An Illinois war veteran reported twice seeing a Sasquatch with a chilling difference: the creature had three legs. From Ohio come reports of Orange Eyes, a Bigfoot standing up to 3.4m (11ft 2in) tall, covered in orange fur and with eyes that glow in the dark: since the beast makes a habit of haunting lovers' lanes, thereby disrupting adolescent in-car entertainment, it is not surprising that concrete evidence is not forthcoming. There are similar reports from elsewhere in the USA - Arkansas, for example, has the celebrated Fouke Monster - although the variant reported from Prince George's County, Virginia, is of some psychological interest: dubbed the Goatman, this beast has a human top half and a goatish lower half, thereby resembling a Greek satyr.
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A picture from the most famous Bigfoot film of them all, shot by Roger Patterson at Bluff Creek, Northern California, on 20th October 1967, apparently showing a female of the species. Many professional naturalists, basing their opinions on disparities between the creature's proportions and its gait etc., believe that Patterson may have been the victim of a hoax. But the matter remains unproven. |
Of all these
regional humanoid monsters, only Florida's Skunk Ape seems to have been clumsy enough to
permit more coherent sightings of itself. Although stories about this beast have been in
circulation since at least the early decades of the century, it was only in the late 1960s
and early 1970s that it became a national celebrity. As one might guess from its name, it
is said to smell worse than a barrel of skunks - an attribute it shares with Mo-Mo and the
Yeti.
A man named Ralph Chambers reported sighting it in 1966; he tried to track it with his dogs, but the stench was so powerful that they refused. However, when the animal turned up in his backyard in the following year they attacked it; it seemed unconcerned and ambled off. In 1970 a party of amateur archaeologists were at work on an Amerindian burial mound when they saw Skunk Ape. They measured the footprints it left as 45cm (171/2in) long and 29cm (111/2in) across at the toes. In 1973 the driver of an automobile claimed to have hit one of the creatures as it stepped out into the road in front of him; it limped away. Analyses of the blood and fur it left on his car proved inconclusive. All of the descriptions given suggested that the creatures were Sasquatch rather than typical lovers'- lane monsters; but by this period, of course, the image of the Sasquatch was well known to the American public, and so it is perfectly possible that the witnesses, quite unconsciously, tailored their memories of what they had seen to fit the "accepted stereotype".
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A lucky snap of a white Bigfoot seen around Fort Worth, Texas, in 1969. The Lake Worth Monster, as it came to be known, caused a considerable flap between July and November of that year. |
Acknowledgements: Book <Monster Mysteries> by John Grant
