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Outside Magazine August 2002

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''Sasquatch Is Real!'' Forest Love Slave Tells All! (Cont.)

IF BIGFOOT STUDIES HAVE A MARTYR, it's Grover Krantz, the first bona fide scientist who came to believe in Sasquatch, and who paid dearly for it. Not long before he died, I interviewed him at his home on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, where he retired after three decades as a professor of anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman. He sat in his chair, smoking like he was competing to see how fast he could empty the pack. The doctors had told him he had terminal pancreatic cancer, so what the hell. His brand: True.

"To begin with, I was trying to find out if it was real," Krantz told me. "Then I wanted to understand it, figure out what it was. Now I want to prove it exists before I die."

"I wouldn't want a live one captured," Grover Krantz said. "That would be the cruelest thing I can imagine. Shoot one. Being dead never hurt anybody."

The grizzled professor—whose solid research and writings in his field of expertise, the use of fossil bone evidence in the theory of human evolution, never received the kind of attention his Bigfoot enthusiasm attracted—joylessly recounted his story. He'd seen my kind. I'd misquote him, paint him the fool. Krantz didn't care. He'd already been through the wringer: lost promotions, professional ridicule, the loneliness of a Berkeley-trained scientist in a field riddled with amateurs, hoaxers, and nuts. "It is tantamount to academic suicide to become associated with any of these people," Krantz once wrote. Yet he did it anyway.

It was Cripplefoot that convinced him. In the late fall of 1969, Rene Dahinden, John Green, and other Bigfoot hunters descended on Bossburg, Washington, an old mining town on the Columbia River about 15 miles south of the Canadian border. Locals had reported a Sasquatch leaving unusual prints just outside the city limits. Krantz drove out to Bossburg a skeptic. "I gave Sasquatch only a 10 percent chance of being real," he told me. After retracing the tracks at the site, the professor brought a cast pair back to his lab. The 17-inch left foot appeared normal, but the right foot curved like a C and displayed enormous bunions and splayed toes.

Applying what he knew about primate feet, the dynamics of weight distribution, leverage, and load arms, Krantz calculated the necessary position of an 800-pound ape's ankle, heel, and toe base, and compared that to the measurements of the track. "They were right on," he said. "Nobody could have faked that."

Krantz came to believe that Sasquatch might have descended from Gigantopithecus, a huge primate that roamed southern China more than 300,000 years ago. (Gigantopithecus is no fiction; its bones are part of the fossil record. And Gigantopithecus could have migrated to North America on the Bering Strait land bridge.) He spent much of the next 20 years working out the details of a Sasquatch's day-to-day existence. Once in, he was in big.

"Humans don't constitute any threat to Sasquatch," Krantz said. "Once in a while I'll run across somebody who believes early Homo sapiens might have killed off Sasquatches in some areas." The professor scoffed. "Sure. With a bow and arrow they're gonna bring down a Sasquatch. When we can't do it with a goddamn gun!" (This was, of course, a reference to the notorious "battle" between miners and Sasquatches around Mount St. Helens in 1924, among other incidents.)

Even more than his belief in the existence of Bigfoot, Krantz's conviction that it was acceptable to shoot a Sasquatch attracted vehement criticism. Discussing the issue, Krantz seemed motivated more by manly admiration for the ape's prowess than by specimen lust. "If you drop a Sasquatch with a gun," he warned, "the first thing you want to do is reload." Once you fire, your main problem won't be dragging a quarter-ton carcass out of the forest; it'll be reaching the truck alive. "Start throwing rocks at it," he said. "If you don't have rocks, get a long stick and poke it. You want to make sure it's dead." And even if the beast is dead, its mate may charge out of the trees and kill you.

In Bigfoot culture's raging ethical debate—Should we shoot a Sasquatch?—Krantz unapologetically defended his loaded-for-bear position. "I wouldn't want a live one captured," he told me. "That would be the cruelest thing I can imagine. Shoot one. Being dead never hurt anybody."

That attitude didn't endear him to missing-linkists, who believe Bigfoot may be as much human as ape. It struck others, including most members of the BFRO, as an unsporting method of specimen collection. But Krantz had an arm's-length relationship with the BFRO anyway; he contributed his expert opinions from time to time, but he was not a member. Even after inspecting the Skookum Cast three times, his opinion of it was tempered by a cranky ambivalence.

"I don't know what it is," he told me. "I'm baffled. Elk. Sasquatch. That's the choice."

Crushing another cigarette, Krantz suggested moving our conversation to his garage, which he had converted into a tiny natural history museum. Skulls of all shapes and sizes stared out from the walls: wolverine, seal, monkey, cow, cougar, badger, porcupine, nutria, beaver, camel, dolphin. Prehuman skulls (Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Neanderthal) occupied their own gallery. More than 70 Sasquatch footprint casts lined the opposite wall.

"Where'd this Bigfoot hand imprint come from?" I asked.

"Northeastern Washington," Krantz said. "The guy who got it wouldn't tell me anything else. He thought he had a prime place, didn't want anyone else to investigate."

"Is secrecy still a problem?"

He nodded. "If they've been in this for a while, they know what the goal is," he said ruefully. "There's a first prize out there. Once it's been awarded, the scientists will take over."

The professor sparked another True.

"There is no second prize," he said.

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