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I am frankly at a loss as to where and how to begin this article. In a culture that is now being inundated with “who” is being presented rather than “what” is being proposed it’s hard to introduce a much needed touch of logic. I always prized my British education because of that Island’s pragmatic and common sense approaches. Even when I “went back” to Oxford University to do short courses online (most available to all) as I turned 40 and waxed fearfully nostalgic I was greeted by the logic that is so dominant in the British mentality.
Philosophy is something the British adore, a Classical people worthy of the days of public stoas and groups gathered in profound and passionate debate. Debate is both a style and essential component for anybody who dearly believes something. It is the method by which views confront and compare and by which logic expresses itself, and the means by which large audiences assess the evidence and argument.
Oxford requires that students should be prepared to debate, and part of the curriculum of a number of philosophy courses requires that students must take the view to which they are personally opposed and then defend it. This forces a student to probe into these views, if merely for the sake of defending one’s pride on the floor of debate. The result is that the student truly learns that point of view, sometimes even changing their stance or better appreciating why they firmly hold the opposing viewpoint.
Therefore having waxed nostalgic and having a book coming up on such a topic, I opted to take Philosophy for a semester (Hilary) as a way of refreshing and honing my presentation skills for the release of two of my upcoming books, knowing that, for Bigfoot anyway, the public forum was a quagmire created by folklore masquerading as science. Very little was sacrificed from an actual class in philosophy when Marianne Talbot, of Brasenose and Pembroke colleges, developed the Philosophy of Mind course for Oxford students from afar. Even when entering the restricted online pages for Oxford students, I was glad to see the Common Room was well-designated. We were taught immediately that philosophy requires not formal thinking but natural thinking. We were taught that our conclusions must support our premises. It reminded me rather of Bill Cosby’s witticism. The great comedian once remarked of his days of being an “intellectual” that “an intellectual goes to school to learn how to do what comes naturally to others.”
The principal and the joke actually merge, showing that higher academic education is still very logical! Therefore let’s delve into the evidence of popular Bigfoot lore and see if it supports popular conclusions.
The popular and muddled image of Bigfoot survived for so long because the media reports; it does not investigate. It needs experts, and S&M does not place things in context. It repeats and it repeats. And with time it only has the power of presentation. Repetition then can take on the appearance of established facts or at least most probable and acceptable theory. Tailoring evidence can sometimes become quite innocent, even by some of the “Whos” of whatever topic.
Both here and in my upcoming book Recasting Bigfoot let’s take to task some of the supposed “Whos” who exist merely in the world of S&M. Let us dare to look at and discuss the evidence to see if the evidence proffered by experts supports their conclusions.
I have decided to tackle one hot topic here— the Ray Wallace hoax— because it is the hottest thing that has happened in Bigfootery of late, and it sadly reveals the lack of analytical ability that should be essential to such a pursuit. I was dismayed that both John Green and Jeffrey Meldrum are the main protagonists of what is at worst lying and collusion to deceive (which I do not believe) and at best a clear indication of analytical and scientific incompetence.
I have great respect for John Green’s ability to chronicle Bigfoot, and his work is indispensable to the pursuit. But in his rebuttals to the Wallace hoax he has shown himself terribly duped. I was going to let the immense duplicity go unmentioned until my book’s release, but the error has taken leaps and bounds beyond Green thanks to Jeffrey Meldrum. I was dismayed that John Green’s 2004 The Best of Bigfoot/Sasquatch contained the introduction “Big Foot Did Not Die” where he treated the Wallace family claim with outright error. But then when receiving Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum’s 2006 book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science in which Meldrum repeats the same errors, I had to put up this response. 
To recap:
Ray Wallace had been the lumber contractor who was Jerry Crew’s boss at Bluff Creek. On October 6, 1958, newspapers carried the stories of something that the locals called “Bigfoot.” There was a picture of Jerry Crew holding a plaster cast of an enlarged flat human foot. Bigfoot was born. In 2002 when Ray Wallace died his family admitted that he had made the fake feet that suckered his lumber men at Bluff Creek and began all the nationwide interest in “Bigfoot.”
Ray’s nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, finally showed the feet to the world. The media was thrilled. Bigfooters, however, were not. The Media blew it up into the complete destruction of the entire Sasquatch legend. Bigfootery responded by condemning Wallace as having been “unstable” and openly laughed at how the wooden feet did not match the Crew Print. Websites placed the 2 together to accentuate the difference.
For the newbie, this selective response was no doubt enough to win the day. But when Bigfooter arguments finally found solid print in John Green’s 2004 book and then in Meldrum’s 2006 book, their entire method of investigation was laid bare, revealing what kind of approach they used for the bigger Bigfoot/Sasquatch question all these years.
Let’s us engage in some rather harmful comparative analysis. Apparently, since the death of the late Dr. Boris Fedorovich Porshnev I am the first historian to tackle the question of hominids. As any historian, I must seek out and find a primary source. From there, well, let us continue the article:
For any keen old enthusiast in Bigfoot, Wallace’s wooden feet were a revelation that was easy to accept. Prints unquestionably made by these feet can be found throughout John Green’s old books on the topic, especially his seminal work On the Track of the Sasquatch, 1968, and its 1980 reprint, and now, of course, in his 2004 reprint of these The Best of Bigfoot/Sasquatch.
The developing history of Bigfoot at Bluff Creek is easy to follow thanks to John Green’s admirable ability at ferreting stories. Because he was unique in his view that Sasquatch was real rather than an Indian legend of tall hairy Indians, he was one of the first to take the Humboldt Times seriously, the paper from which all newswires picked up the story. He drove from Canada to California and searched out taxidermist Bob Titmus, who was friends with Jerry Crew, and also mentioned in the article. After touching base, in November Green returned to Bluff Creek. Titmus had written him he found more tracks on the Bluff Creek sandbar. Together they examined them, Green being taken by the stride and the depth of the prints in the hard sand.
Over the years these identical prints would be found, causing Green to pen in On the Track of the Sasquatch. “An unusual feature discernable in most tracks, in varying degrees, is a division right in the middle of what appears to be the ball of the foot.”
These same tracks appeared in August 1962 and were cast by Midshipman Clark. They also appeared again in August 1967 on Blue Creek Mountain road, an occurrence which brought the old Bigfooters back out of semiretirement and caused them to descend on Bluff Creek again.
Concerning the Blue Creek Mountain road tracks, Green writes: “They were familiar to me— the same 15-inch print with a split in the ball of the foot that I had first seen 9 years before. . .” And, again, “This is the type of track first found by Bob Titmus [November 1958] and the type cast by Midshipman Clark.” 
There at Blue Creek Mountain road Green and Rene Dahinden, another of the famous original Bigfooters, took many clear photos. There is no question that the Wallace wooden feet shown to the world match these prints and all the tracks John Green ever chronicled at Bluff Creek. Pictures can be found of Green measuring them, describing them and the unusual and pointless groove in the ball of the foot, and clearly declaring, as in the picture below, that these are typical prints.
It is true that the Wallace wooden feet and the Crew Print do not match. But Green’s books also prove that the Crew print never turned up again after October 1958. Every print he mentions and describes at Bluff Creek is Wallace’s fake foot.
This is serious, for it proves that Wallace’s fake tracks alone are what maintained the interest in the idea of a Bigfoot resident at Bluff Creek, even as late as August 1967, two months before Patterson would “film” one there. Green never shows or describes the Crew Print. It exists merely in a picture of Crew taken by the Humboldt Times.
 Blow-ups of this Crew Print do exist, and it is with the blow-up compared to the Wallace prints that Bigfooters at first defended their belief that Wallace could not have faked the Bigfoot tracks.
The comparison above, right, proves that the wooden feet shown to the world did not make the one print with which Jerry Crew was photographed. But it does not stop there. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a series of articles in December 1965, confirming that “Bill Chambers, at that time a reporter for the Humboldt Times, inspected the prints found by Crew and another set of giant prints found in the Bluff Creek area by contractor Ray Wallace.”
The other print, the hourglass print shown by Dale Wallace, therefore turned up at the same time as the print that Crew cast— coincidentally also in August. Bigfooters completely ignored in 2002 that the Wallace family admitted that Ray’s bothers helped him with another set of feet. Regrettably, they did not show the world the other pair of wooden feet.
Even if one wishes to accept the remote possibility that the Crew Print stands separate from the Brothers Wallace’s shenanigans, it remains damning for Bluff Creek to admit that Wallace’s feet appeared at the same time and continued for 9 years in the area without any Crew Print competition after that first August.
So damning, in fact, it seems to have necessitated a strange counterattack to the whole Wallace connection by Modern and very transparent Bigfootery. In John Green’s The Best of Bigfoot/Sasquatch he devotes only the first couple of chapters to “Recent Developments,” which includes “Big Foot Did Not Die.” Even though the rest of his 2004 book is nothing more than a reprint of his earlier works— and therefore still containing the incriminating texts and pictures describing and showing the tracks that match Wallace’s fake feet— all Green will admit is that Wallace’s wooden foot matches the cast Titmus took from the sandbar in November 1958.
Green now presents pictures of the Crew Print, what he says is the Wallace foot, and what he says is the Titmus 1958 sandbar cast. Describing the Wallace Foot: “They are somewhat crudely carved, and presumably they were made in imitation of those casts. For them to be accepted as the originals with which the tracks were made someone would have to demonstrate how they could make imprints an inch deep in the hard-packed sand and make deep, rounded toe impressions with their shallow, square carved toes.”
In what must either be the most shocking example of utter denial or flagrant deception, the pictures Green presents of both the Wallace foot and the Titmus cast are forgeries!
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