Word: sasquatch
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...only quick glimpse preserved on film is a 20 foot, 16 mm color sequence made by Sasquatch stalker Roger Patterson in 1967. The first few seconds are blurred and shaky, as Patterson, thrown by his horse, runs toward the Sasquatch and tries to frame. Then there are a few dramatic seconds of clarity, as the Sasquatch strides along a river bed. At the end of the sequence she (the sex is suggested, by hairy, pendulous breasts) walks placidly back into the underbrush...
...flatly discount it. John R. Napier, then director of the primate biology program at the Smithsonian Institution, examined the film some 30 times and wrote Patterson in May 1968, "There was nothing I could see that could conclusively indicate a hoax." In his 1973 book, Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, Napier explained his having told Argosy magazine not to dismiss the film. "In effect," he wrote, "what I meant was that I could not see the zipper; and I still...
Patterson's film might really show a Sasquatch. But footprints seem to be stronger evidence, though still at the level of unexplained events--not positive proof of anything. Here the Sasquatch comes off better than other legendary wild mountain men. Napier claims he can explain in terms of other animals all but one footprint attributed to the Himalayan yeti, the original Abominable Snowman. Most Bigfoot prints, on the other hand, are still a mystery...
Maybe the Sasquatch is only the pipedream of Patterson, Napier, and other researchers including Rene Dahinden and Boris Porshnev (who was better known as a historian of peasant uprisings in France). Yet other missing links have been found: The gorilla, a shy creature not at all like King Kong, was a legendary jungle man until authenticated in the middle of the 19th century, and only in the last decade were reports of proto-pygmies in Tanzania born out by the discovery of the Gombe stream chimp. Napier estimates that a population of 500-1000 Bigfoot could explain all the footprints...
MORE PERPLEXING than the Sasquatch himself is the societal reaction to the investigation. The Sikkimese and Tibetans never sold Yeti ashtrays. In the Himalayas no neighborhood whispering campaign ever ostracized investigators for antisocial speculation, broke up an investigator's marriage, or made witnesses fear for their jobs. All those things happened in North America...