What I have always found extraordinary is the stunning inability of
skilled scientists to come to grips with new data, although the
Sasquatch is hardly new data. This item shows us just how hard it
is. It is almost as if the man were brainwashed since childhood.
I suspect we are dealing with the phenomena of extraordinary memory
that finds it difficult to use logic to overcome the emotional
content of the remembered position. Once this is set up, the memory
is not easily lost because so much has been invested in that memory.
Thus when confronted with a clear casting that you or I could not
properly interpret ourselves nor expect anyone to fake anyway, the
trained observer sees exactly what is there and understands what he
is looking at. That casting just went up massively in my world as
outright confirmation of the Sasquatch.
Sooner or later, the heavy money will be spent to film this creature
at night and to even track specimens and more appropriately to
establish actual contact. A bushel of apples would be my first
choice and plenty of cameras able to no night work.
The present efforts smacks terribly of amateurism when real large
game trackers do exist who know how to be as cunning a the quarry.
Recall that no wolverine ever gets trapped twice and after the first
encounter, he will make it his business to work your trap line until
he drives you out of his country. You will never see him either.
Sasquatch
researchers face unwilling peers
Meldrum with the
Skookum Meadow casting. (Courtesy photo)
Wash. — It’s easy
not to believe in Bigfoot. It’s harder to accept the possibility,
and harder still to go public with that acceptance.
Fingerprint expert
Jimmy Chilcutt says he has “had that used against me, or tried to
use against me, in court.” Members of the jury, how seriously can
you take the testimony of a man who who believes in THAT?
Earlier this spring,
while up for a promotion within the faculty of Idaho State
University, Jeff Meldrum found “the bias and closed
narrowmindedness of a few of my colleagues rearing its ugly head once
again.”
Meldrum’s promotion
was approved, but he, Chilcutt and others researching the Sasquatch
phenomenon remain frustrated by those peers who remain unwilling even
to consider their findings.
“It’s baffling
that academics, who one would think would be objective and
open-minded to questions on the fringes of knowledge,” Meldrum
said, “would instead not be fair-minded and egalitarian in the
treatment of their colleagues that delve into that realm to explore
where the evidence will lead.
“But the scientific
community is a community of people and individually they are subject
to all the biases and prejudices of any other cross-section of
humanity.”
A number renowned
scientists — notably George Schaller, one of the world’s
preeminent naturalists, and primatologist Jane Goodall, known for her
chimpanzee research — have publicly called for more a open-minded
approach by science to the research of Meldrum and others.
But perhaps no
scientist has undergone a more dramatic transformation in terms of
that open-mindedness than Daris Swindler.
A long-time professor
of anthropology at the University of Washington, Swindler quite
literally wrote the book on the comparative anatomy of man, apes and
chimpanzees. His masterwork, “An Atlas of Primate Gross Anatomy,”
is considered mandatory reading for all primate anatomists.
And for many years,
Swindler was publicly adamant that Sasquatch did not and could not
exist.
“He was the required
poo-poo guy when it came to anything Bigfoot,” says John Green, a
retired newspaper publisher and editor British Columbia. “If
invited, he would give the scientific comment that there simply
couldn’t be any such thing.”
In September 2000,
though, a group of researchers took a 31/2-by-5 foot cast of what
appeared to be a partial body print of a large animal reclining in
the mud in a Skamania County area of the Gifford Pinchot National
Forest called Skookum Meadow.
Soon after the
discovery a number of scientists, including Meldrum and Swindler,
were invited to an Edmonds, Wash., hotel to study the imprint cast
and discuss their findings as part of a documentary film, “Legend
Meets Science.”
“He looked at
that cast and saw the very same thing I did,” recalls Meldrum. “His
attention immediately was drawn to this remarkable Achilles tendon
and very broad heel imprint, and what we interpreted to be the
prominent buttock.
“The combination of
short, pronounced buttock and a well-developed Achilles tendon equals
biped — and nothing else.”
For Swindler, though,
that realization was profoundly affecting — something that became
obvious to the documentary film’s producer, Doug Hajicek, when he
went to Swindler’s suite to find out what his on-camera testimony
would be.
“He got really
choked up,” Hajicek said of Swindler, who died in 2007. “He
literally had tears coming down his face.”
Hajicek said Swindler
had calculated, based on the size and structure of the creature’s
leg and well-defined Achilles tendon, that the weight of the animal
had to have been between 600 and 800 pounds. And that, as Meldrum
said, the animal had to have been bipedal — that is, moving around
primarily on two legs.
Swindler’s emotions,
Hajicek said, came from having just talked over the phone with his
family to tell them about his findings, “because what he was about
to say on camera was probably going to change his life … that,
basically, these things were real.”
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