LOST COASTER: MY BREAKFAST WITH BIGFOOT

In 1994, TV's A&E launched a new series called "Ancient Mysteries" with its flagship episode investigating Bigfoot. The show ran for four years, narrated mostly by Leonard Nimoy (twenty years after Nimoy narrated "In Search Of..."), but in this first show the narration credit goes to John Swanson.

It's an authoritative, well-produced documentary containing neat bits of info, such as the fact that President Theodore Roosevelt was convinced that the creatures we call Sasquatch exist. Unlike the majority of films discussed in this column, this Bigfoot documentary necessitates a rare departure. Ordinarily I never use the word "I" in an article. Yet the additional component to this one is that after watching the episode when first aired, I decided to conduct an interview of my own.

This is because the producers of the show sent a film crew to Hoopa.

"Here in the Hoopa Valley of Northern California," the narrator says, "Bigfoot sightings are common."

Whereupon the show presents Hoopa Tribal elder Jimmy Jackson. And the first thing he does is refer to what his mother had always told him.

Soon after, we see Byron Nelson Jr. And he says, "I think it's real possible that something like that does exist."

At some point subsequent to these Hoopa speakers, we meet anthropology professor Grover Krantz, who points out that we already have a fourteen foot-tall Asian ape on the fossil record called Gigantopithecus. It is therefore reasonable to assume that what we call Bigfoot is a species descended from Gigantos.

However, Dr. Krantz wasn't in the telephone book. So I called Jimmy, introduced myself, told him I'd seen the TV show, and asked if I could meet him to ask questions about Bigfoot. We got along fine and Jimmy said yeah.

I'd also asked if I could bring a friend with a Camcorder to record our interview. Not for a newspaper. Not for college. Just because I was interested.

So Jimmy and I arranged a time, then my friend Tom and I showed up around ten one morning at Jimmy's place in Hoopa.

He was in his mid-eighties. Wore a cowboy hat. Used to be a logger. I noticed a bunch of acorns he had in boxes. He told us about the leeching process required in order to eat them.

Jimmy showed us pictures of his mother and told us about the Deer Dance. He said that when he was a kid, he and his friends used to climb cherry trees to pick cherries at school, and the teacher had a nail fixed to the end of a stick to jab up at the children in the tree when they weren't speaking English.

Turns out, Jimmy wasn't really an authority on Bigfoot. He didn't know, for example, about plaster casts of footprints found in remote areas with indentations in the casts of dermal ridges, whorls, standing up under professional scrutiny as impossible to fake. In fact, according to Texas Police Department Forensic Examiner Jimmy Chilcutt, the dermal ridges in casts he's seen fall between human and gorilla.

Nor did Jimmy Jackson know much of anything about the famous Big-footage taken in 1967 by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin at Bluff Creek, near Eureka.

In the 952 frames of color film taken is the iconic shot where the Bigfoot is turning mid-stride. "Ancient Mysteries" does a good job presenting the evidence, but falls shy the mark by failing to mention what should be the most compelling and obvious evidence of authenticity available: which I'll get to in a moment.

I realized during the interview (which I called, for no good reason, "My Breakfast With Bigfoot"), that Jimmy didn't know so much about Bigfoot. And he pointed out as much when the time came for us to go.

But he also said, on his back porch, pointing toward the Klamath River, that his mother told him when she was young she had seen four of them come out of the forest and splash around in the river. A big hairy male, a big hairy female, and two hairy young ones. Not bears. Not people. What the Hoopa call Oma. Then they saw her. And they left.

Some years later, I had my copy of that interview copied onto a disk. I contacted Byron Nelson Jr, with whom I had interviewed in the mid-'90s for the editorship of the Hoopa Valley Tribal Newsletter, and mailed him the disk so that Jimmy Jackson's family could have it.

To return to the Patterson film, what makes it particularly remarkable are the pendulous breasts. The fact that the movement of the muscles under the hide are impossible to fake is not so clearly evident to the layman as are the pendulous breasts. Interestingly, tellingly, every time this famous footage is referred to in t-shirts, hats, and sculptures, the breasts are automatically removed and the Bigfoot is made to be male.

We're supposed to believe that a former rodeo rider could make a suit better than the ones used years later in major motion pictures such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Planet of the Apes", and we're supposed to believe he was the only one to buck the male Bigfoot rule, and that he decided to wear, for one time only and never again, a scientist-foolin' Bigfoot suit...with breasts?

Gigantos already on the fossil record.

As the world's most famous primatologist, Dr. Jane Goodall, says on the subject (go to YouTube and have a listen), "You'll be amazed--I'm sure they exist!"

By the way, zoom in on the right breast of the Patterson Bigfoot caught mid-stride and you can see areola nipple.

It was around the time I mailed the disk copy of the interview that I happened to be talking with a Southern Humboldt County resident who wishes to remain anonymous, when he recounted to me something particularly interesting because I had never told him what Jimmy Jackson told me.

According to the anonymous source, he was on his way to work one morning when he stopped off a mile or two south of Phillipsville at a pullout overlooking the Eel River. It was there that he saw four of them emerge from the forest on the other side of the river. A big hairy male, a big hairy female, and two hairy young ones. The same thing Jimmy's mother said she saw far to the north several decades earlier.

Then they saw him.

And they left.