In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,15
felt it wasn’t working. But once in a while there would be a really good report. And it went on like that for years.”
By the mid-1980s, Bindernagel had assembled a large dossier of firsthand reports from across the province. He’d cut his teeth like the best of the investigators, and was becoming a local authority in the burgeoning field of Sasqualogy. But he was also losing hope that a Bigfoot would ever be brought back from the woods in chains. A physical specimen had still not been produced, and society as a whole seemed no closer to accepting a creature of tabloid farce. For Bindernagel, who was spending his own money with virtually no payback, the Sasquatch began to look more and more like a chimera. As much as he tried to keep his activities hidden from his associates in the scientific community, rumors about his part-time sleuthing had reached the ears of more and more colleagues. People in academia were beginning to talk. Suddenly, Bindernagel’s reputation, credibility, and livelihood all seemed to be on the line. So the biologist did what any self-respecting scientist with a wife and two kids would do in that situation: he shelved the creature. After a solid ten-year run, Bindernagel’s hobby, passion, and would-be career were dead in the water. For the first time in his adult life, he found himself forlorn and rudderless. Everything seemed without purpose.
Then in October 1988, something entirely unexpected happened. Bindernagel and his wife were helping guide a group of seventh-grade girls on an overnight camping trip in nearby Strathcona Provincial Park. During the hike in, one of the girls trailing at the back of the caravan stopped in her tracks with her eyes fixed on the ground beside the trail.
“What’s that?” she shouted, pointing toward a patch of mud. Bindernagel approached to see what was the matter.
“When I got there,” he recalls, “I looked down and—my goodness!—I was beside myself: there was a Sasquatch track!”
And not just one. There were several large humanoid footprints pressed deep into the mud on the side of the trail. Unable to do anything at the moment, Bindernagel and his wife returned to the area later to cast the tracks in plaster of Paris.
It was an eerily fortuitous moment that rekindled Bindernagel’s interest with a fury. Many researchers had spent their entire lives without themselves ever seeing a Sasquatch or coming across tracks. But here the beast had all but danced across his path, as if it were taunting him. Not only were the prints in very good condition, but Joan, who had at best been lukewarm toward her husband’s obsession, was also there to see them for herself. It was the vindication that Bindernagel so desperately sought.
He decided on the spot to revive his research; only this time, there would be no half measures. He would come fully out of the closet with his interest, becoming a sort of “Bigfoot biologist.”
Ten years later, Bindernagel published his first book on the subject: North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch. In it, he argued that Bigfoots were an unclassified species of ape that shared physical features and nearly identical behaviors with other primates in the animal kingdom, such as mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Reports of Sasquatches vocalizing, throwing objects, emitting rancid odors, bluff charging, building nests, and scavenging and foraging are all part of the primate repertoire. For Bindernagel they were, in aggregate, too much to be coincidence.
“I am now satisfied with the available evidence for the existence of the Sasquatch in North America,” he writes in the book’s opening. “My view is that not only do we have sufficient evidence to treat the Sasquatch as a bona fide member of North America’s spectrum of large mammals, but that we already know a great deal about its biology and ecology.”2
Bindernagel broke ranks with his colleagues not only by declaring the animal extant but also by circumventing the normal avenues of peer review. It was an act of dissent that effectively made him a heretic. But because he wasn’t a big-name scientist, few people paid him any attention. The book, which was issued by a small British Columbian press, and which faced the usual uphill battles to garner publicity, didn’t reach a wide enough audience. It fell on mostly deaf ears.* Without a carcass or physical specimen, few of his colleagues would take the animal seriously enough to stake their reputations on it, even with Bindernagel’s erudite arguments.