Stories of giant, ape-like creatures have existed for centuries, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that those myths entered mainstream culture. Mountaineer C.K. Howard-Bury saw such a creature firsthand in 1920 and informed journalist Henry Newman of the Calcutta Statesman immediately afterwards. Howard-Bury mispronounced the native word for the creature as “Yeti,” which Newman further embellished by translating it into English as “Abominable Snowman.” In 1951, another mountaineer – Eric Shipton – photographed large footprints during an expedition into the Himalaya Mountains in Nepal. Between Shipton’s photographs and Newman’s moniker from decades earlier, the possible existence of an Abominable Snowman captured the imagination of millions around the world.
Something similar occurred in the American Northwest in 1958 when a road construction team discovered large footprints near their equipment site in Bluff Creek, California. One of the men, Jerry Crew, contacted a taxidermist about how to make plaster casts of the prints. Crew then called Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times about the discovery. Legends of a creature called Sasquatch were well-known in the area, but Genzoli used the word that Jerry Crew and his fellow construction workers had coined – Bigfoot – in his resulting article. Just as had happened when Henry Newman referred to the Yeti as an Abominable Snowman, the word Bigfoot struck a chord and news of the footprints quickly spread.
Ten years later, rumors began circulating that a creature resembling Bigfoot had been found frozen in ice and was being exhibited at fairs and carnivals throughout the American Midwest. Dubbed the Minnesota Iceman, both Bigfoot enthusiast and professional scientists were intrigued by the discovery. Two amateur Bigfoot hunters immediately declared the specimen genuine upon seeing it, while the Smithsonian Institute expressed interest in acquiring the Minnesota Iceman for research and display. Frank Hansen, “custodian” of the creature, hadn’t intended to create a hoax, just make a few bucks as a modern-day P.T. Barnum by putting the Minnesota Iceman on display. When they realized that the creature was a fake, the Smithsonian quickly distanced itself from the Minnesota Iceman, resulting in professional scientists never again taking the existence of Bigfoot seriously.
It wasn’t long before scientists began labeling Bigfoot believers as “crackpots,” while the believers countered that scientists were nothing more than “eggheads.” In his 2011 book Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology, Brian Regal explores the history of these two competing groups, as well as the one person caught in the middle – anthropologist Grover Krantz from Washington State University. His fellow professors labeled him a “crackpot” for his belief in the mythical creature, while the amateur enthusiasts considered him an “egghead” infringing on their territory.
Like almost everyone else at the time, Grover Krantz was fascinated when reports first surfaced about an “Abominable Snowman” in the Himalayas and then Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest – he even visited Bluff Creak in 1964, eight years after footprints were discovered there. When Roger Patterson famously filmed grainy footage of a Bigfoot walking through the woods of California in October 1967, Krantz was completing his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Because he had earlier traveled to Bluff Creek, the Minneapolis Star asked him to comment on the film. Krantz told the paper that stills published in a men’s magazine “looked to me like someone wearing a gorilla suit.” He would later change his mind after watching the actual footage.
The following year, Grover Krantz accepted a position in the anthropology department at Washington State University. In November 1969, fresh Bigfoot footprints were found in Bossburg, Washington. Intrigued, Krantz visited the former mining town to take a look for himself. The visit cemented his reputation as a “crackpot” in the minds of his fellow professors at Washington State University, but the experience made a true believer out of Krantz nonetheless. Casts made from the prints showed that the right foot contained strange bulges on its outer edge and the middle toes were deformed. The creature was dubbed “Cripplefoot” as a result, and the deformities proved to Krantz that the prints could not have been faked.
Grover Krantz took the scientific approach to his investigation into Bigfoot, believing that an undocumented species existed in the Pacific Northwest. In 1935, anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald studied a pair of third-molar teeth uncovered in China. Based on their size and age, Von Koenigswald concluded that they belonged to an extinct apelike creature he named Gigantopithecus. The animal appeared to be native to China and lived approximately two million to 350,000 years ago. Grover Krantz argued that both the Yeti of the Himalayas and Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest were descendants of Gigantopithecus. While some of the original Gigantopithecus remained in China, others migrated to North America via the same Bering land bridge that humans used over eleven thousand years ago. Their distinct environments then caused each branch of Gigantopithecus to evolve differently, one capable of surviving the frigid conditions of the Himalayas and the other within the warmer Pacific Northwest.
Having established a scientific hypothesis for how the Yeti and Sasquatch could have come to exist, Grover Krantz next began studying plaster casts of footprints. “An 8ft. tall, heavily built hominid would require certain structural modifications to its feet because of its great absolute body weight,” he concluded. He then used mathematical equations to determine what type of structural modifications would be necessary, and his results matched the structure of the plaster casts. Furthermore, the footprints – including those of Cripplefoot – contained small, barely perceptible dermal ridges, the foot’s equivalent of fingerprints. The deformity of Cripplefoot and existence of dermal ridges, Krantz argued, proved that the footprints were genuine.
There were many Sasquatch footprints, however, that were indeed hoaxes. The grainy footage taken by Roger Patterson in October 1967 is also considered a hoax, although there is no clear-cut evidence confirming it as such. Patterson died in 1972, and decades later not one but two of his friends asserted that they had worn an ape costume during filming. A North Carolina costume designer even claimed in 2002 that he designed the costume for Patterson, but the costume itself – or even a receipt for its purchase – has never been uncovered. Believers in the film insist that the lack of concrete proof that the footage is a hoax means that it is genuine. The grainy and amateur nature of the film, meanwhile, prevents modern technology to offer any new insights into the matter.
Crackpots still believe in the existence of Bigfoot, while eggheads continue to insist that the creature is nothing more than myth. Grover Krantz, who died in 2002, was that rare exception – both a crackpot and an egghead – who spent a considerable part of his life navigating the two camps despite the impossibility of ever bridging the gap between them.
Anthony Letizia