In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,14

North America? To them it’s just a preposterous claim.”

“But maybe it is preposterous,” I suggest. “What if the Sasquatches don’t exist? Where are they? Isn’t that the $64,000 question?”

Bindernagel’s eyebrows furl. “The question no longer is: Does the Sasquatch exist? That one’s been solved. It exists. The question now is: Why is it scientifically taboo?”

My line of questioning has pushed a button. The biologist’s calm, jovial manner transforms into an agitation that becomes personal.

“Do you know that there’s been almost no recognition of my books? The only reason I can live with this is that once the animal is proven, people will ask, ‘Why didn’t we see this coming?’ And I’ll say to them, ‘We did! I wrote about it years before in those books that all of you have ignored!’“

Joan, who is listening with her back to us at the other end of the room, turns to give her husband a commiserating look. Bindernagel shoots her a pained expression before returning his gaze to me. His eyes are now glazed; his chin quivers ever so slightly.

“Look at me. I’m not a young man anymore. I’m seventy-two years old, and the clock is ticking.”

John Bindernagel’s unceasing half-century quest to get the Sasquatch included in the lexicon of North American mammals has been nothing short of an odyssey for personal vindication.

In the years after his humiliation at the university, Bindernagel scoured every library looking for any information about giant ape-men. At first he found no more than a few tongue-in-cheek reports in old newspaper clippings. Pithier material in books about the Abominable Snowman or Yeti of Nepal also fell into his dragnet. But Bigfoot’s cousin in the Himalayas was both too geographically distant and too nebulous in terms of evidence to be of any use to Bindernagel.

When a British Columbian journalist from Harrison Hot Springs named John Green, a pioneering Bigfoot researcher, started publishing serious books on the subject in the late 1960s, Bindernagel found what he was looking for. Green’s encyclopedic tomes—repositories of impeccably researched eyewitness accounts from across the Pacific Northwest—made him realize that the Sasquatch phenomenon was far more prevalent and widespread than he had even imagined. All of this came at a crossroads for the young wildlife biologist. With his graduate work behind him, Bindernagel was now trying to find his specialty in a field in which original research topics were quickly grabbed by the flood of academics coming out of school. One of Bindernagel’s role models, the American field biologist George Schaller, had become famous for his research on the African lion and mountain gorilla. Bindernagel, who was still without expertise on any animal, knew he had to act fast if he wanted to make his mark.

“Here’s George, the first serious biologist to write about large mammals, and I’m thinking: Is there going to be anything left for the rest of us?” Bindernagel recalls. “I was working on the African buffalo at the time, but someone else had made that his niche. I needed something new. And then one day it hit me like a bolt of lightning: I could make the Sasquatch my animal of specialization!”

Bindernagel carried his epiphany with him to Tanzania, where he took a job as a wildlife consultant for the United Nations. There, a group of scientists at the Serengeti Research Institute helped cement his desire to study the reputed animals.

“I raised the subject there. And there was no laughter and no joking. They said, ‘John, if I were you, and I wanted to pursue this back in Canada, I would do such and such.’ These were British, Dutch, and American scientists. They were first class and were unbelievably supportive.”

In 1975, Bindernagel and Joan moved back to Canada, where they set themselves up on the east coast of Vancouver Island. It was an area of frequent Sasquatch reports, and the biologist wanted to be as close as possible to his bounty. But the financial realities of life, including raising a family, meant that the nonpaying research had to play second fiddle to conventional biology gigs. To make ends meet, Bindernagel spent the coming decade piecing together wildlife survey and consultancy jobs, some of them abroad. He spent his off time pounding the pavement in British Columbia to build his dossier of ape-men reports.

“I’d look for eyewitnesses at a dock, at Port Hardy or someplace, and there would be jokes,” he says. “I’d ask: ‘Has anyone here seen a Sasquatch?’ And people would respond: ‘Just my brother-in-law! Ah-ho-ho-ho!’ In those moments I