I picked up the January issue of Field and Stream today and there was this article on Bigfoot. Frankly I think the fingerprint experts are wrong or the footprints were indeed faked by the same person. That makes a hell of a lot more sense than a large primate roaming about the Walla Walla area.
Print Pro Says Bigfoot May Exist
Eerily similar tracks are found miles--and years--apart.
Police officer Jimmy Chilcutt of Conroe, Texas, and Dr. Jeff Meldrum, and anatomy and anthropology professor at Idaho State University, share a passion: They examine the prints left by hands and feet to reveal the identity of unseen visitors. But while the the testimony of the fingerprint expert Chilcutt can prove a person guilty in a court of law, Meldrum's assertion that certain foot prints constitute evidence of the legendary Bigfoot's existence raises eyebrows of scientist colleagues.
Meldrum hopes some skeptics will change their minds after hearing what Chilcutt has to say about the footprint castings Meldrum has collected from the Pacific Northwest.
"The ridge detail (fingerprint pattern) on the casts is neither man nor ape," says Chilcutt. "Is it possible to have faked it? Sure. But (the faker) would have had to have an intimate knowledge of primate footprints, and that didn't exist at the time the castings were made."
Chilcutt initiated the study of primate fingerprints in the mid-1990s, working on a hunch that the identifying ridge patterns (the arches, loops, and whorls made by folds in the skin) would someday help forensic specialists catch criminals. He explains that it would be helpful if criminologists could identify the race of a person by his fingerprints. But research in that direction has been inconclusive, Chilcutt believes, because the races have interbred so much. Primate, however, have undiluted gene pools. To date, Chilcutt has more than 1,000 fingerprints of lemurs, monkeys, and apes in his computer data bank.
When he heard about the Bigfoot castings in Meldrum's laboratory, he was intrigued but skeptical. "What I do is catch bad guys in Conroe, Texas," Chilcutt says. "I didn't care one way or the other (if Bigfoot existed)."
But a casting made near Walla Walla, Washington, in 1984 piqued his interest. Not only did the ridge pattern run vertically along the edges of the foot, then angle across underneath the toes--a pattern different from humans and apes, which have ridges running horizontally and at an angle across the foot pad, respectively--but the imprints showed splits in the feet where the ridges did not realign perfectly when the skin had healed. Chilcutt got a second jolt when he found a northern California casting made in 1967. The pattern was similar to that on the Walla Walla casting, Although made from a smaller animal. For them to be fake, Chilcutt believes the same person would have had to fabricate both foot prints, 17 years and several hundred miles apart. That seemed unlikely to Chilcutt, especially after he tried to duplicate the casting and failed.
The fingerprint expert has become a believer.
"I can assure you," he says, 'there's an animal up in the Pacific North west that we have never seen."