Media Article # 96
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Article prepared and posted by Matthew Moneymaker

Wednesday, May 27, 1981

Anthropologist Summoned to Examine Bigfoot Tracks

The Oregonian

OLYMPIA (AP) - Thurston County sheriff's deputies have summoned help in studying some mysterious tracks that may lead to another Bigfoot hoax or perhaps the legendary Sasquatch.

Deputies took photographs and plaster casts of giant humanlike footprints discovered along a one-mile stretch of logging road in a remote wooded area near Alder Dam, 30 miles southeast of Olympia, then turned the evidence over to an anthropologist from The Evergreen State College.

The anthropologist, who asked not to be identified, was at the scene Monday to examine the tracks, which measured 12 inches long, 6 inches wide at the toes and 4 inches at the heel, said Deputy Neil McClanahan.

The footprints appeared to have been made recently and had an imprint of five toes at the front and another toe near the middle of the sole, McClanahan said.

The deputy said the anthropologist believes the footprints, spaced 25 inches to 39 inches apart, indicate a gait much larger than a human stride.

He said the "large and deeply imbedded tracks," if authentic, would have been made by an animal weighing at least 400 pounds, but do not resemble the footprints of a bear, the only indigenous species that large.

McClanahan said Melvin Frost found the footprints Friday while operating a bulldozer for the Weyerhaueuser Co. in a remote stretch of company-owned land where access is restricted by locked gates. The nearest public road is 23 miles away.

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