Sugarfly
07-22-2005, 02:29 PM
'Bigfoot' spotted in Yukon
Nathan Vanderklippe
CanWest News Service
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
TESLIN, Yukon -- It was a quiet night in Teslin when the woods began to crackle and the dogs started to howl.
Melvin Harper heard it, and saw a figure flitting near a neighbour's light post, then through a forested island next to the log houses in this Yukon town of 400.
"It was something big, about eight feet tall (2.4 metres). It's black, hairy muscular. It was huge," he said. "He was like teasing us, making noises in the bush, coming back and forth."
"It was like a sasquatch," said Tom Dickson, who also saw the creature.
"Like how you see it on TV, how they advertise it -- the same image. You can't see no eyes, nothing, just black, but it was moving pretty fast. It was a shocking feeling, like if you see a bear."
Roger Smarch heard it, too, and went to look the next morning. It's at least the third sighting of a bush creature in Teslin in a year, leading locals to surmise that perhaps a mythical sasquatch -- or a family of them -- has migrated north from more typical haunts in northern California and the interior of British Columbia.
Looking in the woods near the place where the creature was last heard, Smarch found crushed meadow flowers and small trees snapped in half more than two metres up their trunks. And he discovered a track, more than 30 centimetres long and printed deep into the mud. When his 135-kilogram uncle tried to make an impression beside it, he couldn't make a dent.
"I think it's bigfoot," he said, as he pulled back the rubber mat and wooden crate that he placed over the print to protect it, more than a week after the strange night. Some of the town's hunters have said it looks like a print left by a moose that slipped in the mud, but Smarch won't hear of it.
"It's not a bear, not a moose. It's definitely something," he said.
Smarch also found something else, a tuft of dark chocolate-coloured hair on the forest floor that he says was left behind by the creature.
On Tuesday morning, Philip Merchant picked apart the tuft of hair in his lab at the Yukon Environment Department, measuring it and inspecting it beneath a microscope.
The hair isn't hollow, ruling out moose and caribou. It's too long to be horse, and the sample also includes a downy underfur, which rules out humans -- and perhaps other two-footed creatures.
"If underwool is a bovid, cervid thing in mammals then we probably can rule out primate," said Merchant, a wildlife technician.
© The Leader-Post (Regina) 2005
Nathan Vanderklippe
CanWest News Service
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
TESLIN, Yukon -- It was a quiet night in Teslin when the woods began to crackle and the dogs started to howl.
Melvin Harper heard it, and saw a figure flitting near a neighbour's light post, then through a forested island next to the log houses in this Yukon town of 400.
"It was something big, about eight feet tall (2.4 metres). It's black, hairy muscular. It was huge," he said. "He was like teasing us, making noises in the bush, coming back and forth."
"It was like a sasquatch," said Tom Dickson, who also saw the creature.
"Like how you see it on TV, how they advertise it -- the same image. You can't see no eyes, nothing, just black, but it was moving pretty fast. It was a shocking feeling, like if you see a bear."
Roger Smarch heard it, too, and went to look the next morning. It's at least the third sighting of a bush creature in Teslin in a year, leading locals to surmise that perhaps a mythical sasquatch -- or a family of them -- has migrated north from more typical haunts in northern California and the interior of British Columbia.
Looking in the woods near the place where the creature was last heard, Smarch found crushed meadow flowers and small trees snapped in half more than two metres up their trunks. And he discovered a track, more than 30 centimetres long and printed deep into the mud. When his 135-kilogram uncle tried to make an impression beside it, he couldn't make a dent.
"I think it's bigfoot," he said, as he pulled back the rubber mat and wooden crate that he placed over the print to protect it, more than a week after the strange night. Some of the town's hunters have said it looks like a print left by a moose that slipped in the mud, but Smarch won't hear of it.
"It's not a bear, not a moose. It's definitely something," he said.
Smarch also found something else, a tuft of dark chocolate-coloured hair on the forest floor that he says was left behind by the creature.
On Tuesday morning, Philip Merchant picked apart the tuft of hair in his lab at the Yukon Environment Department, measuring it and inspecting it beneath a microscope.
The hair isn't hollow, ruling out moose and caribou. It's too long to be horse, and the sample also includes a downy underfur, which rules out humans -- and perhaps other two-footed creatures.
"If underwool is a bovid, cervid thing in mammals then we probably can rule out primate," said Merchant, a wildlife technician.
© The Leader-Post (Regina) 2005