Bernard Heuvelmans, a founding figure in cryptozoology, was born on October 10, 1916, in Le Havre, France, and died 23 years ago, on August 22, 2001, in Le Vesinet, France, at age 84,
We find ourselves at August 22, once again, this time, in 2024. And sadly, we have to mourn a major intellectual in hominological thought, Henry Franzoni, who has passed away, at the age of 67. He was a Bigfoot researcher of quiet renown.
Like Heuvelmans, Henry Franzoni was born in France, Paris specifically, and raised in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
The August 10, 2019 Parkinson-related death of Henry Franzoni’s father, “Hank,” gives us more information on Henry’s beginnings. His dad enlisted in the Army during the Korean War. When the Army discovered his aptitude for languages, he was sent to the Army Language School in Monterey, California. There he mastered French and in 1955 was sent to Paris as a French interpreter at SHAPE headquarters. Before leaving, Hank met his first wife, Amanda, on a blind date. They married in Paris shortly thereafter. Henry Franzoni was then born there in 1957.
Henry moved to Portland, Oregon at age 17, where he went to Reed College. Reed is one of the most unusual institutions of higher learning in the United States, featuring a traditional liberal arts and natural sciences curriculum.
Upon graduating, Henry moved back to New Jersey, becoming established in Manhattan. There Franzoni had a 30-year career as a recording artist playing avant-garde music, and a 30-year career as a computer scientist and programmer, until 1988.
Then Franzoni moved back West, and he had a 30-year career as a tribal fisheries scientist and administrator, retiring from work with the Cowitz Indian Tribe on November 30, 2021. He has said that even though he was not an enrolled member of any tribal group, his heritage was from four tribes, but he was a “white guy.”
Bigfoot
Franzoni was once on the Board of Advisors of Peter Byrne’s Bigfoot Research Project with Ron Morehead from 1993-1998. They spent nearly $5 million investigating Bigfoot. In 1993, he created the first Bigfoot website on the web and created the first online Bigfoot discussion group. Henry founded the IVBC (Internet Virtual Bigfoot Conference), and from it issued many groups and organizations that continue as active through the present.
Franzoni appeared in a film, Drumming for Bigfoot (1997) and Sasquatch Odyssey (1999), where he unforgettably plays drums to “talk” to Bigfoot.
He worked with the Bigfoot Research Project that published the forgotten Jeff Glickman analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin film in 1998.
Franzoni lived in rural southwest Washington through the end of his life.
Bigfoot Name Game
I will miss Henry for many reasons, but most of all, our mutual interest was in discovering the “name games” hidden within the “devil locations” and other native names linked to the Hairy Forest Giants.
Henry Franzoni, living in the Pacific Northwest, assembled a remarkable names database, and told me that as of 1998, he had found 2,635 places which were named, Devil, Diablo, or Diabla in the United States.
In a related vein is the native Algonquian word for the Devil ~”Hockomock”~ which I have written more about in my book Curious Encounters. Franzoni has found a total of ten places in the US named “Hockomock,” six in Maine, two in Massachusetts, one in New Jersey (Hockamik), and one in Minnesota (Hockamin Creek). One of these, the Hockomock Swamp in the Bridgewater (Massachusetts) Triangle, is one I have discussed extensively. It is a place where people vanish and creatures like giant snakes, Bigfoot, Thunderbirds, and phantom panthers are seen. I first talked to Henry Franzoni, Hockomock-area residents, and Native Americans about the meaning of the name “Hockomock” to discover its link to the word “Devil.” Then I looked in a Depression-era Writers Project Administration (WPA) guide, the one on Massachusetts, and found it defined the variant name for the swamp, “Hoccomocco,” as “evil spirit.”
Franzoni further wrote me in the 1990s about Skookum:
The modern Chinook jargon meaning is Big, strong, and swift whilst the original Chinook village meaning is ‘Evil God of the Woods’. Places have to be examined as to when they were named, and often a correlating old story has to be located to really suggest that a particular Skookum place is worthy of our bigfoot interest. A number of Skookum places fit the bill just fine after being investigated though. Places like Mt. Duckabush in the Olympic Range was once named Mt. Arleta by Lt. Patrick O’Neill, who led the second group ever across the Olympic Mountains in 1890. O’Neill mentioned in his diary that the native guides he had with him called it Skookum and believed their gods lived on it. His native guides abandoned him and his group when a panther shrieked at their camp continuously one night. Oddly enough, most native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula did not venture into the interior, because they thought their gods lived there.
There are some interesting parallels between some stories of the Himalayan Shangrila and native legends of a hidden valley in the Olympics, guarded by skookums,…The Chinook jargon does have many different interpretations for the word Skookum depending on which expert is consulted. I used MacArthur’s 1924 definition, but for me the BF connection was strong once I went to a Skookum place and figure that I stood 10 feet from a smelly Bigfoot on my very first day of looking.
Henry’s last gift to the International Cryptozoology Museum:
The pictured vintage informational sign for Devil’s Lake, Oregon.
Henry Franzoni Speaks
For 23 years, Henry went silent about Sasquatch. But then he began talking again.
Henry Franzoni was with Tim Halloran, and his wife Dana, at the Squatchfest, January 26, 2024, Kelso, Washington.
After years of not talking about Bigfoot, Henry Franzoni appeared on podcasts, in others’ books, in the documentary A Flash of Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed (2022), and then he wrote his own, Failing in a Cooler Way: Why I Never Found Bigfoot (2023).
When Franzoni’s book was released, I was sent a freshly printed copy. I immediately read it and posted on X: “A thoughtful, intellectual new book, Failing in a Cooler Way by Henry Franzoni, overlaps nicely with adventures I’ve had in the land of Jeff Glickman, Skookum, and Tesla. This unbelievable ride makes you pause and relate it to your own journey.”
In drumming. Henry felt he communicated with the male Bigfoot via “5s” and the females via “6s.” Even via his autograph to me in his book, I knew he was sending me a signal.
John Heinan wrote me in 2016: “It would be real shame if this sweater of Henry Franzoni’s isn’t in the (International) Cryptozoology Museum.”
I wrote Henry and John, bemoaning the fact Henry could not relocate it. I said “It appears to be a classic, one of a kind Bigfoot sweater…But where is it?”
John decided, “Sadly the sweater can only be seen on Netflix these days. 1997 documentary titled Bigfoot.”
As a young man, Henry was married, divorced, and re-married in 2022. Franzoni lived married, with eight cats, until he died.
And now, Henry’s sweater belongs to the ages. His energy has burst into the tomorrows of Bigfootery. Goodbye Henry.
