Bigfoots Don't Stink--At Least Not Always

Cryptozoology News suggests Sasquatch mat have a defense system similar to skunks

"In British Columbia and Alberta strong smells are mentioned in only 4. 5% of reports". --John Green, Spring 1995

A foul smell is often associated with Bigfoot, popular culture has reinforced this stereo type. In the first Anchorman Bigfoot's anatomy is used to describe the most foul cologne. Cryptozoology News (CN), although poorly sourced, reminds us that John Green's data points to a small percentage of odor being associated with Bigfoot encounters. CN continues to suggest that Sasquatch similar to skunks may have a defense mechanism citing examples from Dr. W. Fahrenbach, a retired biologist from the Oregon Primate Center, and Dian Fosey a renowned Gorilla researcher.

Before we send you Cryptozoology News, we wanted to share John Green's data regarding the odor associated with Bigfoot encounters.

It is common knowledge that sasquatches are reported to have a strong and unpleasant smell--in Florida they are commonly called "skunk apes". It is probably also well known, at least to the readers of newsletters, that strong smells are not always reported; but is this just because the witnesses were not in a position to smell anything, or because sasquatches do not always smell bad?

To contribute some information for anyone interested in this question, here are the results of an analysis of reports from the western part of North America that I have entered in my computer.

In 923 descriptions of supposed sasquatches, only 72 mention a strong smell. Nine mention a mild smell and eight state specifically that the animals had no smell. Strong smells were mentioned in less than eight percent of reports. This percentage is fairly consistent throughout the American states, percentages being: Washington, 9%; Oregon, 11%; California, 8%, and the average for eight other western states, 8.5%.

The percentage in Canada is lower. In British Columbia and Alberta strong smells are mentioned in only 4. 5% of reports. The number of descriptions involved, 217, would appear to be large enough so that the different percentage may have some significance, but it is hard to imagine what it could be.

Absence of a report of a strong smell obviously has no significance if the witness was a good distance away or was inside a building or vehicle. Restricting the survey to reports where it would seem that the witness should have noticed a strong smell if one was present gives the following results.

    In contact with the animal:     strong smell    5,     mild     0;      no smell,     5.

    Less than 5 feet away, in same air:                0,        2,            3.

    Estimated 5 feet away, in same air:                4        1            4.
    Estimated 10 feet away, in same air:              5,        1,            14.

Up to 5 feet the percentage of strong smells, in 24 reports, is 37.5%.

At 10 feet, in 20 reports, the percentage drops to 25%.

With some animals strong smells are associated only with the adult males. Most sasquatch reports do not involve any identification of sex, but it is usually assumed that most are males. My files contain only one report in which a sasquatch is identified as a female and said to have a strong smell.

    * A single report, that of Albert Ostman, has a disproportionate effect on the statistics. He claims to have been carried home by an adult male and then to have been close to a young male and a young female. In conversation, although not in his written account, he said that the adult male had a strong smell, the two juveniles mild smells. If his account is left out the number of reports of mild smells drops to seven, and the percentage of strong smells reported" in British Columbia drops to 4%.

John Green

Spring 1995

You can read the skunk gland theory at Cryptozology News  

Today in Bigfoot History | Jul 27, 1923 | The Legend of Old Yellow Top

The Yellow Top Legend

Old Yellow Top was allegedly a shaggy haired humanoid with a yellowish mane and a pronounced limp said to have wandered near the mines in Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. The following newspaper articles, dated 1923 to 1970 are all courtesy John Green, Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, 1997...

Sept 1906 and July 1923 -North Bay Nugget  (Ontario)

PRE CAMBRIAN SHIELD MAN SEEN BY TWO PROPECTORS

"Cobalt, Ontario Canada July 27,1923 - Mr. J. A. MacAuley and Mr. Lorno Wilson claim they have seen the "Pre-Cambrian shield man" while working on their mining claims North and East of the Wettlaufer Mine, near Cobalt. This is the second time in seventeen years that a hairy ape-like creature nicknamed "Old Yellow-Top" because of a light colored mane has been seen in the district. The two prospectors said they were taking test samples from their claim property when they spotted what looked like a bear picking in a blueberry patch. Mr. Wilson said he threw a stone at the creature. He said, "It kind of stood up and growled at us, then ran away. It sure was like no bear I have ever seen. Its head was kind of yellow and the rest of it was black, like a bear, all covered with hair." The first report of the creature was made in Sept. 1906, by a group of men building the head frame at the Violet Mine, east of Cobalt. It has not been seen since that time."

... And this news item dated April 16, 1947 -- North Bay Nugget - Ontario

”OLD YELLOW-TOP" REPORTED SEEN IN COLEMAN TOWNSHIP
Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. - "Old Yellow-Top", the half-man, half beast that is supposed to be roaming the wilds around the Cobalt Mining Camp, was supposedly seen again by a woman and her son who live near Gillies Depot, while they were walking the tracks into Cobalt. The woman, who did not want her name made public, said she noticed a dark hairy animal with a "light" head ambling off the tracks into the bush near Gillies Lake. She said she did not get a clear look at the thing, but said it walked very much like a man. The sighting is the third such report to be made since 1906, or 1947. A search party was formed to try to find "Old Yellow-Top".

...and this article dated August 5, 1970  - North Bay Nugget, Ontario

THIRD APPEARANCE BY PRE-CAMBRIAN SHIELD MAN  ( Actually, 4th )
Results in Bus Accident near Cobalt Lode Mine
Cobalt, Ontario Canada - Twenty seven miners on their way to work the graveyard shift at Cobalt Lode could have lost their lives when the bus in which they were riding went out of control and almost plunged down a nearby rock cut. Bus driver Amos Latreille, who has been driving the route for the last four months, said a dark form, which walked across the road in front of him, startled him. "At first, I thought it was a big bear. But then it turned to face the headlights, and I could see some light hair almost down to its shoulders. It couldn't have been a bear." Although no one was hurt, Mr. Latreille said he did not know if he would continue to drive the bus. "I have heard of this thing before, but never believed it. Now I am not so sure." One of the miners at the front of the bus said he caught a brief glimpse of the creature. Larry Cormack said it "looked like a bear to me at first, but it didn't walk like one. It was kind of all stooped over. Maybe it was a wounded bear, I don't know." Mr. Cormack added that he did not believe that PreCambrian Shield Man existed anyway.” My father used to talk about it, but I've seen it close up," he pointed out. The story started back early 1900s when a group of construction workers claimed to have seen the creature.

Today in Bigfoot History | July 2 1995 | John Green Calls Peter Byrne a Fraud

John Green (left) Peter Byrne (right) are pioneers of Bigfoot research.

"Peter Byrne is a fraud. He tells the public that Sasquatch is near human because that's what they like to hear." --John Green;  in a 1995 Chicago Tribune Article

In an article almost two decades old we see some of the same divisive debates that still plague the modern Bigfoot community. Ape vs. human. Kill vs. No-kill.

The excerpt further below is from the July 2, 1995 Chicago Tribune article. In the article you will read opinions of Peter Byrne from Grover Krantz and John Green. 

At the time Mr. Byrne was investigating the Bigfoot mystery under a grant from the Academy of Applied Science. A former Big Game Hunter, he was initially involved in the search for the Himalyan Yeti in the 1950's in the Slick expedition. 

Grover Krantz was a professor of physical anthropology at Washington State University, perhaps most famous to the general public as one of the few scientists not only to research Bigfoot, but also to express his belief in the cryptid's existence. 

Finally John Green is Canadian retired journalist and first began investigating Sasquatch sightings and track finds in 1957 after meeting René Dahinden. 

Time was running out.

But then, in 1992, good luck struck. Byrne received from Boston's Academy of Applied Science a very generous five-year grant. It provided enough money to found the Bigfoot Research Project, and to hire two assistants to help him launch the most high-tech monster search the world has ever seen--a search that relies on police gear, wildlife research equipment, a Jeep, a video camera, and, above all, a phone line. Byrne has a toll-free number, 1-800-BIGFOOT, and a dozen or so people call in every month to report sightings. The old hunter takes notes and then, if a sighting sounds promising, he rushes off to investigate- -to peruse the crushed twigs or watch witnesses imitate the horrible scream. Every detail is logged onto computers. Eventually, if all goes as planned, Sasquatch's migrational patterns will become clear, and Byrne can jump into a helicopter.

There are, on standby, two Bell 206 choppers equipped with the infared sensors used to track prison escapees. These would zero in on the beast, and Byrne would shoot a small dart. The dart would loop into the Sasquatch's flesh, extracting a small bit of tissue--enough to fill up, say, one tiny test tube--and ultimately the creature would lope off, unharmed. And the cameras would whir: You know the tabloids would be there. Indeed, they can't wait. Last year, the crew of "Unsolved Mysteries," an independent syndicated TV show, spent a week with Byrne filming a mock Bigfoot hunt that was replete with a Hollywood stunt man wearing oversized shoes.

Byrne has also been covered by "Ancient Mysteries," "Sightings," and the Australian Broadcast Corporation, and newspapers ranging from The Hood River News to The New York Times.

There critics are out there.

With all the fame has come criticism. For instance, Grover Krantz, a Bigfoot believer who teaches anthropology at Washington State University, argues that Byrne is "a sham, a fake." Krantz takes issue mainly with Byrne's opposition to killing, which evolved after decades of watching bumbling tourists murder Nepalese tigers. "I argue for humane treatment too," says Krantz. "But in order to attain protection for the Sasquatch, we have to prove they exist. And Peter knows that the only way we can do that is by bringing in a body." John Green, a retired Canadian journalist who has written several books on Bigfoot, is even more critical. "Peter Byrne is a fraud," Green says. "He tells the public that Sasquatch is near human because that's what they like to hear."

Green is certain that, "if Sasquatch is real, he's just an animal." But Byrne feels the truth is far more complex: He likes to think of the creature as a convict. "As a child," he explains, "we played a game called Convict 99. One person was the fugitive. Others were the police; they tried to put themselves in the mind of a fugitive. Now we're trying to do the same thing. Bigfoot is out there, but where? Where is he hiding?" It's a vast question and, trying to answer it, Byrne has forded an icy, chest-deep stream on snowshoes and slept out on winter nights with nothing but a small fire to warm him. He says, "It's like we're trying to find a needle in a haystack and the needle is moving and it doesn't want to be found."

You can read the full article titled, "ON THE TRAIL OF BIGFOOT," at Bigfoot Encounters

Today in Bigfoot History | MAR 14, 2004 | John Green Publishes Thoughts on P/G Film

John Green with White Lady (photo: Steven Streufert of Bigfoot Books)

"The answer has been in plain view all along, the creature on the film holding it, quite literally, in its arms." --John Green

What you read below is a paper written by John Green that was published on the website of Roger Thomas. The website is now defunct and we were only able to access this page through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

John Green, of course, is one of the four horsemen of sasquatchery. Born February 12, 1927, Mr. Green is a retired Canadian journalist and continues to be a leading researcher into the Bigfoot phenomenon. In 2004 he published the paper below, in the paper he advocates for the authenticity of the Patterson/Gimlin film and adds a comment from Dr. Jeff Meldrum using the concept of intermembral index, a measurement used to determine limb proportion.

Thoughts on the Patterson-Gimlin Footage

By John Green, 14 March 2004Almost thirty-seven years ago two young men from Yakima, Washington, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, emerged from a remote forest in the northwest corner of California with a brief 16-millimeter filmshowing a hairy creature walking along a sand bar on its hind legs, and the debate on whether their film shows an unknown animal or a man wearing a fur suit has gone on ever since.

Now, thanks to a new book on the subject, that debate should be at an end. The answer has been in plain view all along, the creature on the film holding it, quite literally, in its arms. And that answer, ironically, is the opposite of the one in the book.

The creature cannot be a man in a suit.

The writer of the book, of which only review copies are so far available, claims to have cracked the case by finding two key witnesses, the man who wore the suit, a Yakima acquaintance of Patterson and Gimlin named Bob Heironimus, and the man who sold a gorilla suit to Patterson and told him how to modify it, Philip Morris, a costume maker from Charlotte, North Carolina.

The creature in the movie has normal-looking arms. It cannot be a man in a suit.

The Heironimus story is not new. It surfaced several years ago one of the many unsubstantiated claims to have been "the man in the suit" that crop up from time to time. Phillip Morris appears to be a real find, a man who actually was making gorilla costumes in 1967 and who says he remembers selling one to Roger Patterson.

One of the things that Morris is quoted as saying is that the way to make the arms in the suit look longer than human arms is to extend the gloves of the suit on sticks. Many people have noted that the arms of the creature in the film look unusually long, almost as long as its legs. Some, including myself in 1968, have published estimates of their length. No one went on to deal with the question of how human arms could be extended to match the extra length and what such an extension would look like.
There is no way to establish for certain if any of the dimensions estimated for the creature in the film are accurate, but what can be established with reasonably accuracy is the length of the creature's legs and arms in relation to one another. From that ratio, which anatomists call the "intermembral index," it is simple to calculate how many inches must be added to the arms of a man of known size in order to make his arms long enough to fit the supposed suit. In my own case the answer turns out to be about 10 inches.

But in order for the arms to bend at the elbow, which they plainly do in the movie, all of that extra length has to be added to the lower arm. The result, in my case, is about 12 inches of arm above the elbow and 29 inches below it — almost as much of a monstrosity as Edward Scissorhands. The creature in the movie has normal-looking arms. It cannot be a man in a suit.

Many issues in the long debate about the movie remain unresolved — what the film speed was, whether a man could duplicate the creature's unusual bent-kneed walk, whether its behavior was normal for an animal, whether the tracks left on the sandbar could have been faked, and so on — but all of them turn out to have been irrelevant to the main issue.

My measurements of the film, made 36 years ago, gave the creature arms that were 30 inches from the shoulder to the wrist and legs that were 35 inches from the hip to the ground. My own measurements are about 24 inches from shoulder to wrist and 40 inches from hip to ground. Only the ratios of the measurements matter, the actual size of either the human or the creature makes no difference, and the ratios for creature and human are so much different that precise accuracy of the measurements is not significant either. The much ridiculed Patterson-Gimlin film does not show a man in a suit.

What about Roger Patterson buying a gorilla suit? Philip Morris does not claim to have records, only a memory, and neither Mrs. Patterson nor Bob Gimlin remember Roger having any such suit. But Roger was trying to make a Bigfoot documentary at that time and most such documentaries contain re-enactments by someone wearing a fur suit. If he did buy one it has little more significance than an apprentice carpenter buying a hammer.

And the descriptions of the suit by the two key witnesses are totally contradictory. Morris is quoted as having described his suit in precise detail, and how he made it. The suit had six separate pieces: a head a body (arms, torso and legs), two hands and two feet. A knitted cloth material served as a backing to thousands of synthetic nylon strands called dynel, which were driven by a powerful knitting machine with needles through the knitted cloth material and then pulled back through to the other side. It had a 36-inch zipper up the back.

Bob Heironimus is also quoted, saying that Patterson made the suit himself by skinning a dead horse and gluing fur from an old fur coat on the horsehide. It was in three parts, head, torso and legs that felt like bigger rubber boots and that went to his waist. He thought the feet were made of old house slippers. The suit weighted 20 or 25 pounds and he needed help to get in and out of it. It also smelled bad. "It stunk. Roger skinned out a dead, red horse."

A Comment by Jeff Meldrum

It has been obvious to even the casual viewer that the film subject possesses arms that are disproportionately long for its stature. John Green is a veteran researcher into the question of Sasquatch or Bigfoot. He was among the first to view the film captured by Patterson and Gimlin and has studied it intensely in the intervening years. His recognition of the significance of the unhumanly long arms of the film subject is point that has not previously been articulated in such a straightforward manner. It is such a fundamental observation that it is considered a breakthrough in assessing the validity of this extraordinary film. Anthropologists typically express limb proportions as an intermembral index (IM), which is the ratio of combined arm and forearm skeletal length (humerus + radius) to combined thigh and leg skeletal length (femur + tibia) x 100. The human IM averages 72. The intermembral index is a significant measure of a primate's locomotor adaptation  The forelimb-dominated movements of the chimp and gorilla are reflected in their high IM indices of 106 and 117 respectively. Identifying the positions of the joints on the film subject can only be approximate and the limbs are frequently oriented obliquely to the plane of the film, rendering them foreshortened to varying degrees. However, in some frames the limbs are nearly vertical, hence parallel to the filmplane, and indicate an IM index somewhere between 80 and 90, intermediate between humans and African apes. In spite of the imprecision of this preliminary estimate, it is well beyond the mean for humans and effectively rules out a man-in-a-suit explanation for the Patterson-Gimlin film without invoking an elaborate, if not inconceivable, prosthetic contrivance to account for the appropriate positions and actions of wrist and elbow and finger flexion visible on the film. This point deserves further examination and may well rule out the probability of hoaxing.

Jeff Meldrum Ph.D. Associate professor of Anatomy & Anthropology
Idaho State University,
Pocatello,
Idaho, 83209-8007.

Dr. Meldrum is an expert in primate anatomy and locomotion. He recently coedited, From Biped to Strider: The Emergence of Modern Human Walking, Running, and Resource Transport. He became interested in the Sasquatch question eight years ago after witnessing 15-inch tracks in southeastern Washington state. He has examined numerous footprints, including those associated with the Patterson-Gimlin footage.