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By
Charles Reid
Staff reporter
November moonlight shone through the overhanging trees onto a pair
of large human-like tracks headed for a waterfall's frozen pond.
The first track was sharp, the second was scuffed as if the maker
had slipped before walking across the ice. Because Winsloe's Robert
Jones (not his real name), 23, had camped and hiked thoughout his
life and he had seen animal tracks, he said he had no doubt the
one-inch deep tracks in the fresh snow belonged to a sasquatch.
"No animal makes that kind of track. It was clearly five-toed.
(You could) see the individual toes. I put my shoe - it's size 11
- next to it and it was half that still. It looked like a big human
foot, about the same size as mini snowshoes."
The sasquatch is a mythical, large, hairy, gorilla-like creature
witnesses say lives in the northwestern part of Canada and the United
States. It's name comes from B.C.'s Coast Salish First Nation term
sasqits or hairy man.
Witnesses say it walks on two legs like a human, but has a flat,
ape-like face. Sasquatch sightings and tracks have been reported
in North America for two hundred years. It's called bigfoot in the
United States and yeti in Nepal, an country in Asia's Himalayan
mountains. For Jones and a co-worker he calls Kelly, who was along
for the hike, reality and folklore suddenly mixed that late fall
day in 2000.
They were five kilometres from civilization and panic washed over
them in a wave, Jones said.
"There's a sense of fear that comes over you. Kelly's a tough
fellow. He grew up being a boxer. He was freaking out and getting
all anxious. Kelly grabbed a large stick."
For several minutes they stood in the clear, cold night and listened
to the forest. It was unbearably quiet, said Jones.
"You have to understand it's a deafening silence. There's almost
too much noise because there's no noise. By this time we were a
little freaked out. There was a sense of uneasiness, a sense we
were being watched."
Jones, originally from Bedford, N.S., worked as a bellman during
the summer and fall for the swanky $700-a-night Emerald Lake Lodge
in Yoho National Park. Kelly, from Vancouver, B.C., had been at
the lodge several months before Jones arrived.
Just over the Alberta border, B.C.'s 1,310-square-kilometre Yoho
butts up against Banff National Park. It would fit into the area
between Charlottetown and Summerside from east to west and Cavendish
and Tryon from north to south.
The Emerald is part of a resort chain in the Rocky mountains. It
sits about 210 kilometres northwest of Calgary, about 15 kilometres
along an access road linked to the Trans-Canada Highway.
Trails into the mountains lead from employee residences and Jones
and Kelly would often hike them after their 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift.
Both wore headlamps similar to miners' lamps that night, but bright
moonlight lit the trail so they didn't need to use them.
Jones said they'd been on this offshoot of the main trail before
and decided to walk the metre wide path to a 10-metre high waterfall.
A tiny stream trickled down the almost frozen waterfall. Behind
it was a cave about three metres up in the rock. At the pond side
they saw the tracks. They vanished on the pond's frozen surface.
Snow had fallen about 12 hours earlier, Jones said, so there was
no chance this was an old animal track which thawed and refroze
into a distorted shape.
The men returned using a different trail. Before they headed back
they paid close attention to the ground and when Jones saw the same
track again he knew it wasn't a dream.
"We could clearly see it again coming back down. If you'd seen
it you'd know this wasn't a shadow."When they got back there
Jones told his co-workers what they saw. People who had worked at
the lodge for several years weren't shocked because stories of sightings
and reports of weird noises in the woods had floated around the
lodge for years.
A sighting like this doesn't surprise wildlife biologist Dr. John
Bindernagel either. The sasquatch is a real animal and he's got
the tracks to prove it, he said in a telephone interview from his
British Columbia home.
In 1988, he found sasquatch tracks near his house on Vancouver Island.
He poured plaster into the prints and when it dried he pulled out
casts 15 inches long and eight inches wide - about a man's size
20 shoe.
A man who wears size 11 shoes usually has a foot about 10 inches
long and four inches wide.
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 Candace
Dorey, an employee of the Bookmark on Queen Street, holds a copy
of In the Kingdom of Gorillas by Bill Weber and Amy Vedder. Witnesses
say the sasquatch's face looks ape-like. (Reid photo)
Bindernagel said because wildlife biologists have routinely used
tracks as evidence an animal exists, the hundreds of prints found
in Canada and the United States point to an undiscovered animal
living in North American forests.
"We can be pretty sure there's a large mammal in North America
we haven't seen before. We do have a lot of evidence we have to
work with."
In North America there's a database of over 3,000 items including
reported sightings, hundreds of plaster casts of tracks, and pictures
and film of the animal.
It's this evidence that prompted Bindernagel to publish his book
North America's Great Ape: the Sasquatch in 1998.
It's a field guide to the sasquatch's habits and behaviours. Because
the sasquatch doesn't fit into a neat slot for scientists to study,
there wasn't categorized information available for witnesses to
identify what they saw. And that's why, Bindernagel said, he wrote
the book.
"It doesn't fall into anyone's bailiwick, so to speak. I'm
not saying it should be in a field guide, but if it was people can
say that's what I saw. It's those people I think I can help."
The argument for the sasquatch being a large ape instead of a primitive
human is based on witnesses' reports of it throwing rocks, swinging
sticks and vocalizing when they were noticed.
Jane Goodall, a scientist who studied chimpanzees in the wild, documented
similar behaviors when chimps perceived a threat. Research of African
mountain gorillas found they release a rotten egg smell from glands
when threatened.
Witnesses have claimed they've smelled this scent before or after
seeing a sasquatch. So if wildlife biologists ignore evidence, they're
not doing their job, Bindernagel said, and new animals aren't discovered.
"It's very frustrating. With my collegues I'm just getting
very, very tired. They're not looking at the evidence. Wildlife
biologists shouldn't ignore it. We're stuck with not just disbelief,
but denial. It's not a matter of belief, it's not a matter of faith.
This is mainstream biology. We will look bad when we find it."
But for Neb Kujundzic, a UPEI philosophy professor and department
chair, the validity of Bindernagel's research depends on how it
stands up to long-term scientific study. All scientific discoveries
are theories until another scientist comes along and proves or disproves
it, he said in an interview in his book-lined UPEI office.
"Theories are respected solely because they haven't been refuted
yet. The essence of science is refutation."
Using the scientific method, a scientist presents a hypothesis then
tries to find evidence to prove it. For the scientist's theory to
be valid it has to always return the same result and stand up to
new evidence. This means a hypothesis implies a correlation. Kujundzic
used 400 bowls of chili as an example.
He always get a headache after eating a bowl of chili - that's the
hypothesis. If he still gets a headache after 400 bowls that's the
correlation. This correlation should be provable no matter where
or when he eats the chili. But, said Kunjudzic, if the person eats
bowl 401 then doesn't get a headache, the hypothesis isn't valid.
Something has changed and the hypothesis gets retooled.
This is how the scientific method is supposed to work, said Kujundzic.
"There you see it, others you don't. If you see it, it should
be all over the world."
And it's the difference between science and pseudo-science. It's
like a straight line versus a circle.
Open-ended science is a straight line on which a theory is presented
and evidence given to prove or disprove it, while close-ended pseudo-science
is a circle in which a theory is presented, but it can't be refuted
because there's no evidence.
But, he said, it doesn't mean discoveries like the H. pylori ulcer-causing
bacteria, once laughed at by scientists who thought ulcers were
caused by stress, won't eventually be accepted. "It emerged
from kookland to mainstream science."
And for Jones the sasquatch has become mainstream.
"I'd always had that thought, but never thought I'd see anything.
I'm not a fool, I know what I saw.
"I believe we saw something. I'd like to go back."
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