Today in Bigfoot History | May 15th 1977 | Canadian Bus Driver and 6 Passengers See Bigfoot

Canadian bus driver and 6 passengers claim they saw Bigfoot. 

"The hoax would be more important than a real Sasquatch sighting...it would teach us a lesson to smarten up." -- Rene Dahinden on the possibility the Canadian sighting was a hoax

The hoaxers eventually did fess up, but as Rene has said this is an important hoax to dissect.  So that's what we are going to do. But first let's start with the sighting.

As the story goes a Canadian bus driver named Pat Lindquist, who also happened to be a reserve Vancouver city police officer, was westbound a mile east of Lake Erroch on the Harrison Hot Springs-to-Vancouver run when he saw a 7 foot tall creature with black fur and a light colored face. It was estimated to be 300 pounds, but weight estimates usually just indicate it was heavier than the average human--very hard to guess visually.

This was an interesting encounter, because not only was the creature witnessed by the bus driver, but all six passengers saw it too, some waking up to see the creature! It gets better, the driver stops the bus and gives chase. He actually gets out of the bus and catches up with the creature. In the Oklahoma City Times he describes the confrontation:

"The first thing I noticed was the smell...a horrible smell like very rotten meat. The bush was thick and I was pushing the branches apart when I saw it about 20 or 25 feet away. I just couldn't believe it."

"At first I was mad. But then I went to awe and then to fright and I began to shake. I couldn't stop shaking and then I got out of there." The smell has been a common element in the reports from numerous people who claim to have been close to the Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot.

Lindquist, who is 6-foot-2, said the thing before him was no more than seven feet tall, only "much heavier than I am." "It had flat, flared nostrils like a monkey and large, wide eyes. It didn't make any sound except heavy breathing. It had a

broad chest and it was heavy up and down."

"It could have taken two steps and grabbed me, but it didn't do anything. It didn't growl. It didn't show its teeth. It just looked at me." Lindquist said the hair on its face was a light brown and "it appeared to have the mange; the skin underneath looked kind of white."

Ten days later the perpetrators admitted on radio that it was a hoax. Now, for those of you that think that we shouldn't dissect this hoax and give hoaxers any tips. I don't think there should be a concern. Either there is evidence or there isn't, otherwise it is just a story.

This hoax was composed of a team of  four individuals and took weeks to prepare for, in fact they started by selecting a bus line and planted a passenger that would alert everybody else on the bus.

The gorilla suit was bought for $200 dollars and was worn by a guy who was 5-foot-11 and  165-pounds. A far cry from the 7-foot 300-pound creature described.

This story even had footprints made from a resin cast they created based on one seen in the book Sasquatch/Bigfoot: The Search for North America's Incredible Creature by Don Hunter and Rene Dahinden.

You can read the original article, before it was revealed as a hoax, below:

MISSION, British Columbia (AP) - A furry creature about seven feet tall lumbered across Highway 7 near this Fraser Valley community Sunday and made some believers in the legendary Sasquatch.

The sighting, 35 miles east of Vancouver, occurred as a Pacific Stage Lines bus driven by Pat Lindquist was westbound a mile east of Lake Erroch on the Harrison Hot Springs-to-Vancouver run.

The passengers and Lindquist saw ahead of the bus a glimpse of something they all described as a seven-foot tall, 300-pound beast with dark brown to black fur or hair and a light-colored face.

"At first we thought it was a prankster in a fur suit," said Lindquist, 28, a reserve Vancouver city police officer. "But people were shouting 'what is it, what is it', so I slammed on the brakes to have a look.

"To tell the truth, I thought it was someone trying to con us so I took off after it. I guess I thought I was going to pull off his hat and bawl him out. I don't know why I did it. I'm not sure I really intended to catch up with it."

Lindquist, who police here describe as "very nervous and pale" when they arrived on the scene, later described what happened when he gave pursuit.

"The first thing I noticed was the smell...a horrible smell like very rotten meat. The bush was thick and I was pushing the branches apart when I saw it about 20 or 25 feet away. I just couldn't believe it."

"At first I was mad. But then I went to awe and then to fright and I began to shake. I couldn't stop shaking and then I got out of there." The smell has been a common element in the reports from numerous people who claim to have been close to the Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot.

Lindquist, who is 6-foot-2, said the thing before him was no more than seven feet tall, only "much heavier than I am." "It had flat, flared nostrils like a monkey and large, wide eyes. It didn't make any sound except heavy breathing. It had a

broad chest and it was heavy up and down."

"It could have taken two steps and grabbed me, but it didn't do anything. It didn't growl. It didn't show its teeth. It just looked at me." Lindquist said the hair on its face was a light brown and "it appeared to have the mange; the skin underneath looked kind of white."

© Oklahoma City Times; Monday, May 16, 1977

April Fool Cryptids from Museum of Hoaxes

Not surprisingly, April fools brings it share of "new found" cryptids. Even less surprising, these "cryptids" would show up on a top 100 list of April Fools Hoaxes at MuseumofHoaxes.com.

Consider this as Bigfoot Lunch Club's Public Service Announcement that April 1st is a fallacious day for discovering new cryptids.

#9: Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers
1995: Discover Magazine reported that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had found a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. "To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin," the article quoted her as saying. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.

#12: Flying Penguins
2008: The BBC announced that camera crews filming near the Antarctic for its natural history series Miracles of Evolution had captured footage of Adélie penguins taking to the air. It even offered a video clip of these flying penguins, which became one of the most viewed videos on the internet. Presenter Terry Jones explained that, instead of huddling together to endure the Antarctic winter, these penguins took to the air and flew thousands of miles to the rainforests of South America where they "spend the winter basking in the tropical sun." A follow-up video explained how the BBC created the special effects of the flying penguins.

#14: The Body of Nessie Found
1972: On March 31 1972, a team of zoologists from Yorkshire's Flamingo Park Zoo, who were at Loch Ness searching for proof of Nessie's existence, found a mysterious carcass floating in the Loch. Initial reports claimed it weighed a ton and a half and was 15 ½ feet long. The zoologists placed the body in a van and began to transport it back to the zoo. However, the police chased down their truck and stopped it under a 1933 act of Parliament prohibiting the removal of "unidentified creatures" from Loch Ness. The body was then taken to nearby Dunfermline for examination. The discovery of the carcass received worldwide media attention. The British press dubbed it "Son of Nessie." But upon examination, Edinburgh scientists identified the creature as a bull elephant seal from the South Atlantic. The next day John Shields, Flamingo Park's education officer, confessed he had been responsible for the body. The bull elephant seal had died the week before at Dudley Zoo. He had shaved off its whiskers, padded its cheeks with stones, and kept it frozen for a week, before dumping it in the Loch and then phoning in a tip to make sure his colleagues found it. He had meant to play an April Fool's prank on his colleagues, but admitted the joke got out of hand when the police chased down their van.

#33: The Derbyshire Fairy
2007: In late March 2007, images of an 8-inch mummified creature resembling a fairy were posted on the website of the Lebanon Circle Magik Co. Accompanying text explained how the creature had been found by a man walking his dog along an old roman road in rural Derbyshire. Word of this discovery soon spread around the internet. Bloggers excitedly speculated about whether the find was evidence of the actual existence of fairies. By April 1 the Lebanon Circle website had received tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of emails. But at the end of April 1, Dan Baines, the owner of the site, confessed that the fairy was a hoax. He had used his skills as a magician's prop-maker to create the creature. Baines later reported that, even after his confession, he continued to receive numerous emails from people who refused to accept the fairy wasn't real.

#48: Tasmanian Mock Walrus
1984: The Orlando Sentinel featured a story about a creature known as the Tasmanian Mock Walrus (or TMW for short) that many people in Florida were supposedly adopting as a pet. The creature was said to be four inches long, resembled a walrus, purred like a cat, and had the temperament of a hamster. What made it such an ideal pet was that it never had to be bathed, it used a litter box, and it ate cockroaches. In fact, a single TMW could entirely rid a house of its cockroach problem. Reportedly, some TMWs had been smuggled in from Tasmania, and there were efforts being made to breed them, but the local pest control industry was pressuring the government not to allow them into the country, fearing they would put cockroach exterminators out of business. Dozens of people called the paper trying to find out where they could obtain their own TMW. A picture of a Tasmanian Mock Walrus accompanied the article. Skeptics noted that the creature looked surprisingly similar to a Naked Mole Rat.

#66: Smaugia Volans
The April 1, 1998 online edition of Nature Magazine revealed the discovery of "a near-complete skeleton of a theropod dinosaur in North Dakota." The discovery was referred to in an article by Henry Gee discussing the palaeontological debate over the origin of birds. The dinosaur skeleton had reportedly been discovered by Randy Sepulchrave of the Museum of the University of Southern North Dakota. The exciting part of the discovery, according to the article, was that "The researchers believe that the dinosaur, now named as Smaugia volans, could have flown." In actuality, the University of Southern North Dakota does not exist, though it has been made famous by Peter Schickele who refers to it as the location where the music of the obscure eighteenth-century composer PDQ Bach was first performed; Smaug was the name of the dragon in Tolkein's The Hobbit; and Sepulchrave was the name of the 76th Earl of Groan in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. This Earl, believing that he was an owl, leapt to his death from a high tower, discovering too late that he could not fly.

EXTERNAL LINKS
The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time
Fictitious Creatures of April Fool's Day

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Profiling Hoaxers: The Psychology of Fame

Money and power are handy, but millions of ambitious people are after something other than the corner office or the beach house on St. Bart’s. They want to swivel necks, to light a flare in others’ eyes, to walk into a crowded room and feel the conversation stop. --Benedict Carey, New York Times

The News Tribune of Tacoma Washington, ran a story today about Cliff Cook. For those unfamiliar with Cliff Crook he is responsible for the photo in Benjamin Radford presentation below. The photo has been revealed as a hoax and has become a trophy to skeptics, along with the Frozen Georgia Bigfoot. They will probably be followed soon by the Sylvanic Bigfoot video footage.



What motivates hoaxers? I always get the sense that they believe in Bigfoot, despite the hoax. There has to be a more complete answer to their motivations. I wanted to know the psychology behind it. Oddly enough, there is not a lot of studies on hoaxing, but that's because hoaxing is really a polite term for what these "hoaxes" really are. These "hoaxes" are really lies, fraudulent lies. Y'see a real hoax is like what you see on Candid Camera, April Fools, etc. Proven hoaxes are lies. I'm not trying to be harsh, but if we are honest we might be able to understand motives better.

So why lie? Some have speculated greed as the motivation. After all, there is money to be made in the Bigfoot/CryptoZ industry. The only issue is, any proven "hoax" has never been profitable in the long-run. Although you can argue "hoaxers" are short-sighted and gambling on the bet they will not be caught, I think there is something that is a far stronger motivator. Fame.

Before you say, "Duh!" Give me a chance to be more specific. Fame is much more than "getting attention," it is deeper than that, its fulfilling a "need." Understanding a hoaxer's desire to attain fame can provide a few clues to overall psychological make-up of Bigfoot hoaxers. Let me quote Benedict Carey of New York Times.

For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.

People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.

In a 1996 study, Richard M. Ryan of the University of Rochester and Dr. Kasser, then at Rochester, conducted in-depth surveys of 100 adults, asking about their aspirations, guiding principles, and values, as well as administering standard measures of psychological well-being.

The participants in the study who focused on goals tied to others’ approval, like fame, reported significantly higher levels of distress than those interested primarily in self-acceptance and friendship.

Surveys done since then, in communities around the world, suggest the same thing: aiming for a target as elusive as fame, and so dependent on the judgments of others, is psychologically treacherous.

We think there is a lot more to to this, and although we can't assume whether a "hoaxer" is really interested in finding Bigfoot, we can assume finding Bigfoot is not their first priority. Don't get us wrong, we are extremely inclusive here at BLC, good research and theories can come from anywhere. As far as "hoaxers" go? We feel a "hoaxers" are repeat offenders. And we should always be leery when they appear back in the news.

Dislamer: I don't want anybody to think I am a "hater." I already have my claim to fame. My fame peaked in 2008 and I'm okay with that.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Cliff Cook Article at The News Tribune
The Fame Motive at The New York Times
Loren Coleman Weighs-in