Anatomy of a Beast by Michael McLeod

Author:Michael McLeod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

When I mentioned Patterson, he swiped at the air as if to dispel a bad odor. "Shit, old Patterson, he didn't have nothing, man," he said contemptuously. "He didn't have five cents—only a line of gab. He went down there to Bluff Creek three or four times and never seen a doggone thing and he came back and he was questioning me and a pumping me. . . . He didn't even have a camera. He wanted to borrow my camera. And I said, 'Hey! That camera's worth ten thousand dollars. Have you got ten thousand dollars to leave here case Bigfoot tears it up?' "

He hobbled into the back room and reappeared with some cases, which he threw open to reveal an old 16 mm sound camera. I knew the camera from my days as a news photographer—an Auricon CineVoice, worth a substantial amount of money in its day. "I had that made to order in 1953," he said. He added almost in passing that he'd shot film of a Bigfoot. At the time I thought he was pulling my leg, but several years after the interview, I watched a film with the Bigfoot archivist Larry Lund. Lund said he'd acquired the film from Wallace, who told him he shot it in 1957. It turned out to be a series of lingering shots, taken from a distance, of a Bigfoot—looking suspiciously like the creature on the album cover—wading ankle-deep in a bog grabbing fish. What Wallace did with the film, if anything, I never discovered.

Then he started talking about flying saucers.

In the years since I interviewed Wallace, I've often wondered how a person so completely nuts in one regard could also carry on a successful business, contribute positively (and generously) to his community—he got kudos in Willow Creek as a Little League coach—and be, in so many other respects, normal. Wallace was officially outed as the original Bluff Creek hoaxer after his death in 2002, when his nephew described to a newspaper reporter how Ray—aided by his brother Wilbur, also known as Shorty—faked the footprints using a set of carved wooden feet with which the nephew posed for a photograph.24

It could almost be said that fake footprints were in Wallace's blood. He was six years old and living near Mount St. Helens in 1924 when the "mountain ape" panic hit and armed posses charged into the forest—big news in an area that didn't get much. His boyhood friend was another joker named Rant Mullens. Wallace mentioned Mullens to me (in a story about some kind of falling-out involving a pair of fake Bigfoot feet), but the story made no more sense to me at the time than his rambling on about a four-hundred pound guy named Lard Smith who never got out of his pickup because he couldn't. Later, in a newspaper archive, I found an interview given by Mullens shortly before his death, in which he recounted how, as a boy, he and an uncle had carved huge feet out of wood and used them to make tracks on the mountain to keep the St.

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