(Historic) Grover Krantz
Grover S. Krantz was born in 1931 in Salt Lake City, UT. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in 1971 with a concentration in human evolution. He served as a professor at Washington State University from 1968 until his retirement in the 1990s. He died February 14, 2002, in his Port Angeles, Washington home.
Krantz claimed to be mostly a sasquatch skeptic, giving them about a 10% chance of existing until he investigated the 1969 'Cripple Foot' incident in Bossburg, WA. He was so convinced by these tracks that he soon became one of the staunchest and the first truly academic bigfoot proponent. He appeared in virtually every bigfoot documentary made after 1970.
Contents
- Legacy
- Books
- Obituaries
- References
Legacy
Krantz accumulated dozens of plaster casts which he determined were made from genuine sasquatch footprints. He claimed to have a unique method of detecting authentic casts and separating fakes based on a secret set of anatomical features. Yet he was fooled by a fake cast made in Indiana[1].
Krantz’s office was filled with casts, drawings, skulls and other material pertaining to primate anatomy. He was probably the first researcher to decipher possible dermal ridges in bigfoot casts and went on an extended personal quest to have this evidence authenticated by fingerprint experts and was convinced it would change the minds of the scientific community. But these efforts were mostly in vain, and interestingly the cast which most convinced Krantz has never been endorsed by renowned primate fingerprint expert Jimmy Chilcutt.
Upon his death, much of his collection went to Idaho State University professor Jeff Meldrum. Krantz himself donated his own skeleton to the Smithsonian Institute but only under the condition that they also accept that of his beloved irish wolfhound, Clyde [2].
Often at odds with René Dahinden (who had no patience for academics), Dr. Krantz argued that the sasquatch is the descendant of a species of prehistoric giant ape, Gigantopithecus blacki, which he theorized traversed the Beringian land bridge 10,000 years ago. Krantz estimated the sasquatch population at roughly 2000 animals roaming the vast wilderness between northern California and British Columbia.
Krantz claimed that his academic interest in sasquatch research came at the expense of promotion and recognition at work. He was also a very outspoken proponent of the controverisal 'pro-kill' camp, insisting that a bigfoot should be shot and killed, if the opportunity presented itself, in order to scientifically confirm their existence and satisfy the scientific community.
Books
- The Scientist Looks at the Sasquatch (Moscow: University Press of Idaho, 1977, with anthropologist Roderick Sprague)
- The Scientist Looks at the Sasquatch II (Moscow: University Press of Idaho, 1979, with Roderick Sprague)
- The Sasquatch and Other Unknown Hominoids (Calgary: Western Publishing, 1984, with archaeologist Vladimir Markotic)
- Big Footprints (Boulder: Johnson, 1992), revised as Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (Seattle: Hancock House, 1999)
Obituaries
Loren Coleman wrote in an obituary, “As the modern era's first academically-affiliated physical anthropologist to actively involve himself in Bigfoot/Sasquatch research, Dr. Krantz was one of the most quoted authorities on the status of the controversy." He began his research in 1963, and it took him from the analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967, to an examination of the Skookum Cast of 2000. He wrote or edited several papers on the Sasquatch, of a formal scholarly nature... and four books.... Dr. Krantz, as an outspoken academic, was a focus of the highly accalimed 1999 documentary Sasquatch Odyssey (director Peter von Puttkamer), which also profiled the late Rene Dahinden, John Green, and Peter Byrne. While these men did not often get along, they formed the "Four Horseman of Sasquatchery," the foundation of thought on these unknown hominoids in the Pacific Northwest from the 1960s onward.”
References
