Bigfoot on campus

An Idaho State University professor takes a scholarly approach to the legend of Sasquatch

BY SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
LOS ANGELES TIMES

December 10, 2006

POCATELLO, Idaho - At a glance, Professor D. Jeffrey Meldrum would seem to be a star on the Idaho State University campus here.

A popular instructor, Meldrum has written or edited five books, written dozens of articles in academic journals, and ranged across the American West and Canada for his field research. Primatologist Jane Goodall wrote a blurb for his latest book, which she said "brings a much-needed level of scientific analysis" to a raging debate.

The problem is the subject of the debate: Bigfoot.

Concerned scholars unite

Meldrum is in pursuit of the legendary ape-man also known as Sasquatch.

Some of his colleagues are not amused. They liken his research to a hunt for Santa Claus, and 20 of them signed a letter earlier this year expressing worry that Idaho State "may be perceived as a university that endorses fringe science over fundamental scientific perspectives that have withstood critical inquiry."

Or, in the words of physics professor Douglas Wells: "One could do deep-ocean research for SpongeBob SquarePants. That doesn't make it science."

Meldrum, 48, who earned his doctorate from Stony Brook University, declines to say whether he believes Sasquatch exists, but adds that based on the evidence he's gathered in the past decade, he thinks the likely answer is yes.

"I believe it would be more incredible to dismiss all the assertions about Bigfoot as a series of hoaxes and ruses," he says with academic precision, "than it would be to at least entertain the possibility that an unrecognized large primate exists in North America."

Serious look at a legend

The controversy surrounding Meldrum's work, "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science," is testimony to the enduring fascination with Sasquatch, as the Salish Indians called the ape man; or Bigfoot, the term the Humboldt Times in Eureka, Calif., coined in an August 1958 article about a local logging crew's purported discovery of giant footprints.

But although there have been plenty of books on the subject, Meldrum's is one of the few that could put its author in the middle of an academic fracas. As the book's overleaf puts it, he is "willing to stake his reputation on an objective look at the facts."

Skeptics say it is absurd to think that a huge ape roams the American wilderness. No carcass has ever turned up, and many footprint "discoveries" over the years have been correctly dismissed as hoaxes, Meldrum concedes in his book.

Ray Wallace, a force behind the 1958 footprint discovery and a source of Bigfoot photos over the years, famously confessed on his deathbed four years ago that the hulking creature once captured on film was really his wife dressed in a gorilla suit.

On the other hand, no one has ever proved that Bigfoot doesn't exist.

Into this void comes the 297-page book, an entertaining compendium of Bigfootology.

A chart compares estimated physical dimensions of one purported Sasquatch with Arnold Schwarzenegger "at the peak of his bodybuilding career." The California governor comes off as a pip-squeak next to the 7-foot-4, 700-pound creature.

Obsession versus career

Meldrum's small office is crammed with plaster casts he has collected in the wilds of strange footprints and handprints, even a buttocks print that he firmly says do not belong to any known mammal.

The professor says he has heard the strange wailings that some attribute to Bigfoot, and once he was in a cabin in Ontario when a big rock got thrown against an outside wall. Bigfoot, he presumes.

Meldrum says most of his research has been financed with private donations - about $80,000 so far, mostly from a Texas oilman who believes he may have encountered Bigfoot on a hunting trip.

The professor's supporters point out that his Bigfoot work doesn't interfere with what he does all day, which is teach human anatomy.

"I had heard he was way into Sasquatch, but he hasn't even mentioned it in our course," says Heather Lien, 29, a graduate student in physical therapy.

Meldrum's interest in the topic dates to an itinerant childhood in the prime Bigfoot-sighting terrain of Utah, Oregon, Idaho and eastern Washington, where his father was a produce merchandiser.

"I spent a lot of time in the woods," Meldrum recalls.

When he was 13, his parents gave him a book called "Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life," which he keeps in his office. His interest in the creature, and the mystery and romance of the search for it, grew so profound that one friend wrote in his 1976 Idaho high school yearbook, "Good luck hunting for Bigfoot."

His specialty is the evolutionary adaptation of bipedalism, or walking on two legs. (One of the books he edited is called "From Biped to Strider: The Emergence of Human Walking, Running and Resource Transport") Over the years, Meldrum says, he and others have come across large prints that cannot be attributed to known animals.

Meldrum says many of the prints would be extremely difficult to forge. The "flat flexible feet," up to about a size 28, quintuple-E-wide shoe, are less rigid and arched than a human foot.

"All in all," he argues in the book, "this would be an efficient strategy for a giant terrestrial bipedal ape."