The San Francisco Chronicle, December 6, 1965
By George Draper
Growing Mystery - "Animal-Men Of The Northwest"
There is mountain testimony that giant man-animals may be roaming the remote forest and mountains of the northwestern part of the United States. Two men in responsible positions have told this reporter they encountered the hairy sub-humans at different times and places.
There exist tape-recorded interviews with others who have either seen one of the monsters or heard its hideous scream or smelled what they described as "the foul stench" of its body. These creatures, they said, appeared to be half ape and half men and weighed more than 500 pounds.
A man-animal, according to a Southern Pacific employee named Gary Joanis, picked up a deer he had shot and fled with the corpse into the tall timber. A Fresno, California lock and safe company operator said he watched in horror and disbelief as one of these freaks of nature attacked his hunting partner. Yet another man, who works for the University of Oregon, said he saw one of the giants stride across a meadow.
Geologist, R.A. E. Morley, has claimed in a lengthy, taped-recorded statement, that someone hurled a boulder at him while he was swimming in a mountain stream and he thinks it was one of the elusive man animals.
Giants have been sighted as far south as Pinecrest, California, where the so-called "Terror of Tuolumne" was reported last year. At Fort Bragg, California, three years ago [l962], Robert Hatfield saw a man-like monster peering over the backyard fence at 4:30 a.m.
All of these sightings, backed in many cases by secondary evidence as huge, human-like footprints, massive droppings, strange screams and other details mesh to some extent with world-wide reports of giants. By far the most frequently mentioned of course, is the so-called Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.
Whether this creature exists or whether the enormous tracks found in
the Himalayan snow fields were the work of leaping mountain foxes is a
question still under investigation. Other giants reported in recent years
include the Daghestan Wild Man Of The Caucasus Mountains; the ghost monster
of Nyasaland's omba rain forest as the Ufiti; the Tokoloshe, which is believed
to have
bewitched and seduced a woman in Southern Rhodesia five years ago and
"the thing" a giant that popped up in the Malayan jungles in l956.
Although none of these man-animals have been photographed, captured live or shot, there is an eerie persistence about the reports of their existence.
Consequently, a young electronics engineer named Lee Trippett from Eugene,
Oregon is making plans to hunt a man animal of the Pacific northwest by
using a radical technique. In a nutshell, Trippett hopes to influence the
lonely creature's subconscious mind by resorting to parakinesia and extra-sensory
erception. [ESP] "This involves setting up a certain sense of sympathetic
vibrations," Trippett said. There have also been frequent reports of
man-animals in British Columbia where the creature is known as Sasquatch.
John Green, publisher of The Advance at Agassiz, British Columbia has just compiled a report listing l20 Sasquatch incidents ranging from sightings and attacks to the discovery of tracks and various strange occurrences.
In l942, Green reports a man at Katz, British Columbia had his arm broken by a hairy giant while picking berries. The other Green items include:
The Indians at Bishop's Cove, B.C., were reported in l907 to be terrified by a monkey-like wild man "that digs clams at night and howls." A hairy giant near Harrison Mills, British Columbia in l945 chased Henry Charlie more than a mile. In the early l800's, two mountain hunters in British Columbia were killed by a creature "that walked on two legs."
A train crew captured a half-man, half-beast near Yale, British Columbia
on July 3, l884. "It had forearms longer than a man and could break
a stick no man could break in the same way" according to publisher Green's
report. Young Trippett has compiled a list of 41 man-animal incidents reported
in the states of Washington, Oregon and California. These include
many reported sightings of the beast and the discovery of two sets of tracks
in the wilderness of
northern Humboldt County. One set of tracks, each footprint l6
inches long was found on Bluff Creek on October 4, l958 by Jerry Crew,
field director of the Child Evangelism Fellowship.[Almost 9 years
before the filming at Bluff Creek by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin]
Bill Chambers, at that time a reporter for the Humboldt Times, inspected
the prints found by Crew and another set of giant prints found in
the Bluff Creek area by contractor Ray
Wallace.
"To tell the truth" said Chambers, who now runs a Eureka, California sports shop, "I don't know what to think of those tracks." "But it kind of makes a believer out of you when you're way out there in those mountains and follow those tracks at night with a flashlight."
California agricultural inspector R.P. Doran, who is stationed in the remote and rugged Siskiyou Mountains on the California-Oregon border said he has heard reports of the Bigfoot, as it is known in that area for many years. "If it is a hoax," said Inspector Doran, "then somebody has put it over pretty good." The Siskiyous at dusk have a wistful haunting quality. Soft round fog hangs in the steep ravines, veiling the stands of pine and fir. It is much the same in the Trinity Alp Mountains of California to the south.
Calvin Rube, a Yurok Indian, stands by his home atop a lonely mountain over-looking the Klamath river. "The Bigfoot was known to my people as the traveler or the patroller. It's is job to keep nature and men in harmony" Rube said.
Although he has never seen Bigfoot, he said he was heard Bigfoot's weird cry on two occasions. "One time" he said, "it made a pale face jump clean over the campfire." "The other ti me we found his track the text morning. It was l8 inches long. And before the track there was a sapling tree that had been broken off ten feet above the ground."
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