Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

Chapter 10

From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.

Why haven’t they been found? That’s the ninety-nine-thousand-dollar question. And my two-cent answer is timing. See, the people in a position to prove their existence, who know how to find and analyze physical evidence, they won’t go anywhere near it for fear of ruining their reputations. And that fear goes back to the time when Sasquatch first came to light.

If we’d had a rash of sightings way back in, say, the ’40s and ’50s, when we were still a cohesive nation with shared beliefs, maybe there would have been enough traction to force the scientific community to act. And if they had, if they’d proven these creatures are as real as the gorilla or chimpanzee, icons like Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall might have built their careers studying the great apes of North America.

The problem was that sightings peaked in the late ’60s, early ’70s, which was, coincidently, the dawn of public mistrust. We’re talking Vietnam, Watergate, “do your own thing” counterculture. Now, I’m not saying any of that was bad, especially in a democracy. You need a healthy degree of critical thinking. You need to question authority. But Bigfoot came along just as everyone started questioning everything, including academia. This was a time when university profs were getting hit from both sides; the right with their creationist agenda, and the left who’d suddenly realized the connection between science and war. The upshot was that already cautious PhDs got even more skittish about their grants and tenure.

Which led them to drop Bigfoot right into the “crackpot” files. Where it has stayed till… yeah… till this day… even with what’s happened… which we’ll get to.

There’s a big reason Uncle Sam hasn’t released a full report on Greenloop. But…

Holds out her hands like a traffic cop.

“One thing at a time,” as Ms. Mostar said.

Point is, public skepticism dissuades qualified experts from searching for physical evidence, and lack of physical evidence only fuels public skepticism.

Which is why the burden of proof has been mainly left to amateur adventurers who either never find anything or make it worse for themselves like that time with the FBI.[25] You know about that, right? Came out a couple years ago? Some whack-job group in the ’70s pressured the Bureau to test a hair sample they collected and the sample turned out to be a deer. And it’s those kinds of public, Al Capone–vault fiascoes that keep credible eyewitnesses from going public. And I’ve talked to more than my share of eyewitnesses. In this job, you get a lot of folks who are sure they’ve encountered something. Not hoaxers. They don’t come to us. They go to the media. That’s where the money is, and fame. All that shaky footage that shows up every now and then. The most famous one, the “Patterson-Gimlin film” that gave us the image most people associate with Bigfoot… Roger Patterson claimed he was out there getting ready to make a Bigfoot movie and just “happened” to run into the real thing. Really?

No, the folks I talk to, I believe them, or rather, I believe that they believe themselves. But like Mrs. Holland said, “Knowing you saw something is different from knowing what you saw.” That’s why, even now, when I think about one of those BS documentaries from my childhood, I still believe the guy who passed the lie detector test. He wasn’t acting. He really thought he saw it. They all do.

Remember, I’m from the Southwest, where it’s, like, UFO central. If I had a nickel for every time somebody said they saw lights in the sky… and they do. I’m sure there were lights in the sky, and I’m sure they were sure those lights were coming to give them an anal probe. If you gave them all polygraphs, asked them, under oath, what did you see, or hear…

You get a lot of those too. Hearing stuff. Noises in the night. Footsteps or breaking branches, or that grunt. A couple times, I’ve talked to folks who’ve sworn they heard or smelled something. I’ve had several hikers or campers who’ve consistently reported that refuse and spoiled eggs odor. I might have smelled it myself, that time when we found the dead deer.

A thumb over her shoulder to the map.

Maybe that was it, or maybe it was just us hoofing it for three straight days without a shower. I don’t know what I smelled but I know that I smelled something. I trust my nose, ears, eyes. But my brain…

I think the human mind isn’t comfortable with mysteries. We’re always looking for answers to the unexplained. And if an answer can’t come from facts, we’ll try to cobble one together from old stories. If we’ve heard about UFOs when we happen to see a light in the sky, or a Scottish lake monster when we happen to see a ripple in the water, or a giant, apelike creature when we see a dark mass moving among the branches…

That’s why I dismissed everyone who ever reported anything to us. Even the credible ones. And by credible, I mean embarrassed. They didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want to look crazy. They always asked to speak to me in private, remain anonymous, make sure that they weren’t being recorded. They were almost positive that their minds were playing tricks on them. They didn’t want to believe it.

She sighs.

I should have believed them. Each time I almost did, because once they started talking, the doubt fell away. I should have followed up every time someone looked me straight in the eye and said with confident clarity…

I saw it!

I don’t know what woke me up tonight. A sound, or the outside porch light flicking on. It wasn’t ours, not at first. The Perkins-Forster house, shining up onto the ceiling above my head. I got up, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and crept to the back window. I didn’t want to wake up Dan. He has a lot to do tomorrow. Village handyman. That’s why I didn’t risk opening the back balcony doors.

But just looking through the window, I could tell that something wasn’t right. Their compost bin had been knocked over, which was weird because they’re supposed to be animal proof. They’ve got these deep stakes that go way down into the ground. And the lids are locked with twin rotating levers. The lid was unlocked now, or wrenched off. I could see it lying near the overturned bin among a carpet of scattered trash.

Then I saw something moving. Just a shadow, I think, on the other side of their house. Rustling bushes along the edge of the tree line. It was gone when I looked up. Probably a raccoon. That was my conscious thought. Raccoons are smart, right? And I’ve seen them go through trash cans in the heart of Venice Beach. Still, I checked to make sure the balcony was locked, then crept silently downstairs to see about the other doors.

I checked the front first, wondered if I should set the alarm, then realized that I had no idea how. That was when our back porch light went on. I started switching on the inside lights. Actually, I hit the downstairs master switch and squinted hard in the glare.

That must have scared it, the whole bottom floor going from night to day. It was turning to run just as I entered the kitchen. It must have been standing right on the back step.

It was so tall, the top of its head disappeared above the doorway. And broad. I can still picture those massive shoulders, those thick, long arms. Narrow waist, like an upside-down triangle. And no neck, or maybe the neck was bent as it ran away. Same with the head. Slightly conical, and big as a watermelon. I’m also not sure if its hair was black or dark brown. And the long, wide, silvery stripe running down its back. That might have been reflected light.

I wasn’t scared. More startled. Like when a car swerves too close. That moment of focus, where you’re outside of your body. That was me, watching the thing run through the bushes bordering our yard. I inched up to the door and pressed my face against the glass. That’s when I saw, and I’m sure about this, two pinpricks of light through the brush.

It wasn’t a reflection from inside. I had my hands cupped around my eyes. And they weren’t anything mundane like glistening leaves. I saw those too. These were different, set slightly behind the foliage, at what had to be, maybe, seven or eight feet off the ground. I’m not exaggerating the height. I know all those plants, and where I come up to them.

I stared at the lights for a second or two. They stared back. They blinked. Twice! And then they were gone, darting sideways into darkness as a branch snapped in front. I must have kept leaning against the door for half a minute, fogging up the glass with increasingly deeper breaths.

Then the hand grabbed my shoulder.

Okay, a little melodrama in writing this, and now, I see the humor in what happened next. But, holy crap, when I felt that grip.

Who knew that Dan has such quick reflexes? If he hadn’t caught my wrist mid-swing, I might have totally nailed him in the nose.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dan backed up, dropping my arm, holding up his hands. “What the f—”

I cut his babbling off with my own, trying, failing, to cohesively relate everything I’d seen.

He was looking past me, his repeated “What is it?” answered by my repeated “I don’t know.” We looked from the brush to the ground, to this line of big footprints that led right back to our doorstep.

As he slid the door open, this wave of cold, stinking air whooshed in. It was “that” stench, so powerful I almost gagged. Dan grabbed the coconut stabber off the kitchen counter and took a step out onto the porch. I reached for the knife rack, then realized, like an idiot, that Mostar’s javelin was resting against the wall in front of me. I probably should have left it there. I nearly stabbed myself in the face as the long wobbly pole caught on the doorway. But I felt like I needed something for protection, especially after what we saw.

Footprints were everywhere. Clear. Sharp. You could see the individual toes, and how they made trails leading from the Perkins-Forster bin, to ours (which was still intact), to the trees, which we were not going to investigate!

The smell kept us on the porch, assaulting our noses, nudging us back inside. As Dan twisted the lock, I brought up the burglar alarm. Dan wasn’t sure how it worked either. At first, we kept getting these error messages. He finally figured it had something to do with the cracked windows, the ones damaged in the eruption. He’s learning how to bypass it now, sitting with his iPad at the kitchen table while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew. It’s our new “recycled blend,” all the week’s grounds pressed together. Mostar’s idea. “Gotta make it last.” I’m not questioning that anymore. “Watery coffee today’s better than none tomorrow.”

We should probably just save it. We’re jumpy enough as it is. We haven’t heard or seen anything for about an hour. Dan thinks we should also set the internal alarms. They’re just motion sensors, the same ones the houses use for light and heat. I’m against it. What if I set them off accidentally when I get up to use the hall bathroom? Dan thinks I’m crazy for not sharing the master bath. “So what if you wake me?” He’s said that twice. I guess we have bigger problems now.

But do we?

A couple times we considered going over to Mostar’s house, but, in addition to not wanting to wake her, we don’t want to go back outside.

Too paranoid? “Siri, should we be worried?”

At least we’re talking about it openly. And that feels good. Dan doesn’t doubt what I saw. He just feels bad he doesn’t know more about it. Yeah, he’s a total nerd, but a sci-fi nerd, not horror or fantasy, as he’s been explaining to me tonight. So many subgenres. All Dungeons & Dragons to me. I will say that I can’t believe we’ve never talked about this before. All these years. This is what it takes? Back and forth, genuine communication. Even if it is just speculating on what’s out there.

Where did it come from? How did it get here? And are there more than one? I mean, there has to be, at least in general. We’re not talking about magic. This thing’s not immortal. There’s gotta be more of them to make more of them. But how many? And how have they stayed hidden—no, that’s not accurate—hidden enough to remain unproven? How does an animal this big remain off the books for so long?

Dan just learned how to bypass all the cracked windows. Time for bed. I’ll put the coffee in the fridge. Gotta make it last.

From Steve Morgan’s The Sasquatch Companion.

Some theories surrounding the origin of Sasquatch trace its lineage back to a prehistoric ancestor called Gigantopithecus. From teeth and fossilized jawbones recovered in Asia (first discovered by anthropologist G. H. R. von Koenigswald in 1935), it can be hypothesized that this super ape stood as tall as ten feet, weighed up to eleven hundred pounds, and existed as late as 100,000 years ago.

The lack of a complete, or even partial, skeleton has left the posture of this creature to the imagination. Most artistic renderings paint Gigantopithecus as a stooped, long-armed, knuckle-walker, while dissenters such as Dr. Grover Krantz postulate erect, bipedal locomotion. In his book Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, Krantz described his reconstruction of a Gigantopithecus blacki skull based on recovered jaw fossils. From this process, he determined that the position of the neck “indicates a fully upright posture.”

Not only does Krantz’s hypothesis corroborate eyewitness accounts of Sasquatch’s humanlike gait, the thesis of Gigantopithecus’s terrestrial, rather than arboreal, existence would also explain the physical makeup of Bigfoot’s feet. Almost no cast or photograph of a Sasquatch footprint shows the traditional simian gripping digit. The mystery of its absence is solved when we consider that its ancestor Gigantopithecus, whose size and weight prevented life in the trees, had little evolutionary need for this feature.

If both hypotheses are correct, that this prehistoric mega-simian was both upright and ground dwelling, it would have stood in good stead to survive the climatic catastrophe that supposedly caused its extinction. According to the fossil record, the last Gigantopithecus blacki (the largest of its species) died out roughly 100,000 years ago, when the jungles of South Asia retreated into open grassland. But what if, as Darwin himself lamented, the fossil record is “imperfect”? What if the reason no recent Gigantopithecus remains have been discovered in central China is because Gigantopithecus simply moved away?

Some might have made it to the mountains of Hubei, where their descendants live today as the Yeren. A second group could have trekked farther west into the Himalayas, becoming what we now refer to as the Yeti. And a third, intrepid offshoot may very well have braved the northern wastes in search of an entirely new world.

For decades, it has been theorized that, like the first humans, Gigantopithecus migrated from Asia to America during the last great ice age, across the now-submerged Siberian land bridge of Beringia. This theory has recently run into some controversy, however, as the conventional “inland ice corridor” narrative has been challenged by evidence pointing to an earlier, coastal route. However, corridor or coast, it is logical to assume that these two hominid species reached the new world alongside one another.

This co-migration would explain the many behavioral adaptations that differentiate Sasquatch from other modern great apes. Nocturnal behavior, for example, would have been an excellent way to avoid the sharp eyes, and sharper spearpoints, of daylight hunting Homo sapiens. Likewise, their general expertise at stealth in day or night conditions would have been vital in the open, treeless tundra of Beringia. Coupled with swift, energy-efficient legs[26] and an upright posture to watch for danger, they could have not only survived the Beringian steppe but also the human “blitzkrieg” that annihilated so many other Pleistocene mammals.

The term “blitzkrieg,” or “lightning war,” comes from the early days of World War II, when the speed and shock of Adolf Hitler’s mechanized forces caught an unprepared Europe utterly by surprise. That is why the “blitzkrieg theory” has been used to describe the mass extinctions of large animals that were slaughtered by early humans. Like the Polish cavalry and the French Maginot Line, the wildlife of Europe, Eurasia, and finally the Americas, were caught completely unprepared. Regardless of how much climate is to blame, there is no denying that human hunting contributed to the greatest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs. In North America alone, entire species vanished within a thousand years of humanity’s arrival.

The ability to elude humans would not have been exclusive to North America’s great apes. According to the human paleobiogeography hypothesis, present-day Africa enjoys such a plethora of large animals because their ancestors evolved alongside ours. Taking evolution in steps, adapting to humans before they became fully human, spared Africa the horrors of blitzkrieg. It may also have spared some of the megafauna of southern Asia as well, including a certain giant ape.

We know that proto-humans such as Homo erectus began migrating out of Africa somewhere between 1.8 and 2.1 million years ago. They might not have been us, but they were enough like us to sound the alarm for Gigantopithecus. By the time fully evolved Homo sapiens arrived in Asia, the gentle giants would have had enough warning to avoid us altogether.