Jamie Jackson, a visiting Bigfooter from WA
www.bigfootdiscoveryproject.com
Message from the Curator
Now that El Niño has chosen to deliver us a
dry-but-cold Winter, we can breathe a sigh of
relief ‘cause the river isn’t showing any signs of
rising. And even better than that is the fact the
skies are clear, and visibility is at its best. No
time like the present for some ‘squatchin (just
be sure to wear your “Long Johns.” ) As Tom
points out in this issue, we’re very excited about
the prospects of finding some signs of BF in
Nisene Marks Park, and have plans to investi-
gate other nearby areas, such as the Portola
Redwoods and possibly Henry Coe Park in the
San Jose area as well.
A couple of issues ago I mentioned that I
had interviewed for a job, and expected that
I wouldn’t get it because I lack expertise in
HTML and Dreamweaver (web site creation
software.) Well, I was right– I did not get the
job. However I did get a contract freelance
design job, which is actually even better as I can
still pay attention to developing the museum,
but also earn some bucks to pay the bills. I have
opted however to close the museum during the
week as attendance has been sketchy Monday -
Friday. So for the months of January and
February the museum will be open only on the
weekends (10-6) or by appointment. So if you
are planning to be in the area and want to visit
the museum, just give us a call and we’ll be
happy to open for your visit, even if it’s
midweek. So thanks to some creative refinanc-
ing and the freelance work, we can continue
with the Discovery Project and our search for
tangible proof for at least another year.
The stories continue to come in... a lady who
now lives in Boulder Creek said that back in
1985, while she was in an area known as the
Brickyard, close to Raytown, near Kansas City,
she was watched by an 8-9’ brown BF. It had a
human-like nose but the face was covered with
hair. She said the area is hilly and heavily forest-
ed, and that there are underground caverns
nearby. She was of the opinion the BF get
around underground.
January 21, 2007 Volume 2 Number 9
It has come to my attention (via Cryptomundo)
that Stanford University recently offered a
course concerning cryptozoology. The course
was within the “Program in History and
Philosophy of Science and Technology.”
The following is taken from Stanford’s
website, introducing the “one-time” course...
Dinosaurs, Sea Serpents, and
Abominable Snowmen: Unknown
Animals in Modern History
HIST 40S
Instructor: Peder Roberts
Course Description:
Why does the Loch Ness Monster have a
scientific name despite generally being
considered not to exist? How did Native
Americans think about fossils, and how did
this knowledge relate to European paleontol-
ogy? Why do ‘living fossils’ attract so much
attention? Who exactly determines the ‘right’
way to study – or even just represent – the
sasquatch or the yeti?
The central goal of this course is to examine
how the way people think about these and
other animals is related to their historical
context. Our case studies include dinosaurs,
mastodons, the Gloucester Sea Serpent, the
yeti, the mountain gorilla, lake monsters, and
the Flores ‘hobbit people’. We will use a
variety of sources including media reports,
photographs, movies, personal recollections,
historical analyses, scientific papers and
documents, novels, and comic books.
Course Aims
Students will:
• Consider how scientific evidence can inform
historical research, and vice versa.
• Learn to work with a range of primary
sources, not limited to written texts.
• Explore the relationship between popular
1
culture and scientific knowledge.
• Analyze how and why individuals claim
expertise or privileged knowledge.
• Examine the relationship between knowledge
claims and the intellectual and cultural context
within which they are made.
Well, at least they’re making some progress;
my experience at Stanford 40 years ago was
that they wouldn’t even talk about such things.
Recent acquisitions for the Reference Library:
Little People and a Lost World, Linda Golden-
berg, Twenty-First Century Books, 2007
Searching the Abyss: A Beginners Guide to
Cryptozoological Investigation, Mark A.
Mihalko, Publish America, 2005
Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozool-
ogy, 2 Volume Set, George Eberhart, ABC-
CLIO, 2002
On the Trail of the Saucer Spies: Ufos and
Government Surveillance, Nick Redfern,
Anomalist Books, 2006
Scream of the Sasquatch DVD, 2006
UFOs and the National Security State:
Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973, Richard
M. Dolan, Hampton Roads Publishing, 2002
Searching For Ropens - Living Pterosaurs in
Papua New Guinea, Jonathan Whitcomb,
BookShelf Press, 2006
Tales of the Cryptids: Mysterious Creatures
That May or May Not Exist, Kelly Milner
Halls, Darby Creek Publishing, 2006
The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings,
John Keel, Tor Books, 1970
Roadside Americana: Landmark Tourist
Attractions, Eric Peterson, Publications
International, 2005
Weird California, Greg Bishop, Joe Oesterle
and Mike Marinacci, Sterling Publishing, 2006
---Michael Rugg
 F I E L D W O R K
Happy New Year!
Let’s Take a Walk in the
Forest of Nisene Marks
by Tom Yamarone
It’s always a wonderful time of year –
even the weather has been nice! The new
year brings a new beginning to just about
everything. It seems that way to me. The
only drawback I can see is that we’re still
several months away from the right
conditions to be getting out in the woods
on a consistent basis. For now, it’s still the
“off season” – the time of day hikes and
scouring the home library (or bigfoot
museum) shelves for something interesting
to bide our time.
The on-line investigations have been
busier than usual this Winter. I have been
following-up on several reports but the
best one is from years ago. The current
ones turned out to be nothing more than
bored individuals submitting a series of
seemingly believable reports from a little
town in northern California. It still took up
a chunk of time just before Christmas, but
fortunately, didn’t become a problem.
I can tell you about a great local area to
explore. On a frigid morning in mid-
December, I had the opportunity to take a
friend and spend a few hours out in the
Forest of Nisene Marks – a state park just
south of the bigfoot museum. I chose this
location because a report came into the
BFRO from a man who had a sighting
here in April 1958.
2
Back then the area was logging company
land that had been logged in the 1920’s
and 1930’s. He and his friends would ride
their bikes on the logging roads, hike and
camp in the area. Today, most of the same
area is preserved much as it was in the
state park.
We were looking for the logging road he
was on and it’s still there today as a fire
road – specifically Hinkley Creek fire
road. On the map, it begins off of Olive
Springs Road just up from Soquel, CA.
We were fortunate to come upon two local
residents taking a Sunday morning walk –
otherwise we might never have found it.
They directed us to a gated dirt road with
a posted “no trespassing” sign care of a
local lumber company. They said it was
OK to access the state park via this road,
so we did. We had to cross one substantial
creek and three smaller ones in the first ¼
mile and were soon climbing up a steep
grade above Hinkley Creek.
Another chance encounter with a local
woman walking her dogs allowed us to ask
about the road and what lay ahead. She
assured us we were on the right path and
that we would soon come to a sign indicat-
ing we were entering the state park. We
proceeded along this road for another mile
or so and soon reached the first ridge line.
The area is beautiful and heavily wooded
with 2nd growth redwoods and we had
barely penetrated the expanse that is now
the Forest of Nisene Marks. There are still
two residences within this area of the park
and they use the road we were on to come
and go from their homes. We could smell
the smoke from their wood burning stove
but never actually saw the residences.
It’s not hard to imagine that this area could
still be habitat for bigfoot creatures. I am
of the opinion that there is ample, untram-
meled forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains
for this to be a distinct possibility and the
reports that Mike has received at the
museum bears this out. There is also a
report on the BFRO database from just
south of the state park boundary from
November 2004. Yes, the Forest of Nisene
Marks is an expansive area with many
remote places not explored on a consistent
basis to this day.
The report I took in December involves two
14 year old boys who pushed their bicycles
up this very dirt road on that April day in
1958 and coasted back down. It was while
they were coasting down the logging road
that the witness slowed his bike at a large
mud puddle so as to not splash through it.
He glanced to his right to see a large, dark
figure leaning out from behind a redwood
tree alongside the road. As his friend
approached from behind him, and he
looked in that direction, it moved back
behind the tree and jumped down the steep
slope off the road. They both stopped and
heard it running down a slope that was so
steep that had they considered doing the
same, they would have been sliding down on
their behinds. He reported that they listened
to it running down towards Hinkley Creek
for quite a while – more than a minute at his
estimation. He said they were more surprised
than scared. The creature never intimidated
them and it wasn’t anything that they were
aware of – like the black bears they knew
were up here.
Left: Little waterfall fern gully
Top center: Forest hillside, Nisene Marks
Bottom center: Steep hillside off Hinkley Creek Fire Rd
Right: Hillside of fire road Nisene Marks
3
No, they weren’t scared of what they
couldn’t figure out. It was a mystery and
remained so for many years. So were all the
other strange occurrences that they would
experience in this forest – mostly wood-
on-wood knocking, whistles and some
strange screams. Then in the early 1960s
this young man was riding motorcycles on
these roads and had a very alarming
encounter. As they sat on their bikes
watching the sunset from Sandy Point
Overlook, something started screaming
from down below them. A blood curdling
scream and roar that was unbelievably loud.
Over the next ten minutes, the creature
sounded off two more times – the last one
emanating from just below their vantage
point. The young men started up their
motorcycles and fled the other direction
exiting the hills near the current state park
entrance.
The area that we hiked in last month is just
as he described it. Very steep slopes drop
down from this road into the Hinkley Creek
watershed. And, as I mentioned earlier, this
is just one very small portion of the
protected parkland. We hope to spend more
time this year exploring the trails of Nisene
Marks state park by day and, hopefully,
arranging to camp out in the few backcoun-
try, walk-in camp sites that are available
here. We’ll keep you posted as to what we
plan and what we may find.
There are many more areas just like this in
the Santa Cruz Mountains. We would
encourage anyone interested in looking for
bigfoot to come and explore them. The
back country of Big Basin Redwoods,
Portola and Butano state parks offer many
miles of isolated forest to enjoy and
investigate for possible bigfoot activity. Let
us know if you are planning on doing so
and maybe we can join you.
PALEOANTHROPOLOGY
Oldest Australopithecine
Child Remains Discovered
By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer
NEW YORK - In a discovery sure to fuel an
old debate about our evolutionary history,
scientists have found a remarkably complete
skeleton of a 3-year-old female from the
ape-man species represented by "Lucy."
The remains found in Africa are 3.3 million
years old, making this the oldest known
skeleton of such a youthful human ancestor.
"It's a pretty unbelievable discovery... It's
sensational," said Will Harcourt-Smith, a
researcher at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York who wasn't involved in
the find. "It provides you with a wealth of
information." For one thing, it gives new
evidence for a contentious feud about whether
this species, which walked upright, also
climbed and moved through trees easily.
The species is Australopithecus afarensis,
which lived in Africa between about 4 million
and 3 million years ago. The most famous
afarensis is Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in
1974, a creature that lived about 100,000 years
after the newfound specimen.The new find was
reported in a recent issue of the journal Nature
by Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany; Fred Spoor, professor of
evolutionary anatomy at University College
London, and others.
The skeleton was discovered in 2000 in
northeastern Ethiopia. Scientists have spent six
painstaking years removing the bones from Bernard Wood of George Washington Univer-
sandstone, and the job will take years more to sity, who didn't participate in the discovery, said
complete. Judging by how well it was pre- in an interview that the fossil provides strong
served, the skeleton may have come from evidence of climbing ability. But he also agreed
a body that was quickly buried by sediment in that it won't settle the debate among scientists,
a flood, the researchers said."It's a once-in-a- which he said "makes the Middle East look like
lifetime find," said Spoor.The skeleton has a picnic." Overall, he wrote in a Nature
been nicknamed "Selam," which means commentary, the discovery provides "a veritable
"peace" in several Ethiopian languages. mine of information about a crucial stage in
human evolutionary history."
Most scientists believe afarensis stood upright
and walked on two feet, but they argue about The fossil revealed just the second hyoid bone to
whether it had ape-like agility in trees.That be recovered from any human ancestor. This tiny
climbing ability would require anatomical bone, which attaches to the tongue muscles, is
equipment like long arms, and afarensis had very chimp-like in the new specimen, Spoor
arms that dangled down to just above the said. While that doesn't directly reveal anything
knees. The question is whether such features about language, it does suggest that whatever
indicate climbing ability or just evolutionary sounds the creature made "would appeal more to
baggage. The loss of that ability would suggest a chimpanzee mother than a human mother,"
crossing a threshold toward a more human Spoor said.
existence.
The fossil find includes the complete skull,
including an impression of the brain and the
lower jaw, all the vertebrae from the neck to
just below the torso, all the ribs, both shoulder
blades and both collarbones, the right elbow and
part of a hand, both knees and much of both shin
and thigh bones. One foot is almost complete,
providing the first time scientists have found an
afarensis foot with the bones
still positioned as they were in life, Spoor said.
The work was funded by the National
Geographic Society, the Institute of Human
Spoor said so far, analysis of the new fossil Origins at Arizona State University, the Leakey
hasn't settled the argument but does seem to Foundation and the Planck Institute.
indicate some climbing ability.While the lower
body is very human-like, he said, the upper
body is ape-like:
• The shoulder blades resemble those of a
gorilla rather than a modern human.
• The neck seems short and thick like a great
ape's, rather than the more slender version
humans have to keep the head stable while
running.
• The organ of balance in the inner ear is more
ape-like than human.
• The fingers are very curved, which could
indicate climbing ability, "but I'm cautious
about that," Spoor said. Curved fingers
have been noted for afarensis before, but their
significance is in dispute.
A big question is what the foot bones will
show when their sandstone casing is removed,
he said. Will there be a grasping big toe like
the opposable thumb of a human hand? Such a
chimp-like feature would argue for climbing
ability, he said. Yet, to resolve the debate, If you are reading this and don’t have a
scientists may have to find a way to inspect subscription yet, what are you waiting for?
vanishingly small details of such old bones, to
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get clues to how those bones were used in life, make check payable to CapriTaurus
he said.