Fort Worth Star-Telegram from Fort Worth, Texas • 19

4 a- i 'I 't A aeeenfc WEATHER CROSSWORD FEATURES a Sunday section FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM SUNDAY AUGUST 22 1976 is there really 'Bigfoot' in Oregon's mountains? or 'Nessie' occupying deep lake in Scotland? oi Sasquatch Indians told tales By THOMAS LOVE IOII7I WwkiaflM Star PORTLAND Ore The summer sun was slipping behind the wooded Oregon hills on a June evening last year as Al sat before his campfire frying potatoes for a simple supper Emotionally drained by his high-pressure job here Al treasured the few relaxed weekends he was able to spend quietly camping in the Mt Jefferson wilderness accompanied only by his German shepherd Witch As dusk approached the silence was broken by a growl from Witch who was lying by his side tail and hackles raised "She barks when there's something she understands but growls when it's something she doesn't" he said "So I figured there must be a deer raccoon or something like that "But when 1 looked up I saw something quite different straight in front of me It was about 150 yards away from where I sat I was scared and almost ran because at first I thought it might be a bear But then I could see that it wasn't any bear" he recalls "I had dreamed about Bigfoot but I never dreamed he really existed" Al said "Not there he was squatting down with his arms across his knees quietly watching me" WHAT HAPPENED is typical of the experiences of those who have reported sighting Bigfoot the mysterious hairy man-like creature said to be roaming the sparsely populated mountains along the Pacific Coast from northern California to central British Columbia "He seemed to be terribly curious" Al recalls "He fa VV' BIGFOOT Peter Byrne who is AMONG LOCAL LEGENDS and one of the few involving any aggressiveness at all on the part of Bigfoot is a story of the Nootka Tribe that one of its members a trapper named Muchalat Harry was kidnaped by a large tribe of Bigfeet on Vancouver Island in 1928 He was asleep in a lean-to the tale goes when he was scooped up by a Bigfoot and taken to the anima I's camp where there were about 20 of the creatures They examined him feeling his skin and then seemed to become bored and ignored him Seizing the opportunity Harry escaped He never went into the woods again There are a number of stories about Bigfoot in the early days of white exploration along the Pacific Coast including reports that: In 1810 a Northwest Fur and Trading Co agent named David Thompson told of finding footprints 14 inches long and 8 inches wide which did not appear to be those of a bear The Indians told him they belonged to the "mamouth" In 1840 Elkanah Walker a missionary to the Spokane Indians reported on the Indians' belief "in a race of giants which inhabit a certain mountain off to the west of us" In 1884 The Daily Colonist of Victoria British Columbia reported the capture by a group of railway-men of a "half-man and half-beast" which could have been a young Bigfoot The creature kept in a cage was described as "something of the gorilla type standing about 4 feet 7 inches and weighing 127 pounds He has long black strong hair and resembles a human being with one exception his entire body excluding his hands (or paws) and feet are covered with glossy hair about one inch long" It's unknown what eventually happened to the animal In 1886 Jack Dover "one of our most trustworthy citizens" told of spotting an animal picking berries and shoots He said it was about 7 feet tall with "a bulldog head short ears and long hair" IN 1924 a number of miners near Mt St Helens in southern Washington told of spotting and shooting a "huge creature at least seven feet tall and covered with long black hair" which then fell out of sight into a canyon For the next several nights the miners' cabin was pelted with rocks and the men finally retreated from "Ape Canyon" There is only one known Bigfoot photo 28 feet of 16 mm color movie film taken by two men at Bluff Creek in northern California on Oct 20 1967 Of poor quality it shows a large hairy upright-walking figure which turns once to look at the camera and then disappears into the trees There has been a great deal of controversy over the authenticity of the film but Byrne believes it is legitimate Although most "experts" have been unwilling to examine it apparently out of fear that a positive conclusion could damage their scientific reputation what little technical examination has been conducted indicates that the film is genuine How is Byrne going about searching for the elusive Bigfoot? With his present finances there isn't really too much he can do other than collect reports of sightings So far this year there have been two sightings reported to Byrne one south of The Dalles and the other in Northern California Last year there were three an average year Byme said PUBLICITY IS BYRNE'S best weapon which is one reason for the information center "It brings people in" he explained "And when they come in they talk They tell of sightings and things they've never told anyone else" squatted there for about 45 minutes watching me as if he was wondering what I was I just sat there and watched continuing with what I was doing slowly stirring the potatoes "Finally I picked up the cheap little camera with a small electronic flash unit When I tried to take a picture the flash seemed to scare it It just stood up and slowly walked off "I was sitting back in the pines while it was out in the sunlight and all I got on the film was a picture of the pine trees" he sadly remembers Al spent two nights at his campsite but never again spoted the creature Is there any doubt in his mind about what he saw? "NONE AT ALL" he insists "I was sure it was Bigfoot Now I'm more sure than ever For the next five weekends I took a box of apples and left it where I'd seen him For the first two weeks the apples were gone but the box was there It could have been anything that took them deer bear or whatever "But on the last three weekends the box was gone too I couldn't find any trace of it Now tell me what other animal in the area would pick up a whole box of apples and carry it off? "I believe it's there I think it lives in that area I don't think it's nomadic When he left it was like he had some place specific to go not as if he were looking for a place" Al said If Al's experience with Bigfoot quiet non-aggressive period of watching followed by a calm unhurried retreat is typical of those who have sighted the creature so is his personal reaction "Please don't use my full name" he asked "I don't want any more people to know who I am than do now I didn't tell anybody about my experience for a long time I was worried about what people would say Then I was listening to a radio talk show where they were discussing Bigfoot and I called in Somebody got my name and nearly drove me crazy trying to find out where I'd seen the animal so he could shoot it "That's my main concern that someone will shoot it" A HUNDRED MILES to the west of Portland lies the town of The Dalles the center for the growing scientific hunt for Bigfoot The town was selected because of the concentration of sightings nearby The search is being directed by Peter Byrne a former professional hunter in Nepal who has dropped a years-long effort to find the Abominable Snowman to try to find Bigfoot He operates out of the Bigfoot Information Center a trailer over which flies the search's official flag a large footprint of course At the moment he is operating on a shoestring The entire operation is financed by admission fees to the Bigfoot display in the trailer and a modest contribution from the Academy of Applied Science in Boston which is also helping to finance the major search now under way for the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland Although the academy's contribution now covers only payments and liability insurance on the trailer the Bigfoot search will be promoted to the organization's main activity once the Loch Ness operation is completed The tale of Bigfoot goes back more than 100 years as far as the white man is concerned and a great deal further in Indian legend According to the Indians the Bigfoot population was once much greater Legends handed down from father to son tell of the Giant Men of Mt Shasta the Stwanitie and the Sasquatch on the trail of Bigfoot holds a plaster cas-tof what may be one of the creature's footprints He has it at the Bigfoot Information Center in The Dalles Ore Does he have much trouble with hoaxes? "No not too much" he said "In these small Northwestern communities the people don't like hoaxes You have to lie and cheat to hoax and they just don't like that" If he ever gets enough money to have a well-financed search there are a number of steps Byme plans to take including: An increase in historical research He is convinced there must be a number of unknown records of Bigfoot sightings in old newspapers diaries and books For instance there is an intriguing brief mention in the l-ondon Times during 1785 about a "great hairy wild man" captured by the Indians and being sent to a French zoo A computer program to look for patterns in Bigfoot sightings and try to determine just what sort of environment Bigfoot likes Aerial teams to search open places in the mountainous region such as ridge lines and streams since planes "can cover so much ground" A widening of his public relations program "to reach out and ask for information" JUST WHAT IS IT that Byrne is searching for? No one including Byrne knows for sure There is one thing he is certain of however Bigfoot isn't an ape or some other primate we know about "From what we know the animal has both breasts and buttocks An ape has neither It may be a fossil man of some kind since it has many characteristics of primitive man It has human features a small nose and big eyes It has the unique human foot and has never been reported seen on all fours It's also interesting that no one has ever seen one running "It could be related to the extinct giant ape Gigantopi-thecus whose fossils have been found in China Or it could have some sort of relationship with the Yeti although it's much larger Or it may be something entirely new to science" Associated Press PfcoU A LOOK AT A LEGEND This is an unretouched frame of movie film shot in 1967 of what is purported to be Bigfoot Made in Del Norte Calif it is one of the few scraps of physical evidence there is such a creature Loch Ness legend can be traced back 1400 years -y f- ly used sonar to explore the lake's bottom Loch Ness is one of the lakes in the Great Glen a 100-mile geological fault that slashed Scotland diagonally from the Atlantic to the North Sea millions of years ago During the ice age glaciers scraped across the bottom of the 900-feet deep 14000-acre lake which is now filled with 263 billion cubic feet of dark icy water the rest of the rig is submerged in Loch Ness its position indicated only by a nearby bottle filled with air and anchored to a weight by a fishing line "Five million dollars could find the monster in a week" said Emory Kristof of the National Geographic team "There's US Navy equipment that could figure out if anything's in the loch But there's no compelling reason to spend $5 million to find what could be a large trout" Kristof isn't looking for trout He isn't in fact sure exactly what he is looking for but he's assuming that it's a predator eats fish is big and doesn't have to come up to the surface for air IF THERE IS one monster there will have to be more than one witnesses have seen as many as three at once Estimates of their size have varied from three feet in length for babies to as much as 25 feet for adults Rines and his crew which includes Dr Harold Edgerton the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who pioneered high speed photography using strobe flashes have a more complicated monster-watching system than the Geographic team The Rines expedition is panning Ur-quhart Bay with sonar which can detect large things that swim within 1000 feet of two underwater photographic rigs Alerted by the sonar Rines' crew can press a button to trigger an underwater camera and strobe lights Nearby are other cameras and TV gear Last week the TV was broken The equipment is suspended from a raft and a boat bobbing gently in the early-morning fog that blankets Loch Ness THE DIVERS who have been working with these crews don't like the water It is black and cold only 42 degrees To see more than a few yards they need bright lights which turn the water an ugly amber "We're a month behind" worried WATERY MONSTER artist's sketch is based on descriptions by people who were shown a photograph purported to be the Loch Ness monster of Scotland It was displayed by researchers to a limited audience last December in Concord NH cameras They play out their adventures at the other end of electronic cables They don't 'show very much emotion about the strange work they are here to do What emotion they do show is frustration for these teams of technicians have been spending a lot of time presiding over equipment that doesn't work It is a problem that has dogged researchers ever since modem tools became available in the investigation of the loch's legend What the deep dark peat-stained waters haven't hidden from view the equipment of the searches has failed to lock onto in any conclusive way Photographs purporting to show the Loch Ness monster have been taken before but the dark grainy blobs they contain easily could be eels or birds or boats disappearing across the top of the water IN 1970 Martin Klein who heads a US underwater search and survey firm used sonar in the loch and detected a large moving object Another group recorded underwater sounds similar to the sounds of whales and dolphins but not fish sounds Nevertheless the evidence was scanty enough that the odds against the monster's existence stayed at about 100 to 1 in betting parlors Last fall however a Scot bet the equivalent of $90 that Nessie is real Asked for an explanation he said his granny had a vision in her tea leaves A flood of bets followed as word filtered out that forthcoming photographs would prove conclusively that the elusive monster was more than a tourist promotion The odds dropped to 6 to 1 The photographs revealed in December came tantalizingly close They were in color taken underwater on June 20 1975 by Robert Rines dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord and head of the Academy of Applied Science founded in 1963 to support unusual areas of research ONE PHOTOGRAPH showed what appeared to be a creature with a big body long neck and flippers But part of the neck did not appear and critics suggested there might be two separate objects instead of one monster By JO THOMAS Kaifhl News Wire DRUMNADROCHIT Scotland -In the long pale summer evenings here in the highlands the sky stays white until nearly midnight But the water in Loch Ness is black and cold in all seasons At Temple Pier on the ruins of an ancient Druid temple now vanished except for a few stones two American expeditions are trying once again to find the Loch Ness monster Sponsored by respected publications they are equipped with all the shiny trappings of modern electronics They have set up headquarters in a trailer near the pier And yet this is an eerie place where the past seems continually to nudge the present Here drinking water still flows from a well dug in the sixth century Across the bay a ruined castle looms And all around there are people who accept in a matter-of-fact way that the lake might hold a monster FOR 1400 years ever since a "fearsome beastie" killed a man and was driven away or so legend says by St Columa the lake has drawn the curious and the brave the dreamers and the explorers the scientists and the kibitzers to stare across its sullen waters waiting for a ripple a wake a glimpse In search of the monster men have used harpoons nets guns air balloons motor boats helicopters submarines dogs and sonar They have boasted of plans to trick it cage it bomb it And one distillery offered nearly $2 million to anyone who could deliver it to London Romantic perhaps but Scottish law shields the big unidentified thing that cruises the water below If there is a monster someone someday will prove it A quest some believe for madmen drunks and fools And yet the people who are trying to find the monster this summer aren't swashbucklers or distinctive adventurers THEY ARE technicians They run sonar gear and set up remote-contro THE NATIONAL Geographic team has mapped the bottom of Urquhart Bay the widest part of the loch and the place where many people have seen the monster Until now scientists have believed the bottom of the lake to be a V-shaped slit Actually the Geographic team found the bottom of Urquhart Bay is flat The studies of the bottom are important because there has been endless speculation about underwater caves or holes or tunnels in which one more more monsters might live "We don't know what hidey holes they've got" said Tim Dinsdale He was living on a boat moored at Tampa Pier helping both expeditions This was his 40th try Dinsdale was an aeronautical engineer 17 years ago when he first got hooked on the Loch Ness riddle In 1960 he photographed the monster with a movie camera It looked rather like a disappearing boat "I GOT THE silent treatment from science but I've learned to be patient" he said "In 1966 the RAF (Royal Air Force) analyzed the film and said it was an object but not a submarine and not a bird" Since then Dinsdale has watched them all the scientists the journalists the crackpots In one expedition a team used audible sonar to disturb the monster: "A pinger Ye gods you could hear it above the surface! And then two vessels came from either end towing acoustic rattles the kind warships tow to decoy torpedoes They hoped to frighten the beast and make it pass between sonar beams" graphic rigs working and they are spending days amid tangles of wire They are mostly fiddling They do the small tests that still can be carried on they wait for parts from the US However exotic the quest the daily work is painstaking ordinary Holly Arnold a former volunteer with the now-defunct Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau has been kibitzing "You quit hoping" she said "You wish people good luck but people come and go" Ultimately the Geographic photo rig which is now positioned in 90 feet of water will attempt to lure the monster to its camera with various kinds of bait: fish the recorded sounds of fish in distress a blinking light and a steady light ANYTHING LARGE within a range of five to 20 feet will cause sonar equipment to trigger powerful lights and an underwater camera The system will run 24 hours a day when it works At the moment the sonar is broken and An earlier Rines photograph taken in 1972 with an underwater camera showed what appeared to be a close-up of a diamond-shaped flipper But the picture was so dark it had to be enhanced with computer processing of the sort that made intelligible the faint photograph of Mars sent back earlier from space photographs Rines is back for another try hoping to photograph the monster clearly enough to prove that It is real This time he said "we're going to stick it out" The New York Times is co-sponsoring his expedition at a cost of more than $75000 not counting donated time and equipment Zoologists at Harvard Cambridge the Smithsonian Institution and the British Museum of Natural History are serving as advisers INTRIGUED the National Geographic Society also has sent a team on a monster hunt So far though neither expedition has been able to get its underwater photo Rines "The fish are usually here in June but the drought has kept them from coming up from the sea" As the weeks of summer slipped by both expeditions working independent i.