- November moonlight shone through the overhanging trees
onto a pair of large human-like tracks headed for a waterfall's frozen
pond.
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- The first track was sharp, the second was scuffed as
if the maker had slipped before walking across the ice.
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- Because Islander Robert Jones (not his real name), 23,
had camped and hiked throughout his life and he had seen animal tracks,
he said he had no doubt the one-inch deep tracks in the fresh snow belonged
to a sasquatch.
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- "No animal makes that kind of track. It was clearly
five-toed. (You could) see the individual toes. I put my shoe ? it's size
11 ? next to it and it was half that still. It looked like a big human
foot, about the same size as mini-snowshoes."
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- The sasquatch is a mythical, large, hairy, gorilla-like
creature witnesses say lives in the northwestern part of Canada and the
United States. Its name comes from B.C.'s Coast Salish First Nation term,
sasqits or hairy man.
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- Witnesses say it walks on two legs like a human, but
has a flat, ape-like face. Sasquatch sightings and tracks have been reported
in North America for 200 years.
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- It's called Bigfoot in the United States and Yeti in
Nepal, an country in Asia's Himalayan mountains.
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- For Jones and a co-worker he calls Kelly (not his real
name), who was along for the hike, reality and folklore suddenly mixed
that late fall day in 2000. They were five kilometres from civilization
and panic washed over them in a wave, Jones said.
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- "There's a sense of fear that comes over you. Kelly's
a tough fellow. He grew up being a boxer. He was freaking out and getting
all anxious. Kelly grabbed a large stick."
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- For several minutes they stood in the clear, cold night
and listened to the forest. It was unbearably quiet, said Jones.
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- "You have to understand it's a deafening silence.
There's almost too much noise because there's no noise. By this time we
were a little freaked out. There was a sense of uneasiness, a sense we
were being watched."
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- Jones, originally from Bedford, N.S., worked as a bellman
during the summer and fall for the swanky $700-a-night Emerald Lake Lodge
in Yoho National Park. Kelly, from Vancouver, B.C., had been at the lodge
several months before Jones arrived.
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- Just over the Alberta border, B.C.'s 1,310-square-kilometre
Yoho butts up against Banff National Park. It would fit into the area between
Charlottetown and Summerside from east to west and Cavendish and Tryon
from north to south.
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- The Emerald is part of a resort chain in the Rocky mountains.
It sits about 210 kilometres northwest of Calgary, about 15 kilometres
along an access road linked to the Trans-Canada Highway.
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- Trails into the mountains lead from employee residences
and Jones and Kelly would often hike them after their 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.
shift. Both wore headlamps similar to miners' lamps that night, but bright
moonlight lit the trail so they didn't need to use them.
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- Jones said they'd been on this offshoot of the main trail
before and decided to walk the metre-wide path to a 10-metre high waterfall.
A tiny stream trickled down the almost frozen waterfall. Behind it was
a cave about three metres up in the rock.
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- At the pondside they saw the tracks. They vanished on
the pond's frozen surface.
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- Snow had fallen about 12 hours earlier, Jones said, so
there was no chance this was an old animal track which thawed and refroze
into a distorted shape.
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- The men returned using a different trail. Before they
headed back, they paid close attention to the ground and when he saw the
same track again he knew it wasn't a dream.
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- "We could clearly see it again coming back down.
If you'd seen it you'd know this wasn't a shadow."
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- When they got back, Jones told his co-workers what they
had seen. People who had worked at the lodge for several years weren't
shocked because stories of sightings and reports of weird noises in the
woods had floated around the lodge for years.
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- A sighting like this doesn't surprise wildlife biologist
John Bindernagel either. The sasquatch is a real animal and he's got the
tracks to prove it, he said in a telephone interview from his British Columbia
home.
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- In 1988, he found sasquatch tracks near his house on
Vancouver Island.
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- He poured plaster into the prints and when it dried he
pulled out casts 15 inches long and eight inches wide ? about a man's size
20 shoe. A man who wears size 11 shoes usually has a foot about 10 inches
long and four inches wide.
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- Bindernagel said because wildlife biologists have routinely
used tracks as evidence an animal exists, the hundreds of prints found
in Canada and the United States point to an undiscovered animal living
in North American forests.
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- "We can be pretty sure there's a large mammal in
North America we haven't seen before. We do have a lot of evidence we have
to work with."
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- In North America there's a database of over 3,000 items,
including reported sightings, hundreds of plaster casts of tracks and pictures
and film of the animal.
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- It's this evidence that prompted Bindernagel to publish
his book, North America's Great Ape: the Sasquatch, in 1998.
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- It's a field guide to the sasquatch's habits and behaviours.
It also includes drawings of what it looks like based on evidence he's
gathered since 1963 when he was an undergraduate at Guelph University.
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- Because the sasquatch doesn't fit into a neat slot for
scientists to study, there wasn't categorized information available for
witnesses to identify what they saw.
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- And that's why, Bindernagel said, he wrote the book.
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- "It doesn't fall into anyone's bailiwick, so to
speak. I'm not saying it should be in a field guide but if it was, people
can say that's what I saw. It's those people I think I can help."
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- The argument for the sasquatch being a large ape instead
of a primitive human is based on witnesses' reports of it throwing rocks,
swinging sticks and vocalizing when they were noticed.
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- Jane Goodall, a scientist who studied chimpanzees in
the wild, documented similar behaviours when chimps perceived a threat.
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- Research of African mountain gorillas found they occasionally
release a rotten egg smell from glands when threatened. Many people have
claimed they've smelled this scent before or after seeing a sasquatch.
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- So if wildlife biologists ignore evidence, they're not
doing their job, Bindernagel said, and new animals aren't discovered.
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- "It's very frustrating. With my colleagues, I'm
just getting very, very tired. They're not looking at the evidence. Wildlife
biologists shouldn't ignore it. We're stuck with not just disbelief, but
denial. It's not a matter of belief, it's not a matter of faith. This is
mainstream biology. We will look bad when we find it."
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- But for Neb Kujundzic, a UPEI philosophy professor and
department chair, the validity of Bindernagel's research depends on how
it stands up to long-term scientific study.
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- All scientific discoveries are theories until another
scientist comes along and proves or disproves it, he said in an interview
in his book-lined UPEI office.
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- "Theories are respected solely because they haven't
been refuted yet. The essence of science is refutation."
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- Using the scientific method, a scientist presents a hypothesis
then tries to find evidence to prove it. For the scientist's theory to
be valid it has to always return the same result and stand up to new evidence.
This means a hypothesis implies a correlation.
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- Kujundzic used 400 bowls of chili as an example.
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- He always gets a headache after eating a bowl of chili
? that's the hypothesis. If he still gets a headache after 400 bowls that's
the correlation. This correlation should be provable no matter where or
when he eats the chili.
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- But, said Kunjudzic, if the person eats bowl 401 then
doesn't get a headache, the hypothesis isn't valid. Something has changed
and the hypothesis gets retooled.
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- This is how the scientific method is supposed to work,
said Kujundzic.
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- "There you see it, others you don't. If you see
it, it should be all over the world."
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- And it's the difference between science and pseudo-science.
It's like a straight line versus a circle.
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- Open-ended science is a straight line on which a theory
is presented and evidence given to prove or disprove it, while close-ended
pseudo-science is a circle in which a theory is presented, but it can't
be refuted because there's no evidence.
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- As an example of pseudo-science, Kujundzic used theories
that extraterrestrial knowledge helped ancient Egyptians and Central America's
long-dead Aztecs build pyramids.
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- But, he said, it doesn't mean discoveries like the H.
Pylori ulcer-causing bacteria, once laughed at by scientists who thought
ulcers were caused by stress, won't eventually be accepted.
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- "It emerged from kookland to mainstream science."
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- As for Jones, the sasquatch has become mainstream.
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- "I'd always had that thought, but never thought
I'd see anything. I'm not a fool, I know what I saw."
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- But, Jones who now lives in Winsloe, said he'd like to
return and hike the trail again.
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- "I believe we saw something. I'd like to go back."
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- © Copyright 2002 Charlottetown Guardian http://www.canada.com/search/site/story.asp?id=A2863A
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