**During the last several months we have made many great contacts in the Bigfoot arena and many of these researchers haven't been heard from in many years. North America Bigfoot Search will be reaching out to these great leaders and asking them to write a column for us explaining their past, where they've been, what they've been doing and maybe their angle on the Bigfoot issue. This will be a section where guests can speak their own words in their own style. Their ideas do not necessarily reflect the policy, procedures or theories associated with North America Bigfoot Search. You will find these individuals well versed in Bigfoot. We thank them for their contributions and we welcome your comments (nabigfootsearch@yahoo.com). 

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Our second guest columnist has been in the Bigfoot arena for over 4 decades. He was the founder of the International Bigfoot Society and was the editor of the "Track Record Newsletter" for almost 20 years. It is our priviledge to host Ray Crowe and his update.

 
August 16, 2008
Western Bigfoot Society—Ray Crowe

   The question is often asked of how I got involved with Bigfoot, and why was the Western Bigfoot Society created.
   In the 1990’s I ran a small used books shop in North Portland.  One of my customers, a Native American, Roy Caddy, came by one day and told me of a group in Vancouver, Washington, that was interested in this mythical creature, and people actually got together and actively went in search of it.
   At the time, I had been interested writing a short story for Dime Novels, where large amounts of financial inducement were offered. My friend, Roy Caddy, commented that the Vancouver group had several ladies, some quite attractive, a charismatic president, and an older bearded mentor, the late Mr. Datus Perry, that was somewhat of a legend himself.

   I thought at the time that here might be a good plot for my short story, and when Roy Caddy invited me to a meeting of the Vancouver group, I jumped at the chance to meet these interesting people who chased after myths.
   The meeting assembled (I’ve long forgotten what they named themselves), and the serious members discussed the problem of “Kill or No Kill” options, and if they should carry firearms into the field. As it turned out, it was a tie vote, and it was finally voted to carry a rifle in the trunk of the vehicles.

   They were having a field trip two weeks from then, and asked if I would care to join the group.  I, of course, assented, and asked details on where and when to meet…at the presidents home at 8 AM.

   The following weekend, to gain a better perspective of what this short story would be about, I took a trip into Skamania County, WA, where I could get some details to add to my short story; what kind of plants were to be found, both for cover and for a large creature, like Bigfoot, to eat. I found several berry types, ferns, huge and massive cedar and Douglas fir trees, and was able to write down details about the deep woods. My wife and I, along with my granddaughter Mallory, 8, drove into the much higher elevation area of the Horse Heaven Wilderness area, north of Carson in Skamania County. Snow was still thick on the ground, but trails were open. So, Mallory on my shoulder, we explored the woods, looking for huge tracks of a mythical beast in the snow.  We found nothing, but was able to conjure up several scenarios of a monster living in the area.

   The following weekend I met with the Vancouver group and we started north in a caravan of several cars.  Our destination, the Yale Reservoir, wasn’t too far away, but we took a long route up into the hills, stopping frequently to look at wildlife, or a pile of poop of some critter alongside the road.
   At Siouxon Creek, we made evening camp. While there was still light, the president showed me what to look for; hairs on trees that were not deer or elk (several trees had the grey hair stuck to them along game trails), trees broken above eight feet, apparently a mark of some kind; and footprints, often huge, and spread well apart as the giant creature strode through the countryside.

   That evening, the beer came out, the group got plowed, and I retired to the camper on my truck, rather disappointed with the group.  The next morning, one of the group came down the trail early, armed with a bow and arrow.  He shot an arrow straight into the air for some reason.  I retreated to my truck.  Then the group assembled to go chase a Bigfoot…in their cars.  A call blaster, a speaker mounted on the lead vehicle, was supposed to attract the creature as they rode up and down on mountain roads dressed in camouflage gear.

   Horrified, this was my last trip with this group. I declined when they wanted me to join them on their drive… I was a naturalist, with thousands of hours in the woods collecting insects, fossils and minerals, plants, or photographing scenery.  I said I’d wait near camp and search the area…I was still looking for material for my short story.
   The group wasn’t gone for more than ten minutes when I found what looked to be huge tracks in the dried mud alongside the road. In one of the several tracks, there appeared to be indistinct toe marks.  They measured eight feet apart, so I marked and photographed them. Exploring further, I found a heavily used elk trail.  At the roadside, where it would be easy for a creature to see in dim light the underside of leaves, alder trees had been broken…about eight feet up.  I descended the elk trail…looking and feeling foolish, as with magnifying glass, I examined the sides of cedar trees for hairs. Lots of them were found, as expected along an elk trail.  On one tree though, there was this strange hair.  Reddish in color, and over eight inches long. I carefully bagged it and put in a baggie to show the group.  Going back to the tracks, I took a small box of plaster of Paris, intent on making a footprint cast. I dumbly mixed the plaster way too thin, and it simply flowed down the gutter, leaving a white outline.

   The group returned. Happy that they had routed a small herd or elk, but no Bigfoot creatures.  I showed my finds to the president…and he agreed that the tracks might be of a Bigfoot.  When I told him I was keeping the hair, he got downright hostile though, and that was the end of my association with the group…except for my friend, Roy Caddy.  As it was so easy to find the evidence of the tracks, trees and hair…I guessed I might have been duped. Except…for their strange reaction to the finding of the red hair.

    The next weekend, still interested, but dubious, I agreed to go with Roy and another friend into the Clackamas River drainage east of Portland, OR, on another Bigfoot hunt. We ended up in an area near Indian Henry Campground, where along a trail lined with black raspberries, I found near an elk trail, curious holes in the ground where fist sized rocks had been pulled up…no sign of them.  Nearby was another elk trail. The books on Bigfoot suggested that sometimes the creatures threw rocks at their prey.  Another clue?   

   We spent most of the day wandering in the brush…crushed ferns, a game bed? A hollow under fallen logs, another sign? Moss disturbed by something moving, another sign? Or just all just probably elk sign?  Back at the camper, dripping with sweat on the hot summer day, in the dust of a dried puddle, there was the perfect imprint of a human foot, but the size of a child.  Had something been checking us out while we were supposedly checking them out?  There was no reason, like fishing, toadstools or fern frond hunting for a small child to be in that particular area.  Here again though, I had others with me in the search…I still could be having the wool pulled over my eyes.

   A week later, I went back to the same area…only by myself this time. I explored an elk trail running through the woods.  And…there it was, a 16 inch track with toes showing on the side of a bank. I tried to plaster it, but the angle was too steep, and it never turned out.  But I was turned…finally convinced that there was something to the Bigfoot legend I had been reading about in  several softback books in my book shop.
   Roy Caddy was not satisfied with the Vancouver group either, and suggested that I start a group of my own.  As it turned out…the bookshop had a very large basement that was unused.  Roy and friends offered to do the redecorating, painting, and such.  My father put some lighting in, Roy made an interesting podium, and one of our first “members” bought 50 folding chairs at a church garage sale…we were in business.  Our first meeting featured speaker Datus Perry with his eight-foot tall Bigfoot cut-out creature.  There were many, many interesting meetings thereafter.

   The rest is history. The name Western Bigfoot Society was the first thing to come to mind.  Every group needs a newsletter, so the Track Record was conceived.  I wrote it on my old desk computer…cutting and pasting.  Later a website was introduced by Mr. Henry Franzoni.

   Later, we took our first of many, group field trips, with about ten, to the Ape Caves near Mount Saint Helens in Washington on a field trip.  This started an annual tradition of the Cave Crawl that was enjoyed by many members.  Also, there was an annual camp-out in Carson, WA, with a multitude of interesting speakers.
   And…the society lasted until 2008, having had at a maximum 250 members worldwide…so many in distant countries that the name of the society was changed to the International Bigfoot Society, where a website under the same name still exists.  Due to personal reasons, I retired in early 2008, and gave up the society 501(c)3 status, mostly instigated by Mr. Peter Byrne.  The vice president, Patty Reinhold, still holds occasional meetings of the now small group.

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July 16, 2008 Our first guest columnist is an icon in the Bigfoot world. He was one of the first researchers to put a formal investigative group together and lead expeditions to understand and research Bigfoot. It is our extreme honor to welcome Peter Byrne....in his words...

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE BIGFOOT MYSTERY BY PETER BYRNE Some of you, reading this, will recognize my name, in that it has been associated with the Bigfoot phenomenon for some forty-seven years, since December, 1959, to be exact, when it all started for me with a cable I received at the Royal Hotel in Katmandu, from my friend, the great explorer, the Texan, Tom Slick, inviting me to come to the U.S. to design and lead a project of investigation into the mystery. My brother, Bryan, and I, had just concluded three years in the high Himalaya, hunting for the Yeti-expeditions sponsored by Tom-and had just come down from the mountains and were resting up in the capital. The cable informed us that we were to close down our operations, that the time had come to try something else. To wit, a Bigfoot research project in the United States of America. The wording of the cable, apart from the surprise of the invitation, was, I have to admit, at first viewed with not a little skepticism. A Yeti in the US? A large hairy primate wandering around between the freeways and the skyscrapers? Nevertheless, three weeks later we were sitting down with Tom in San Antonio, Texas and pouring over maps of the Pacific Northwest which, to our astonishment, portrayed an area five times the size of the Nepal Himalaya. A few days after that we headed north … and for me that is where The Great Search, as we called it, began.

The Pacific Northwest has a great mystery. It centers around the possibility of a large, hair-covered, bipedal primate living, undiscovered, in its vast forest-covered mountain ranges. The evidence that supports the reality of the phenomenon is as yet all circumstantial, in that even after all this time we still have no physical remains-which of course is what science demands, for proof-and little more than a single piece of footage (Patterson and Gimlin, 1967) a few scratchy still photographs, a background history and a number of eyewitness reports. Nevertheless, for people who have conducted serious research into the phenomenon, all of this adds up to something worthy of dedicated and ongoing investigation … the Bigfoot phenomenon, something which, in my case, has fascinated and challenged me for nearly five decades. To me, and to many others, finding one, indentifying it, learning about its way of life, its social structure, its means of communication, is an incredible challenge. A near impossible dream. But in my case, since I first entered the field, in 1960, it is one in which my interest and determination has never waned. Early in 1960, under the direction of Tom Slick, I set up what we called The Bigfoot Research Project 1, basing in a rented cottage at a place called Salyer, in Trinity County, northern California, with equipment that included a used Jeep and an old Ford station wagon, two small, five MPH motorcycles called Tote Goats, an Olivetti typewriter and a telephone. My brother Bryan helped me put together a full-time, salaried, search and investigation team, among whom were a local man named Gerry Crew (who first brought Bigfoot to the attention of the public by photographing and casting footprints a year previously,) his nephew, Jim Crew, a young woman named Shirley Lawrence, from Sydney, Australia (who had been with us in the Himalaya) and a professional mountain lion hunter, on sabbatical from the US Fish & Wildlife Service, Steve Matthes, from Carlotta, CA. In addition we put together a twenty person volunteer “on call” team of enthusiastic and interested local men and women. Our search and research operation with BRP 1 was fairly simple and mainly consisted of interviewing people who claimed to be eyewitnesses-there were not very many to be found in those early years-in an effort to build a data base of credible encounter reports and see what patterns were suggested, as well as field work that was essentially a search for physical sign-footprints, or other-which same involved camping out and hiking long distances on the back country trails of the Six Rivers National Forest and the Marble Mountain Wilderness, and up and down their deep, twenty to thirty mile creeks, among them Dillon Creek, Red Cap Creek and Bluff Creek, the latter being where, seven years later, Patterson and Gimlin were to shoot their immortal piece of footage. We operated like this for two years and ten months, in the course of which we found four sets of Bigfoot footprints (one set underwater, in sand, in a creek bed) unearthed some very interesting sighting reports and discovered, in a remote area, what we believed was a bed made by one of the creatures. I found the bed while hiking down Red Cap Creek with Gerry Crew. We had been dropped off in the creek’s headwaters by Jeep and were moving slowly along in the creek bed itself, about ten miles down, when I noticed some yellow decaying moss on a high bank, close to the water. I investigated and found a large, bed-like structure on the ground, on top of the bank. It was nine feet long, four feet in width, nine to ten inches in depth and made entirely of soft, tree-bark moss, which same had been pulled off three nearby trees up to a height of twelve feet. Scattered around the bed were the broken, skeletal remains of two deer, some of the larger bones of which had markings that indicated they had been gnawed by something with large, flat incisor teeth. The bed was clean and odorless and a very careful search of it, and of the clearing around it, showed no sign of human usage or association, such as match sticks, fishing line, cartridges, or cigarette ends; likewise we found no hair in or around the bed. And so our belief was that the bed was probably made by a Bigfoot; being twenty miles upstream from the nearest road, it was hardly the place for a hunter to be; again, the stream had only very small fish in it, not the kind of water to attract a fisherman. Among the footprints we found during the course of the project were some that measured fourteen and half inches and, much later, Bigfoot enthusiast and anthropologist Dr. Grover Krantz, of WSU, Pullman, Washington, stated that they were identical in shape and measurement with those left by the female subject of the 1967 footage.

Among the sighting reports we documented, probably the most interesting one came from a Native American lady, a Yurok, living in the Hoopa Indian Reservation, not far from our base, who told us that some years previously her father had encountered a Bigfoot while searching for crawdads in a creek bed, east of the reservation. He was on his hand and knees at the time and so when the creature appeared, it did not see him. But what the Bigfoot then did, after it appeared, was the most significant part of the report in that it might possibly explain why no feces from one of the creatures has ever found to date. It stepped out of the brush, walked through the fast-flowing, shallow water to a big rock, climbed up on the rock, squatted on it, defecated into the water and then stood up and walked back into the brush and disappeared. When Tom Slick died in the crash of a small plane near Dillon, Montana, in October, 1962, our project came to an end. Bryan left the Bigfoot scene, got married and went to live in Nevada (where he lives today) and I went back to big game hunting, which was my profession before I got into The Great Search and I continued this, as a pro hunter, running trophy safaris for tiger, leopard, buffalo, bison and croc, in the jungles of north India and southern Nepal, through to December, 1969, at which time I was contacted by two old friends of Tom Slick, C.V. Wood and Carol Shelby, of Los Angeles, asking me if I would like to open up another Bigfoot project, their long-time interest in the phenomenon having been sparked by a new piece of footage made in northern Washington State by a man called Ivan Marx. We had two quick meetings, one in New York and the other in Los Angeles and as the new year of 1970 dawned, another venture, Bigfoot Research Project 11., was under way. The new project opened up on January 1st, 1970 with a base in a little place called Evans, just north of the city of Colville, in northern WA with a search team consisting of myself, a local woodsman and naturalist named Don Byington, a hunter named Dennis Jensen, from Idaho-who had worked with Patterson at one time-and Ivan Marx, who described himself as a wildlife guide and lived in a rented tarpaper shack at the edge of a scattering of small, wooden-framed houses close to the Columbia River, about a mile from our base at Evans … a place called Bossburg. The project started well, with a keen, enthusiastic team, ample funds, good vehicles and quality equipment and for while it looked as though we might have a very promising search under way. Then the Marx footage was proved to be faked and sponsorship interest waned and within a month or so, Wood and Shelby dropped out. I continued on, for another ten years, but was able to work the search for only six months of each year, May through October, having to spend the remainder of the year generating funding to keep the project going. This I did by spending each winter, in Nepal, running photo and wildlife observation safaris in the jungles of the south and white water, river-running trips in the Himalayan north. I further augmented the funding with the writing and sales of my book, THE SEARCH FOR BIGFOOT which, in a paperback edition by Simon & Schuster, NY, was a best seller. (It can still be found today on the internet, via Amazon. com.)

In 1980 I closed down the Bigfoot Research Project 11 and returned full time to river-running, wildlife photo safaris and high mountain trek guiding in Nepal. On one of these safaris, I had a client named Dave Ransburg, owner of a sprinkler company in Peoria, Illinois, and some time after he returned home, he contacted me to ask if I would be interested in opening up another Bigfoot search. When I replied in the affirmative, the third Bigfoot research project was quickly born. I made a base at a place called Parkdale, in the Hood River valley, in northern Oregon and with a staff of three, a ten-person board of professional persons as advisers, a seventy-person volunteer team, three vehicles, a large, fully equipped mobile base van, a standby helicopter equipped with FLIR, and ample funding, quickly got a third project, Bigfoot Research Project 111, under way. The third project lasted five years, during which time I spent just over one million dollars of the sponsor’s money. That may seem a lot, but in addition to the cost of salaried employees, it was dispersed in large increments, one, for instance, for a $75,000 professional analysis of the ’67 footage; another for a $100,000 computer analysis of my Geo Time patterns; and yet another, costing $250,000, for a very sophisticated, solar-powered surveillance system, custom built and installed in the mountains to monitor what we believed to be routes used by the objects of our search. In 1995, its million dollar budget exhausted, BRP 111 came to an end, at which time I returned to something in which I had developed a strong interest over the years, i.e., wildlife conservation in the forests of southern Nepal. Nowadays I spend six months of every year in the little Himalayan kingdom, where I have a private safari lodge presently under construction, one to be used as a base for wildlife conservation and research, and the remaining six months in the U.S., at a base in Pacific City on the Oregon coast, striving away, with research and field work, at the old, the never-ending challenge … the great mystery of our time … the presence, in the vast Pacific Northwest forests, of a huge, mysterious, hair-covered primate, one that may well be a hominid, one that seems to have the ability to continually outwit us and, for the foreseeable future, using native instincts and wood craft skills far superior to ours, to frustrate all of our attempts to bring him to bay … Peter Byrne. petercbyrne@yahoo.com www.internationalwildlife.org ©2008 North America Bigfoot Search LLC