on the cover / By Ryan “Capt. Buhne” Hurley

BIGFOOT TRAPPED BY NORCAL FANATIC!

True, other “Bigfoot” have been captured on film. The reason PGF has maintained such robust crypto-longevity? Other videos fail to convince any but the most Kool-Aid drinking of Bigfooters. Even some of the more highly regarded also-rans depict nothing but pixelated, blurry Rorschachs — “blobsquatches,” as they have come to be known in the Bigfoot community. (If you doubt this, try typing the words ‘redwoods Bigfoot film’ into YouTube. Shot in 1994 by a professional film crew near the Smith River in Del Norte County, this clip is regarded as one of the top 5 or 6 Bigfoot videos ever shot. See the blobsquatch? I rest my case.)

And yet, reigning champ though PGF is, each year that goes by without a more convincing offering is one more year that mainstream science smirks at us “believers.” Trotting-out the 40-year-old home movie as proof that Bigfoot lives in the same Pacific Northwest wilderness that each year is increasingly encroached upon by more mountain bikers, backpackers and digital cameras than the previous year?

I got a “D” in statistics, but what are the odds against a brigade of huge apes hiding-out for four decades … in California ?

Dr. Grover Krantz had a solution. Before he passed away in 2002, the Washington State University anthropologist was the modern father of legit Bigfooting. A rare academic who risked his credibility to the study, he lent a fatherly, academic tone to the analysis of Bigfoot – a field overrun with weekend monster hunters. Krantz diligently weighed the evidence, and concluded scientifically that Bigfoot was real.

But after squinting at hundreds of footprint casts and re-spooling PGF ad nauseum he, too, grew weary of endlessly pondering the sometimes sketchy body of secondary proof. Fed up with lack of a specimen, in the 1980s Krantz went public with his controversial belief: The only Bigfoot research strategy that “made sense” was to bring in a body. And because the carcass of a naturally expired Bigfoot would almost certainly never be found, any guesses what that meant?

“There will be a prize of some kind,” wrote Krantz in authoring the modern Bible of Bigfooting, Bigfoot Sasquatch: Evidence , “to the hunter who brings in the first specimen.” Keenly aware of the scorn directed his way by his Washington State University colleagues, Krantz was effectively lobbying the Bigfoot community to invest in face paint, ghillie suits, assault rifles and hollow-point bullets.

The guy wasn’t fucking around: There existed the very real possibility that Bigfoot was a relic strain of man ( Homo sapiens sapiens ), and thus protected under criminal murder statutes. But then, some level of risk is inherent in hunting a gigantic, muscular ape-man.

In the weeks preceding this article, a pining anxiety crept into my soul, and I just couldn’t shake it. Here I was, living in the heart of Bigfoot country. The popular BFRO.net Bigfoot sighting database listed more Bigfoot encounters in Humboldt County than any other county in the U.S., save for Skamania County, Wash. But I wasn’t doing a damned thing to prove Bigfoot’s existence — to dethrone PGF as the preeminent piece of evidence.

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