Print Pro Says Bigfoot May Exist: A Summary

This article was taken from the January 2000 issue of Field & Stream Page 15 - written by Keith McCafferty

It looks like Bigfoot has finally made the big time! McCafferty writes in his Field and Stream article, "Eerily similar tracks are found miles - and years - apart."

It seems that legitimate journalists as well as magazines have taken up the subject of Bigfoot. Does that mean that people are starting to accept its existence? Probably so. McCafferty starts his half page article with an unusual twist. He interviewed a police officer named Jimmy Chilcutt of Conroe, Texas, and Dr. Jeff Meldrum, an anatomy and anthropology professor at Idaho State University. McCafferty says that they are both passionately interested in proving the existence of Bigfoot. They seem to be a unlikely team when it comes to Bigfoot.

Both "...examine the prints left by hands and feet to reveal the identity of unseen visitors." McCafferty explains that Chilcutt's fingerprint science is so exact, that it can prove someone's guilt or innocence in a court of law. However, he tells his readers that Meldrum is unable to impress his scientific colleagues and skeptics with his footprint finds. He goes on further to say that by teaming up with Chilcutt, Meldrum hopes to add more weight to his finds.

McCafferty writes, "Meldrum hopes some skeptics will change their minds after hearing what Chilcutt has to say about the footprint castings Meldrum has collected from the Pacific Northwest."

Chilcutt is quoted as saying, "The ridge detail [fingerprint pattern] on the casts is neither man nor ape. Is it possible to have faked it? Sure. But [the faker] would have had to have an intimate knowledge of primate footprints, and that didn't exist at the time the casting were made."

McCafferty explains that Chilcutt started studying the fingerprints of primates in the mid-1999's. Since human fingerprints and footprints were singularly identifiable, enough to prove guilt or innocence in a court of law or prove the identity of a stolen baby, he suspected that he would find similar patterns (the arches, loops, and whorls made by folds in the skin) on the fingers and feet of primates. He was working on the assumption that this information would "...someday help forensic specialists catch criminals."

McCafferty further explains that Chilcutt continued by saying that ..."it would be helpful if criminologists could identify the race of a person by his fingerprints. But research in that direction has been inconclusive," Chilcutt believes, "because the races have interbred so much. Primates, however have undiluted gene pools."

McCafferty says in his article that Chilcutt has "...more than 1,000 fingerprints of lemurs, monkeys, and apes in his computer data bank."

When Chilcutt first heard about the print castings in Meldrum's laboratory, he was interested, though reserved about it. He catches criminals in Texas and didn't care if Bigfoot existed or not, McCafferty explains. That was, however until he actually saw the casting made in Walla Walla, Washington, in 1984. That got his attention.

Chilcutt says, "Not only did the ridge pattern run vertically along the edges of the foot, then angle across underneath the toes - a pattern different from humans and apes, which have ridges running horizontally and at an angle across the foot pad, respectively - but the imprints showed splits in the feet where the ridges did not realign perfectly when the skin had healed."

On top of that, Chilcutt got another shock when he found a northern California casting made in 1967. The pattern was similar to that on the Walla Walla casting, although made from a smaller animal. "For them to be fake", McCafferty says Chilcutt insists, " the same person would have had to fabricate both footprints, 17 years and several hundred miles apart. " McCaferty said that it seemed unlikely to Chilcutt, especially after he tried to duplicate the casting and failed.

McCafferty says the fingerprint expert has become a believer.

"I can assure you," Chilcutt says, "there's an animal up in the Pacific Northwest that we have never seen."