http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA012206.01A.Bigfoot.356ab92.html
Roy Bragg, Express-News National Writer
SILSBEE — It's so quiet in the Big Thicket National Preserve on this cold January night, you can hear a leaf drop.
Scattered throughout this section of the woods, sitting silently and
bundled against the near-freezing temperatures, are a dozen or so
maverick researchers looking for the large, hairy, elusive embodiment
of fringe science — Bigfoot.
Also known as Sasquatch or the Yeti, Bigfoot is a topic that draws its own line in the sandy loam.
Either you believe a highly intelligent, feral ape-like creature roams the rural woods, or you don't.
The members of the Texas Bigfoot Research Center — teachers, bankers,
public safety personnel and men and women from other walks of life and
from across Texas and Louisiana — have bought into it.
So they've descended on a desolate corner of Southeast Texas where strange sounds have been heard in the woods recently.
To track those strange sounds, the researchers brought their own.
At the top of every hour, expedition leader Daryl Colyer stood up to
aim a dim red-beamed flashlight into an olive drab ice chest, where
he's mounted a CD player, a sound booster, and a boat battery to power
them. Wires snake out to speakers that hang from tree limbs.
With the flick of a switch, a deafening roar spilled forth from the speakers, rolling across the woods.
Part animal growl, part pained howl and entirely creepy, the "Ohio
Howl" is purported to be the only authentic recording of Bigfoot. For
Colyer's group, it's being used tonight as a digital shout-out intended
to elicit a response. He played it several times.
Five teams have been deployed in the woods alongside a logging road on
the northern end of the Big Thicket. They're equipped with listening
devices, night vision goggles, video recorders and even throwaway
one-shot cameras.
Seconds later, there's a series of howls coming from the direction of a nearby creek.
"Coyotes," whispers David Peddy, a college math instructor and part-time police officer, nodding knowingly.
More silence. Then comes a noise, from the other direction, that sounds like chimps impersonating coyotes.
"Barred owls," says Colyer in a barely audible breathless voice.
And so it goes for hours.
Something 'out there'
Throughout history and around the world, there has been something "out there."
Because so many people view it as a myth, a definitive history of
Bigfoot is hard to find. There have been sporadic reports for 250 years
in North America, dating to Spanish explorers and even earlier to
Native American culture.
It's been immortalized in book and film, the most memorable being "The
Legend Of Boggy Creek." For many Bigfoot enthusiasts, that film is the
Sasquatch equivalent of the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan or the
Netscape IPO — a milestone that impacted a generation.
Across the oceans, there's the abominable snowman, or Yeti, that lives in the snows of the Himalayas.
Critics and cynics abound, and David Daegling is foremost among them.
The University of Florida anthropologist wrote "Bigfoot Exposed," a
scholarly vivisection of the Bigfoot story from cultural, scientific
and historical perspectives.
"I think we have to be careful not to paint the Bigfoot community with
too broad of a brush," he said. "There are, within that community,
people who are more skeptically inclined. And then there are true
believers, and there's nothing that can change their mind about it."
Daegling said the presence of Bigfoot hoaxes hurt serious attempts to prove the existence of the creature.
"One of the historical failings of the Bigfoot community has been that
even though they'll (investigate and) rule out some report as a hoax,
they don't pursue that question vigorously enough," he said.
There was, for example, the classic grainy 1967 film of Sasquatch
traipsing along a tree line in the northern California woods, and
footprints found in the same region 10 years earlier. Both were seminal
pieces in the growth of the Bigfoot movement. Both were debunked as
fakes years later. Neither revelation changed the minds of Bigfoot
believers.
Beyond debunked publicity stunts, Daegling said, Bigfoot numbers don't add up.
Bigfoot is spotted all over the country. Bigfoot prints range from
three-toed to nine-toed. Bigfoot's height ranges from man-size to black
bear-size.
"Bigfoot descriptions are all over the map," Daegling said. "The only thing they have in common is that they're big and scary."
Human nature and culture, Daegling said, explains a lot of the Bigfoot myth.
In Tibet and Nepal, Yeti is a meddlesome troublemaker that raids
villages and gets drunk off stolen beer. It destroys crops and
impregnates local women.
"Our Bigfoot is different," he said. "Our Bigfoot is quiet, and it's
not scared of people. The encounters in North America are much more
mundane. But people who see Bigfoot are affected, and it's
life-changing."
Daegling said Bigfoot fills in a blank for some people burdened by
modern society — it is wild, it is solitary, it can disappear at will,
and it can outsmart everyone.
And the legend continues due, in large part, to eyewitness accounts,
perhaps the most unscientific of all observational techniques.
"I don't think these people are lying," Daegling said. "They remember
seeing Bigfoot, but there's a difference between remembering it and
actually seeing it. That's because memories are fallible."
Typically, there is a sighting in an area. Then other people, who've
heard the report, see or hear something they can't explain. Their
subconscious fills in the blank, Daegling said, with Bigfoot.
"The only thing to do, at this point, is collect a specimen," Daegling
said. "That's what you've got to be after. There are thousands of
footprints that have been found, hairs that are inconclusive. Thousands
of people have seen it, but we haven't solved it.
"I'm not suggesting they go out and shoot them," he said. "But, by dumb
luck, someone sometime has got to find a carcass. Just once in 50
years, you'd think one of these thousands of people would've come
across it. You've got these great big creatures out there all the
place, and we can't find just one of them?"
No simple task
Daegling's request sounds simple, but it's not.
"Sasquatch has the stealth of a cougar, has at least the intelligence
of the chimpanzee and is as rare as a jaguarondi," Colyer said. "When
you put that in one package, it explains the difficulty trying to track
them down."
Bigfoot is nocturnal, nomadic and stays in remote areas where few people live.
In Texas, 80 percent of the sightings in the Lone Star State came from
East Texas, Colyer said, where most of the land is densely forested,
receives lots of rain and is sparsely populated. Of those interactions,
hunters, who as a practice go out of their way to find remote places,
report most of the sightings.
The Texas Bigfoot Research Center, one of dozens of groups nationally
that conduct self-funded forays into the woods, was created to take an
orderly scientific approach to investigating the reports.
"We get eyewitness accounts all of the time," he said, "and I'll bet
that only two or three of 10 are possibly legitimate. If you're not
familiar with the woods, it's easy to misinterpret sounds."
The center's protocol is based on the principle used by birders and
hunters, who employ animal calls to lure the critter being sought. A
day team follows up and searches areas where suspicious noises emanate.
Many times, the group comes out of the woods empty-handed.
Beyond that, team members realize the public's skepticism about
Bigfoot. Two state workers, for example, asked not to be identified in
this story for fear of repercussions from co-workers and skittish
supervisors.
Scott Kessler, a Pineville, La. firefighter, said his co-workers tease
him about his Bigfoot work, but they're always attentive to his stories
from the wild when he returns from field research.
"The majority of the people don't want to know what's out there," he
said. "If there is something, the innocence of the wild is gone."
Nor do scientific organizations want Bigfoot to be discovered, Colyer
said, because it would undermine a lot of what's assumed to be fact
about nature.
Mike Hall, a Palestine contractor, said he saw something suspicious in
the Sam Houston National Forest during a research trip last January.
He was driving back to the base when a humanoid figure appeared at the edge of the range of his headlights.
When Hall stopped his truck, the creature ran into the woods. It hid behind a tree briefly, then disappeared into the brush.
Kessler said he shot video that seems to show blinking non-human eyes in the dark brush.
And in a September incident, after a night of back-and-forth
vocalizations, Colyer said, the group's base camp possibly was
approached by an unknown entity.
He awoke to a fecund animal smell permeating the camp. At the same
time, another member's dog began barking aggressively, and there was
movement in the darkened woods outside of the group's sight. And there
was a voice.
"It sounded," Colyer said, "like moans, groans and wailing."
But that was months ago.
Just a boot print
This night yielded only some suspicious knocks — something hitting a
tree to the south — before Colyer radioed the other teams at 4 a.m.
with orders to pack it up for the night.
Two days later, the teams would see a shadowy figure in the woods and
hear it growl, though they couldn't capture the image or the sound for
proof. At least three members saw the shadowy figure and several more
heard the growl.
Colyer suspects it was Sasquatch, but he's not always convinced when the team encounters evidence.
As the team ended its vigil on the second night of a five-day excursion
here, for example, a team member reported a suspicious footprint.
It was suspicious, but not in a Sasquatch way. It resembled a human boot print in roadside mud. Colyer told them so.
The members who found it argued that it didn't have the pattern marks
that a boot's sole would make. Colyer then pointed out that the print
had no toe marks. They countered that the creature may have dug its
toes in the mud as it walked, thus masking the toes.
Colyer finally dropped to his knees and stuck his face close to the
boot print, which was illuminated by four or five flashlights.
"There are square marks right there," he said with an exasperated sigh. "It was a boot."
Back in the truck, as the group headed back to its base camp, Colyer shook his head.
"You've got to see these things with your mind, not your heart."
A NESSIE hunt using a team of dolphins was planned by the Tory government, according to declassified secret documents.
Excitement is mounting in Malaysia over claims of "Bigfoots" are
lurking in its southern jungles, with wildlife experts on the hunt for
the mythical beast and a telephone hotline set up to report sightings. 
In September, 1939, the West African Review
contained an article "Living Monster or Fabulous.Animal?" Readers will
recollect that some years earlier there had been a type of "Challenger
Expedition" into Central Africa to search the Iruwuni forests of the
Belgian Congo for a huge, mysterious, antedeluvian monster. "Is the
Brontosauros still alive in the morasses of the Congo?" were the
headlines in some of the London papers. No report of the traces of any
such monsters ever appeared, and I was not surprised. I had been right
through the Belgian Congo in 1923, and had come into intimate contact
with a number of what would be called Native Commissioners or District
Officers in British territory, as well as with noted big-game hunters.
None of these men, who were in positions to know before anyone else of
the existence of such monsters, ever alluded to the possible existence
of them. Yet stories do circulate among natives of animals never listed
in any Museum.
Been
waiting on this one a while... since about 2003 actually, but this is
the brightest glimmer of hope I have seen (even if it does say 2005)
