This October will be the 50th anniversary of the legendary Patterson footage, widely considered the single best evidence for the existence of Sasquatch (a bipedal ape believed to live in the Pacific Northwest).  The Patterson footage is a piece of video captured by Roger Patterson, a rodeo cowboy in his 30s who headed out to the Pacific Northwest with his buddy Bob Gimlin to make a documentary about Sasquatch, and returned with footage that has fascinated the World for the last half century.

To skeptics,  the film is just a man in a monkey suit, but to believers, it’s indisputable proof that Sasquatch exists.  Supporters cite the extreme height, powerful muscle movements, and non-human limb proportions and walk, and the fact that it was much harder to find a realistic costume in the 1960s, as proof that the video is authentic. Watch the video and judge for yourself.

I must admit I’m a skeptic, and it’s mostly because what are the odds that the very people who were trying to get sasquatch on tape would be lucky enough to do so.  Much more likely that this was a scam to get publicity by some self-promoting aspiring film makers.

I also think that believing in Sasquatch (as some HBDers do) is somewhat inconsistent with believing in racial differences in intelligence, because if high intelligence did not evolve until humans migrated North (a major tenet of HBD), how could something as dumb as an ape have walked to North America?

Indeed the strongest evidence that mainstream science marshals against Sasquatch is the fossil record’s remarkably consistency in showing no apes have ever been indigenous to North America.

None.

Or have they?

The scientific consensus is that modern humans did not leave Africa until about 70,000 years ago and did not colonize North America until about 15,000 to 24,000 years ago, however as commenter Melo informed me, there’s shocking evidence that someone or something was making stone tools in California, 130,0000 years ago!

However MeLo cautioned:

While it is a very interesting discovery the evidence isn’t really strong. From what i’ve read they didn’t find any hominin fossils or tools, just rocks that could have been tools and a mastodon fossil that has wear and damage similar to other prey of archaic humans.

It’s very possible that the mastodon died 130,000 years ago, but was “dug up” and then broken and butchered by native north american homo sapiens. Further studies need to be constructed in order for a more clear picture to resonate within the details.

However if this really is evidence of 130,000 year-old tool making in North America, then who, or what, made them, since modern humans were confined to Africa at that time?  Is it possible that some sub-human hominin made it to North America before we did, and that Sasquatch are the descendants of these things?  If sub-human hominins only went extinct because they were replaced by modern humans, and modern humans didn’t arrive in the Americas until relatively recently, and only in small numbers in places like Canada, then perhaps such a creature could have survived.

An ancient legend

If you get some Native Americans drunk enough, they’ll tell you that he’s still out there.  Some kind of demented creature, half-man, half-beast, surviving in the wilderness, raping Native American women for centuries.  The hybridized offspring of these unwanted sex acts were said to be very slow, and have trouble learning Native American language and customs.

The skeptics

Scientists dismiss sasquatch as just a myth because such a large creature (2 to 3 meters tall and weighing over 500 lbs) could not possibly have gone undetected all this time, especially given the large population such a creature would need to be reproductively viable.

However believers note that the mountain gorilla wasn’t discovered until 1902 and the Komodo dragon wasn’t discovered until 1912, and probably in both cases, they were also dismissed as myth until a white scientist saw one, although admittedly, nothing big has been discovered lately.  About decade ago there was talk of a giant new ape being discovered in the Congo, but this turned out to just be another type of chimp.

Finding undiscovered large land animals is a bit like finding undiscovered multi-billionaires.  In the first few years Forbes magazine began tracking the richest people, there were many super rich people who had evaded detection, but now, almost all have been found.

Still, extinct hominins are increasingly being discovered, and some having existed more recently in time than thought.  If there is currently only one extant hominin (us) then this is perhaps the first time in millions of years that this has occurred.

Especially interesting is Homo floresiensis, an extremely short bipedal hominin thought to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago.  If such a creature could have lived so recently, perhaps it’s still alive, and this has created much speculation that it is Orang Pendek, an alleged bipedal sub-human primate less than 5 feet tall that Indonesian locals have long claimed to have seen.  However the idea that floresiensis could still be alive took a hit when it was discovered that their remains were not only 12,000 years old, as originally thought, but over 50,000 years old.

And of course Sasquatch is vastly larger than Orang Pendek, and thus should be much easier to detect.  On the other hand the Pacific Northwest is huge.  As a Canadian I can tell you there’s nothing scarier than flying solo over British Columbia’s 62 million acres of century old forest, and an astonishing 73 aircrafts flying from California to Alaska simply vanished, never to be recovered from the utter vastness of the forest.

If 73 aircrafts can hide in the Pacific Northwest, then why not sasquatch, especially if it’s an endangered species with only a few dozen individuals left?

The perfect hoax

If I was going to attempt one of the many sasquatch hoaxes that have been tried over the decades, there would be two people I would contact. First, Sun Fang, the tallest woman in the World, with an astonishing height of 7’3″.

I would try to pay her to put on an authentic looking monkey mask and then place fake hair all over her naked body and then run through the Pacific North West as I filmed.  No one would believe a woman could be that tall and so it would be assumed to be a man in a monkey suit, but what monkey suit could have such realistic naked breasts (since it would be an actual woman), and thus the film would be judged authentic.

But to please even the hard-core skeptics, I would need DNA evidence and for this I would need a second person.  If Albert Perry, a recently deceased African American who lived in South Carolina,  has a living male descendant, I would try to pay him for a sample of his hair, since it’s known that Perry had an extremely rare Y chromosome.  Unlike virtually all other men, who trace their male heritage back to a man who lived about 100,000 years, ago, Perry’s male lineage diverged 338,000 years ago.

I would tell the scientists that prior to getting the female sasquatch on video, there had been a male, but he ran too fast for me to film but I got a hair sample.  When the scientists would DNA test it, they probably wouldn’t remember Albert Perry (if they heard of him at all), and would be stunned that the hair sample’s Y chromosome diverged 338,000 years old, and see this is as evidence of an archaic proto-human.

Further, when CNN came to interview, I would talk like a country bumpkin so no one would suspect I’d have the sophistication to pull off such an elaborate hoax.

Too bad I’m not a sociopath. I could have been really, really rich 🙂