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Outside Magazine August 2002

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


	Heir apparent Jeffrey Meldrum in his lab at Idaho State. (David Barry)

GROVER KRANTZ PASSED AWAY on February 14, 2002, sent across the river without his prize. In his will, he gave his footprints, files, and books to his successor, Jeffrey Meldrum, a 44-year-old associate professor of anthropology at Idaho State University. (The bones his wife kept to sell and make some money.) In April, Meldrum backed a van up to Krantz's garage, packed the stuff up, and drove it home to Pocatello, Idaho.

Over the last six years, with Krantz less active in Bigfoot hunting, Meldrum has become the anchor keeping this fringe science from drifting into farce. A charming guy with a cop mustache and a brown moptop, Meldrum made his scientific reputation in 1997 by discovering, with Duke University physical anthropologist Richard Kay, a previously unknown and long-extinct species of South American primate based on 12-million-year-old teeth unearthed in central Colombia. As a specialist in evolutionary morphology—the study of how animals have come to be shaped the way they are—Meldrum is one of the country's top experts in primate foot mechanics.

In 1996, an editor

"If it turns out to be an ape," says Meldrum, "The most disconcerting thing will be the crow that will have to be eaten."

at the science journal Cryptozoology asked him to review an obscure book called Bigfoot of the Blues, a nonfiction account of a Sasquatch tromping around the Blue Mountains near Walla Walla, Washington. Meldrum drove to Walla Walla and met the book's main character, an old 'squatch hunter named Paul Freeman, who led him to a fresh set of tracks. How convenient, thought Meldrum, relishing the chance to debunk the mystery.

But he couldn't. "When I got on my knees and looked closely," he recalls, "I could see dermal ridge details"—the dips and whorls of fingerprints—"that would be awfully hard to fake."

In his lab in the Life Sciences building at Idaho State, where I go to meet him, Meldrum throws open drawers full of bones and footprints to find a cast of that Blue Mountain track. "Here it is," he says, holding up a white Shaquille-size plaster cast. "The subtle detail is incredible. Both humans and apes have only two phalanges, or segments, in their big toes and thumbs, and three in the rest. See this small toe? There's one, two, three phalanges. But look at the length of that. The foot is only about 15 inches, yet the small toe is as long as my pinkie finger. What that tells you is that this foot would have a grasping ability as good as my hand."

Fully hooked, Meldrum examined print casts that dated back to the late 1950s. Some he tossed as obvious hoaxes. Others contained impossible-to-fake signs of veracity. "When they discover tracks, most people cast only the clearest footprint," he says. "I looked for the messier prints, because they're the ones that tell me something about how the animal moved."

Then an even stranger thing happened. He started to recognize identical prints found years apart. "Here's the Bigfoot that Jerry Crew cast in 1958," he says, holding up a plaster cast familiar from the Humboldt Times photo. "Now here's a track found near Hyampom, California, about 60 miles south, in 1961. When you look at the shape, proportions, and relative positions of the toes, they're from the same guy. I say guy because it looks like a big male."

For Meldrum—who is a curator in the BFRO—the discovery of the Skookum Cast was also momentous. "The ridge detail I saw in the skin eliminates bear, elk, and coyote," he told me. "That sort of detail is characteristic only of primates."

OK then, I ask, if an ape really is leaving these prints, why haven't we found a body? Why isn't there a single damn skull?



	Scientific proof?: Plaster casts frm the BFRO collection. (David Barry)

(The failure to produce a body is, of course, the most powerful ammo deployed by critics of belief in Bigfoot. Citing that failure, Michael Shermer, who debunks pseudoscience professionally as the editor of Skeptic magazine and as a columnist for Scientific American, barely registers Sasquatch on his radar anymore. "New species of smaller organisms are found all the time, and most of the people I meet who are into cryptozoology seem OK," says Shermer. "But Bigfoot really isn't in that category anymore. After 100 years of anecdotes, stories, sightings, and footprints, it's time to cough up the body or forget it. To name a new species, we need to have a complete type specimen. But they've got nothing.")

"Think about it," Meldrum says, gamely taking up the challenge. "It's rare, reproduces infrequently, and if it's like other apes, it may live for 50 years. It's at the top of the food chain, so death most likely comes from natural causes. When an animal is ill or feeble, it'll hide somewhere safe, which makes it more difficult to find any remains. Scavengers strip the carcass and scatter the bones. Rodents chew up what's left for the calcium. Soil in the Northwest is acidic, which is conducive to plant fossilization but not to bones. They disintegrate."

Meldrum's academic career hasn't exactly been helped by his research, but neither has he faced the ridicule that dogged Grover Krantz. "There's a different climate now than when Grover put his neck on the chopping block," says Meldrum. During his tenure review a few years ago, some colleagues looked askance at his Sasquatch work. "There were people in my department who would have denied me tenure on that basis alone," he says. "But there were others who said the subject doesn't matter—it's the way in which I went about doing the science." Meldrum's scientific method passed muster, and he was awarded tenure.

"If it turns out to be an ape," says Meldrum, revisiting my question, "it's not going to overturn our ideas about human evolution or even primate evolution. In fact, it'll confirm what some of us suspect, which is that descendants of Miocene-period apes populate every northern continent.

"The most disconcerting thing," he concludes, "will be the crow that will have to be eaten."

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