Footprints, casts and the forgery problem

Tracks are the largest body of physical evidence in this subject and the least load-bearing. Scientific American, profiling Jeff Meldrum in December 2007, reported that his laboratory at Idaho State University "houses more than 200 casts relating to Bigfoot" DOCUMENTED. Talking to the Seattle Times five years earlier, he had put the number he considered anatomically genuine far lower, at 40 to 50. Grover Krantz, in 1972, wrote that he had "examined casts made from the footprints of 17 different individuals and photographs of tracks and casts of another 50."

Those are real objects on real shelves. They establish that many large foot-shaped impressions have been pressed into soil and snow and copied in plaster. Everything past that is inference.

What a cast can and cannot show

A cast preserves the shape of a hole, not the object that made it. It cannot show weight, because depth depends on soil moisture, grain size and compaction as much as on load. It cannot show the maker was alive, because a rigid form pressed into mud leaves the same outline as a foot. It cannot show the maker was walking, because a track can be dug out and shaped by hand rather than compressed by stepping.

Shape does carry information. Krantz argued from leverage mechanics that a bipedal hominid of "500 to 1,000 pounds" would need "greatly enlarged ankle bones, especially the heel, very short metatarsals, and a more nearly equal set of toes," plus a "double ball at the base of the big toe," and reported finding those features ALLEGED. That is an argument about internal consistency, only as good as the assumption that no forger could reason the same way.

1958: Jerry Crew and a word

In August 1958, Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator working for Wallace Construction on a logging road along Bluff Creek in Humboldt County, California, found large human-shaped prints around his machine. An Associated Press story in the Fresno Bee of October 8, 1958 reported that Crew "last week brought out a plaster cast of a clear footprint," and that the taxidermist Bob Titmus had furnished the plaster. Two taxidermists who inspected the site described the clearest print as "16 inches long, five inches across at the heel and seven inches across at the ball of the foot" DOCUMENTED. A Humboldt Times correspondent, Betty Allen, had already walked the road and counted "38 perfect tracks at least 16 inches long and 7 inches wide."

The Humboldt Times in Eureka ran a front-page story and, as the Seattle Times put it in 2002, "coined the term 'Bigfoot.'" Wire copy carried the word into general use within weeks; the AP account of a sighting by two of the road crew ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on October 16, 1958 under the headline "We Saw the Thing With 16-Inch Feet." Popular retellings credit a named columnist on a specific October date. I could not confirm either from a source I could open, and Allen's dispatch, which the reprint dates to September, already uses the word, so treat that origin story as unverified.

The cast exists. The animal does not follow from it.

Ray Wallace, and the limits of the 2002 claim

Ray L. Wallace (1918 to 2002) co-owned the company that held that road contract. He died of heart failure on November 26, 2002 in a Centralia, Washington nursing facility, aged 84. Nine days later the Seattle Times ran an obituary by Bob Young in which his son Michael said, "Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died." A nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, said he held the alder-wood carvings; family members said Ray had asked a friend to carve the 16-inch feet, which he and his brother Wilbur strapped on ALLEGED. A great-nephew, Todd McKinley, told the Blue Mountain Eagle three weeks later that the family's track-making "spanned 20, 30 years."

The popular version is that Bigfoot was explained in 2002. It was not.

What the claim supports: the contractor on the founding job owned carved feet, and his family says he used them there. That alone makes the 1958 series unusable as evidence.

What it does not support: the claim is posthumous and secondhand, and no analysis matching the carvings to Crew's cast has been published. John Green, a newspaperman who investigated in 1958, wrote that the family "produced no bogus feet that bore any" resemblance to the Bluff Creek road tracks, and that the one pair resembling casts from the area were "crude and inaccurate copies" CONTESTED. Green added that Wallace was based at Willow Creek, hours away, and that Wallace's friend Ed Schillinger "recalls that he was usually away somewhere trying to drum up future contracts." Green did not claim the tracks were real. His words: "I am not saying it can be proved that those tracks were not faked, or that Ray Wallace could not have been involved." Meldrum's published reply was that "to suggest all these are explained by simple carved feet strapped to boots just doesn't wash."

Nothing in the Wallace claim reaches Bossburg in 1969 or the Blue Mountains in 1982.

Rant Mullins

A second admission gets folded into the first. Rant Mullins, a retired logger of Toledo, Washington, then 86, told Michael Dennett in 1982 that while working for the Forest Service in 1930 he had cut "a pair of 9 inch by 17 inch 'feet' with a hatchet and a jack-knife from a piece of alder wood," that a companion, Bill Lambert, walked them around huckleberry pickers' cars at the base of Mount St. Helens, and that he made eight sets in all HOAX. Mullins also said he supplied a 16-inch pair to Ray Wallace, his Toledo neighbor, in 1969. That last part is his own uncorroborated account, dated eleven years after Crew's cast, so it cannot reach 1958.

Bossburg, 1969: the strongest argument on the other side

On November 24, 1969, Joe Rhodes, a butcher from nearby Colville, found large prints in soft soil by the Bossburg community garbage dump in Stevens County, Washington. On Saturday, December 13, René Dahinden, Ivan Marx and a local man named Jim Hopkins found a fresh trackway in snow along Roosevelt Lake. Casts were taken, and polyurethane replicas of Bossburg cast D are sold to collectors today at $69 against a list price of $90 DOCUMENTED.

Every specific about that trackway traces to Dahinden's own account, dictated to Don Hunter for their 1975 book Sasquatch ALLEGED. By it, the left print measured 17.5 inches long, 6.5 across the ball, 5.5 across the heel; the right was 16.5 long, 7 across the ball, 5.5 at the heel, with the third toe twisted over or missing, the little toe out at a sharp angle, and two lumps along the outer edge. A careful count gave 1,089 clearly definable prints. The trail crossed a railroad and a highway, and something stepped over a forty-three-inch, five-strand wire fence.

This is the strongest pro-track argument on record, because it asks the forger to know pathology. John Napier examined casts and photographs, identified the right foot as talipes equinovarus, club foot, and concluded from the way the heels registered that the cause was probably an early childhood injury. He wrote: "It is difficult to conceive of a hoaxer so subtle, so knowledgeable, and so sick, who would deliberately fake a footprint of this nature. I suppose it is possible, but it is so unlikely that I am prepared to discount it."

Krantz said these casts turned him. In a 1992 interview he described casting "a pair of footprints I saw in the wild," one obviously crippled, and concluded that a forger able to plan that "had to outclass me in those areas, and I don't think anyone outclasses me in those areas, at least not since Leonardo daVinci. So I say such a person is impossible, therefore the tracks are real."

Three problems sit under it. The diagnosis is not agreed: Napier said club foot, while Krantz in Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (1999) called the same deformity metatarsus adductus, or skew foot CONTESTED. An argument resting on a forger knowing one pathology weakens when qualified readers cannot agree which pathology it is. The method has been questioned too: Dennis Trune, an anatomist at Oregon Health Sciences University, told Dennett that Krantz "knows his anatomy" but that "I find it difficult to believe that one can tell the location of the ankle (tibio-talus) joint, which is on the top of the foot, from imprints of the bottom of the foot." And Dahinden distrusted the location from the start. It was, he wrote, "the obvious place for a hoaxer to plant his work."

Ivan Marx

Marx was central at Bossburg, and his credibility collapsed. In October 1970 he produced roughly thirty seconds of 16mm footage of what he said was the crippled creature, filmed, he said, in hills six miles northeast of Bossburg. Peter Byrne hired him in early 1971 and guaranteed $25,000 for the film subject to authentication. Don Byington's young son Stephen recognized the location and led the group to it: the edge of the forest at the northern boundary of the Byington ranch, not the hills. Rocks, dead branches, frozen cow droppings and a piece of old tractor metal matched the film frames. So did a branch the film subject walks under without stooping, which Byrne wrote "measured six feet from the ground; to walk under it, without stooping, the subject of the footage could only have been a maximum of five feet eleven inches in height." Marx had claimed eight feet. Norm Davis then noticed that shadows fell at different angles in the movie frames and in the stills, so the two could not have been shot seconds apart as Marx said. Marx left town overnight, and Byrne's attorneys opened the sealed canister holding the master to find about a hundred cut pieces of old black-and-white Mickey Mouse footage HOAX.

Paul Freeman and the Forest Service, 1982

Leon Paul Freeman (1943 to 2003), a Forest Service watershed patrolman, said he met a reddish-brown creature nearly eight feet tall near Walla Walla, Washington on June 10, 1982, at sixty yards ALLEGED. Tracks followed in the Mill Creek watershed, and about a week later at Elk Wallow, which Krantz dates to June 17 and Matt Crowley to June 16.

Krantz built his strongest case on the Elk Wallow casts, arguing that they carried friction ridge skin from a higher primate that was neither ape nor human. In Cryptozoology in 1983 he reported ridges "spaced about 1/2 mm apart" and listed his examiners as "thirty police fingerprint workers, mostly from the Western states, twelve of whom might be considered experts. Also included are six physical anthropologists with expertise in this area, as well as four pathologists and two zoologists." Twelve is the number that matters, and it is the one usually dropped when the list gets repeated.

The Forest Service brought in Rodney L. Johnson, a wildlife biologist, and Joel Hardin, a Border Patrol tracker. Both concluded the tracks were fake, and Dennett later reported the agency withheld the finding from the public. Johnson noted an absence of organic matter in the track bottoms. Dahinden went to Walla Walla in 1983, interviewed Krantz, Freeman, Forest Service officials and Hardin, and told a reporter he wrote the prints off "100 per cent" for three reasons: pine needles had been brushed away from inside the tracks; forestry staff sank deeper into the mud than the alleged Sasquatch had; and a dog and horses brought to the area showed no reaction to any smell. Krantz said he had not talked to Hardin because he found inaccuracies in the tracker's report, and insisted the prints were genuine CONTESTED.

On October 29, 1987, ABC's Good Morning America ran a skeptical segment in which Freeman said that before the 1982 Mill Creek discovery he had faked Bigfoot tracks DOCUMENTED.

Indian Springs, 1987

In November 1987, Dahinden was with Freeman near the junction of Indian Springs Road and Squaw Springs Road when Freeman found another set of prints. Dahinden's account, published by Dennett, is the closest thing on record to a track being caught in the act ALLEGED:

I took off my shoes and socks and walked around to see what type of impression I might make. I didn't leave much of a track, but when I looked closely I could see the imprint of my dermal ridges. Yet the Bigfoot tracks did not show any dermal ridges! ... The disturbed soil was from the top lip of the footprint impression between the second and third toe. Looking closer I saw a small piece of dirt with a skin pattern. It is my view that this skin pattern was made by someone patting down the dirt before pushing more dirt on top.

Dahinden photographed the tracks and Freeman cast them. Only later, going through the photographs, did Dahinden notice that a run of four consecutive prints was left, right, left, and left.

The midtarsal break

Meldrum's central claim is that some casts record a flat, flexible foot bending across the midfoot, leaving a pressure ridge where a human arch would leave nothing. In 2007 he named the tracks as an ichnotaxon, Anthropoidipes ameriborealis, in a paper called "Ichnotaxonomy of giant hominoid tracks in North America." The genus name is registered: GBIF's backbone taxonomy carries "Anthropoidipes Meldrum, 2007" and flags its status as DOUBTFUL CONTESTED. An ichnotaxon is by design a name for a trace, not for an animal.

The counter is that a flexible midfoot is not exclusive to non-humans. Jeremy DeSilva and colleagues opened their 2015 paper by noting that the midtarsal break "was once treated as a dichotomous, non-overlapping trait present in the foot of non-human primates and absent in humans." DeSilva and Simone Gill had reported in 2013 that 32 of 398 adults tested, about 8 percent, showed lateral midfoot pressure above 200 kPa and the midfoot dorsiflexion characteristic of a midtarsal break, and that those people "had on average a significantly flatter foot than those without," with more pronation. The 2015 study, 671 adults and children, found that "a low arch and pronation of the foot explain 40% of variation in midfoot peak plantar pressure" DOCUMENTED.

None of those papers mentions Bigfoot and none was written as a rebuttal. The consequence is still direct: a heavy, flat-footed, pronating human can leave a midfoot pressure ridge, so the ridge alone cannot exclude a human maker. David Daegling's objection is methodological: "Even if you have a million pieces of evidence, if all the evidence is inconclusive, you can't count it all up to make something conclusive." Green's published reply is that Daegling "believes that all the footprints which have been preserved in film and plaster can readily be reproduced using strapped-on carved wooden feet, yet he makes no attempt to see if it can actually be done."

Reading a trackway

Single prints are weak. Trackways carry more, and the measures are cheap: step length, heel to heel between successive opposite feet; stride length, the same foot to the same foot; straddle, the lateral spread either side of the line of travel; and step angle, each foot's long axis relative to the direction of travel. They constrain a walker: step length should shorten uphill, straddle should widen on a side slope, and feet should slip on a steep gradient.

Contemporaneous 1958 numbers survive. Al Corbett told the AP that measuring along more than sixty feet of trail gave an average stride of 50 inches, against 30 inches for a six-foot-four man with long legs. Betty Allen recorded steps "of sometimes 60 inches, 52 inches or the one short step over a small mound of dirt, which was 40 inches."

Substrate, and why soft ground lies

Depth is not weight. The clearest published test is Matt Crowley's. He built a wooden "stomper," jumped on it in his front yard, then repeated the test in wet soil in an estuary of the Duwamish River in South Seattle. His finding: "Wet or dry soil, organic matter is squished into the bottom of tracks made by compressive events." Several Freeman tracks lack that. Crowley's explanation is excavation rather than compression: "If soil is excavated, any organic matter on the surface will be removed. The resulting track will not have organic matter pressed into the bottom of the track." Excavation is also, he notes, "a much easier way to create impressive depth than pure compression." That is Johnson's 1982 observation approached from the other end.

How easy this is

The most instructive case is the smallest one.

In May 1990 a construction worker sent Krantz a cast from southern Indiana, since called the Bloomington track, almost 14 inches long. Krantz published it in Big Footprints (1992), writing that Bob Titmus "decided it had all the signs of a legitimate imprint from a living foot," that at the San Diego Police Department "Ed Palma and his colleagues pronounced the several patches of ridge detail as consistent with a real primate foot of that size," that "they all agreed that no human foot could have made that imprint," and that it showed "the two sasquatch traits that I have never revealed." Dennett quotes him saying the track "passed all my criteria." The sender, Krantz wrote, had moved away and "cannot be reached."

Dennett spent eight months finding him and reached him by phone on August 29, 1993. J. W. Parker said he had made the print and the cast himself HOAX. "It took about twenty minutes to form the print in the mud." The dermal ridges came from his own foot and hands, placed where the "least amount of wear or abrasion would occur." Guessing at the secret traits, he added toenails and scars. He made "the ball of the foot appear deeper near the inside of the foot to simulate the weight-bearing area during a light push-off," and at the last minute pressed in the shell of an American black walnut where the fifth toe would have been.

Titmus told Dennett the quotes attributed to him were probably literally true, but that no conclusion of authenticity could be drawn from one footprint, that he did not claim to be an expert, and that he was "a little suspicious of the appearance of the toes." Palma could not remember that particular imprint, and added, "I wouldn't say I can't be fooled."

Twenty minutes of amateur work in mud passed the leading advocate's published and private tests DEBUNKED. That is the condition of the track record.

Major cast series

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Sources

Everything listed is a source I opened directly.

• Michael R. Dennett, "Bigfoot Evidence: Are These Tracks Real?" Skeptical Inquirer, 1994. Bloomington, Parker, Indian Springs, Titmus, Palma, Trune. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/skeptical.htm
• Michael R. Dennett, "Bigfoot Jokester Reveals Punch Line, Finally," Skeptical Inquirer 7(1), Fall 1982, 8–9. Rant Mullins. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/mullens.htm
• Michael R. Dennett, obituary of Paul Freeman, Skeptical Briefs, 2003. Forest Service investigation; the October 29, 1987 Good Morning America segment. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/dennett03.htm
• Matt Crowley, "Paul Freeman's Magic Bigfoot Track," Skeptical Inquirer online, September 12, 2025. https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/paul-freemans-magic-bigfoot-track/
• Bob Young, "Lovable Trickster Created a Monster with Bigfoot Hoax," The Seattle Times, December 5, 2002. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20021205&slug=raywallaceobit05m
• "Bigfoot Feat: Remarkable Hoax Looms Large in Grant County Family's History," Blue Mountain Eagle, December 24, 2002. https://bluemountaineagle.com/2002/12/24/bigfoot-feat-remarkable-hoax-looms-large-in-grant-county-familys-history/
• John Green, "Bigfoot Did Not Die," on the 2002 Wallace coverage. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/wallace_flap.htm
• John Green, review of David J. Daegling, Bigfoot Exposed (AltaMira Press, 2004), The Relict Hominoid Inquiry 1 (2012): 16–22. https://www.isu.edu/media/libraries/rhi/book-reviews/BF-Exposed.pdf
• Peter Byrne, "The Ivan Marx Footage," 2003. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/hoaxes/marx_footage.htm
• "The Bossburg, Washington (Cripple) Tracks," reproducing Don Hunter and René Dahinden, Sasquatch (1975), with a caption citing Krantz, Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (1999), 298–299. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/bossburg.htm
• Virginia Story, "Sasquatch Tracks Are Sighted in Bossburg in Stevens County on November 24, 1969," HistoryLink.org Essay 7938, October 31, 2006. Source of the Napier quotation. https://historylink.org/File/7938
• Grover S. Krantz, "Anatomy of the Sasquatch Foot," Northwest Anthropological Research Notes 6(1), Spring 1972. https://www.woodape.org/index.php/anatomy-of-the-sasquatch-foot/
• Grover S. Krantz, "Anatomy and Dermatoglyphics of Three Sasquatch Footprints," Cryptozoology 2 (1983): 53–81. https://www.woodape.org/index.php/anatomy-and-dermatoglyphics-of-three-sasquatch-footprints/
• Betty Allen, Humboldt Times dispatches, 1958. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/humboldt_times1958.htm
• "Wild Indian Gets Credit for Gigantic Footprints," Associated Press, The Fresno Bee, October 8, 1958. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/1958.htm
• "We Saw the Thing With 16-Inch Feet," Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1958. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/road-crew-see-BF.htm
• "Alleged Sasquatch Prints Are Fakes, Says Rene Dahinden," The Sun (Vancouver), August 4, 1983. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/paul-freeman-tracks.htm
• David Foster, "Search For Sasquatch Is All Consuming Passion," Associated Press, The Columbian, March 3, 1989. Source for the June 10, 1982 date. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/wallawalla.htm
• Marguerite Holloway, "Bigfoot Anatomy," Scientific American, December 1, 2007. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bigfoot-anatomy/
• Jeremy M. DeSilva, "Revisiting the 'Midtarsal Break,'" American Journal of Physical Anthropology 141(2) (2010): 245–258. DOI 10.1002/ajpa.21140
• J. M. DeSilva and S. V. Gill, "Brief Communication: A Midtarsal (Midfoot) Break in the Human Foot," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 151(3) (2013): 495–499. DOI 10.1002/ajpa.22287
• J. M. DeSilva, R. Bonne-Annee, Z. Swanson, C. M. Gill, M. Sobel, J. Uy and S. V. Gill, "Midtarsal Break Variation in Modern Humans," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 156(4) (2015): 543–552. https://www.bu.edu/motordevlab/files/2015/01/ajpa22699.pdf
• GBIF backbone taxonomy record for Anthropoidipes Meldrum, 2007. https://api.gbif.org/v1/species/search?q=Anthropoidipes
• BigfootCasts.com, "1969 Bossburg Bigfoot 'Cripple Foot' cast D." https://bigfootcasts.com/products/1969-bossburg-bigfoot-cripple-foot-cast-d

Not consulted directly. John Napier's Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (1972) is quoted here at second hand, through HistoryLink. Claims commonly sourced to that book, including a snow-melting experiment at Val d'Isère, a figure near 800 pounds per square foot for a mechanical stamp, and the Colville hoaxer Ray Pickens, are left out because I could not open the book or any source quoting it on those points. Meldrum's 2004 Journal of Scientific Exploration paper and his 2007 ichnotaxonomy paper are cited from secondary evidence only; I could not retrieve either text.