By SCOTT D. JOHNSTON
For Grays Harbor News Group
Hundreds of witnesses, experts, enthusiasts and believers will discuss and debate everything about the legendary bipedal primate known as Bigfoot at the sixth annual Sasquatch Summit next weekend at Quinault Beach Resort and Casino.
The event was created by local radio personality Johnny Manson, who claims to have had some Bigfoot experiences himself.
Manson said he’s seen and heard some strange things around his home, “out in the woods” a few miles from Ocean Shores — not surprising since many experts in the field consider the temperate rainforests, dense timberland and rugged mountains of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula to be ideal Bigfoot habitat.
John Pickering, a lifelong Grays Harbor resident, has been making casts of animal tracks for more than 20 years, including some he believes were made by bigger-than-human bipeds. He will demonstrate his methods in a Sunday workshop session at the Sasquatch Summit.
His interest began in 1984, when he and a friend had what they considered an “unexplainable experience” while camping in a remote area of the Wynoochee Valley. Their campsite was harassed, at 20- to 40-minute intervals throughout the night, by one or more large, unseen creatures creating “a pretty heavy commotion in the timber near our camp — crashing of brush and cracking and breaking of big limbs,” seemingly moving randomly around the campsite. “Come daylight, we got the heck out of there,” he recalled.
Since then, he personally has discovered two “track sets” and has assisted with researching many more. “When you look at overall sighting databases from different organizations, and weed through them, the Olympic Peninsula emerges as one of the highest reported areas in the world,” he said.
As a scientist and full professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University for 25 years, Summit speaker Jeffrey Meldrum agrees. The area “certainly has a great deal of reporting, both contemporary and historical,” with numerous eyewitness encounters and “very good footprint records” — including “one of the most intriguing,” a print set tracked down by a deputy sheriff near Elma. He called it “a remarkable record that leaves little to the imagination and little to be misinterpreted. Something left those footprints and the anatomy and morphology is such that they’re not simply enlarged human footprints, but attest to a large, very heavy, bipedal primate.”
Meldrum said the “nearly 300 footprint casts that are assembled in my lab reveal a remarkably consistent foot anatomy.” He will bring a large display of casts from all over, particularly the western US, to the Sasquatch Summit.
His Saturday afternoon presentation will offer scientific perspective “on the behavioral ecology of sasquatch — ways in which we have a context within biology and anthropology for the existence of such a creature.”
The summit will run Friday through Sunday, Nov. 16-18. Advance tickets and more information are available at www.sasquatchsummit.com.
