BOB TITMUS

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BOB TITMUS
Eulogy, ...his life and times

Robert Merle Titmus
December 24, 1918 - November 15, 1997 age 79

Written by his neighbor and good friend, John Green

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Bob Titmus, a key figure in Sasquatch/Bigfoot investigation for almost 40 years, died at Chilliwack, British Columbia, on July 1st, following a heart attack suffered a few days before at his home in Harrison Hot Springs. He was 78.

Not widely known to the public because he never sought publicity, Bob contributed more solid evidence for the existence of the creature than any other individual, and had the most extensive collection of original footprint casts, most of them from tracks he found himself.

He had a role in the public debut of "Bigfoot" in California in October, 1958. At that time he had a taxidermy shop near Redding, and he supplied his old friend Jerry Crew with the plaster-of-Paris and the instructions for using it that enabled Jerry to make his famous cast of one of the 16-inch prints that kept showing up on the dirt road where he was working above Bluff Creek in the northwest corner of the state.

A few weeks later Bob and a friend, Ed Patrick, blew away the notion that "Bigfoot" was a freak individual, by finding and casting distinctly different 15-inch tracks on a sandbar beside Bluff Creek.

Those tracks were not in soft dirt like those on the road, but in hard-packed wet sand, yet they averaged an inch in depth, making it impossible to dismiss them as being easy to fake. The casts Bob made then, and a year later on the same sandbar, are still possibly the best ever obtained anywhere.

Bob was one of the men who brought Tom Slick into the investigation in 1959 and was the original field leader of the "Pacific Northwest Expedition" that Tom financed in California. Later, again with Tom’s backing, he shifted his search to a new area on the central British Columbia coast in the early ‘70s. Bob’s move to British Columbia proved to be permanent. He spent several years operating from a boat among the islands and inlets between Bella Coola and Prince Rupert, and found Sasquatch footprints on several beaches, one a fresh set coming out of the water and into the woods on a small island which the creature could only have reached by swimming through a storm-whipped sea.

After Tom’s death Bob continued the search until he ran out of money, then started a taxi business in Kitimat so that he could continue searching along the coastal streams and beaches on a part-time basis.

The casts he made during that period were all lost when his boat was destroyed by fire, but in 1977, while he was clearing a homestead near Hazelton, he was notified that some boys had found tracks close to the Skeena River at Terrace, and was able to get two superb casts of 15-inch tracks there. When Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin claimed to have filmed a female Bigfoot at Bluff Creek in October, 1967, Bob came from Kitimat to the first public showing, in Vancouver, B.C., and then went on down to California, where he made casts of eight tracks at the film site. He was the first investigator to go there and what he found left him totally convinced that the movie was genuine. Most of his investigations continued to be in British Columbia, and he became a Canadian citizen, but he returned to Bluff Creek for several months in the fall on a number of occasions, and was successful in finding tracks there several more times, once getting casts of both knee and hand prints.

Photo above: John Green discusses tracks on the "wide spot" of the Bluff Creek sandbar with Bob Titmus at Bluff Creek, August 28, 1967...photo by Rene Dahinden.

A lifelong hunter, he was firmly in the camp of those who considered Sasquatch to be normal animals, and he hunted with a gun to collect one for study, but never had the opportunity to use it.

Another disappointment concerned some brown hairs that he collected one by one from bushes and branches near Bluff Creek while following an apparent Sasquatch trail. Years later it became possible to identify the hairs by immunological reaction. They proved to be from a higher primate; the eminent scientist who did the tests limited the possibilities to human, gorilla or chimpanzee.

As a veteran taxidermist, Bob was sure that the hairs could not be from any of the three, as could easily have been established with a comparison microscope--but the scientist had ground up all of them.

Bob’s achievements were recognized by the International Society of Cryptozoology, which made him an honorary member in 1987, the first person from the Untied States to achieve that distinction.

Because of a back injury sustained in 1962 during a storm on the B.C. Coast, he lived with constant severe pain for more than 30 years, when other health problems limited his activities.

His last trips to Bluff Creek were in 1994 and 1996, but by then he was unable to go far from his car. On his last search along the sandbars of Bluff Creek, in the late 1980’s, he was again able to cast several tracks, but because it was getting dark he did not attempt to take them out at that time, and left them buried under a tree at the film site. He has never been back, so if anyone can find the right tree the casts may still be there.

….. © John Green, Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, Canada July 1, 1997

...More on Titmus:
Robert "Bob" Titmus of Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia Canada has spent about half a century tracking and hunting in the Pacific Northwest from California to Alaska. His fieldwork over several decades in North America's most rugged Terrain has convinced him that the Sasquatch does exist. His fieldwork was dedicated to establishing this fact. His expertise as an animal tracker is recognized and he has undoubtedly had more field experience in tracking and searching for the Sasquatch than anyone else alive, layman or scientist.

Titmus served in the US Marine Corps during WW II, seeing action in the South Pacific. He had what he believes was his first Sasquatch sighting while in uniform, not realizing what he had seen until Sasquatch reports became public in the 1950's. Since then, he has had two further sightings and reportedly has tracked the supposed animals dozens of times. He has what is undoubtedly the largest collection of Sasquatch track casts in existence and he has made most of the track casts that are currently available in northern California housed at the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek California. He was also one of the first to recover for scientific analysis what he thinks are Sasquatch hair specimens.

Bob Titmus is a quiet, modest and unassuming individual; he has never south publicity for himself or his activities, preferring to work quietly in the background. He carried out field work, sharing his information freely with any scientist who is interested enough to look at his evidence. Having spent most of his life in the wilderness, Titmus has not pursued writing activities and thus has no publications of his own. He was however, one of the major sources in John Green's works. John Green and Bob Titmus lived within a few hundred feet of each other in the same town until Titmus' death.

Photo above: Titmus left with dog handler Dale Moffit and tracking dog, "Lady" Labor Day weekend September 1967, Bluff Creek trip that included Rene Dahinden and John Green. Photo identified by the Berscheid family, Bob Titmus' x-wife.

Some of Bob Titmus' work and his parts of his collection can be seen at the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek, California, Hwy 299 between Eureka and Redding California.