Recent Expedition Report

(*Note- This report is much to long to be reported on one page. I have broken it into sections so please click on link at bottom of report to go to the next page.)

Andrew Peterson

August 30, 1999

PRELIMINARY REPORT OF THE 1999 SIX RIVERS NATIONAL FOREST EXPEDITION

J. Richard Greenwell
Expedition Leader

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Dear Friends and Associates:

We have recently returned from the 1999 Six Rivers National Forest Expedition, our third annual field project to this area. The purpose of this project was to attempt to produce new evidence for the supposed Sasquatch or Bigfoot, a large, bipedal primate said to inhabit the forests of North America. This e-mail is intended to summarize the results of this year's project for many of our friends and colleagues, thus saving us the time and energy it would take to write or call each one of you individually. I will, of course, be in touch with many of you anyway in the course of time. Meanwhile, if you have any questions at all about our project, please do not hesitate to call or e-mail me. Ultimately, a Field Report will appear in a future issue of the journal Cryptozoology. Meanwhile, there is nothing confidential contained herein, so please feel free to share this information or this text with others, through e-mails, Internet postings, or whatever.

PROJECT PHILOSOPHY AND INTENT

First, for those who may not be aware of the philosophy and intent behind the Six Rivers National Forest Expeditions, let me preface this communication with an explanatory introduction. Our starting position is that, over time, interesting evidence has been produced that runs contrary to theory in anthropology and expectations in zoology -- that is, that a large bipedal primate occurs in North America. It would be easy to dismiss the occurrence of such a species as "impossible." In fact, this has been done -- in my presence. My position, instead, is that normal scientific procedure should be followed, and that involves testing the hypothesis that such a species exists. This is obviously best done in the field, despite the many financial, logistical, and physical difficulties involved. Only by testing the hypothesis in this way, however, can it be stated that the scientific method is being properly applied to the problem, and that true objectivity is involved.

Through this process, my opinion or anybody else's opinion concerning whether or not this species exists should be of no interest whatsoever to other scientists -- there already have been, in any case, far too many opinions and appeals to authority on this subject. What should be of interest to other scientists is new persuasive evidence produced by sustained fieldwork, provided that such evidence is collected under controlled conditions, following scientific protocols, and subsequently published in a format that permits adequate analysis, evaluation, and criticism by others. The question then is: Is the hypothesis validated by such new evidence? If it is not, it shall continue to be a viable hypothesis, one that still might be validated in the future. There is no need to reject or dismiss such a hypothesis, as do many unthinking scientists. The hypothesis simply remains invalidated, and that should be sufficient for everybody. Furthermore, it will remain invalidated unless definitive evidence -- i.e., proof -- is produced at some future time. Such a procedure is simply part of the objective methodology of science -- not necessarily of most scientists, relatively few of whom, unfortunately, have been trained in the fundamentals of the scientific process or the philosophy of science -- and that is what we are pursuing.

There is one final point I would like to make on this topic, and that is because one of my procedures could be misunderstood -- or even misrepresented -- at some future time. When in the field, I put aside all preconceived notions and theory, and proceed under the temporary assumption that the phenomenon is real -- that is, that the species in question does, in fact, exist. The rationale behind this procedure is fundamentally simple: if this species does exist, then the easiest method of collecting pertinent evidence in support of this is to treat it as if it exists. That is, to deal with it on its own supposed terms in its own supposed environment. What I am doing, then, is temporarily giving it the benefit of the doubt, bending over backwards in its own supposed habitat, being Mr. Nice Field Guy, and allowing the supposed species to manifest its biological existence as it sees fit -- and I'll be paying close attention, examining all evidence or factors that, under normal circumstances, might be overlooked or dismissed out of hand. This temporary field procedure in no way should be misunderstood or misinterpreted as an acceptance of the reality of such a species. It is simply a useful operational methodology in the field, and it has nothing whatever to do with my overall permanent objectivity when evaluating scientific problems of this kind. At the end of the fieldwork, I take off that Mr. Nice Field Guy hat and put on my Mr. Nasty Scientific Guy hat. That is when all the evidence that has been collected for an unknown species, if any, is objectively sifted, sorted, analyzed, and evaluated, with tough questions asked and critical criteria invoked.

The final product, then, is evidence that has been collected in the field under conditions favoring the phenomenon -- in this case the Bigfoot -- but then evaluated in a scientific setting under conditions favoring strict and objective analysis. To my knowledge, nobody has ever questioned our procedures. I simply wanted to convey them clearly here, and thus avoid any ambiguities or doubts that could arise in the future concerning our intentions or procedures.

The one-month 1999 expedition included myself (J. Richard Greenwell), Secretary of the International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC), Angelo P. Capparella, a field biologist at Illinois State University, Darwin A. Greenwell (my eldest son), a college student affiliated with the School of Music at the University of Arizona, and Ronnie L. Roseman, a Florida businessman who helped fund the expedition. This year, with over 500 lbs. of specialized equipment, materials, food, and clothing, we returned to the Siskiyou Wilderness -- last year we spent a month in Bluff Creek, with no results whatsoever. Obviously, one has many adventures during a one-month period, but I shall try to keep the narrative brief. I can report, to start with, that no sightings of such a supposed primate were made by any of us, and no clear, unambiguous tracks were found. It should be noted, at the same time, that only one clear, unambiguous track of a black bear was found during the same period -- I made a cast of it -- this despite the area probably containing the highest concentration of bears anywhere in the world. The reason for this is the very low proportion of terrain that will show a clear track, or any mark at all, due to a substrate composed almost entirely of rocks, compacted soils, and forest duff. Only mud flats around some limited water sources are good for track deposition.

We never conduct these field projects expecting to prove the existence of this unverified primate. Our basic working philosophy is that, if it were that easy to prove, it would already have been proven a long time ago. All we can hope to do, though a number of strategies over an extended period of time in a remote wilderness setting, is increase the probability of obtaining further evidence -- perhaps good evidence. However, we are unable to predict by how far we are increasing that probability, the reason being that practically nothing is known about the natural history of the supposed species under investigation.

The evidence that we were exposed to this year can be divided in to two categories: physical evidence and sound evidence. Sound evidence can then be divided into three categories: calls, footsteps, and manufactured sounds such as tree-knockings and "crashes."

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