The giant, bipedal, forest-dwelling, hirsute hominid known as Sasquatch has been the subject of active investigation by people such as scientists, professors, academics, amateur researchers and enthusiasts alike.
Sasquatch research has been reported and recorded for nearly a century and the following articles highlight some of the Sasquatch investigators. Their resolve is notable especially when faced by those who think these reports are “just stories”.
Dr. Jeff Meldrum, is a professor of Anatomy and Anthropology and scientist who refutes the “just stories” assumption. He is the author of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (2006), which was even praised by British Primatologist and Anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall DBE.
Dr. Meldrum has replied to the “just stories” comment by pointing out these stories leave tracks, shed hair, deposit scat, vocalize, and are observed and described by reliable experienced witnesses. Hardly just stories.
Let me introduce some of those people deserving recognition in Sasquatch research and investigation in the following three articles.
John W Burns (1888-1962) was a British Columbia school teacher and a government agent in from the 1920s to 1940s, who worked at the Chehalis First Nation Reserve. In his spare time, he wrote about regional news for a local newspaper. The preferred subject of his writing were the wild giant entities he had heard of from peoples of the Sts’ailes First Nation, located near Harrison Hot Springs, B.C.
In their Halq’emeylem dialect, these entities were called Sásq’ets and described as a shapeshifting creature that could walk in both the physical and spiritual realm.
Burns referred to the shapeshifter as Sasquatch in his writings.
One of his articles; titled Introducing BC’s Hairy Giants: A collection of strange tales about British Columbia’s wild men as told by those who say they have seen them, captured such interest that it was published in the Macleans Magazine in 1929.
He authored the book; The Hairy Giants of British Columbia (1940).
Burns was more of a writer and a storyteller, than a classic researcher. He, however, was the first person to introduce and write about Sasquatch for the Canadian public.
John W Green (1927-2016) was a journalist, a published author and a Sasquatch researcher from Agassiz, B.C.
After graduating from UBC, he achieved a master in journalism from Columbia University in New York, in 1947, then joined the Canadian Navy for a few years.
Once he concluded his military career in 1950, he worked in Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria as a journalist, then moved to the Agassiz-Harrison region where he wrote and published a local newspaper for many years. In 1954, he purchased the Agassiz-Harrison Advance newspaper.
A chance meeting with Rene Dahinden in 1957 got Green interested in investigating the Sasquatch phenomena, and he wrote two books on the subject with Dahinden: On the Track of the Sasquatch (1968) and Year of the Sasquatch (1970).
Green sold his newspaper in 1972, with the intention of spending more time researching and writing about Sasquatch. Through the following years he wrote four more books about Sasquatch: The Sasquatch File (1973), Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), Encounters with Bigfoot (1980) and The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot (2004).
Rene Dahinden (1930-2001) was born in Switzerland, and moved to Canada in 1953 to take a serious stab at searching for Sasquatch.
He teamed up with John Green in 1957 and spent his entire life researching Sasquatch through the Pacific Northwest in Canada and the United States.
He was one of the strongest advocates and supporters of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin’s film about Sasquatch, dubbed Patty, which was filmed in California by Patterson in 1967.
Still to this day, that film, which was analyzed hundreds of times, provides clear undeniable evidence of the existence of Sasquatch.
Dahinden co-wrote a book with Don Hunter entitled Sasquatch, which was originally published in 1973, revised and renamed Sasquatch/Bigfoot: The Search for North America’s Incredible Creature (1993).
The 1987 film, Harry and the Hendersons, filmed by the Montreal film director David Suchet, was based on the life of Rene Dahinden.
Dahinden also appeared in Kokanee beer commercials for a few years too.
Along with Dahinden, there were three more colleagues, John Green, Peter Byrne and Dr. Grover Krantz, where this group of Sasquatch researchers were dubbed the “Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery” in recognition of their work on the still unclassified entity called Sasquatch.
Stay tuned for further Sasquatch researchers and enthusiasts in the next two articles
