Category Archives: In the News

Ben Anderson, Alaska Dispatch, 25th Sept 2012

Is there a Bigfoot on Alaska’s North Slope? One Barrow family thinks so, and it has them worried about a remote cabin property they own about 35 miles south of America’s northernmost community.

Sarah Skin has been camping at the cabin every year for the last half-century. In the last three years, she and her family say they’ve repeatedly seen 10-foot tall, bipedal creatures that are black, brown or grayish in color. Skin said that they’ve seen the creatures three years running, each time in the fall when the family heads to the cabin to hunt for caribou.

Before that, she’d never seen anything like the Bigfoot, as she refers to the mysterious beasts, anywhere near her cabin, located about halfway between Barrow and the community of Atqasuk.

“People from a long time ago used to see them, I guess,” Skin said. “I’m 50 years old and I’ve been camping out here my whole life, and I’ve never seen anything like this, ever.”

Arctic tradition

The Far North has a tradition of Bigfoot sightings dating back to Inuit legends recounting the tale of the “Tornit” or “Alaska Bushman.” In her 1971 book “Yukon Trophy Trails,” Dolores Cline Brown recounts a night when she and a friend were awakened by a loud knocking and banging against their cabin door.

According to Brown, another hunter had seen large man-like tracks in the dirt around the cabin earlier that day, and warned them that if they saw the bushman to “kill him dead quick.”

Numerous other unverified or unverifiable reports — as is usually the case with cryptids like Bigfoot — also exist. Perhaps the most famous of these is the story of a hunter who, in 1966, came face-to-face with a Bigfoot near a mine on Jade Mountain in Northwest Alaska.

Neelie Ravencast, who along with Tony Hernandez founded Investigation of Paranormal in Alaska (IOPIA) about 20 years ago, has long kept a database about unusual activity in the state, including Bigfoot sightings. She said that 1966 account came from a letter to John Green from a man named Bob Betts. It was recorded in 1971 in a newsletter for Bigfoot enthusiasts.

“They say a Bigfoot was killed in 1966, near the Kobuk River, in the evening,” Ravencast said. “(The miner) would often see large man-like tracks around his mine, and one day he came face-to-face with a Bigfoot.”

The account goes that the man shot the Bigfoot, but was so frightened by what he had done he cut up the body and threw it into the nearby river.

Encounter with soldiers

The Skin family account may be the northernmost reported in the state. Ravencast said that the Alaska Bigfoot loves the tundra, even though sasquatch is usually associated with heavily wooded areas like the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.

“They say that that’s where they roam, the tundra,” Ravencast said. She said that the IOPIA database contains numerous accounts of Bigfoot sightings in the tundra of Southwest Alaska.

But only one other account exists from so far north, a 1988 account recorded by IOPIA and on the website of the Bigfoot Field Researchers’ Organization, which also compiles reported sightings of the elusive creatures.

In that 1988 report, a team of “special forces” soldiers was supposedly training north of the Arctic Circle when they began to see large footprints in the snow, made by something they estimated at nine feet tall. They followed the tracks to a wooded area and heard a bellow from ahead, scaring them enough to turn around.

The Skin family’s accounts add fuel to the prospect of Arctic Bigfoot sightings. And Sarah certainly sounds convinced of what she and family have seen in recent years.

In 2010, she said one of the creatures, running on the shore, followed a boat traveling downriver for some distance before breaking off. In September 2011, she and her family spotted three “big black figures” standing on a hill on the way to the cabin from Barrow. Six hours later, the creatures were gone.

The most recent sighting came earlier this September, she said. Her sons, Joe and Edgar, were out hunting caribou when they saw one of the creatures, which they estimated at 10 feet tall.

“They saw one about a mile from my cabin, there was a big herd of caribou coming toward them and suddenly this big black creature started chasing them,” Skin said.

Damaged meat rack

She also said that her cabin has been damaged in recent years and that her meat rack, which had been “hanging sturdy” for 25 years, had been torn down “by something.”

The family hasn’t been able to compile any evidence other than eyewitness accounts, though Sarah said that she’d called the North Slope Borough and attempted to get in touch with wildlife officials about what she’d seen, but no one had gotten back to her.

“Nobody’s volunteered to help us, so it’s going to be a family effort to try and get some photographs,” Skin said.

Could there be another explanation for what the Skin family claims to have seen at their remote cabin? One possible explanation, though unlikely, could point to polar bears.

Despite their coats of white fur, polar bears have black skin underneath their coats, and adult males could grow to be 10 feet tall when standing upright. Polar bears have also been documented moving further inland from their traditional coastal territories, perhaps as a response to diminishing sea ice that makes up their habitat for much of the year.

Adding to the theory are reports earlier this year of Arctic Alaska polar bears being documented as suffering from alopecia — hair loss — and other skin ailments that could affect the coverage of their fur. That makes the possibility of spotting a largely-hairless polar bear, 30 miles inland, standing on its hind legs an almost-plausible substitute for Bigfoot.

Throwing a wrench in that theory, though, are follow-up reports that the cases of alopecia seem to have dried up as the year has worn on. And polar bears don’t run on two legs, as Skin and her family report they’ve seen the creatures doing.

Alaska has a population density of only about 1.2 people per square mile, so it’s tantalizing to think that there might be something out there in the vast wilderness that’s gone unnoticed or unrecorded for years. But until there’s some more evidence beyond the usual eyewitness accounts and undocumented encounters, the Alaska Bigfoot will remain an elusive and mysterious creature.

Steven Streufort, the owner of Bigfoot Books in Willow Creek, showed off this 18-inch-long plaster cast taken from tracks found in the forest. / Photo by Kristan Korns, Two Rivers Tribune.

By KRISTAN KORNS, Two Rivers Tribune. 14th August 2012

Tribes all along the Pacific coast, from Central California all the way up to Alaska, have shared stories about large hairy human-like creatures that live hidden in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Steven Streufort, who runs Bigfoot Books in Willow Creek, said that European settlers arriving in the area disregarded the stories at first – until they started finding footprints and catching sight of the creature themselves. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the local stories reached the outside world. “In the late 1950s they started to cut into a remote area of virgin timber north of Weitchpec,” Streufort said. “When they started cutting roads into there, they found footprints in the new roads.” A logging tractor driver from Salyer named Jerry Crews took pictures and made plaster casts of huge footprints at his work site near Bluff Creek. The footprints were 16 inches long. The Humboldt Times in Eureka published the pictures in October 1958, and the story was retold by newspapers around the world.

Despite the stories of Bigfoot being in the worldwide news media for over 50 years, and told throughout the Pacific Northwest for hundreds of years before that, people are reluctant to come forward with their own sightings. “They may tell you if they know you and trust you,” Streufort said, “but they don’t want to go on the record. It can damage your reputation publically.” Many well-known and respected local residents are rumored to have told close friends and relatives that they saw Bigfoot, but almost no one would talk with the TRT about their experiences. Serene White, a former legal clerk for the Hoopa Valley Tribal Court, explained why. “A lot of people keep quiet about what they’ve seen,” White said, “because they don’t want people to think they’re crazy or a liar.” She said that people have come up to her on the street, harassed her, and called her a liar. White said that she only told a few people about what she’d seen, before James “Bobo” Fay asked her if she’d retell her story for “Finding Bigfoot” on the Discovery Channel. White said that she saw a creature around midnight on August 21, 2007, not long after she returned to Hoopa after studying at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She was on the river bar near Chief Jackson’s, at the very north end of Hoopa near Beaver Creek, and saw something in the moonlight. “I thought it was a bear at first. It was hunched over with its hands in the water,” White said, “There was someone else there with me, but they want no part of this.” White said that she grabbed a large flashlight and pointed it at the creature. “When I turned on the light, it stood up and turned, and it made some sort of growling or crackling noise,” White said. “Have you ever seen hackles come up on a dog? That’s what it did. Then it ran off. I just watched it, sort of in pause; like shock,” she said.

Streufort said that he has heard stories like that from dozens of people living in the Klamath-Trinity area. “There’s so much unexplored forest in the Pacific Northwest that you can’t cover it all,” Streufort said, “but people have seen these creatures. Streufort said that he knows a woman who works for the fire service who has seen Bigfoot and found tracks. The woman doesn’t want to go public, he said, because she’s afraid she might lose her job. Not everyone harasses Serene White for telling her story. Privately, many people share their own stories, or their family’s stories. “About 50 people in town have talked to me about it,” White said. “It was either their experience, or their dad’s, or their great grandma’s.” White didn’t think the creature she saw was an animal. She said that it looked more like the things her elders had told her about when she was a kid. “When I was told all those stories as a kid, I thought they were just to scare kids into staying close to camp,” White said. “I didn’t think they were real.”

By James Hibberd. 2nd August 2012.  Entertainment Weekly ( ew.com)

TV critics took on Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot during a contentious panel at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Beverly Hills on Thursday.

For those who haven’t seen the show, it’s a bit like Syfy’s Ghost Hunters, only an expert team looks for Sasquatch instead of spooks. There are interviews, data crunching, mysterious footprints and a group hunting in the woods … but no actual bigfoot.

The press tour reporters have spent nearly two weeks in a hotel interviewing actors and executives promoting TV shows. So when Animal Planet rolls out this panel the critics are, understandably, thinking: Show us bigfoot or GTFO.

A critic points out: If these guys actually find bigfoot, such huge news is not going to really stay quiet until a regular episode of Finding Bigfoot airs. One asks: Has Animal Planet run out of real animals to do shows about? Yet another wonders: First Animal Planet airs a mermaids special, now this — isn’t Animal Planet damaging its brand with this stuff?

Animal Planet’s president, Marjorie Kaplan, is good humored about the situation. “Animal Planet has many shows about animals that may be more familiar to you,” she says. “Finding Bigfoot is an exploration of the secret corners of the planet … There are places on this planet that we know about and places we don’t …  New species are being found all the time.”

She also points out the network’s Mermaids: The Body Found special* got “extraordinarily” high ratings.

The Finding Bigfoot team, however, is far less amused by the critics’ skepticism. Seems there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence pointing to the existence of bigfoot and this crew are true believers. (There is more than one bigfoot, they say, and they mostly come out at night … mostly…)

“I’ve had one 15 feet away growling at me,” declares bigfoot researcher Matt Moneymaker. “So that’s why I think it’s [unfortunate] when people say they’re not real. They exist … I don’t think people realize how many witnesses there are out there … For those who don’t think these things exist, [famed primatologist] Jane Goodall thinks they exist** — and she may know a little more about it than you do.”

“You can’t equate bigfoot with mermaids,” bristles bigfoot researcher James “Bobo” Fay. “You’re ignorant of the subject matter.”

So is there solid real evidence of bigfoot?

Absolutely, they say. There’s all kinds of evidence! Except, you know, an actual or former bigfoot.

“There’s every kind of evidence that they exist,” Moneymaker says. “Except bones. Except a carcass.”

* Mermaid body not actually found

** True

It is said that in this in day and age, anything is for sale. And this was no exception in Nacogdoches, Texas. Steve Busti, the owner of the Museum of the weird in Austin, Texas, paid $212 for a few strands of bigfoot Hair ( allegedly).

“i’m really looking forward to having the hairs tested” he said. If however, the tests show that they emanated from a known animal, then explaining this to his missus, will no doubt be a hair raising experience :)

The link to the full article can be found here