Sasquatch Revealed with Dr. Jeff Meldrum

After Dr. Jeff Meldrum's preesentation he and Cliff Barackman discuss tracks (photo: Craig Flipy)

On Dec 28th in the Dalles, Oregon Dr. Jeff Meldrum gave a presentation to kick off the "Sasquatch Revealed" exhibit at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center. The exhibit was curated by published author Chris Murphy.

Susan Buce, marketing director of the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center, deserves a lot of credit for a successful evening; which included a generous last-minute additional presentation by Dr. Jeff Meldrum for those who were not able to buy dinner tickets. The event was completely sold out and very successful.

Among the two speakers that were publicized, Dr. Jeff Meldrum and Thomas Steenburg, a surprise guest was Bigfoot legend Bob Gimlin, who recalled the moment he and Roger Patterson filmed Patty. (watch a video of Bob Gimlin describing that day while watching a 3d recreation).

Left to Right: Tom Yamarone, Cliff Barackman, Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Guy Edwards, Bob Gimlin, Paul Graves, Tom Steenburg, Chris Murphy (photo: Craig Flipy)

After listening to Tom Steenburg I was impressed with his no-nonsense approach to research. He definitely declared the typical caveats, addressing that portions of his research were anecdotal, but he mentioned it at the top of his presentation and didn't belabor the point. In my opinion many bigfooters, myself included, can spend too much time prefacing and defending. Mr. Steenburg does not suffer from this and gets right to the point. 

I immediately purchased two books authored by Tom Steenburg after the event; In Search of Giants: Meet the Sasquatch and Bigfoot Sasquatch Encounters. I recommend them in that order. These are great books that cover the Canadian side of the Sasquatch Phenomena.

Speaking of books, novelist Kirk Sigurdson attended the event with me and we were able to spend some more time afterwords with Cliff Barackman, Bob Gimlin, Dr. Meldrum, Chris Murphy, and Tom Steenburg. Cliff had some casts from his Orang Pendek Project and shared them with Meldrum.

Kirk has some excellent follow ups from the event with greater detail at his Kultusbook.com website. There are two links below. 

Read about the Sasquatch Revealed "after-party".

Check out an in-depth review of the Sasquatch Revealed lectures

Looking to Travel the Columbia River Gorge? Check out Columbia River Gorge lodging and Columbia River Gorge attractions.

Dr. Meldrum to Speak at Bigfoot Exhibit Opening in Oregon

Dr. Jeff Meldrum is a Full Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University

"Chris Murphy curated it, and we brought it down from Vancouver, B.C. We’re trying to mix in some updated local stories with the exhibit." -- Susan Buce; Columbia Gorge Discovery Center

Below is a press release from The Discovery Center and Museum in the Dalles, Oregon. This should be a great event for the whole family. A presentation by Dr. Jeff Meldrum will kick off a new exhibit curated by Chris Murphy himself.

PRESS RELEASE - For Immediate Release
Date: November 27, 2013
Contact: Susan Buce, Marketing Manager, 541-296-8600 x 215
marketing@gorgediscovery.org


SUMMARY: 
Columbia Gorge Discovery Center presents “Sasquatch Revealed,” a new exhibit opening Saturday, December 28, 2013 with dinner at 5:30 p.m. and a speaker presentation by Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Chris Murphy, and Thomas Steenburg following at 6:30 p.m. This exhibit draws from all the available scientific research and evidence compiled to date on the hominoid known as Sasquatch, or Bigfoot. Tickets are required by Dec. 23. Call 541-296-8600 x 201 for more information or visit www.gorgediscovery.org


“Sasquatch Revealed” Exhibit opens Dec. 28

THE DALLES, Oregon — Does Sasquatch exist? Rumors of a large, hairy, man-like creature roaming the Cascade Mountains have existed for centuries. Where does myth end and science begin? Columbia Gorge Discovery Center presents “Sasquatch Revealed,” a new exhibit opening Saturday, December 28, 2013 with dinner at 5:30 p.m. and a speaker presentation by Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Chris Murphy, and Thomas Steenburg following at 6:30 p.m.

This exhibit draws from all the available scientific research and evidence compiled to date on the hominoid known as Sasquatch, or Bigfoot. The display, curated by Christopher Murphy of Vancouver, British Columbia, will be at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center through February 23, 2014. Explore audio segments, view a gallery of footprint and handprint casts, reports of sightings in Wasco County and United States, newspaper reports, comparative skulls, and artist renditions.

Buffet dinner will be served starting at 5:30 pm in the Basalt Rock Café, with your choice of herb-encrusted prime rib or roast salmon with lemon dill glaze. Children’s menu includes ‘Mountain Mac & Cheese’ and ‘Sasquatch Stronganoff’.

Following the dinner, noted Sasquatch researchers Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Chris Murphy and Thomas Steenburg will give a presentation.

DR. JEFF MELDRUM, Professor of Anthropology from Idaho State University will give a talk Dec. 28 and sign his acclaimed book, “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.” Medrum’s book takes a detailed look at the scientific DNA and forensic evidence gathered on Sasquatch. Meldrum has published numerous academic papers ranging from vertebrate evolutionary morphology, and the emergence of bipedal locomotion in modern humans. Dr. Meldrum is also a co-editor of a series of books on paleontology.

CHRIS MURPHY became involved in the Sasquatch mystery when he met René Dahinden in 1993. He then worked with Dahinden in producing posters from the Patterson/Gimlin film and marketing them along with Sasquatch footprint casts.  In 2000, Chris embarked on a project to assemble a comprehensive pictorial presentation on the Sasquatch. This initiative led to publication of his book “Meet the Sasquatch,” written in association with John Green and Thomas Steenburg, and his Sasquatch exhibit at the Vancouver, B.C., Museum.

THOMAS STEENBURG, born in Ontario, Canada, in 1961, has been actively interested in the Sasquatch since a child. Since 1979, he has actively gone into the rugged outdoors in search of the elusive Sasquatch. Having interviewed many eye-witnesses and investigate many reported sightings, he is all the more determined to pursue and answer the question: is the Sasquatch real or simply folklore? Steenburg has authored three books on the Sasquatch mystery and has appeared in several television documentaries and as a public speaker.

Cost for Adult dinner and presentation: $20 members, $25 non-members; Children: $10 members, $15 non-members.

Cost for presentation only: $10 members, $15 non-members; Children: $5 members, $7.50 non-members. Reservations are required by Monday, Dec. 23. For information or reservations call 541-296-8600 x 201.
The exhibit will be at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center through February 23, 2014.

The Discovery Center and Wasco County Historical Museum is the official interpretive center for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.  Live raptor shows are presented Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Hands-on, multi-media exhibits illuminate the cultural and natural history of the Gorge, including Ice Age geology, Native American culture, Lewis and Clark's cargo, the Oregon Trail, trade, transportation, ecology, and more. The Discovery Center is located off I-84 at exit 82, 5000 Discovery Drive, The Dalles, Oregon, 97058.  Open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.  Museum adult admission is $9, seniors $7, kids 6 to16 are $5, and children 5 and under free.  For more information, phone (541) 296-8600 x 201, or visit www.gorgediscovery.org.  

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Today in Bigfoot History | JAN 19, 1999 | Bob Gimlin Hangs up on Wired Magazine

Bob Gimlin did not even dignify the accusation that the bigfoot in the P/G film was a costume. The arrow points to where skeptics believed a zipper was exposed

"I was there. I saw [Bigfoot]. The film is genuine. Anybody who says different is just trying to make a buck." Bob Gimlin's response to WIRED Magazine before he hung up on them.

This is a "Today in Bigfoot History" update to the zipper story from January 11th. Once Cliff Crook and Chris Murphy claimed to have seen a zipper-like shape on the costume, it created ripples among the community at the time and polarized some bigfooters.

It is ironic Cliff Crook is accusing anybody of an inauthentic picture of Bigfoot.  After all, he was the man behind this picture...

WIRED Magazine did some great journalism, getting reactions from respected P/G film proponents like Ray Crowe and Grover Krantz. They even ask independent imaging experts from Pegasus Imaging and Adobe, who both agreed an anomalous blob can be interpreted as anything.

Ray Crowe summed it up quite nicely comparing the Crook/Murphy analysis to looking for sheep in the shapes of clouds.

You can read the great piece of journalism below.

Sasquatch: Man in a Monkey Suit?

Joseph Rose 01.19.99

YAKIMA, Washington -- The scratchy movie footage shows a big, brown, hairy creature retreating over a stream bed into dense forest. But wait. Is that the glint of a belt buckle on Bigfoot? Or have skeptics gotten carried away with Photoshop?

Loyal Bigfootologists and some computer-imaging experts are giving disapproving grunts to two researchers who claim that a computer analysis of a famous 1967 film shows a man in a monkey suit, not the legendary giant of the Northwest woods.

Bigfoot buffs Cliff Crook of Bothell, Washington, and Chris Murphy of Vancouver, Canada, say enlargements and computer enhancements of the film's frames reveal an object hanging from the fur that resembles metal fasteners used on clothing at the time.

"When the guy in the suit turned to look at the camera, it probably snapped loose and dangled from the fur," said Crook, who has been searching for the elusive creature for 42 years. "It's a hoax. Why would Bigfoot be wearing a belt buckle?"

The claim has howling-mad Bigfoot enthusiasts branding Murphy and Crook as traitors on Internet newsgroups and attempting to discredit their findings as a publicity stunt.

"It's like picking a sheep out of the clouds," said Western Bigfoot Society president Ray Crowe of Portland, Oregon. "They've blown up the images beyond the size of recognition. So, they can pretty much see anything they imagine."

At issue is the footage taken 32 years ago, when Bigfoot trackers Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin of Yakima were investigating reports of sasquatch footprints in Six Rivers National Forest, near the California-Oregon border. They purportedly spotted a female Bigfoot darting across a sandbar, and Patterson let his 16-mm Kodak movie camera roll.

The minute of jerky, grainy film and the plaster-cast footprints Patterson made that October day became the veritable gold standard for trackers and enthusiasts, the evidence by which all things Bigfoot are measured.

Murphy began questioning the film's validity after discovering an aberration in the footage while helping his son with a class project in 1995. Using a computer, he zoomed in tighter and tighter on the frames, finding what appears to be a glimmering ornate latch in the shape of a bottle opener.

Four sequential computer-scanned frames on the film appear to show the object in motion, said Crook, who reviewed Murphy's findings, which were released 12 January. He said the object appears to be cinching a costume.
Murphy said he's convinced "there's something out of place" in the film. "I have now sent my material to an expert in the [photo-enhancing] field," he wrote in an email.

Steve Armstrong of Tampa, Florida-based Pegasus Imaging said he would like a shot at examining the evidence. He believes the film is such that it wouldn't capture an image of something as small as a buckle. And then there's the bit-mapped nature of digital compression and enlarging.

"Zoom in on an image too much, and you get a lot of blocky artifacts," Armstrong said.

The result, said Jennifer Polanski of Adobe Systems, might be "a blob" that looks something like a belt buckle. Even with Adobe's popular Photoshop software, it's hard to see how someone can take a faraway figure like that in the Patterson-Gimlin film and zoom in on a metal fastener, she said.

In Yakima, on the edge of the wooded east slope of the Cascade Mountains, there have long been rumors that the late Roger Patterson paid a Hollywood costume designer to make the suit and a big Yakima Indian to wear it for the film. Just last week, there was talk that the owner of the suit had hired a local attorney and was getting ready to bring it out of the closet for the world to see. Like the other rumors, that one has yet to be proven true.

While Patterson died years ago, Gimlin, 67, still lives in Yakima. He dismisses the rumors and the new computer analysis as "wacko."

"I was there. I saw [Bigfoot]. The film is genuine," Gimlin said in a telephone interview. "Anybody who says different is just trying to make a buck." And he hung up.

Washington State University anthropologist Grover Krantz, one of Bigfoot's stalwart backers in academia, agrees that the Crook-Murphy analysis is amateurish and irrelevant.

"Look at the way it walks," Krantz said, referring to the figure in the Patterson-Gimlin film. "Even if Patterson had hired someone to get in a suit, there's no way he could have trained him to walk in this manner. I know, I've tried to reconstruct the motion."

Today in Bigfoot History | JAN 11 | "Zipper" Found on Patty "Bigfoot Costume"

Today, January 11, in 1999 the color plate of frame 352 from the Patterson/Gimlin film was carefully examined by imaging specialists at a color technology laboratory in Ventura, California. State-of-the-art scanners were used to magnify the image down to the color-point level.

All of this came about due to a press conference called by Cliff Cook and the supporting testimony of his associate Chris Murphy. Murphy claimed to of found a bell shape (aka zipper pull tab) within the grainy film image and even took the time to hand craft a pretzel-like, clay model of this bell shape.

The final image in the series shows the detail in question at approximately 1600% magnification. At this level of resolution the individual points of color are clearly visible.

Murphy's "bell-shaped object" is not readily discernible at any level of resolution. To the naked eye the "object" appears to be a diffuse blotch of light reflecting off the fur. At increasingly higher magnification this detail still appears to be a diffuse blotch of light reflecting off the fur. Several other parts of the bigfoot figure show similar blotches of light reflecting off the fur.

The detail in question has no clear edges, and has no visible "artificial" shape. The lab tests demonstrated that a clear magnification of the color plate does not reveal anything like the pretzel-like object displayed at Crook's press conference. The image analysts stated that Murphy seems to be relying on some "highly imaginative, Rorschach-like interpretations of fuzzy details in enlargements of the color plates."

It is important to note The Oregonian on this same day had a headline "BIGFOOT PROOF CALLED 'MAN IN MONKEY SUIT'" The article was released by United Press International and begins with these two paragraphs...

BIGFOOT PROOF CALLED 'MAN IN MONKEY SUIT'
PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 11 (UPI) _ Two longtime trackers of the legendary creature Sasquatch say grainy film footage that allegedly proves the existence of the beast also called Bigfoot shows nothing more than a ``man in a monkey suit.''

The Oregonian newspaper reports today that Bigfoot trackers Cliff Crook and Chris Murphy have determined that four magnified frames from the so-called ``Patterson-Gimlin Film'' show tracings of a bell-shaped fastener on the creature's waist, indicating that the image is likely that of a human being wearing a costume.

The Associated press chimes in as well with this report reprinted below...

CLAIMS AGAINST BIGFOOT FILM SET ENTHUSIASTS AT ODDS
By JOHN M. HUBBELL
Associated Press

BOTHELL, Wash. (AP) - In the hearts and minds of true believers, Bigfoot's existence has long been enshrined in a single minute of jerky, grainy footage of a startled sasquatch retreating into the upper California woods.

But two enthusiasts of the legendary being are alleging four magnified frames of the 16 mm footage show tracings of a bell-shaped fastener at Bigfoot's waist. They say the creature in the so-called Patterson-Gimlin Film can finally be dismissed as a man in a monkey suit.

"It was a hoax,'' said Cliff Crook, a longtime Bigfoot tracker who devotes rooms to sasquatch memorabilia in this suburb north of Seattle. "How can an artificial, manmade object end up on a Bigfoot?''

The film, purportedly showing a female Bigfoot fleeing a stream-bed, was taken by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin on Oct. 20, 1967. It has largely withstood independent scrutiny and, for many steeped in the lore of the man-beast, has become bedrock evidence of its very existence.

"There's no way of really detracting from it,'' said Ray Crowe, president of the Western Bigfoot Society in Portland, Ore. The image captured in the footage "has a fluid motion. It's a wild creature of nature.''

The film is important because many Bigfoot believers compare all plaster casts of telltale footprints against those made by Patterson the day he purportedly filmed the creature slinking across a sandbar in the Six Rivers National Forest.

Discredit the footage, experts agree, and the gold standard for Bigfoot tracks will be washed away.

Crook bases his assertion on computer enhancements performed by Chris Murphy, a Bigfoot buff from Vancouver, British Columbia, who maintains he discovered an aberration in the footage in 1995 while helping his son Daniel prepare a class project.

Murphy declined to be interviewed, instead supplying a written narrative detailing his discovery.

According to that account, the Murphys used a color photocopier to duplicate a frame of the Patterson film. Zooming in again and again, Chris Murphy became suspicious.

To him, something geometric - vaguely the shape of a bottle opener - seemed to take shape at Bigfoot's waist. Murphy maintains that four sequential computer-scanned frames of the film show the object in different positions, as if it were swinging. He theorizes something is cinching the sasquatch costume in place.

Murphy made a clay model of the object and in October gave that and the enlargements to Crook, a charter-bus driver transfixed by sasquatch stories since 1957. That's the year he made a camping trip with teen-age friends on Washington's Olympic Peninsula that ended with telltale signs of a sasquatch encounter: a rustling of brush, a throaty growl and an ever-worsening hallmark musk.

Decades later, at 58, spare rooms in his home are dubbed "Bigfoot Central,'' stuffed with photos, plaster casts and maps dotted with push-pins that chart sasquatch sightings.

Now his hoax assertion is giving rise to a howl that would make a Bigfoot proud. Longtime enthusiasts smell a deserter.

One recent e-mail was typical of the incredulity Crook's allegation of a costume fastener is up against.

"Cliff, Cliff, Cliff,'' it scolded. "That's matted feces.''

"There are two witnesses (and) there are footprints,'' said Rene Dahinden, a Richmond, British Columbia, researcher who shares the film's copyright. "We've never had anything like it previously, and anything like it since.''

Dahinden, 68, discounts Murphy as an amateur. "He wasn't involved in this until 1993,'' Dahinden said. "He couldn't spell the name 'sasquatch' before that.''
Grover Krantz, a Washington State University anthropology professor and Bigfoot expert, also believes firmly in the old footage.

"I fully accept the Patterson film,'' Krantz said. "If there was a fastener, it could not be seen in an enlargement. The film grain is such that it cannot hold an image of something that small.''

The truth of the Patterson-Gimlin film remains as elusive as Bigfoot itself. Enthusiasts such as Krantz and Crowe see the film as a building block for their faith. And the faiths of Crook and Murphy endure in spite of it.

Crook knows that, in dissent, he and Murphy are "far outnumbered.''

"There's a few broken friendships because of this,'' Crook said. "I just figured, 'This is a search for the truth. When it becomes something different, that's when it should stop.'''

Maybe a Bigfoot will one day view the film, Crook figures, and offer its own disapproving grunt.

"There's just too much evidence that these creatures do inhabit certain areas out there,'' Crook said, ever sanguine. "Even though the Patterson film is a hoax, it doesn't mean Bigfoot doesn't exist.''