Watson - Sasquatch Canada: Beyond British Columbia

I started this project with some trepidation. One has only to spend some time listening to podcasts and consuming media about the legendary forest creature that I will refer to as Sasquatch to realize opinions about what these beings are vary wildly. In addition, those opinions can sometimes be accompanied by considerable rancour, and those who do not agree with certain thinking can be subjected to vitriol from those who hold the correct beliefs.

Still, as I did the research for my book Canadian Monsters and Mysteries , I realized that when Sasquatch in Canada was discussed, with a few notable exceptions, the attention of researchers veered toward British Columbia (BC).

I certainly understand this bias. BC is connected to the great Pacific Northwest wilderness where these creatures are often seen, and there is a rich community of researchers actively engaged in the hunt for Sasquatch there even as I write this. As I commented in Canadian Monsters and Mysteries , however, Canada is the second-largest country in the world. While BC is not a small province, it is literally possible to hide whole countries in the vastness of the Canadian wilds stretching from the borders of BC all the way to the Atlantic coast. I decided that I would focus my research on the areas outside of British Columbia so that persons interested in Sasquatch could see the wide variety of sightings across the breadth of this huge country.

And Canada is huge, as I pointed out above, though the vast majority of the Canadian population lives within 150 miles of the US border. If I drive two hours from my home, I can be in forested areas that stretch unbroken to meet the Arctic tundra. A few hardy souls and First Nations people inhabit these gigantic swathes of wilderness. It is an ideal location for a large, undiscovered creature to live.

And, in fact, Canada is home to a Lazarus speciesa species that is supposed to have gone extinct, only to be rediscovered later. Canadas Lazarus species is the wood bison, the largest land animal in North American. The wood bison is supposed to have gone extinct in the early part of the twentieth century due to disease and overhunting, but in 1957, the species was rediscovered by a Canadian wildlife officer as he was making an overflight of a wilderness area in Alberta.

If the largest known land animal in North America can hide out in the Canadian forest for a few decades without being seen, imagine what a determined and intelligent Sasquatch might do.

I chose the quote from Pete Catches, a Lakota (Sioux) medicine person, that opens this book for a reason. My feelings about Sasquatch are very ambivalent.

On the one hand, I am perfectly willing to entertain the idea that there may be an undiscovered species of great ape or hominid living in the wilds of North America and beyond. However, one has only to read books like Timothy Renner and Joshua Cutchins Where the Footprints End series to suspect that something far stranger is going on, at least in some cases.

Ive struggled with this strangeness that surrounds the Big Man, as some indigenous people call the creature, since I was a sixth grader reading Ivan Sandersons epic work on the Abominable Snowman. Even though Sanderson presented the evidence and made the argument that the Abominable Snowman was a flesh and blood creature that lived all over the world, I had an intuitive feeling of strangeness about what I came to think of as Sasquatch. I had no doubt that it existedthere were far too many witnesses to ignorebut I wondered, along with all the skeptics, why it was that no firm physical evidence had been found for that existence.

That feeling persisted, much later, when I began to look at the stories of Sasquatch in Canada. While the vast majority of sightings in the Great White North seem to be of a flesh and blood creature, there are still aspects of some cases that seem to indicate that we are dealing with something more than a flesh and blood animal.

I have chosen not to make this book a massive compendium of every sighting I could find in my research. Accordingly, I will open with several sections in which I detail sightings in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and other provinces of Canada.

Once I have laid out a wide assortment of sightings stretching across the wilderness of the Great White North, I will dive into more specific areas of Sasquatch research. As an example, I have chosen to focus on visual sightings even though many people believe they have come into contact with Sasquatch because of wood knocks, vocalizations, stone throwing and the like. Those experiencers were simply too numerous for me to include in the book, but I will devote a section to discussing this secondary evidence and an alternative theory for the many convincing but nonvisual encounters.

I will also discuss the beliefs of some of the First Nations people about Sasquatch. In that discussion, I will stray outside the borders of Canada to examine statements from indigenous people in the States. The reason for this is simple practicality. Native people, for the most part, are quite reluctant to discuss these creatures, so I had to cast the net a little wider to find pertinent data. I think that the opinions of First Nations people are very relevant to this topic and may open our minds to the true nature of this phenomenon.

Following this template, I hope to produce a work that will provide those interested in Sasquatch with a wide variety of sighting informationthe major argument for a flesh and blood creature (usually)as well as ideas and concepts that may argue for something far stranger existing in the woods of Canada. Because they are so common, I have included a chapter on roadside and road crossing sightings with some thoughts about highways, byways, and liminality.

One area that I have avoided is discussion of the numerous photos and videos online. I do not pretend to have expertise in the realm of photo or video analysis, and unlike many who claim such expertise after an hour online, I will stay out of these arguments in order to avoid getting bogged down in the endless argumentspro and conraging around the photographic and film evidence available. While these videos and pictures add to the mass of circumstantial evidence that surrounds this subject, in this age of image manipulation, it is impossible to accept them as conclusive proof.