Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 23
Finally, before I left I asked about the rumour that I had heard from Greg that there were already Bigfoot samples at the lab.
‘Certainly not,’ he replied.
‘Not even in the secret freezer in the basement? Surely all government laboratories have one of those?’ I enquired.
‘Not even there.’
I was invited back to Ashland and made three more visits, spending several days going through my collection of hairs and other material with the lab's experts. The first to undergo scrutiny were the hairs on the ‘The Steak’ sample that Justin Smeja had given me when I met him in San Francisco. Cookie Smith is Ashland's principal hair morphologist, having taken over from the legendary Bonnie Yates a few years earlier. As soon as we put ‘The Steak’ hairs under the microscope we could see the small cubic crystals of salt that Justin had used to preserve the sample. The hairs were very short, too short for a bear I thought, and much too pale, although American black bears do occur in a wide range of coat colours. When we followed the hairs to their tips it was clear that they had been cut. Instead of tapering off, the hairs ended abruptly with some separation visible between outer layer, the cuticle and the cortex and medulla. Either this had been deliberate or, since ‘The Steak’ had been dug up with a spade, it was this excavation which had done the damage. Cookie thought these might be bear hairs, but couldn't really decide.
That same day I took Justin's boot over to Ed Espinoza's laboratory. Ed is the deputy director of the Ashland lab and a man of great ingenuity. He was at work on a very neat mass spectrometer, an instrument that separates the components in vapour given off when a sample is heated up. A fabulous, heavy perfume filled my nostrils as soon as I entered Ed's lab. He explained that he had been at work on some samples of agarwood, a scented wood that has been used for centuries in the production of incense. Its scarcity mixed with a high demand, especially in the Middle East, have made it one of the most expensive woods in the world and stimulated a lively market in contraband. Ed's spectrometer identifies the volatile components given off when a minute sample of wood is heated, and as each wood has a characteristic profile of these volatiles, the species can be identified without much difficulty.
With the voluptuous scent of agarwood still wafting through the lab, I unwrapped the sliver of leather I had taken from Justin's boot and put it on the lab bench. One of the uses of the mass spectrometer is to identify bloodstains from hunters' clothing. To blend in with their surroundings in every sense, hunters don't wash their clothes much, if at all, during the hunting season. The spots of blood that have spattered onto the clothes from animals they've shot often remain in place for a long time. If a Fish and Wildlife agent suspects a hunter of shooting a protected species, like a mountain lion, or killing more bears than his licence allows, then the clothing can be requisitioned and the blood spots examined by Ed's mass spectrometer. In this case it is the volatile elements of the animals' red blood cell pigment haemoglobin that are profiled in the machine. That was an exciting prospect indeed for the sliver of Justin's boot.
The blood on the boot was what I call a first order sample, one that has come directly from an animal so its attribution is not in doubt. This distinguishes it from second and third order samples where the attribution is less secure. A second order sample might come from an object which the creature had been seen to rub itself against, like Dan and Garland's bait tree. A third order sample might be a hair retrieved from a bush close to the site of an ‘encounter’ but without any direct evidence that the encountered creature was the same one that left the hair on the bush. The blood on Justin's boot was definitely first order, so if Ed's instrument could identify it we would be pretty sure it came from the Bigfoot he shot. ‘The Steak’, on the other hand, having been retrieved from the scene several weeks later, might easily have belonged to a different animal altogether.
Before vaporising the blood on the boot and injecting it into the mass spectrometer, Ed wanted to have a careful look at the sliver under another instrument to be sure that the clearly visible dark spots really were blood. If not it would be a waste of time and money to carry on with the costly business of firing up the mass spectrometer. We went into an adjoining room where on the bench stood an anonymous grey box about the size of an old-style television. This was a VSC 6000 spectral comparator, the latest version of one of the mainstays of forensic analysis. The VSC 6000 works by shining a narrow wavelength beam of visible infrared or ultraviolet light onto a specimen and then detecting the wavelengths of light that are transmitted back. This technique is frequently used to detect forged banknotes, altered signature on cheques and other similar evasions. It also detects blood. By choosing a setting that illuminates the specimen with infrared light and then scanning across the wavelengths of the emitted light, the instrument picks up a signal from the iron-containing haem molecule which is absolutely characteristic of all blood samples.
Ed opened the instrument and put the sliver onto the tray inside. He started the scan, and as this began a sequence of images appeared on the video screen next to the machine. Each one was an image of the sliver, illuminated by infrared light but filtered to show only a small range of wavelengths. After each scan, the filter changed automatically and the next image, at a higher emission wavelength, began to form. The outline of the sliver was clear to begin with, but as the emitted light filter increased in wavelength it became harder and harder to make out. In the first images I could clearly see the dark spots that Justin had pointed out were the ones where the creature's blood had dropped onto his boot. At around 43onm nothing was visible.
‘That isn't blood,’ said Ed decisively. If the spots had been blood we would have seen a bright spot, or spots, when the haem fluoresced under the infrared beam. There was nothing. We continued to the end of the wavelength sequence. Still nothing appeared. I asked Ed if he could tell what was in the spot. He said that he could not. I asked if perhaps the haem on the boot had deteriorated to the point where it no longer fluoresced. ‘I doubt it very much,’ was Ed's succinct reply. ‘At this point, if we began by suspecting this to have been blood, we would discontinue the investigation. It is not blood.’ No point, then, in firing up the mass spectrometer. Whatever was on Justin's boot was not blood, either from a Bigfoot or from anything else.
While I was still contemplating the implications of this result for Justin Smeja's story, Ed introduced me to another of his instruments. This one was a Fourier-Transform Spectrograph and I wanted to use it to examine the two ‘hair’ samples that I had received from donors that I suspected from their appearance might not be hair at all. The FTS measures the spectrum of radiation given off by a sample when it is excited by a magnetic pulse. Rather like the VSC 6000 spectral comparator, components in sample emit radiation of a characteristic wavelength that can be tracked and displayed as a series of peaks on a trace. An experienced operator will recognise the most familiar peaks, but the machine is also capable of comparing the emission spectra with a reference collection and coming up with the best matches.
Ed normally uses this instrument to examine fibres of clothing to see what they are made of, so it is perfect for hair and for the questionable fibres whose authenticity I wanted to check. We started with the first sample, which I suspected from its branching structure was a plant root of some kind. Ed spread a single fibre across the small aperture through which the spectrum would be measured, switched on the magnetic flux and the scan started. It was much quicker than the VSC 6000 and in less than a minute we had a good spectrum on the screen. Ed didn't need any time to think. He immediately recognised the clear signal of cellulose in the spectrum. Nevertheless he requested a comparison from the instrument and that confirmed his initial opinion. This fibre contained cellulose, a component characteristic of plants but not found in animals.
Before we moved on to the second suspicious sample, Ed thought we should check what genuine hair looked like. I plucked one from my head and laid it across the aperture of the instrument. Shortly after a very different set of peaks appeared on the screen. This spectrum was nothing like cellulose. Far to the right, a large peak dominated all the others. ‘That is keratin,’ Ed announced quietly. The peak on the spectrum came from the peptide bond, found in all proteins but giving this particular profile in keratin, the principal component of mammalian hair. Again Ed asked for a comparison with the reference spectra. The closest was with merino sheep wool, also made of keratin.
We turned our attention to the third sample, which I had thought might be some sort of glass fibre, perhaps from an ethernet cable or insulation material. It shimmered, quite unlike hair, and I was surprised that the donor had still identified it as hair. In fact that seemed so unlikely that I thought it may have been a deliberate hoax, just to see if I identified it as an animal and by so doing discrediting the entire project. As the magnetic probe was lowered onto the hair there was a faint yet audible cracking sound, absent from genuine hair. We didn't have to wait long for the answer. The spectrum appeared on the screen. Ed didn't recognise it. There were peaks but they did not correspond to any peptide bond. This was not a hair, as I had suspected all along. When Ed asked the instrument to check the spectrum against the reference collection, the closest match was silicon dioxide – the main component of glass. I checked the sample number against my database to identify the hoaxer. When I saw which sample this was, I knew at once how it may have been a genuine mistake, in ways I will explain later, rather than a deliberate attempt to fool me.
I spent the rest of my time at Ashland going through the different, genuine hair samples in my collection and seeing which looked like possible primate hairs and which were clearly not. It certainly was no easy task. Primate hairs tend to be quite fine and straight and without the thicker guard hairs typical of many other animals, but there are no outstanding features of primate hairs that make a positive identification easy. Even Cookie Smith was unsure about some of the samples, though she was prepared to give a guarded opinion on others. The easiest to differentiate were the deer hairs, which I cut from the Lab's reference collection of skins. They had a very cellular medulla. The recently retired Bonnie Yates, one of the world's greatest authorities on hair identification, was kind enough to come back to the lab and help me go through my burgeoning collection. Like Cookie Smith, she was prepared to have a stab at some identifications, but by no means all of them. It was Bonnie who told me that individual variation was so great that to give a positive ID from hair you needed many hairs from different parts of the body. She was also the one who pointed out that when she had been unable to positively identify a hair sample, the Bigfootologist would twist this to imply that it was from an unidentified animal. This was such a frequent and irritating corruption of her opinion that she stopped trying to help Bigfootologists many years ago.
On the eve of my departure from Ashland I went for a walk with my wife in Lithia Park in the centre of town. The park was in a blaze of colour from the pink and white dogwood trees. I sat on a bench while Ulla walked on a bit. I was facing a thinly wooded hillside and enjoying the warm spring afternoon. Then about halfway up the hill a mountain lion walked right across my field of view. I wasn't mistaken. It walked like a leopard, with a long tail held in a graceful curve. I didn't even think to myself: ‘What on earth was that?’ It was a mountain lion and that was that. I mentioned this to Ken that evening when he and his wife joined us for dinner. I knew sightings were uncommon, but neither he nor his wife had seen a mountain lion in the thirty years they had lived in Ashland. Now I knew what it felt like to have seen a Bigfoot. Ulla thought I must have seen a large domestic cat. Ken was too polite to say what he thought. But I know what I saw. It wasn't a cat, or a badger or a raccoon or any of the other suggestions. It was a mountain lion.
We left Ashland and travelled north to meet up with Lori Simmons and her fiancé Adam Davies. We were going to have another go at tempting the Big Guy out from beneath its tree. When I told Ken about this intended adventure he began to get rather concerned. He didn't really believe there was a sasquatch living under the tree, but he thought there might well be a bear. I had never seen a live black bear and he thought I really should, just in case the Big Guy decided he was fed up with being taunted and came out to attack. To rectify this gap in my experience, Ken organised a trip to a nearby wildlife centre where there were bears, both black and grizzly, along with other native animals, including mountain lions.
Wildlife Images near Grants Pass, Oregon is primarily a rehabilitation and education centre run by Dave Siddon, who showed us round. Although the idea behind the centre is to care for injured or abandoned animals and birds before releasing them back into the wild, some residents become acclimatised to humans and cannot be set free. Instead they might land a career in films. We saw the peregrine falcon that had, apparently, starred alongside Tom Cruise. We saw two magnificent bald eagles with equally glitzy film careers. We met ‘Tundra’, a sad-eyed and very shy timber wolf who was being walked on a lead and had yet to have her first audition.
Further into the park we came across the mountain lion enclosure. The animal behind the fence was huge, much bigger than the one I had seen in Lithia Park. Its body was almost the size of an African lion though its head looked disproportionally small. Even so it wasn't hard to imagine how an animal like this could have killed the jogger without any difficulty. In the adjoining pen were eight black bears just lying around. I didn't like the look of them at all. And they were pretty big too. They looked really mean, with a facial expression that reminded me of a Rottweiler. I had been reassured by the woodsmen I had met that black bears were not a threat and you just needed to keep your eye on them. They were far more frightened of you and would always walk away. That was the theory.
Next to the black bears was an enclosure with nothing in it. Or so it seemed at first. Dave approached the wire fence and began to call out for ‘Grizz’. As we waited, he explained that Grizz had been rescued as a cub from Alaska when his mother was shot. Dave had agreed to take him on condition that he would be returned to the wild in Alaska as soon as he had grown. The trouble was that Grizz became far too tame and it was obvious that he could not be safely released back into the wild. He had lost any fear of humans and was very likely to approach anyone he came across, with severe consequences. It was not so much that he might attack a human, though that is always possible with a grizzly, but that he would be shot as a danger to the public. So Grizz was going to live out the rest of his life in Oregon. Less free than in his native Alaska perhaps, but much safer for him, and for Alaska.
Without a sound Grizz appeared, ambling silently towards the fence. To say he was enormous is an understatement. When he got to the fence he raised himself up onto his hind legs. He must have been at least ten feet high. Dave threw him an apple, which rolled back to rest close to the electric wire that was our real protection. Grizz could have demolished the chain-link fence with one swipe of his mighty claws. He sat in his haunches and, with immense delicacy, used one claw to remove the apple to a safe distance from the wire and then crushed it in his jaws. The odd thing was that although Grizz was double the size of the black bears, he didn't look as threatening. His expression was quite mild in comparison. But this is a dangerous illusion. Grizzlies are far more dangerous than black bears.
I was glad to hear that there weren't supposed to be any grizzlies where I was going. Even so I bought an extra can of bear spray, just in case.
25
Knock Three Times
Every day following the extraordinary experience with Lori and the Big Guy I asked myself what could have made that knocking sound coming from under the tree. It could not have been a hallucination, as others heard it too. It must have been a large animal living under the tree. What other explanation could there possibly be? If it really were a sasquatch then this was a unique opportunity: an opportunity to locate one, set hair traps and perhaps even film or photograph the creature at a specific location rather than relying on a rare chance encounter in thousands of square miles of forest. I arranged to return in May 2013 after giving a genealogy lecture in Boston. Adam Davies, who had met Lori the previous year and was now engaged to her, would fly over from the UK and join us. Adam, you will recall, is the British cryptozoologist who has done so much work on the Sumatran orang-pendek. He and Lori had camped close to the Big Guy's tree earlier in the year and had obtained a brief trail-cam video sequence of a large bipedal creature standing over their sleeping bags, an experience neither of them will ever forget, though they were asleep at the time. It could have been the Big Guy. They certainly thought so. Adam had shown me the video clip. It was very short, only a couple of seconds, but when he took me to the location I could see from the scale of other objects in the frame, which included a fixed picnic table, that this was a creature at least four feet high with a well-defined dorsal musculature. Was it a bear? It didn't look like it.
We met up at Marblemount and booked into the local inn. What a change there was from my previous visit in March. The snow had all gone and the gardens were full of rhododendrons of different colours mixed in with pink and white dogwood blossoms. The weather was warm, but Marblemount was empty. Even though this was perfect hiking weather, the season here only gets going in June. We were the only ones staying at the inn, and we soon found out that the two restaurants in town only opened at the weekends, which this was not. We managed to get something to eat at the gas station, then prepared for the next day's anticipated rendezvous with the Big Guy.
