The Big Book of Mysteries. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

millennia.

      ANCIENT AIR TRAVEL?

      Some very strange, ancient gold ornaments from Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Columbia made by Mochica or Chimú people were thought by Fortean investigator Ivan Sanderson to resemble model airplanes, and, as the illustration shows, there was good reason for his hypothesis.

2 MYSTERIES OF THE MOUNTAINS

      There is a subtle difference between asking whether Bigfoot or Sasquatch is real and asking whether the phenomenon associated with that name is real. The phenomenon is certainly real. New reports of sightings or the discovery of footprints come in almost daily. Someone or something — psychic entity, mental aberration, extraterrestrial being, unknown physical lifeform — is triggering the sightings. Someone or something is leaving the footprints. An enormous amount of Sasquatch evidence is accumulating in the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the United States.

      On October 20, 1967, just after 1:00 p.m., Bob Gimlin and Roger Patterson managed to take 953 frames of 16mm cine film of something that looked like a very big, hair-covered humanoid.The existence of their film eliminates two theories: whatever they saw was not a hallucination, nor was it the result of auto-suggestion, self-hypnosis, or any sort of psycho-sociological mind trick that they’d accidentally played on themselves. As far as is known, cameras can’t record images that exist only in the photographer’s mind.

      The film wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to dispose of another theory: whatever is on the Gimlin–Patterson film is not a commonly known but misidentified zoological species. This thing wasn’t any kind of bear or anthropoid ape seen in strange conditions or from an odd perspective. It could have been one of two things: a hoax, or an unknown creature of some sort that possessed a type of objective reality capable of leaving a photographic record.

      The indigenous people of Canada and North America have cultural and traditional histories of Bigfoot that go back several centuries. The oldest written records go back nearly two hundred years, and the sightings are by no means culture specific. Indigenous people as well as European, African, and Asian immigrants have all been involved in Bigfoot episodes.

      Statistical analysis produces interesting correlations. There are, for example, more than six hundred place names in the northwestern United States that are thought to have associations with the Bigfoot or Sasquatch legends. These place names are not positively linked to population density. If hoaxers had been responsible, it would have seemed probable that the more people there were around, the greater the chance of a hoaxer working the area — but not so. What the sightings and place names do seem to correlate with positively is mountain ridges and mountain crests: in other words, if there really are such things as Sasquatch or Bigfoot, then they are closely associated with high and inaccessible places — just as the Yeti is in Tibet and Nepal.

      Let us relate to you one of these thousands of typical reports. Two hunters from Stewart in British Columbia were travelling at an altitude of over 1,200 metres along an old mine access road. As daylight faded they turned a corner and jumped from their truck thinking that they’d seen a bear moving ahead of them. Setting off in pursuit, they saw that it was walking upright. The creature became aware of them at the same moment and turned to look directly at them. It turned its shoulders and the whole of its upper body, as it didn’t seem to have a neck.

      The men described a dark face with a small beard and a flattish nose. It seemed as surprised to see them as they were to see it. The last glimpse they had of it, the Sasquatch was vanishing among the trees. The hunters noted particularly that it was very big — over seven feet tall — and heavily built, and that there was a powerfully unpleasant smell around it. They also noticed that the hands swung lower than the knees.

      Albert Ostman had a much closer encounter than the Stewart hunters. He reported how in 1924 he was prospecting in Toba Inlet in British Columbia when an eight-foot Sasquatch picked him up like a rucksack and carted him along inside his sleeping bag for about three hours. When dawn broke he found he was in a Sasquatch “homestead” of some description and that it was occupied by the adult male that had kidnapped him, an adult female, and two young ones. Although they prevented his escape for several days, Ostman was unwilling to use his gun on them because they had done him no harm, and clearly intended no harm. He finally escaped by tricking the adult male with some snuff from his pack, and while it was rushing to find water to sooth the irritation, Ostman made a dash for freedom.

      Dr. W. Henner Farenbach performed another interesting piece of statistical analysis on a large sample of Sasquatch footprints. The print size of any natural animal species, including human beings, tends to follow a normal bell curve of distribution. Most human beings, for example, have British shoe sizes greater than four but smaller than eleven. The great majority — the apex of that normal distribution bell curve — being between six and nine. A few very small-footed people have sizes two or three, and an equally low number of large-footed people wear sizes eleven or twelve.

      When Dr. Farenbach made the calculations, he discovered that the Sasquatch prints adhered well to this normal, natural pattern. If hoaxers were responsible, it seems highly improbable that they could have colluded over such wide distances and over so many years to produce such a realistic sample range.

      SASQUATCH SOUNDS

      In addition to footprints and occasional hair samples, there are sound recordings in existence that claim to have caught Sasquatch vocalizations. Some of the most interesting of these were made by Al Berry and Ron Morehead in the Sierra Nevada. They can actually be contacted through the Internet at their web site “Sierra Sounds,” where CDs or tapes are available.

      One question frequently asked by serious Sasquatch researchers is why prominent, orthodox scientists haven’t joined their ranks in any perceptible strength. It may be argued that they have, but that the traditionalist and rather cautious academic official media are still reluctant to give much space or weight to Sasquatch research.

      The well-balanced information available over the Internet via the Virtual Bigfoot Conference Site organized by Henry Franzoni suggests that part of the problem is to be found in the suspicion among a number of researchers that Bigfoot seems to possess a kind of paranormal sixth sense, and perhaps some additional ultra-human abilities. How else, one might sensibly ask, has it managed to avoid contact with Homo sapiens for so long?

      Once the question of a sixth sense arises, Franzoni warns, orthodox scientists begin to shy away from delving into a phenomenon. This is probably because of the heavy bias in favour of the mechanistic philosophy of science which appears to have been a dominant influence since the seventeenth century, and the lasting impact of Rene Descartes.

      Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s profound and highly readable work entitled Why Puzzling Powers of Animals Have Been Neglected makes the point that academic biology has inherited from seventeenth century science a strong faith in reductionism — a technique for explaining complex systems in terms of smaller and simpler parts. For example, it was once believed that atoms formed the fundamental bedrock for all physical explanations, but recent subatomic research has shown that the atoms themselves can be thought of as patterns of vibrations within fields: which more or less dissolves the foundations of the old style materialistic science.

      Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, has said: “Through modern physics, materialism has transcended itself.” What seems to have revolutionized the philosophy of science as far as physics is concerned has not yet conquered the stubborn materialism that still persists in some areas of biology. As Dr. Sheldrake says, “Fields of enquiry that are inherently holistic have a low status in the hierarchy of science.”

      There is, however, another biological philosophy of science known as vitalism which suggests that living organisms are truly alive, whereas mechanistic and materialistic theories regard them as merely inanimate and soulless.

      Because vitalism admits the existence of unknown vital principles, its adherents