Stan Courtney is Making a List and Checking it Twice

Stan Courtney's audio recordings have solved one philosophy's oldest questions, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Quite an accomplishment. An accomplishment one could rest their laurels on, but Courtney didn't stop there, he also built the most useful online list of Bigfoot web sites. The page is called SquatchMarks, The name comes from a hybrid of the two words Sasquatch and Bookmarks. We would even go as far as calling it the Google of Bigfoot sites, but, honestly, its better.

When you search for "Bigfoot" on Google you get 4x4's, Computer networks, and people with genuinely Big feet.


Squatchmarks filters out all of those false positives and then even categorizes them for you. Dont take our word for it, here are few quotes from other sites.

...a treasure trove of links to just about every Bigfoot/Cryptozoology website in existence --southeastsasquatchassociation.weebly.com

...an attempt to collect as many Bigfoot / sasquatch links as possible in one list. --Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers.

...has an extensive links page,and I'm glad he does because he sends quite a few visitors to BigfootSightings.com

...Wow Stan..that sets a standard! Nightwing a member at BigfootForums.com

...Stan Courtney's Squatchmarks put us on the map! BigfootLunchClub.Com

We owe a special gratitude to Stan Courtney. In 2007 when we were a small isolated blog, one person noticed us, and all of the sudden we started getting traffic from a page called Squatchmarks at Stancourtney.com the rest is history, everybody at BLC would like to thank Stan for putting us on the map.

We were fortunate enough to track Stan down and ask a few questions. He generously lent his time to do an interview with us. Not only does he talk about his creation of the best online list of Bigfoot websites ever. He also shares what drives his craft, discusses various opinions on call blasting, the Sierra Sounds, and a possible bigfoot language.

QUESTIONS REGARDING YOUR AUDIO

BLC:You are known by many regarding your Bigfoot sounds, but you have an impressive library of bird audio. Where does your interest in bird sounds come from? Ornithology, birdwatching or just a fan of the different sounds they make?

SC: I have always had an intense interest in birds, and especially bird songs. However, my first audio recordings were of frogs in the Williamette Valley where I lived in the late 1960's.

BLC:I Love the sound of the Red-winged Blackbird, and was glad to be able to see you had a recording. Whenever I hear it, I always look around to see if I can catch it in flight. Do you always have the luxury of seeing the bird you are recording?

SC: I use several different techniques in gathering wildlife sounds. I always carry a recorder with me in the woods, I also am currently attempting to record 24/7 from two different locations. And then I also use a 24" parabolic microphone. So some of my sounds I record while I see the subject but most of my sounds are recorded remotely.

BLC:When it comes to technology and technique, you are awful forthcoming and very helpful on your site. Is this a philosophy you developed on your own? or did you also have a generous mentor when you first started your craft?

SC: My goal has always been to share my sounds and to encourage others to share their sounds as well. I am always more than willing to try and questions about recorders, techniques or sounds in general. Many researchers in the birding community are very helpful in this regard.

QUESTIONS REGARDING BIGFOOT

BLC:You have some sounds in the unidentifiable category, but I assume they all don't all fall into the Bigfoot column or do they?

SC: I have always been very careful not to label any sound as being Bigfoot related. To my knowledge there are no videos showing a Bigfoot making a vocalization. Whatever "Unknown sounds" that I have recorded are just that, unknown. And I would assume quite a few sounds that I have labeled as "unknown" are not Bigfoot related.

BLC:Is there a distinctive Bigfoot Sound and do you have any on your site?

SC: I have heard roars, screams, whoops, whistles, howls all at very close range. I think most researchers would have labelled them as being sasquatch. Unfortunately, for several different reasons, I do not have recordings of them. At this time, although I have some recordings that were very close, none of them would fit the category as being typical Sasquatch type vocalizations.

BLC:Birds generally use calls to attract mates, primates vocalize usually to declare territory; do you think call blasting is useful to Bigfooting?

SC: Call blasting has been used extensively by many researchers. If used in a prudent manner I think it can have startling results.

BLC:Do you have an opinion regarding the Sierra Sounds, or the proposed language found on them?

SC: I am convinced that squatches have a language. One of my primary goals is to record close-in vocalizations that would be useful to compare to other researchers recordings.

QUESTIONS REGARDING SQUATCHMARKS

BLC:Squatchmarks is the definitive go-to page to find Bigfoot sites, blogs, chatrooms, radio shows, forums, audio, videos--everything Bigfoot on the web. It’s better than Google if you are looking for a Bigfoot site. Not only is it the largest list on the web, but it is extremely user friendly; clearly labeled and categorized like a spreadsheet on a single page. Has this page always been like this, or did it evolve over time

SC: I first got on the internet in 1997 and have always searched for a decent start page, with no advertisements. Squatchmarks as you see it today has basically always been the same.

BLC:Did you build Squatchmarks primarily for yourself and hope it would be useful to others?

SC: I guess I built it for myself. As most of the items on my webpage they are a resource to keep things organized so I can find files that I use.

BLC:Did you know you were building a research tool that would become indispensable to other Bigfooters?

SC: I have been surprised by the number of people that use squatchmarks. It is a constant effort to keep it updated. I rely on other researchers to send me new links and delete broken ones.

Thank you Stan for taking the time to do this interview. We appreciate your contributions to Sasquatch research and everyone here at Bigfoot Lunch Club salutes you.

Its worth your while to check out Stans Cortney's Site here.
And make sure you check out Squatchmarks, here.
And you can follow him on Facebook

Yes Virginia, there is a Bigfoot

"Dear Bigfoot Lunch Club: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Bigfoot.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Bigfoot?

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Bigfoot. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion and the coelacanth exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Bigfoot. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. Plus, Dr. Jeff Meldrum has several high quality casts of tracks and Loren Coleman, who has debunked many of monsters, still pursues the elusive Bigfoot. Yes Virginia, there is a Bigfoot.

Today fans we provide you with a bounty of Bigfoot for the little feet.


Let's Start with the Carolina Pad Company. They have a whole line of "green" products with Sasquatch as their official spokesperson. If you care about the environment and you want your kids to have the eco-friendliest stuff go to www.find-sasquatch.com. plus they have a Games and a Fun Stuff section.


Next, we have our dear friend Linda Newton-Perry of Bigfoot Ballyhoo. She has a Bigfoot Blog just for kids. She is the co-author of three Bigfoot children's books, which are EYE OF THE BEAST, LOCK YOUR DOORS COUNTRY FOLK and THE LITTLE RED CAR AND BIGFOOT. You can buy her books here. Check out her Bigfoot Fancy 4 Kids site here.



Finally we have something for the young adult. If you have a tween interested in the wonders of science the rigors of research and the adventure of new discoveries, the folks at the Mid-America Bigfoot Research Center have what you need. They offer free (they request you become a member) online courses to teach all the knowledge and discipline you will need to be a Jr.Field Researcher. The bonus is they don't stop there, if your serious about research and analytics, they have several more courses for members.

Oh and what about online games? We have two yeti games.
Penguin toss
Facebook App Gift of the Yeti
Snowdrift a game you can play in your browser.

2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner Writes Bigfoot

Kim Murphy, LA Times journalist, just won her second Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her eloquent, wide ranging coverage of Russia’s struggle to cope with terrorism, improve the economy and make democracy work.

We stumbled across an article at The Exile, a russian-based newspaper, that seems less than pleased. They go as far as calling her Kim "Bigfoot" Murphy. Mocking the fact that she wrote a great article about Bigfoot. Like that's an insult anyway? I can speak for everybody here at the Bigfoot Lunch Club, we would love to have the middle name "Bigfoot." Then it would match our ankle tattoos we all got that night when we decided to have one of our club meetings in a pub (trust me, it wasn't the worst idea that night--another pint and you would be logged in to "Bigfoot Lunch Pub" instead.)

All kidding aside, we would like to share the Bigfoot article written by a two-time Pulitzer prize winning journalist Kim "Bigfoot" Murphy.

To read the full Bigfoot article, "Science Is Hot on Heels of Bigfoot Legend" by Kim "Bigfoot" Murphy, just click on "Expand Full Post" below.



Science Is Hot on Heels of Bigfoot Legend
January 21, 1996|KIM MURPHY, TIMES STAFF WRITER
WALLA WALLA, Wash. — Stories have always been told about things that happened along old Mill Creek Road, the trail of bumps and switchbacks that winds up from the farms of southeastern Washington to the hushed and empty ranges of the Blue Mountains.
The large, human-like footprints found along the creek. The sounds heard late at night outside the lonely cabins on the upper end of the road. The man who was riding his motorcycle and saw something in the brush, 10 or 12 feet tall, making a weird, high-pitched scream.

As far back as the 1920s, there were reports of a family of huge "man-creatures" skulking up near homesteads along the nearby Coppei River. Six dairy cows were said to have been herded away by the beasts. One by one, the homesteaders left and moved back to town. But the stories persisted. As long as anyone remembers, it has been an item of belief for many here that Bigfoot walks the Blue Mountains.

"Up north here, we growed up with this thing. People would say, 'Look out for the wild man.' Man, how can you doubt it when you still got diapers on and they got a picture of you pointing at a Bigfoot track?" said Wes Sumerlin, a Walla Walla mountain man whose alleged sighting of two ape-like creatures about seven miles off Mill Creek Road last summer has led to hopes of the first scientific evidence of the legend.

Sumerlin and two colleagues came back with clumps of hair that Ohio State University researchers are testing for DNA comparisons. The tests, said Oregon primate zoologist H. Henner Fahrenbach, "could legitimize, to my mind at least, the sightings, the footprints, everything. It would put one item of concrete evidence behind all the circumstantial evidence."

Grendel, Snowman
From Northern California to the dense forests of British Columbia, the legends of Sasquatch have been handed down over hundreds of years, a Northwest version of the fearsome fable--from the Grendel of "Beowulf" to the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas--that is as old as the forest and the night.

Now, years after much of the forest has given way to suburbs, the Sasquatch is in resurgence all over the Northwest, a cultural phenomenon that is at least as remarkable as any scientific evidence uncovered in the DNA labs.

Two books were published last year, one documenting Sasquatch legends, the other an attempt to trail Bigfoot across the Dark Divide, an area of the Cascades in southern Washington and northern Oregon.

Bigfoot now commands two sites on the World Wide Web; a well-funded research project has been launched near Oregon's Mt. Hood to exhaustively document and prepare a computer analysis of all plausible Bigfoot reports; a pair of hotlines are in place to collect Bigfoot sightings; the Western Bigfoot Society, the largest of a host of interest groups all over the world, meets monthly in the basement of a used bookstore in northern Portland, Ore.; a Bigfoot symposium is scheduled this summer outside of Vancouver, Canada.

"Something is definitely afoot in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Either an officially undescribed species of hominoid primate dwells there, or an act of self- and group deception of astonishing proportions is taking place. In any case, the phenomenon of Bigfoot exists," Washington naturalist Robert Michael Pyle wrote in "Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide."

Mainstream scientists have scoffed at reports of a man-ape lurking in the forests of the Northwest, something akin to the great apes that dwelt in East Asia approximately half a million years ago. Not only is it unlikely that one wouldn't have been seen and clearly photographed by now, but it would be difficult for so large an animal to find adequate food in the wild lands that remain, they say.

On the other side are a handful of anthropologists, zoologists and others who say that it is possible that the great apes could have crossed the Bering Sea along the ancient ice passage into North America--and survived by cunning, brawn and shyness in the huge tracts of forests in the Northwest.

"We have an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence. We have footprints by the tens of thousands. . . . I have a giant footprint that is 22 inches. And they go bigger than that. The second thing we have is sightings, and they number in the thousands. They're from people in all walks of life, from game wardens to loggers, plain old grandmas, police officers with 20,000-candlepower searchlights," said Fahrenbach, who teaches a course on Bigfoot science at Portland Community College.

To Kill a Bigfoot
Gordon Krantz, anthropology professor at Washington State University, estimates that there have been about a quarter of a million Bigfoot "events" over the past 40 years. He said he has tracked nearly identical reports from the Northwest into western China and the former Soviet Central Asia, supporting his theory that the ancient gigantopithecus--the greatest ape that ever lived, about 8 or 9 feet tall--did not die off in Asia 400,000 years ago but crossed over into North America and survived in small numbers.

Krantz has touched off something of a controversy in Bigfoot circles by openly advocating the view that a specimen should be hunted down and killed.

"Someday down the line, 50 years from now, somebody by the rare chance might just stumble across the skeleton of a Sasquatch, and then the government sends out masses of [chimpanzee researcher] Jane Goodall's granddaughters, and establishes definitely, they were there, but they're extinct," Krantz theorized. "Everybody will be standing around wringing their hands saying: 'If only we knew they were real, we could have saved them.' Well, they could have been saved if only we would blow one away now. The first one who bags one should get a big, big prize. The second one should be hanged."
One opponent of Krantz's view is Peter Byrne, director of the Bigfoot Research Project at Mt. Hood.

Byrne is a big-game hunter in the classic tradition--Irish, with a good head of white hair and a penchant for khakis and wool sweaters. He spent a good part of his hunting-and-tracking career in Nepal before developing an interest in the Sasquatch and undertaking the first major organized Bigfoot expedition in Oregon in 1960.

It failed to produce a Sasquatch, but Byrne hasn't quit looking. He now spends much of his time tracking down witnesses, carefully probing their stories for holes, sending investigators to look for corroborating evidence, then entering the results in a computer database. So far, 103 sightings going back 50 years--none of them outside the Northwest--have been deemed credible by the four-member team working at Mt. Hood. The project is sponsored by the Academy of Applied Science in Boston.

All told, Byrne figures that he has spent 16 of the last 35 years looking for Bigfoot. He still has never seen one, although like many other Bigfoot researchers, he has heard that shrieking cry in the forest, in the dead of night, that doesn't sound like any other known animal. He only heard it once.

"It was a kind of screaming roar. Very, very powerful. It lasted about five seconds, there was an interruption of four or five seconds, then it happened again. I've heard elephants. I've heard tigers. I've never heard anything like this."

Whatever is finally found in the woods, Byrne said, shouldn't be shot.

"There are those people who say: 'Shoot one, cut off the head and send it to me, it's all over.' We realize that could be the answer. But these things have never harmed anyone, and they've never demonstrated any kind of aggression, and we feel that any attempt to shoot one would be criminal," Byrne said.

The Bigfoot story last August in Walla Walla started with some youths who said they had heard screaming sounds up in the mountains. A local rancher said all his cattle had come down off Biscuit Ridge, where the good feed was, and gone over to Black Snake Ridge, where there wasn't any feed.

Smell of Sasquatch?
The rancher talked to Sumerlin. "I said, 'What about the deer, the elk?' He said, 'I haven't seen any of 'em for about a week.' He said, 'Hell, there aren't even any birds up there.' There ain't nothing sticks around when those critters are there," Sumerlin said.

Sumerlin talked to Paul Freeman, who has spent much of the last several years looking for Bigfoot, and Bill Laughery, an ex-game warden. The three decided to drive up and have a look the next day.

Freeman started out taking the two other men back to where he had seen some tracks earlier. They hiked in off the main road and started climbing into the highlands. Then, Sumerlin said, he got "a whiff of something."

"Smelled like somebody skinning muskrats. And then I thought, 'Hell, there ain't nobody skinning muskrats up here.' " Freeman had gone on ahead, but Sumerlin called Laughery back.

"I stood there just a second or two, and all of a sudden I smelled it: a real pungent, heavy odor like an animal that's in rut. Like you can smell a bull elk or a buck deer," Laughery said. The two men were interviewed separately but gave identical accounts.

Clumps of Hair
Sumerlin and Laughery said they moved together into a clearing, where they found a number of small trees twisted and broken, so fresh they were still dripping sap. There were large clumps of long hair, some black, some dark brown, caught on the trees where they were broken.

Laughery started to walk on when Sumerlin said he saw something moving in the trees. "It's like you can't see it, but you can see the daylight breaking behind it," he said. "Bill was there--he packs those sneaky little spyglasses around--and he said, 'Wes, I see something, but I can't put a head on it.' . . . I got down by him and he was talking about it while I was walking toward it, and then he said, 'Hell, it's gone.' I was looking at the back of the critter, I was just seeing part of it. But he was looking on the other side, and he was getting a good look at it. But basically we saw the same thing. It was a big, hairy critter, about 7 foot tall, I'd say, covered with hair."

"It was 7 to 8 foot tall, buckskin brown, I could see it well enough to see fringe about 1 inch high, a little, on the top of the head," Laughery said. "We were 87 feet away and we stood and watched that for four or five minutes, and it didn't move at all. I looked it up and down. I couldn't see its face. . . . I got a quarter-view. And then the minute I turned to Wes to say something, it took off."

Laughery and Sumerlin said they believe that there were actually two creatures, one that moved off down the canyon, another that headed down a small trail. They both saw the big one jump the trail, 15 feet in one leap, and they got a better look at it. They followed it down 60 to 70 yards through ferns and low bushes.

At about that time, they said, Freeman came running up and kept moving toward the car. "Paul said, 'Let's get the hell out of here,' " Sumerlin said. But the three of them sat down, quietly.

Ties to Fakery
"We sat down three or four minutes and started hearing that brush snapping," Sumerlin said. "We heard a snip, and then we heard another snip, and every time we heard a snip, we'd point. We didn't say nothing. And pretty soon we got up and went over there and we could hear it breathing. Just a real heavy breathing. I looked over and the hair was standing right up on Bill's arm."

From far down in the canyon, they said, there was a whistle. And then from where the breathing was, a grunt, and a crash of bushes, and whatever it was was gone.

The three men went back to collect the hair samples, and the twisted tree branches.
Their story has been discounted by some Bigfoot investigators because it involves Freeman, who is believed to have faked some Bigfoot evidence in the past. But Sumerlin and Laughery said they know all the stories about Freeman and he could not have faked what they saw.

Sumerlin has a good reputation in the Blue Mountains, even among skeptics. "Wes Sumerlin's one of the better mountain men around here," said Del Klicker, who was born on a farm on Mill Creek Road. "It's always been kind of the thing around Walla Walla, that we've got Bigfoot up here, but I've been around here and taken care of cattle, and I've never seen a track."

The hairs will finally tell the tale, Sumerlin and others believe.
Paul Fuerst, associate professor of molecular genetics at Ohio State University, said technical problems have delayed completion of the tests until at least the end of this month. Fuerst said the tests, if they can be completed, "will either show that it was something we know, a bear or a squirrel, or they will show whether it is in fact an unknown species."

Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times