2000: A team of prominent Bigfoot investigators from the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BFRO), including Grover Krantz, Jeff Meldrum, Matt Moneymaker, and John Green, led an expedition near Mt. Adams in Washington state. They found what they claim to be a large mammal’s left forearm, hip, thigh, and heel imprint in a muddy wallow. All agreed that the cast could not be attributed to any commonly known animal of the area and “may represent an unknown primate.”The impression was found near a bait area where apples, melons, and peanuts had been laid out, yet somehow the researchers failed to record what animal had taken their bait. A cast was taken from the impression (dubbed the “Skookum cast” or “Bigfoot’s Butt Print”), which measured 3.5 by 5 feet and weighed 200 lbs.This made quite a stir in the Bigfoot community, as it was the first “body print” found, and—if authentic—was arguably the most significant evidence since the 1967 Patterson/Gimlin film. I first took special notice of the imprint when I was interviewed about it for an article in New Scientist magazine, and I asked Moneymaker for permission to examine the cast; he refused.
2002: Decades of Bigfoot hoaxing is revealed when former logger and lifelong prankster Ray Wallace dies. Once a worker at a logging camp in Humboldt County, California, in 1958 he carved wooden shoes that resembled oversize human tracks, which he used on and off for decades in mountain areas for unsuspecting loggers and hikers to marvel and puzzle over. Wallace’s family had proof, producing the carvings that were later revealed to match at least one famous set of prints, the Onion Mountain/Blue Creek Mountain tracks found in 1967. Wallace’s faked tracks spawned seminal media coverage of Bigfoot, including in the Humboldt Times (Eureka, California), which first coined the word term Bigfoot in 1958. Bigfoot experts grudgingly acknowledged the prolific hoaxing but stated that, of course, Wallace hadn’t made all the tracks.