Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 20
The DNA sequence recovered by Dr Ogden was of good quality across the regions that had worked and made sense by matching known mitochondrial sequences. But still the most likely explanation was contamination by human DNA that, as we have seen already, is the curse of ancient DNA work. I then began to wonder whose DNA this might be. It was unlikely to have been anyone from the Pangboche monastery. Theirs would have been a typically Nepalese or Tibetan sequence. It could have been one of the curators from the Royal College of Surgeons. It could have been Dr Ogden, but I soon ruled that out with a swab. Could it have been Peter Byrne's DNA or even Jimmy or Gloria Stewart's, the only three people that I knew for sure had come into contact with the Finger?
Often when I have analysed ancient bones I get multiple sequences from a number of the individuals who have handled the specimen. But the sequence from the Finger had come from only one person. I could tell that from the pattern of peaks on the output trace from the sequencing machine. They were all crisp and unmixed. Since I couldn't imagine the Stewarts handling the gruesome artefact more than absolutely necessary, the finger pointed at none other than Peter Byrne himself. It was he who had snapped it off in the monastery and smuggled it over the Nepalese border to Calcutta. So I made sure when I visited him in Oregon, that I got a cheek swab. And when the results came back, it matched the sequence from the Finger in every respect. Just a bit of fun, but also a demonstration of the persistence of DNA, which had remained on the surface of the Pangboche Finger for over fifty years.
Peter is a great survivor and so, clearly, is his DNA.
20
The Man who Shot a Bigfoot
In the Bigfoot world no recent case has aroused more controversy than the ‘Sierra Kill’. Not only is the account gripping in itself, it has also stoked the embers of a long-running argument surrounding the deliberate killing of a Bigfoot. As soon as I heard about the ‘Sierra Kill’ I knew this was a most important case to put through the rigours of genetic analysis.
The story begins when Justin Smeja, an unassuming and likeable young hunter from Sacramento, an electrician by trade, was driving to his favourite hunting ground high up in the Sierra Nevada in northern California. I met Justin in San Francisco where he recounted his story, clearly not for the first time. He told me he had grown up hunting in the forests almost every weekend since he was a kid. Mostly he hunted deer, wild pigs, turkeys and bears. But not ‘lions’, by which he meant mountain lions, or cougars. It was illegal to kill a ‘lion’.
In October 2010, he and his hunting buddy were in the Sierras of northern California at about 7,200 feet. They were on the lookout for bear and deer. They had seen a few deer, though none they liked the look of. With the exception of bear, Justin kills to eat, and these deer were too young. They headed for a familiar grassy clearing surrounded by pine forest, a perfect place for a clear shot at any deer coming out into the open to graze. As soon as they reached the edge of the clearing, Justin and his buddy saw the Bigfoot.
‘So we drive in and look into this open meadow, and we see this creature that's on two legs. And at first glance I thought it was a bear, and me and my buddy saw it at the same time. I slammed on the brakes. And we're sitting there looking at this, and maybe for the first second or two I did think it was a bear, it was furry and was the right colour. I saw it was on two legs and that it looked kinda like a person in a bear suit or Wookie suit or something like that. (Wookie was the huge, hairy, Bigfoot-like character from Star Wars. During filming in Washington State he needed an armed guard to protect him against Bigfoot hunters.) It must have been seven or eight feet tall and at least 600 pounds. It was huge. I'm sitting there looking at it, watching it. A couple of seconds go by and I decide I'm gonna kill it.
‘My buddy is yelling at me, saying stop, don't shoot, don't shoot, it's a person in a bear suit, stuff like that. I have a lot more hunting experience than he does so I decided it was my call, so I started squeezing the trigger. It started to turn to run away. It turned sideways and I shot it right here, on the top of its rib. It was a direct hit. It fell to the ground then started trying to get up and staggering around just like anything does when you shoot them. It started to try and get its balance and run away and that's when I could have had the kill shot. It was mostly staggering away on all fours, but just like if you shoot a person they don't usually run away on two legs, they crawl away fast.’
I hoped that this last remark was not taken from Justin's personal experience.
He was lining up for the second, fatal shot when his buddy yelled out that there were more of them. Justin took his eye away from the rifle scope and saw two smaller ones, maybe three feet tall and thirty or forty pounds. They looked like juveniles. Walking on two legs most of the time, sometimes on all fours, they melted into the wood. Justin and his friend got out of their vehicle and ran after them. They found them almost at once and, like the two hunters, the youngsters were looking for the fallen adult.
‘We kept seeing them and they were obviously looking for their parent. It was just like when you shoot a sow pig: when you shoot a pig then you find out it has babies they always take you to the parent, so we were kind of following them, they were kind of following us and we were maybe fifteen feet away from them at times.
‘Eventually I decided to shoot one. I was gonna shoot one from the beginning as soon as we saw one. I pulled up the rifle and my buddy is saying the same thing, no this isn't a good idea, we already have one on the ground, let's find that one and get out of here. So that was the plan, to find the big one and leave. Eventually I gave up trying to find it and said, “Let's just shoot one of the little ones, throw it in the truck and that way we'll have some proof that we can show people.” So I shot the little one square in the neck, walked up to it, grabbed it. It was still alive, it was bleeding all over me.’
Justin immediately regretted what he had done, and for two reasons. When he held the dying juvenile close to his face, its almost human appearance panicked him. He thought he might have shot a human child, albeit a very strange one. The other reason was that they knew they had to pass a Park Ranger station on the way out. Realising the ranger would have heard the fusillade of rifle shots and was probably on his way to investigate, they decide to bury the body.
‘We got a bunch of rocks and sticks and buried it, got in the truck, drove two and a half hours home without saying a word. Plan was to return the next day and get the body. That night there was a snow storm. It snowed 4ft and we were not able to get back up there.’
In fact the weather prevented them from returning for over a month. They eventually returned to the site in mid-November. The brought with them two trained cadaver dogs and Justin's bloodhound to help them locate the body. The dogs soon found the spot, but there was very little there. After eight hours of digging all they found was a piece of skin with hairs attached, which soon came to be known, rather fancifully given its diminutive proportions, as ‘The Steak’. Though it was no T-Bone, there was plenty for a DNA analysis and a small portion was soon off to Dr Melba Ketchum's Sasquatch Genome Project in Texas. Four days later the results came back identifying it as a Bigfoot. Only later did Justin become suspicious that pretty well every sample tested by Dr Ketchum's lab had been identified as a Bigfoot, which is when he got in touch with me.
Justin has been back to the meadow and the surrounding woods over a hundred times since, but has never seen another Bigfoot. When I asked him whether he now regretted shooting the youngster, he replied quite calmly that his only regret was not to have put the body in the trunk of his car and driven it home. Then he would really have had something to show people. I got the impression talking to him that on the fateful day he did not realise quite how precious a Bigfoot body would have been. He had certainly heard lots of Bigfoot stories, but until the ‘Sierra Kill’ incident he was not particularly interested in them. Though he had spent most of his life hunting in the woods, until the day he shot one he had never seen any signs of Bigfoot and didn't really believe they existed. Like many eyewitnesses I talked to, Justin is now driven, almost to the point of obsession, to convince others that what he saw was real. I had the impression that his desire to be believed was even more important to him than the immensity of the discovery had he been able to produce the genuine body.
As Justin finished telling me his story, he produced a small envelope. In it was a sliver of skin about an inch long by a quarter wide, bone dry now, but still with plenty of short almost blond hairs attached to it. This was all that remained of ‘The Steak’ and he handed it over to my care. Justin told me he had stored ‘The Steak’ in salt to preserve it, hoping this would not have harmed the DNA. On the contrary, I was able to reassure him, it would have helped. Salt preservation is one of the reasons why DNA from Egyptian mummies survives so well. I immediately put ‘The Steak’ and the envelope into an evidence bag. He also produced his hunting boot, the one that had been spattered in blood when he held the dying juvenile. At first I was reluctant to accept the boot for DNA testing as unlike hair, which I knew I could clean up before the analysis, the blood on the boot was bound to be highly contaminated. But I also realised that the connection between the blood on the boot and the dying Bigfoot was much more solid than it was with ‘The Steak’, which had been recovered weeks later and may have had nothing to do with the creature that Justin killed. Luckily I carried a scalpel in my sampling bag, and with Justin's help to identify the exact spot where the blood had landed on the boot, I cut a sliver from the surface and placed it in another evidence bag.
I must say I was slightly surprised that Justin had the time to notice precisely where the blood had landed while the juvenile Bigfoot was choking to death in his hands. Not long after taking ‘The Steak’ and the blood sample from Justin's boot we knew a great deal more about their identity, as we shall see.
21
The Veteran
Dan Shirley, who like Justin was also from Sacramento, had picked up news about my Bigfoot research project through the Internet. We arranged to meet in the lobby of the Airport Marriott Hotel in San Francisco, a sampling venue I had used before for my book DNA USA. He arrived with his research partner, Garland Fields, and both of them looked intense. Dan wore a red sweater with a swooping bald eagle wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, yellow talons outstretched. His long greying hair was swept back and contained in a patterned blue bandana. He could have been a biker, a Hell's Angel, and I was half expecting to see a shining Harley propped outside. But mostly he reminded me of ‘The Boss’ and I thought I heard the opening bars of ‘Glory Days’ by Bruce Springsteen playing faintly in the background. Dan and Garland looked me straight in the eye. When I asked Dan about himself, what I heard did nothing to dispel my unease.
Now working in what he called ‘private security’, Dan had fought in Vietnam back in 1972 after training in special operations. He didn't say much about his time in the jungle, only that he was in an ambush squad.
He really did say, ‘Something happened in 'Nam,’ but that was about as much information as he volunteered. I was keenly aware that I was pushing my luck when I asked him whether he had killed anyone.
‘Yeah. Oh yeah. It's a do or die situation. Oh yeah. You betcha.’ That was as far as Dan wanted to go. He continued:
‘From that point it took quite a few years of adjustment, and I just basically went along trying to live a normal life. I always liked being in the woods or in the wilderness. That never left me. When I got out that's the first thing I did. I went right back to it, and I'm still at it.’
Dan first heard about Bigfoot in 1967 when the Patterson-Gimlin film of the Bluff Creek sasquatch was front-page news. Soon there were Bigfoot sightings all over California, even close to his own hometown, Roseville, a few miles from Sacramento in the far-from-wild Central Valley. He was around fourteen when he went up to Bluff Creek, where the Patterson-Gimlin film was shot, with his father, a lifelong believer in Bigfoot. That's when the bug bit him, and it has never left. Dan and Garland have kept away from the agitated world of Bigfootology. You won't find them at any of the dozens of meetings where the enthusiasts get together to exchange the latest information, or just to gossip. They work alone. Together, but alone. And they work systematically. Over the years, Dan and Garland have identified several ‘hotspots’ in California and southern Oregon where they have either seen a Bigfoot or had a close encounter with one, by which I mean heard or smelled them, or been pelted with rocks.
To attract a Bigfoot their method is to hang apples as bait (always green apples – they work best) from a tree branch about 7–8 feet from the ground. On the trunk of the tree Dan smears a special grease to catch any hairs the Bigfoot might leave as it reaches for the apples. He won't tell me exactly what's in the grease, only that it is based on a mixture of four or five different animal fats. He puts it in the freezer until it hardens. It has taken him years to perfect this method and in a particular hotspot in the Sierras over the past year he has baited the same tree thirteen times. Only once was the grease unable to capture a hair. The apples were always taken. After he has baited the tree and smeared grease on the trunk he always indulges in some wood knocking before he leaves. Like the formulation of the grease, his particular routine has been fine-tuned over time.
‘It's taken me three years to perfect certain segments when I'm wood knocking. I try different sequences of wood knocking. Basically I'll either use two sticks and knock them together or I'll do it in the natural form and knock on a tree. You'll get more results with the natural knocking on a tree. But there seems to be a particular way that you do wood knocks and it's how many knocks and segments that counts. You'll do like “boom boom boom”, and maybe a “boom boom boom boom”. And I've come to find out in my research it's almost like if you're playing the guitar and looking for the right chords.’
Dan is a great believer in wood knocking for communicating with Bigfoot. If he gets it right, then he will often get a knock back in response. This can even develop into a ‘conversation’ lasting several minutes. He disdains the alternative method of calling, often claimed by other enthusiasts to be the more reliable way of getting a response.
‘From my personal experience I have not had any response whatsoever, with what they call a Bigfoot yelp or a Bigfoot howl. I found it kinda fruitless, I've never had a response. The only response you normally get is if you're in an area where there happens to be wolves or coyotes. That's about all you're usually gonna draw. And of course I know people that's had these particular sounds on audios, but it doesn't excite me at all because of the fact so often it's obviously wolf or coyote, and some cases even elk. Up here where we're at, number one we have no wolves, no elk, no moose, but we do have coyotes. I've done the yelps and the howls and to be honest with you after a while I kinda felt pathetic.’
Over the years they have worked the ‘hotspots’ together, Dan and Garland have had two clear daytime sightings.
‘The first time, we were up in northern California, almost into Oregon, and were working one of our research areas which we call Rock Creek Road. On one particular day about ten in the morning we were heading up to our research area. As we pulled around there's a road that comes to a bend. When we came round this bend I looked up the side of the mountain and right on top of the ridge among some pine trees I seen this big black object. I stopped the vehicle and I got out and I started walking down the road so I could get a better view. I thought it was a black bear. As I started getting closer to it, I never left my eyes off it and as I'm looking and observing saying well, that's got arms. It's got hands, it's got a head. And it's the way it was standing next to the tree. And it was black and you could see it was all covered in hair. And then it disappeared.’
The pair climbed to the top of the ridge, but they never saw the creature again. The second clear sighting was in another research area called Mosquito Ridge in the Sierras above Roseville.
‘That was in the winter. Me and Garland went down by the American River, on what we call the North Fork. We went down to the bottom of the canyon and got to the river and we were sitting there observing. To my left this object caught my eye and when I turned around and looked this squatch was walking down the canyon. Just strolling down like it was nothing. You could see it going from tree to tree as it's coming down and it's got that swagger type walk. And at the same time I'm thinking you gotta be kidding. Because I got a whole total view of him, at first I thought it was a human all dressed in black. Garland was to the right of me and I says, “Garland, look at this,” and he turned around. “Look,” I said. “What?” I said it looked like a guy walking down the Canyon, big tall guy dressed in black. Garland said “I didn't see nothing.” I said, “Wow. Strange.”
‘And then I looked again and the squatch popped up again and went behind the foliage. And I told Garland, I said, “Hey, that ain't no man; I'm telling you right now that ain't no man.” Where would they come from? They're in the middle of nowhere, that ain't a human. At that moment we're both looking, and all of a sudden this thing stands up. The foliage is kinda high but he stands up and all you see is this great big huge pair of arms coming out and you could see right here, and you could see the hands. You could count the thumb and the fingers. He was probably about sixty yards away. I grabbed the camera and when I opened up my cam to record it, my camera wouldn't work.’
