My Sesquac

For those of you hardy enough, and intrepid enough, who have read my previous posting on BUTCH' GREAT ADVENTURE, realize that in addition my "Incident at China Lake", where I came into contact with a UFO on the high deserts of California, I also believe in Sasquatch. I love the website for BIGFOOT FIELD RESEARCHERS ORGANIZATION, aka BFRO. It is a very literate and easy to read compilation of Bigfoot sightings all over the United States, naming names, and citing evidence and witnesses, and publishing a lot of articles and essays on Sasquatch.

For those of you who read my lengthy narrative SPIRIT MOUNTAIN, which discussed my week on Mt. Adams as a guest of the Yakima Tribe, you would have been treated to a lot of data regarding Bigfoot. Most of it I pulled off of the BFRO website: www.bfro.net The site has been up and running for several years:


What is a Bigfoot, or Sasquatch?

The term sasquatch, for the North American primate under consideration in this website, is an anglicized derivative of the word "Sésquac", meaning "wild man". The original word, in the Stó:lõ dialect of the Halkomelem language, is used by the Coast Salish Indians of the Fraser Valley and parts of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Indian tribes across North America have a total of more than sixty different terms for the sasquatch.

Bigfoot was a journalistic term generated in the middle of the last century during a rash of sightings in Northern California; its use is not unreasonable since the species has proportionally much bigger feet than those of human beings and, furthermore, the word has come to be recognized widely. A goodly selection of fanciful terms have been used by pioneers and later non-native inhabitants of North America for the occasional published and repeated encounters with sasquatches.

The description given here is derived from a compilation of thousands of eye witness reports from the entire continent, some of astounding length, detail, and corroborative evidence; the Patterson movie, taken in 1967, and a recent computer-based image analysis of it; and statistical analysis of a large database accumulated over the last fifty years, primarily by John Green. For the sake of brevity, the description will not be couched in the customary cautionary terminology with the usual “weasel words”. Hence, the seemingly dogmatic style of the text is used only in the interest of terseness and it should be leavened by reference to the literature cited at the end of this article. This discussion refers to the state of knowledge as of February 2002.

W. H. Fahrenbach, 2002

My wife, Melva, and I spend several wonderful weekends a year over on the Olympic Pennisula, on the north beaches above Ocean Shores. We stay at a wonderful resort in Pacific Beach, between Copalis and Moclips. We drive many of the logging roads and forest ranger roads between Toholah, where the Indian Reservation is, and over to Lake Quinalt, criss-crossing up through those parts of the rain forest that are accessible by car. In Ocean Shores, there is a museum that shows off a plaster cast of a Bigfoot "footprint". It was made up by the Grays Harbor Sheriff's Station, after they investigated several Bigfoot sightings. When you talk to the residents of Aberdeen or Hoquiam, or the loggers and hikers all along the north beaches, or up into the Olympic National Park, and you ask about Bigfoot--and you get that "look". This is serious business to a populus that not only believes in Sasquatch, there have been two dozen investigated "valid" sightings in Grays Harbor County over the last decade.

BFRO number the sightings, and name the names of the witnesses.
August 2005; there was a Sasquatch sighting on the beach near Pt. Brown.
October 2005: Deer hunters had a sighting near Aberdeen.
September 2004; a motorist had a sighting near Humptulips, off of Highway 101.
David Klinghoffer in an article in the NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE made reference to several more sightings:
1997; a motorist had a sighting north of Moclips, and west of Copalis Beach near 101.
1997; a motorist had a sighting near the east side of Humptulips.

Klinghoffer wrote, "In never having contemplated 'Sasquatch possibilities' till he saw one, or thought he did, the deer hunter is like most of the other folks whose stories are collected on BFRO. Their accounts are plausible. They don't seem mad, obsessed, or paranoid--rather almost grateful. Suddenly there has entered into their lives tangible proof that reality has dimensions beyond the everyday, the scientifically provable, the secular.

Vernon Herrington, a former Sheriff's deputy, said, "We sit on the edge this time of year. March through May is the time that either people go out and make tracks, or whatever is making the tracks--and is on the move." Herrington reported seeing a creature, between 8 to 10 feet tall, weighing probably 500 pounds, with a shoulder span of 4 feet, sighting the creature in 1969 near Hoquiam "75 feet away on DeKay Road, off Ocean Beach Road, north of Hoquiam".

So Melva and I are returning to Gray's County, to the site of the sightings on April 25, 2008. We are going to make some late night drives up some lonely roads. I have had a strong feeling for more than a year that we will see a Sasquatch soon; like a premonition, a foregone conclusion. It might be wishful thinking; probably is. But Sesquac and I have an appointment one of these days, and I am looking forward to my glimpse into the para-normal, adding to the ghosts we see in our home often, and the UFO, and the visualizations I get when I meditate. Hamlet was right, Horatio, there is more to this world that what is in heaven or in men's minds.

Glenn Buttkus