Michele Bigley (Special to the Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2011)
Reports of giant ogres date back thousands of years. Who's hiding the hominid* skeletons and cave evidence? (popfi.com)
HAPPY CAMP, California - I knew that lots of honest folks did believe that
Bigfoot (Sasquatch or as crypto-zoologists call him,
Gigantopithecus) not only exists but also thrives in Klamath River country between the Humboldt County coast and the Shasta Cascade.
That was enough to pique my curiosity. In Willow Creek, we headed to the China Flat Museum to meet the curator of its Bigfoot exhibit, Al Hodgson.
Now 87, Hodgson carries his adoration for all things Sasquatch on his sleeve, showing me around the vast collection of unreasonably large casts of footprints (one of which Hodgson made in nearby Bluff Creek, site of the only known filmed Bigfoot "sighting"), as well as schooling me on the history of "sightings" in and around Willow Creek and the hoaxes.
Yes, tricksters have strapped on giant wooden feet and traipsed around the mountains in them.
Levelheaded Hodgson explained the main signs of the big guy's existence: a woven nest of sticks and leaves, an amazingly horrid stench, piled rocks, twisted tree limbs, and massive tracks.
Itching to get into nature, we drove along the aptly named Bigfoot Scenic Byway, which meanders along the Trinity and Klamath rivers, sinuously inching past peaks blanketed with verdant trees, yellow fields, and dramatic lupines. For nearly 80 miles this byway took us as far from civilization as you can get in California without hiking into the backcountry.
We continued through the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, the largest in California, and home to people who believe the high country is sacred and should not be entered by anyone but the most revered [shamanistic California] medicine men.
More*
The Hominid Red-Haired GiantsOtherworldmystery.com.jpg
HUMBOLDT RIVER, Lovelock, Nevada - The Paiute Indians [who inhabited a range from Yosemite, California to Nevada] have a legend about their ancestors and red-haired giants. These giants, known as
Si-Te-Cah, used to kill and eat the Paiute tribes. Though the
Si-Te-Cah were small in numbers, they posed a dire threat to the Paiute, who were beginning to settle the area.... [This means they would literally be the
yakkhas (
rakshasas) of Buddhist lore. Far from animals, these cannibals are sophisticated albeit brutal hominids, like
Alavaka. They live and have lived in many mountainous parts of the world, including Afghanistan:
Steve Quayle wrote about the American military killing and transporting one enormous specimen in
LongWalkers.] Could there really have been a race of Caucasoid giants that inhabited North America before the Native Americans? Are the artifacts discovered in Lovelock Cave proof that history is wrong?
More
Giant artifact compared with normal jaw
Every night, amateur ghost-hunting groups across the country head out into abandoned warehouses, old buildings and cemeteries to look for ghosts.
