QUOTE
Bigfoot no tall tale to witnesses
Three sightings in a year yield a few firm believers -- but a lot more skeptics-- in Yukon town
Nathan VanderKlippe - Sound Off - CanWest News Service
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
TESLIN, Yukon - It was a quiet night in Teslin when the woods began to crackle and the dogs started to howl.
Melvin Harper heard it, and saw a figure flitting near a neighbour's light post, then through a forested island next to the log houses in this Yukon town of 400.
"It was something big, about eight feet tall. It's black, hairy, muscular. It was huge," he said. "He was, like, teasing us, making noises in the bush, coming back and forth.
"It freaks me out that they do have stuff like that out there, that you never seen in your life before. And that big means they are breeding."
"It was like a sasquatch," said Tom Dickson, who also saw the creature. "Like how you see it on TV, how they advertise it -- the same image. You can't see no eyes, nothing, just black, but it was moving pretty fast.
"It was a shocking feeling, like if you see a bear."
It's at least the third sighting of a bush creature in Teslin in a year, leading locals to surmise that perhaps a sasquatch -- or a family of them -- has migrated north from more typical haunts in northern California and the interior of B.C.
Roger Smarch heard it, too, and went to look the next morning. In the woods he found crushed meadow flowers and small trees snapped in half more than two metres up their trunks.
And he discovered a track, more than 30 centimetres long and printed deep in the mud. "I think it's bigfoot," he said.
Some of the town's hunters have said it looks like a print left by a moose that slipped in the mud, but Smarch won't hear of it.
"It's not a bear, not a moose. Whatever it was that made that track was big."
Smarch also found something else: a tuft of dark, chocolate-coloured hair on the forest floor that he says was left behind by the creature.
On Tuesday morning, Philip Merchant picked apart the tuft of hair in his lab at the Yukon environment department, measuring it and inspecting it beneath a microscope.
The hair isn't hollow, ruling out moose and caribou. It's too long to be horse, and the sample also includes a downy underfur, which rules out humans -- and perhaps other two-footed creatures.
"But I don't know," said Merchant, a wildlife technician. "Are sasquatches primates?"
That leaves a few options: grizzly bear, muskox and bison.
"If somebody brought me this chunk of hair and there was no other information at all with it, I'd say I'm virtually certain it's a bison," he said. "But of unknown Yukon mammals the possibilities are endless. Is it sasquatch? I don't know."
Then he laughed.
Whatever the creature was, those who saw it took it seriously, said Marion Gagnon, a student who moved to Teslin from Saskatchewan to work for the summer. She was biking home when she came upon men looking for it.
They ordered her to stay with them for safety.
"Some of them were armed with axes and bow and arrows," she said.
Those who didn't see it are near uniform in their skepticism. The people who reported this sighting are almost identical to a group who said they saw a mystery creature a year ago. Some had been drinking, and the sighting happened about 1 a.m. -- not pitch black in Yukon's long summer days, but not exactly midday, either.
"Do I buy it? No I don't. Not in the least," said Robert Wiseman, who grew up in Teslin. "I think maybe a bear."
Merchant plans to run a few tests on the hair over the next few days, but it may be impossible to know its origin for certain without DNA testing -- and at this point, the Yukon government isn't exactly eager to spend taxpayer dollars on the search for bigfoot.
Rodney Smarch and Alex Lindsay hope they will, if only to put their fears to rest. The two teenage boys cowered in a grandparent's house when they heard the creature knocking on the walls of the house at 5:30 a.m. When they looked out, they saw it hiding behind a car.
"It was kneeling down looking at the house and you could see the knees over the car," said Lindsay.
Ninety per cent of Teslin's population is native, mostly Tlingit people whose lore includes references to a mysterious character called the bushman that's usually used as a story to scare children.
But Harper is now sure it's true, no matter what common sense might say.
"It changes a person's life, that's for sure," he said.
"People used to tell you that there's such a thing as sasquatches. And there is. You'd have to see it to believe it."
nvanderklippe@globaltv.ca
Three sightings in a year yield a few firm believers -- but a lot more skeptics-- in Yukon town
Nathan VanderKlippe - Sound Off - CanWest News Service
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
TESLIN, Yukon - It was a quiet night in Teslin when the woods began to crackle and the dogs started to howl.
Melvin Harper heard it, and saw a figure flitting near a neighbour's light post, then through a forested island next to the log houses in this Yukon town of 400.
"It was something big, about eight feet tall. It's black, hairy, muscular. It was huge," he said. "He was, like, teasing us, making noises in the bush, coming back and forth.
"It freaks me out that they do have stuff like that out there, that you never seen in your life before. And that big means they are breeding."
"It was like a sasquatch," said Tom Dickson, who also saw the creature. "Like how you see it on TV, how they advertise it -- the same image. You can't see no eyes, nothing, just black, but it was moving pretty fast.
"It was a shocking feeling, like if you see a bear."
It's at least the third sighting of a bush creature in Teslin in a year, leading locals to surmise that perhaps a sasquatch -- or a family of them -- has migrated north from more typical haunts in northern California and the interior of B.C.
Roger Smarch heard it, too, and went to look the next morning. In the woods he found crushed meadow flowers and small trees snapped in half more than two metres up their trunks.
And he discovered a track, more than 30 centimetres long and printed deep in the mud. "I think it's bigfoot," he said.
Some of the town's hunters have said it looks like a print left by a moose that slipped in the mud, but Smarch won't hear of it.
"It's not a bear, not a moose. Whatever it was that made that track was big."
Smarch also found something else: a tuft of dark, chocolate-coloured hair on the forest floor that he says was left behind by the creature.
On Tuesday morning, Philip Merchant picked apart the tuft of hair in his lab at the Yukon environment department, measuring it and inspecting it beneath a microscope.
The hair isn't hollow, ruling out moose and caribou. It's too long to be horse, and the sample also includes a downy underfur, which rules out humans -- and perhaps other two-footed creatures.
"But I don't know," said Merchant, a wildlife technician. "Are sasquatches primates?"
That leaves a few options: grizzly bear, muskox and bison.
"If somebody brought me this chunk of hair and there was no other information at all with it, I'd say I'm virtually certain it's a bison," he said. "But of unknown Yukon mammals the possibilities are endless. Is it sasquatch? I don't know."
Then he laughed.
Whatever the creature was, those who saw it took it seriously, said Marion Gagnon, a student who moved to Teslin from Saskatchewan to work for the summer. She was biking home when she came upon men looking for it.
They ordered her to stay with them for safety.
"Some of them were armed with axes and bow and arrows," she said.
Those who didn't see it are near uniform in their skepticism. The people who reported this sighting are almost identical to a group who said they saw a mystery creature a year ago. Some had been drinking, and the sighting happened about 1 a.m. -- not pitch black in Yukon's long summer days, but not exactly midday, either.
"Do I buy it? No I don't. Not in the least," said Robert Wiseman, who grew up in Teslin. "I think maybe a bear."
Merchant plans to run a few tests on the hair over the next few days, but it may be impossible to know its origin for certain without DNA testing -- and at this point, the Yukon government isn't exactly eager to spend taxpayer dollars on the search for bigfoot.
Rodney Smarch and Alex Lindsay hope they will, if only to put their fears to rest. The two teenage boys cowered in a grandparent's house when they heard the creature knocking on the walls of the house at 5:30 a.m. When they looked out, they saw it hiding behind a car.
"It was kneeling down looking at the house and you could see the knees over the car," said Lindsay.
Ninety per cent of Teslin's population is native, mostly Tlingit people whose lore includes references to a mysterious character called the bushman that's usually used as a story to scare children.
But Harper is now sure it's true, no matter what common sense might say.
"It changes a person's life, that's for sure," he said.
"People used to tell you that there's such a thing as sasquatches. And there is. You'd have to see it to believe it."
nvanderklippe@globaltv.ca