In Search of Big Foot

In the last blog, I talked about how I love to watch game shows. Well, when John has the remote, the TV’s tuned to football, old movies, or programs about aliens, or Big Foot. He was watching “Finding Big Foot” on Animal Planet a few months ago. I walked through our family room when the team of investigators howled and “Big Foot” howled back. They were all excited. I thought it was just some campers fooling around.

         Our family has had some pretty good discussions about whether Big Foot exists or not. I want to believe that Big Foot is out there. John, with his degree in Biology, argues against it pointing out that nobody has ever caught one, shot one, or found the remains of one.

   I think Big Foot is highly intelligent and manages to avoid humans. After driving around Mt. Rainier and on the Olympic peninsula, I could easily picture Big Foot living out there undetected. In fact, when we moved here in 1990, it was much less developed, and wilder. The population then was 23,878 (compared to 37,022 in 2010). It seemed feasible to me that Big Foot could be living right here in Puyallup.

A couple of months ago, John gave a talk to US Fish and Wildlife in Stevenson, Washington. I tagged along with him. There were quite a few Big Foot souvenirs in the hotel gift shop for tourists.

          The second night we were there, we went out to dinner with a group of scientists. I confess to tuning out a lot at the “scientific” functions when they start talking shop. But this time, the conversation turned to Big Foot. Apparently a few years before this meeting, the invited speaker was an expert on Big Foot. They asked me if John had told me about this. I shook my head no.

They filled me in. They thought this man was a flake. They couldn’t believe that he had been chosen as the guest speaker, and had some fun at his expense by asking him questions that they thought would prove Big Foot was a myth. John was the lead questioner. The poor man didn’t know that John had plenty of experience arguing against Big Foot with me. I’m pretty sure it didn’t change the man’s belief in Big Foot, or these scientists’ disbelief.

I kept fairly quiet as they reminisced about how funny the whole incident was. I only chimed in to prod John into disclosing a fellow WSU professor’s explanation for why no Big Foot bones were ever found: the soil around here is so acidic from all the fir trees, the bones dissolve. And I pointed out that there was a WSU professor whose whole career was spent looking for Big Foot. They were polite.

         Today, Sarah and I took a relative who is visiting from Virginia, to Tacoma, supposedly to visit the Tacoma Art Museum. We left late and made a few stops before getting there. We walked through the Chihuly Glass Tunnel and tried to get into the glass museum, but it was closed for their annual auction. We stopped in at the Washington State Museum store to find out what time the art museum closed and were told that it closed in 15 minutes, so instead, we browsed through the store.

That’s where I found a book titled The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot. I snatched it up and bought it as a joke for John and we left. He laughed when I presented it to him at home, and said that he thought the author, John Green, was the man who talked at the infamous meeting.

A few hours later, I started looking through it. There is a map of Washington sightings and tracks.  Puyallup had 12 reports. The only place with more reports was Mt. St. Helens, with 16. Hmmmm.

I looked up “Puyallup” in the index. On page 128, there was something extremely interesting:

“Sasquatches may do a lot of screaming, but screams don’t necessarily mean a sasquatch. If they did Puyallup would be the sasquatch capital of the world . . .The screams were most often heard in an area of mixed woods and subdivisions southeast of town . . . They first came to public attention in July, 1972, when a resident of a new subdivision called Forest Green wrote to the Tacoma News Tribune about hearing loud screams one or two nights a month in the woods behind his home.”

The book goes on to say that people recorded the sounds, and that the “unidentified noise is not an ‘eeeee’ scream, but more of a long ‘whooOooOooOoo” or “woopwoopwoop” at a high pitch and with immense volume.”

Background information on why this was so intriguing to me: Forest Green is the development next door to ours. It’s the same distance from our house, as the elementary and junior high school that the kids’ walked to. Our house was built in 1979. If Sasquatch has the same lifespan as a human, he/she could still be around. There have been bears sighted nearby, and a pack of coyotes have been eating pets in our neighborhood. A newspaper article said that they coyotes are living nearby in Wildwood Park. The satellite view on Google Maps shows that there’s still a fair amount of wooded area near us.

John actually unknowingly provided the best piece Big Foot evidence this past winter. He told me that he went out to get the mail, and he heard a strange sound come from our back yard. He said it was really loud, and it sounded like a monkey. He ran back to the house to look out back for it, but didn’t see anything.

I talked to my friend Carol about it. Her back yard and mine are back to back. She said that she had heard the same sound, several times. We still haven’t figured out what animal was screaming.

Big Foot sighting at the Puyallup Fair 2011.

So, does Big Foot exist? Is he roaming around in my own neighborhood? I don’t know, but while I was writing this blog, the dogs went ballistic, and I got jumpy. I’m keeping binoculars, and a camera handy.

Laura Keolanui Stark is keeping an eye out for Sasquatch. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.