ON THE SCENT OF THE SASQUATCH

[admin]

By John Green

This is by John Green and it is very interesting.

ON THE SCENT OF THE SASQUATCH

It is common knowledge that Sasquatches are reported to have a strong and unpleasant smell--in Florida they are commonly called "skunk apes". It is probably also well known, at least to the readers of newsletters, that strong smells are not always reported; but is this just because the witnesses were not in a position to smell anything, or because Sasquatches do not always smell bad?
To contribute some information for anyone interested in this question, here are the results of an analysis of reports from the western part of North America that I have entered in my computer.
In 923 descriptions of supposed Sasquatches, only 72 mention a strong smell. Nine mention a mild smell and eight state specifically that the animals had no smell. Strong smells were mentioned in less than eight percent of reports. This percentage is fairly consistent throughout the American states, percentages being: Washington, 9%; Oregon, 11%; California, 8%, and the average for eight other western states, 8.5%.
The percentage in Canada is lower. In British Columbia and Alberta strong smells are mentioned in only 4. 5% of reports. The number of descriptions involved, 217, would appear to be large enough so that the different percentage may have some significance, but it is hard to imagine what it could be.
Absence of a report of a strong smell obviously has no significance if the witness was a good distance away or was inside a building or vehicle. Restricting the survey to reports where it would seem that the witness should have noticed a strong smell if one was present gives the following results.

Strong Smell Mild No Smell
In contact with the animal 5 0 5
Less than 5 feet away, in same air 0 2 3
Estimated 5 feet away, in same air 4 1 4
Estimated 10 feet away, in same air 5 1 14


Up to 5 feet the percentage of strong smells, in 24 reports, is 37.5%.
At 10 feet, in 20 reports, the percentage drops to 25%.
With some animals strong smells are associated only with the adult males. Most Sasquatch reports do not involve any identification of sex, but it is usually assumed that most are males. My files contain only one report in which a Sasquatch is identified as a female and said to have a strong smell.

* A single report, that of Albert Ostman, has a disproportionate effect on the statistics. He claims to have been carried home by an adult male and then to have been close to a young male and a young female. In conversation, although not in his written account, he said that the adult male had a strong smell, the two juveniles mild smells. If his account is left out the number of reports of mild smells drops to seven, and the percentage of strong smells reported" in British Columbia drops to 4%.

John Green
Spring 1995

ELAPSED TIME OF REPORTED SASQUATCH SIGHTINGS May, 1996

I am indebted to Henner Fahrenbach for the suggestion that the estimated time that a Sasquatch sighting is reported to have lasted might depend on some characteristic of the witness. He raised the possibility that Sasquatches might be attracted to human females and wondered whether observations by females would tend to last longer.

A study of 899, sighting reports in my computer came up with the opposite result. For those sightings in which a time was estimated the average for males was 4 minutes, 37 seconds, while the average for females was only 2 minutes, 3 seconds. The difference was obviously enough to be significant, but significant of what?

A possible answer is suggested by the fact that the reason a Sasquatch was present does not directly affect the elapsed time of the sighting, nor does it matter how long the Sasquatch was hanging around before it was seen. The clock doesn't start until' tine witness sees the Sasquatch, and it stops when either the creature or the witness leaves the scene. It might well be that sightings by men lasted longer because men were more likely to stand their ground and continue the observation.

A check of sightings when the witnesses included both men and women gave a figure for elapsed time very close to that for sightings by males, an average of exactly 4 minutes. That opened up a whole new line of questioning, however, since such a sighting automatically has at least two witnesses, while most reports involve only one. Might the time also depend on the number of witnesses?

That speculation proved to be a productive one. Sightings by lone males averaged 3 minutes, 18 seconds. Sightings by two men averaged 4 minutes; 12 seconds. Sightings by more than two men averaged 9 minutes, 51 seconds.. Reports by more than one women were too few to be significant.

Less than 30 percent of sighting reports contain time estimates in figures. Another 60 percent note only that the time was "brief" or ”considerable". The trend here is not so marked, but it is the same. The percentage of sightings described as "brief" was 56% for females" and 45% for males. For single males the figure was 50%, for two male witnesses 42%, and for more than two males 32%.

People who dismiss Sasquatch sighting reports as lies, mistakes or hallucinations are not noted for giving the matter much thought, but perhaps they should spend a little time on this question: If they are all imaginary what reason would there be for the time estimates to differ according to the sex of the witness or according to the number of witnesses?

John Green

BREASTS, SEX, AND ASHES October 1998

Reported observations of breasts are very rare indeed. In 2600 sighting reports I find only 15 references to large breasts, 10 pendulous breasts, 5 small and 1 medium.

References to genitalia are even rarer; 11 male and 1 female. In 33 cases it was specifically noted that they were not visible, presumably in animals considered to be males.

As to creatures doing anything with fire, I do not have a single modern report and only two very old ones. A man writing to the Antioch, CA, Ledger in 1870 told of hiding to see what had been disturbing the ashes of his fire, where he was camped while hunting. He reported seeing a 5-foot, heavily-built, hair-covered creature take a stick from the fire and swing it around until the flame went out, then do the same with another stick. The other report, carried by Canadian Press a few years ago, quotes an Indian lady, 112 years old, as saying that about 1900 she fled from a "Wetego" at a place in northern Manitoba called Devil's Narrows, and watched from a canoe while it set fire to her camp with a big burning branch.

Ray Crowe's Track Record had a story of two men near Winslow, Arizona, in April, 1995, seeing an 8 to 9-foot creature apparently eating potato peels from foil in the ashes of an old campfire, but that presumably involved interest in the peels, not the fire.



OBSERVATIONS OF ACTIONS PHYSICALLY BEYOND HUMAN ABILITY

Reports by people claiming to have seen large hair-covered primates in North America are often dismissed as observations of human hoaxers dressed in fur suits. Similarly, reports of huge humanlike footprints are dismissed as the work of hoaxers with carved fake feet. Such being the case, attention should be directed to those incidents in which the observers describe seeing things, which, in their opinion at least, would be beyond the physical ability of human hoaxers.
Of 1,340 sighting and track reports in my computer file from western North America exactly 10 percent, 134 reports, include descriptions of this sort. Such information is not usually available when only tracks are seen, however, so the percentage is actually somewhat higher for sighting reports, nearly 12 percent.
Among a wide variety of superhuman actions described the most common is sheer speed, 34 reports in all, 22 of them involving running, 8 walking and 4 hill climbing.
In most cases there is only the observer's impression that the speed was greater than possible for a human, and no doubt some of these impressions are mistaken, but in others there was a definite means of making a comparison. In seven cases the creature ran on two legs alongside a motor vehicle, and in four of these the observer checked the speedometer; 20 miles an hour in two cases and one each at 30 mph and 50 mph. A human sprinter can achieve 20 miles an hour for a few seconds, but probably not in a fur suit. There have to be serious doubts about the 50 mph report, but similar speeds have been claimed in several reports from the eastern United States, which are not in the computer. Other instances include several where the creature travelled bipedally for a known distance in a time only a small fraction of what a human would need, and one where the creature ran past galloping horses.
The second most common category involves superhuman step length, 27 reports in all. Of these 12 involve upright creatures seen crossing a road in two, three or four steps. Another 11 are footprint reports where the human observers could not come close to matching the stride of the large bipedal tracks in the ground.
There are 21 reports of lifting things too heavy for a human to handle in the same way. In 6 of these instances the object was also carried for a distance and in 8 of them it was thrown. In most of these cases the activity was observed, but three of the most extreme examples were indicated by tracks, two in which full fuel drums were apparently picked up and thrown, and one where a trailer loaded with metal culverts was lifted and turned upside down.
There are 14 examples of superhuman power in overcoming obstacles, 6 involving crashing through heavy brush, 5 going up steep banks, 2 running in deep water, and 1 breaking through a barbed wire fence. A related category involves 14 reports of superhuman jumping ability, 6 reports of vertical jumps of as much as seven feet from a standing start., another 6 of hurdling high obstacles such as fences, and 2 of leaping across wide ditches. There are 5 reports of superhuman arm strength, including 3 of breaking large sticks or branches and 1 of bending a heavy metal sign.
On the violent side, there are 9 reports of creatures that kept going after being shot, sometimes repeatedly. Weapons used included 30.06 rifles and shotguns. There are also 5 reports of bipedal creatures seen killing other large animals without using weapons.
Filling out the list, there are 15 reports that involve no extreme action but do measure superhuman height or weight. In 6 cases the creatures stepped over tall obstacles, in 5 they looked in high windows or over high objects, or reached things hung high in the air, and in 4 cases there were footprints showing clear evidence of extreme weight. Including crushing potatoes in the ground.
Finally, among the 820 sighting reports that don't involve any superhuman action there are many that do specify superhuman size. Heights were estimated in 516 of these cases, and 105 of these estimates were greater than 8 feet. Even if there is a tendency for witnesses to overestimate heights, which has not been proved, surely estimates of more than 8 feet should qualify as a describing something beyond the size of any human hoaxer. If those figures are included the proportion of sighting reports that involve descriptions of something superhuman rises to 18.6 percent. And since it is certainly possible that heights are not, on the average, overestimated, or even that they may actually be underestimated, it may be that all height estimates between 7 and 8 feet should be included. There are 222 of these. which would bring the proportion of super human descriptions in sighting reports up to 39.7 percent.
John Green
WATER AND THE SASQUATCH

It is common knowledge that Sasquatch, unlike the other apes, are quite often reported in some sort of association with water. A survey of the 1,343 Western reports in my computer provides confirmation that this occurs throughout the area in fairly consistent proportions.
There are 78 reports in which tracks or sightings indicated contact with water, 5.8% of the total. Also, 104 were estimated to be either within 10 feet or "close" to water another 7.7% of the total.
Percentages in the “contact” category are 7.8% in British Columbia; 6.1% in Washington; 5.3% in Oregon; 4.2% in California and 6% in the other states and provinces.
Actual numbers are small enough so that this degree of variation in percentages could probably be expected, but there are also special circumstances boosting the percentage for B.C. and Washington and reducing it for California.
In B.C. Bob Titmus spent several years investigating among the coastal islands; in Washington in two separate years there was a rash of reports during a salmon run at the mouth of the Nooksack River, while in California the percentage is reduced because there have been so many reports of tracks on dirt roads in the Bluff Creek area.
Over the entire area, there were 38 creatures reported seen wading, four swimming and four reaching into the water. There were also 36 sets of tracks entering and/or leaving the water. These figures don't quite match the "contact" total because some reports include both sightings and tracks.
Swimming Sasquatch have been reported once each in B.C., Washington, Montana and Alaska. The one in Alaska was swimming underwater, and there were also two seen wading in the Nooksack that rose from or went down into the muddy water, where they presumably swam but could not be seen.
Presumably at least some of this water activity involves fishing, but the only report I have of a Sasquatch seen eating a fish, in Oregon, is not in the computer because of confusion about the location. There is also a B.C. report of a Sasquatch seen carrying a fish.
Four Sasquatches were reported seen playing in water: one in Washington in the sea, two in California in a stock-watering pond and one in Alberta in a river. A pair in Oregon was reported eating water plants in a creek and one in B.C. was washing roots.
Eight in various places were reported seen drinking, four from streams, one from a spring, one from a small lake, one from a canal, and a sophisticated Southern California Sasquatch from a hose. One was lying on its belly, another on all fours. The positions of the other six were not described.
More than half of the reports of contact with water involve creeks or rivers, 58%; lakes 16%; the ocean, mainly in inlets, 15%; ponds and swamps, 4.5% each, and 1% sloughs.

John Green January 1996

WHEN TO SEE A SASQUATCH June 1995

It has always been obvious that Sasquatch encounters are reported all around the clock, they are not strictly creatures of either the day or the night. A breakdown of 829 incidents in which a time of day is specified gives the following results:

Day 152 Night 110
Morning 6 Evening 11
Early morning 63 Before 10 p.m. 37
Late morning 37 10 to midnight 50
Noon 14 Midnight 32
Afternoon 24 Before 3 a. m. 62
Early afternoon 61 3 a.m. to dawn 38
Late afternoon 58
Evening (light) 3
Totals 418 340
Dawn 11 Dusk 60


Superficially these figures indicate an approximate equality, although reports in daylight have a clear lead. Each incident requires a human observer, however. Humans see very poorly at night, and consequently are far less active out-of-doors when it is dark than they are in the daylight. These two factors certainly tend to make sightings after dark far less likely than sightings in daylight. For night encounters to compare with day encounters there must surely be far more Sasquatch activity at night. And for this to be the case, Sasquatches must surely be able to see well in the dark, something that no other higher primate can do.

It should be noted that the figures for dawn and dusk are also skewed by human activity. Although the amount of light would presumably be about the same, the number of human observers around at dawn would be only a small fraction of the number at dusk.

Another distortion might result from the fact that footprints found first thing in the morning where there had been none the evening before are known to have been made at night, but there would seldom be a situation when it could be determined in a similar way that prints had been made during the day. The distortion is not great, however, since reports of tracks made at night exceed tracks made in the day by only 17, specifically, 23 at night, and 6 during the day.

Dependence of human observers on artificial light is clearly shown in the light sources listed for night sightings

Headlights 95 Moonlight 54
Flashlight 41 Firelight 8
Other lights 47 Lightning 1
No obvious light 14

WHAT SASQUATCH WITNESSES WERE DOING (1340 Western Reports)



Witness activity Tracks Only Sightings Total & Combined
In car 13 209 222
Hunting 30 95 125
At home 18 85 103
*Sasq. hunting 41 47 88
Outside on foot 13 72 85
Hiking 36 48 84
Camping 15 65 80
Walking 3 61 64
* *Come to see 41 10 51
In truck 4 45 49
Working outdoors 16 33 49
Fishing from shore 15 24 39
Logging 16 18 34
Prospecting 6 17 23
Horseback 5 16 21
Inside building 17 17
On large boat 2 14 16
Motorcycling 4 11 15
Fishing from boat 14 14
Flying 1 12 13
On small boat 2 10 12
Roadbuilding 7 5 12
Trapping 6 4 10
Playing outside 1 9 10
Ranching 1 7 8
Berry picking 2 5 7
In tent 7 7
Bicycling 1 5 6
Farming 6 6
Snowmobiling 4 2 6
Picnicking 1 4 5
At fire 4 4
Skiing /snowshoeing 4 4
On train 4 4
Rockhounding 2 1 3
Rowing /paddling 2 2
Working on machine 1 1 2
Jogging 1 1

*Almost all sightings in this category involve people who have gone to look around where someone reported something, not the people normally referred to as "Sasquatch hunters".
**Reports received from people who knew what they were going to see--when the activity of the original witness is not known.

John Green
Nov. 1995

WHO ARE THE WITNESSES?

Prominent figures in any debate as to whether Sasquatch exist are the hunters, trappers, loggers, prospectors, etc. who have spent a lifetime in the woods without seeing one or any evidence of one.
It is a fact that most people involved in these activities do not report having seen anything, but it is also a fact that some do, and that their reports represent a significant proportion of the total.
In the 1,340 Western reports in my computer, 1,301 activities by witnesses are identified. Of these139 were not accidental, in that the witnesses had gone looking for what they found because someone else, whose activity is not identified, had seen something before them, or, in a few cases, because they were specifically “Sasquatch hunting”.
Of the remaining 1,162 activities, more than 10 percent, 125 witnesses were hunting; 34 were logging; 23 were prospecting; 10 were trapping, and another 77 were involved in various outdoor occupations. Altogether these account for almost a quarter of all reports.
When it comes to finding tracks this group plays an even larger role, accounting for 38 percent of track reports.
Their information is significant, also, in that they are more likely than the average witness to claim considerable familiarity with wildlife (by a ratio of 17 to10), and to have made their observation under good conditions of lighting, time and distance (43% compared to 25%).
Hunters rank second only to hikers in finding tracks (30 to 36), and to people in cars in reporting sightings (95 to 209).
Other common activities for people reporting sightings include: at home. 85; outside on foot, 72; camping, 65; walking, 61; hiking, 48; in a truck, 45; fishing, 38; working outdoors, 33; on boats, 26 (plus 14 fishing from boats); logging, 18; prospecting, 17; inside a building, 17, on horseback, 16; flying, 12; on a motorcycle, 11, and playing outside. 9.
Obviously there are a lot of different ways these categories can be combined, for instance everyone travelling by motor vehicle, 271, including snowmobiling (9) and on a train (4); or everyone travelling on foot, 182, including jogging (1).
There are also significant overlaps. People fishing from boats are automatically in two categories, and most hunters, for instance, would be either on foot or in a vehicle. For some reports both categories are specified, but for most only one.
Something else to take into account is the number of people who are engaged in each activity. Nowadays many more people travel in vehicles than on foot, and the number of potential witnesses in buildings could be much greater than the number in vehicles.
Perhaps statisticians can determine whether or not these figures relate appropriately to what could be expected in encounters with a real animal. I don't have that expertise, but the relationships do seem reasonable to me.
John Green Dec. 1995