When Southern Bigfoot Casts Are Really Western
by Loren Coleman ©2013

The proliferation of easy-to-obtain plaster of Paris and resin copies of well-known tracks of Bigfoot/Sasquatch, we all knew, was going to be a problem. The chickens have come home to roost. The field has to face the consequences of less-than-scientific decisions on how the evidence has been handled.

These are two of the most commonly sold Patterson-Gimlin filmsite footprint copies, which have been easy to find at conferences and online for over 25 years.

The fields of cryptozoology, Bigfootery and hominology, I’m afraid, have matured to the stage of seeing troubles sprout from the widespread exchanging and sharing of Bigfoot casts.  The database is contaminated, and continues to be, for instance, due to the discovered Wallace, probable Freeman, and alleged Crook fakes still contained within it. It is time to sort out the other impurities that may be in the mix.

Let’s look at a few examples of fakes, mistakes, and more that I’ve discovered and can be revealed in this arena.

(1) The Tennessee cast.

The easily obtained common P-G filmsite cast copy has become a liability. The classic 1967 Bluff Creek, California filmsite copy (seen on left above) has been used in hoaxes, as investigator Scott McNabb harshly learned in 1998.   McNabb found this out when someone left a fake print (cast on right above) for him to come across on his June 11, 1998, Tennessee Bigfoot search trek.

Back in 1998, the Bigfoot communication world was driven by emails, forums, chatrooms, and community Yahoo lists. One of these forums was run by Scott McNabb for years, until he turned it over to Bobbie Short in 1997.

A creation can sometimes kill its maker, it so happens.

McNabb suffered badly online for his initial mistake of saying he’d found a real Bigfoot track in Tennessee. After it became obvious that the track he’d discovered was made from a copy of a print from Bluff Creek, 1967, many online trolls and comment makers jumped all over McNabb – as the hoaxer. He was badly criticized, and felt it was nearly impossible to be heard above the yelling and the inhouse debunkers. In the end, McNabb was, more or less, driven from the Bigfoot world. Where is Scott McNabb? What is he doing today? He appears to have been a direct casualty of Bigfoot track copycat fakery.

(2) The Fouke cast

In a new television program on the cable network Destination America, called Monsters and Mysteries in America, there is an Ozarks/Fouke episode. The reality television broadcast was on the creature immortalized in The Legend of Boggy Creek.  The sightings focused on the year 1972 in Arkansas. Strange three-toed footprints were discovered in local bean fields, and casts were allegedly made.

But during the filming of the Destination America program, a very Bigfoot-like cast was shown, in association with the casts that were found in 1972. The production made it appear as if this PNW Bigfoot cast was from Arkansas. (H/T Anthony S).

What they showed was this cast.

In several visits I have made to the Monster Mart in Fouke, Arkansas, I have examined this cast.

Here Scott Norman and I are at the Monster Mart in 2002, with the cast. We knew it was a Western cast, of course. [Scott Norman (left) would die mysteriously in February 2008. ]

In 2012, I examined the cast more closely, with the permission of the new owner (pictured), and took photographs of the label denoting its origin. The cast was copied from one taken in the “High Cascades” in December 1990.  The Cascades is a major mountain range of western North America, extending from southern British Columbia through Washington and Oregon to Northern California. It is not in Arkansas.

(3) The Bandera cast

Other considerations…

Of course, the common denominator for all of these examples is their origin being from the West, and yet the apparent copy is said to have been found in the South – Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas.

Could there be something afoot, as well, with casts from Georgia, Texas, and Indiana? Perhaps some comparative analysis with older Western casts should be undertaken with rare instances of giant tracks/casts from the East?

Take, for example, the Elkins, Georgia, cast, measuring 17.5 inches long. The top half “looks” familiar and the bottom half appears to have been artificially shaved and narrowed. There is something “off” about it.

Cliff Barackman’s Bull Mountain casts, also, from Georgia, are both right feet, and might benefit from a screening for matches with other casts. But nothing has been found amiss with them yet.

How about the Paris, Texas cast (above, top), which looks like one of Cliff Crook Hoh track replicas (above, flipped, for analytic purposes, bottom two), recycled?

If you look in Grover Krantz’s book Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (1999), you will find there is only one Eastern “Bigfoot print cast.” Perhaps we need to revisit what was the actual source of the Indiana cast that Krantz felt was good evidence of a Bigfoot in Indiana. The print turned out to be a hoax. The cast was sent to Krantz by one ”J. W. Parker,” in a plot to trick the anthropologist.

How many Western, ah, Pacific Northwestern Bigfoot track replicas have been utilized as “evidence” for the presence of a Southern or Eastern Bigfoot print that has been said to have been cast?

Buyer beware!