected casts of massive, human-like tracks from Strathcona Provincial Park and even heard a whoo, whoo, whoop call. Its similar to a chimpanzees call in Uganda, but he believes it is a sasquatch calling out for its own kind.Bindernagel comes to the investigation of the sasquatch as a scientist. He studied at the University of Guelph and the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in wildlife biology. He has worked in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, teaching, conducting research, surveys and preparing and implementing wildlife management plans and conservation measures before returning to Vancouver Island, where he worked as a consultant.The Discovery of the Sasquatch is Bindernagels second book on the subject and the most scholarly in its approach. Even he admits his first book, North Americas Great Ape: The Sasquatch, was undertaken with a hobbyists approach to the subject. But the first book attracted the interest of some of the worlds best-known biologists, including chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall. And after its publication, Bindernagel said something unusual started to happen: People began contacting him with reports of sightings. But before they even began to talk with him, they wanted to know one thing.They would ask, Are you serious about this? said Bindernagel. That was always the question Are you serious about this? I had to say, Yeah, obviously I am. So he began to collect their reports. Bindernagel also began to collect and document details of other reported sightings and bring them together, looking for patterns or repeated details.But he started to run into what he calls a roadblock of prevailing knowledge. Too many scientists were unwilling to look at evidence from various sightings. They refused to give much credence to the plaster casts of tracks. We cant get our papers accepted at professional conferences, so our colleagues have remained ignorant of the evidence, Bindernagel said. The scientific gatekeepers keep saying, No, no, no, having Bigfoot on our agenda would taint our whole conference. So in his latest book, he attempts to take a scholarly approach, reviewing and summarizing the existing evidence. He also tries to put it in the context of scientists approach to the discovery process.Its a process he contends is taking far longer than it should because of scientific reluctance. We have scientists demanding evidence, like DNA, Bindernagel said. At the same time, they are ignoring the evidence we do have.Not having the evidence you would like doesnt excuse you from examining the evidence thats available.However, scientists such as Grant Keddie, curator of archeology at the Royal B.C. Museum, take exception to the notion scientists are ignoring the evidence. There just isnt any to study, they say.Keddie said in the past, he has conducted investigations into several sightings, including one report of a creature running in front of a passenger-filled bus near Errock in the Fraser Valley in the mid 1970s.He said he went to the site, conducted a methodical, systematic grid search, as used in archeology, and found nothing. Samples of scat turned out to be coyote droppings. Newspaper reports had described footprints so deep they could only have been made by a creature weighing at least 800 pounds. But Keddie said he made deeper prints running in hiking boots.Police investigators were called in and turned up four men who had rented a gorilla suit, then waited for a bus, before one ran across the road.Another report came from a man with no experience in the B.C. backcountry. An interview revealed the sighting came after a stint in a pub, where locals joked the man was heading into sasquatch country.But Keddie said when stories are refuted, the proven falsehoods dont seem to gain the same traction in the public mind. Nobody remembers them when the next report becomes public. People again start blaming scientists for ignoring the evidence.Keddie said if any evidence was to emerge that was even remotely solid, such as a bone or tooth, the top physical anthropologists in Canada would be on the next plane to B.C.So when I get asked, Have you ever talked to anyone who is really believable or who has good solid evidence? I say, So far I havent, Keddie said.But Jeff Meldrum, associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, said its only a matter of time before such evidence surfaces.Meldrum said in a telephone interview that within the last 15 years, new discoveries have scuttled ideas of human evolution being a linear process to modern homo sapiens. It now looks more likely that as many as six early humans, or hominin, occupied the world at the same time in human prehistory. Discoveries like the 2003 find in Indonesia of homo floresiensis, the remains of a one-metre-tall creature dubbed the Hobbit, have rocked previous theories. Estimated at 18,000 years old, this creature was clearly living at the same time as early humans.Meldrum said such discoveries have seen even previous sasquatch skeptics starting to consider more seriously the idea of a North American ape-like creature, another species of hominin living now.The prospect that such populations might have persisted into the present is not so far-fetched, he said.The scientific community is coming around to recognize that this is a very legitimate question.[email protected]
