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Wildlife Biologist and Sasquatch Researcher John Bindernagel Dies
John Bindernagel, 76, passed away during the evening of January 17, 2018.
John was a great friend to many in the field. I remember talking birds with him when we were together at Craig Woolheater’s conference in Texas, of Bigfoot at Beachfoot in Oregon, and about Sasquatch when at John Green’s tribute in British Columbia. His legacy will be profound.
Texas Bigfoot Conference 2002
John Bindernagel, Bobby Hamilton, Loren Coleman, Chester Moore
Photo: Craig Woolheater
On January 8, 2018, Bindernagel informed his “circle of friends…of just how imminent” his death may be. “After two years of cancer chemotherapy and a year of radiation treatment,…my own terminal cancer is now restricted to pain management.”
For the last few days, Bigfoot community individuals have been sending messages to online forums and lists telling of their great respect for this gentle man.
John in 2018
John A. Bindernagel was a wildlife biologist, since 1963. He published a book in 1998 entitled
North America’s Great Ape: the Sasquatch, and later in 2010,
The Discovery of Bigfoot.
Bindernagel born in 1941, grew up in Ontario, attended the University of Guelph and received a PhD in Biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He moved to British Columbia in 1975, largely because the region was a hot spot for Bigfoot sightings. Over the years, he collected casts of tracks that he felt belonged to Bigfoot. He also claimed to have heard the creature near Comox Lake in 1992, comparing its whooping sound to that of a chimpanzee. Bindernagel considered that the Bigfoot phenomena should receive more attention from serious scientists, but once remarked, “The evidence doesn’t get scrutinized objectively. We can’t bring the evidence to our colleagues because it’s perceived as tabloid.”
He penned the following about himself:
I am a professional wildlife biologist who is seriously studying the sasquatch or bigfoot in North America. My interest in this animal began in 1963 when, as a third-year-student in wildlife management at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, I was laughed at for raising the report of an animal described as an “ape-man” for possible discussion. My field work began in 1975 when our family moved to British Columbia, partly in order for me to begin field work on this species. In 1988, my wife and I found several sasquatch tracks in good condition in the mountains not far from our home on Vancouver Island. Plaster casts which we made from these tracks provided the first physical evidence for the existence of the sasquatch. Wildlife biologists such as myself regularly depend on tracks and other wildlife sign as evidence for the presence of bears, deer, wolves, and other mammals, recognizing that tracks constitute a more reliable and persistent record of the presence of a mammal species in an area than a fleeting glimpse of the animal itself. I am satisfied that the sasquatch is an extant (or “real”) animal, subject to study and examination like any other large mammal, and am much more concerned with addressing ecological questions such as how it overwinters in the colder regions of North America, than with dwelling on the controversy of whether it does or does not exist. I remain aware, however, that many people—including scientific colleagues—remain unaware of the information that exists about this species.
Bindernagel Speaks Out Against Squatch & Squatching
Before his death, Bindernagel registered the following complaint against the casual shortening of the term,
Sasquatch:
I would be remiss if I did not register my disappointment at the recent and increasingly widespread use of the terms “squatch,” and “squatching,” which denigrates the Halcolmelm (Coast Salish) name
Sasq‘ets, anglicized many years ago as “sasquatch,” and which has been more-or-less accepted by the relevant Aboriginal people. ...
http://www.cryptozoonews.com/bindernagel-obit/
