Bigfoot believers: faith and fakery

Posted by Jeff Baker, The Oregonian April 16, 2009 09:47AM
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After Ray Wallace died in 2002, his children revealed that he had a pair of carved wooden feet he used to stomp around the woods in Northern California, leaving tracks that he claimed belonged to Bigfoot.

The disclosure should have been a blow to Bigfoot hunters everywhere, because Wallace's stories about a huge, hairy humanoid are credited with starting the Bigfoot movement. If Wallace was a practical joker, shouldn't that make those who believe in Bigfoot think twice?

"You're not going to shake these people," Michael McLeod said. "They don't want to admit anything. They still deny Wallace has anything to do with Bigfoot."

McLeod interviewed Wallace before his death and Wallace told him Bigfoot "can throw rocks like a bullet and kill deer and elk three hundred feet away on the run." Wallace played him an album of Bigfoot screams he'd recorded. The album cover, McLeod notes in his new book "Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot," "showed a Bigfoot and a cougar posed together on a log."

McLeod is a writer and documentary filmmaker who worked for KGW(8) in the pre-video days. One of his early assignments was to go to Skamania County, Wash., to interview eyewitnesses to some Bigfoot sightings around Beacon Rock. He figured someone in an ape suit had fooled some otherwise rational people, but later started wondering about the famous Roger Patterson film, shot in Bluff Creek, Calif., very near where Wallace first left his tracks.

Patterson and his famous film -- which includes an image of an insouciant Bigfoot, caught in mid-stride, looking directly at the camera -- is the jumping-off point for McLeod's book. He set out to investigate how Patterson made the film and was captivated by the human side of Bigfoot hunting, the people who obsessed over the creature and made the question of its existence an early example of pseudoscience. People want to believe in something -- the Yeti, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster -- and selectively use evidence to support their belief while ignoring anything that contradicts it.

Skeptics point out that Patterson set out to find and film Bigfoot and did, in broad daylight. McLeod did enough digging to confirm, to his satisfaction, that Patterson's friends in Yakima knew all about his Bigfoot schemes and more than likely one of them wore an ape suit for the movie.

As for Bigfoot "there's never been any evidence, physical or any other kind" to prove its existence, McLeod said. "It's folk art. A lot of people have been mistaken in what they've seen, and others have been faked out."

Put another way, McLeod said "'UFology' is nutzoid, but I'm not entirely dismissive of the possibility of aliens out there somewhere. It's a big universe. But the idea of an 8-foot-tall, 700-pound beast walking through the forests of the Pacific Northwest is ludicrous."

McLeod discusses "Anatomy of a Beast" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 23, Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.

-- Jeff Baker: 503-221-8165; jbaker@news.oregonian.com

A review of Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot

1 ) It's a big universe. But the idea of an 8-foot-tall, 700-pound beast walking through the forests of the Pacific Northwest is ludicrous."

2 ) As for Bigfoot "there's never been any evidence, physical or any other kind" to prove its existence, McLeod said. "It's folk art. A lot of people have been mistaken in what they've seen, and others have been faked out."

McLeod discusses "Anatomy of a Beast" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 23, Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.