From The Seattle Times:
(excerpts - see link for full story)
Bigfoot is dead. Really.
"Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died," said Michael Wallace about his father, who died of heart failure Nov. 26 in a Centralia nursing facility. He was 84.
The truth can finally be told, according to Mr. Wallace's family members. He orchestrated the prank that created Bigfoot in 1958.
Some experts suspected Mr. Wallace had planted the footprints that launched the term "Bigfoot." But Mr. Wallace and his family had never publicly admitted the 1958 deed until now.
"The fact is there was no Bigfoot in popular consciousness before 1958. America got its own monster, its own Abominable Snowman thanks to Ray Wallace," said Mark Chorvinsky, editor of Strange magazine and one of the leading proponents of the theory that Mr. Wallace fathered Bigfoot.
Pranks and hoaxes were just part of Mr. Wallace's nature.
Ray L. Wallace, 1918 - 2002
"He'd been a kid all his life. He did it just for the joke and then he was afraid to tell anybody because they'd be so mad at him," said nephew Dale Lee Wallace, who said he has the alder-wood carvings of the giant humanoid feet that gave life to a worldwide phenomenon.
and
Chorvinsky believes the Wallace family's admission creates profound doubts about leading evidence of Bigfoot's existence: the so-called Patterson film, the grainy celluloid images of an erect apelike creature striding away from the movie camera of rodeo rider Roger Patterson in 1967. Mr. Wallace said he told Patterson where to go — near Bluff Creek, Calif. — to spot a Bigfoot, Chorvinsky said.
"Ray told me that the Patterson film was a hoax, and he knew who was in the suit," Chorvinsky said.
Michael Wallace said his father called the Patterson film "a fake" and said he had nothing to do with it. But he said his mother admitted she had been photographed in a Bigfoot suit. "He had several people he used in his movies," Michael Wallace said.
and
As for Meldrum's claim about authentic footprints, Chorvinsky said: "Jeff Meldrum is not an expert in creating hoaxes. I was a professional magician and special-effects film director; anything can be faked."
Michael Wallace said family members knew about his father's hoax but never let on.
"The family just sat back and grinned," he said. "He didn't mean to hurt anyone."
To them, it was just another one of Mr. Wallace's jokes. Like the time he dropped a powerful firecracker down the chimney of a bunkhouse while loggers played cards inside. Or the time he convinced his crew that wild cats with bushy tails were living in forest treetops. |
