Investigators

1911–1973 · died

Ivan T. Sanderson

Naturalist and broadcaster often named as a founder of cryptozoology; founded the Society for Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU).

Ivan Sanderson was a Scottish-born biologist who made his name collecting animals and writing travel books about the tropics. He went to Eton and earned a Cambridge degree covering zoology, botany and ethnology in 1932. During the Second World War he worked in British naval intelligence. Afterward he moved into American radio and television, and in 1951 he hosted The World is Yours, described as the first regularly scheduled color TV series. He also ran a small animal attraction, Ivan Sanderson's Jungle Zoo, which was hit by fire and flooding in 1955.

His interest in the unexplained ran deep. He was an early reader of Charles Fort, the collector of odd news stories. On a 1932 expedition in the British Cameroons he reported seeing a large winged creature that local people called the olitiau. Sources credit him with coining the word "cryptozoology" in the early 1940s, although that honor is also often given to Bernard Heuvelmans. Sanderson's 1948 magazine article "There Could be Dinosaurs" inspired Heuvelmans to take up the subject.

Sanderson became a public face for hidden animals and strange events. His 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life gathered reports of wild men from around the world. In 1965 he set up a foundation that became the Society for Investigation of the Unexplained in 1967. He also wrote about UFOs and in 1968 introduced the idea of "vile vortices," zones around the globe where he argued that ships and planes went missing at unusual rates.

Critics have been hard on his methods. A review in the journal Science said Abominable Snowmen leaned on anecdotes and doubtful footprints. His handling of the 1948 Clearwater, Florida "giant penguin" tracks has drawn special attention: later research reported that he was in touch with the hoaxers early on and edited his account to hide it. Supporters still see him as a pioneer who took odd reports seriously when few scientists would.

Books

• Animal Treasure (1937)
• Caribbean Treasure (1939)
• Living Treasure (1941)
• Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961)
• Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFOs (1967)
• More Things (1969)

1916–2001 · died

Bernard Heuvelmans

Zoologist called the 'father of cryptozoology'; author of On the Track of Unknown Animals.

Bernard Heuvelmans was born in France and trained as a zoologist in Belgium. He earned a doctorate from the Free University of Brussels with a 1939 thesis on the teeth of the aardvark. His teacher, Serge Frechkop, held unusual views about early upright walking in mammals. During the Second World War Heuvelmans escaped from a Nazi prison camp and for a time worked as a jazz singer in Paris.

As a young man he loved Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. The spark for his life's work came from Ivan Sanderson's 1948 Saturday Evening Post article "There Could be Dinosaurs." Heuvelmans began collecting reports of animals that science had not described, from sea serpents to wild men.

His 1955 book Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées, published in English in 1958 as On the Track of Unknown Animals, became the founding text of the field. He followed it with In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents in 1968. With Soviet researcher Boris Porshnev he co-wrote a 1974 book arguing that Neanderthals might still survive. He is widely credited with coining the word "cryptozoology," though Sanderson is also named for that.

Heuvelmans gave the field its structure, its name and its reading list. Critics, including science writer David Quammen, have pointed to leaps of credulity and loose research in his work. Some of his writings came out after his death, including The Natural History of Hidden Animals (2007) and a book on the Minnesota Iceman (2016).

Books

• Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées (On the Track of Unknown Animals) (1955)
• On the Track of Unknown Animals (English edition) (1958)
• In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (1968)
• L'homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant (with Boris Porshnev) (1974)
• The Natural History of Hidden Animals (2007)
• Neanderthal: The Strange Saga of the Minnesota Iceman (2016)

1930–2009 · died

John A. Keel

Author of The Mothman Prophecies; popularized the term 'men in black' and the 'ultraterrestrial' idea.

John Keel was born John Alva Kiehle in Hornell, New York, and raised by his grandparents in Perry. He sold his first story to a magic magazine at age 12. He quit school at 16 and moved to New York City a year later to write full time. He served in the Army during the Korean War era as a radio producer for the American Forces Network in Frankfurt, then worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Egypt. Later he wrote for TV shows such as Get Smart, The Monkees and Lost in Space.

His path into the strange began in 1966, when Playboy turned down a UFO article he had written. The topic hooked him anyway. He traveled to about 20 states and spoke with large numbers of UFO witnesses. By 1967 he had given up on the idea that the sightings were visitors from other planets.

Keel's best-known work came from the Ohio Valley. He investigated the 1966-67 Mothman reports around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and wrote The Mothman Prophecies (1975), which tied the sightings to other odd events and the collapse of the Silver Bridge. The book became a 2002 film starring Richard Gere. He also wrote Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970), a catalog of monster reports, and proposed that "ultraterrestrials" could take many forms. A 1967 magazine article of his is credited as the source of the term "men in black."

Keel is remembered as one of the most widely read and influential writers on UFOs and the paranormal. Skeptics have questioned his reporting. A 2002 Skeptical Inquirer analysis found gaps between letters he wrote during the Mothman period and the story he later published.

Books

• Jadoo (1957)
• Operation Trojan Horse (1970)
• Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970)
• Our Haunted Planet (1971)
• The Mothman Prophecies (1975)
• The Eighth Tower (1975)

1931–2002 · died

Grover Krantz

Washington State University anthropologist; first credentialed academic to argue openly for Sasquatch.

Grover Krantz was a physical anthropologist who studied human evolution. He earned two degrees at UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1971. He worked at Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology from 1958 to 1968, then taught at Washington State University from 1968 to 1998. He wrote more than ten books and some sixty academic articles and did fieldwork in Europe, China and Java.

Krantz did not start as a believer. After seeing the Patterson-Gimlin film in 1968 he was doubtful. His view changed after he studied the "Cripplefoot" casts from Bossburg, Washington, made in late 1969. He argued that the prints showed an injured foot that moved the way a real foot would. His first paper on the subject, "Sasquatch Handprints," appeared in 1971.

He became famous for claiming that some casts showed dermal ridges, the fine skin lines that form fingerprints. He cited outside experts who agreed the marks looked genuine. From the casts he estimated an animal about 8 feet tall and about 800 pounds. His books Big Footprints (1992) and Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (1999) laid out his case.

His Bigfoot work came at a cost. Colleagues called it fringe science, journals turned down his papers, and it hurt his chances for grants and promotion. He donated his body to science. After study at the University of Tennessee's forensic facility, his skeleton went to the Smithsonian, where it was shown alongside his Irish wolfhounds. Washington State University has a scholarship in his name.

Books

• Climatic Races and Descent Groups (1980)
• Big Footprints (1992)
• Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (1999)

1958–2025 · died

Jeff Meldrum

Idaho State University anatomist and anthropologist; leading academic voice for studying Sasquatch footprints.

Jeff Meldrum was a scientist who specialized in how primates walk. He studied zoology at Brigham Young University and earned a Ph.D. in anatomical sciences from Stony Brook University in 1989. From 1993 he taught at Idaho State University, where he became a full professor of anatomy and anthropology. His academic work focused on the evolution of feet and upright walking.

That expertise led him to footprint casts said to come from Sasquatch. He published a number of papers asking whether such an animal could exist and what its prints showed about how it moved. He co-edited the academic volume From Biped to Strider (2004).

His 2006 book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science made him the best-known scientist in the field. He appeared often in documentaries and was interviewed for the 2026 documentary Capturing Bigfoot about the Patterson-Gimlin film.

Meldrum's work drew strong criticism. Scholars including David J. Daegling and Matt Cartmill called it pseudoscientific, and his 2006 book was criticized in Skeptical Inquirer. Supporters valued him as a trained anatomist willing to look at the evidence. He died in September 2025 after a short illness, according to Idaho news reports.

Books

• From Biped to Strider (co-edited with Charles E. Hilton) (2004)
• Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (2006)

1933–1972 · died

Roger Patterson

Shot the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film at Bluff Creek, California, the most debated Bigfoot footage ever made.

Roger Patterson was a former rodeo rider from the Yakima area of Washington State. A local newspaper has described him as often out of steady work and deeply interested in Bigfoot. He became curious about the creature after reading a magazine article in 1959.

In 1966 he self-published a book called Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? He spent time in northern California looking for evidence, often with his friend Bob Gimlin, a horseman he knew from rodeo.

On October 20, 1967, along Bluff Creek near Orleans, California, Patterson filmed about a minute of footage showing a large, dark, upright figure walking away and turning to look back at the camera. Frame 352, the look-back, became one of the most famous images in the field. The exact film site was lost for decades and rediscovered in 2011.

Patterson said the creature was real until he died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1972. Others have claimed it was staged. A Yakima man, Bob Heironimus, said he wore a suit, and costume maker Philip Morris said he sold Patterson a gorilla suit. Supporters argue the movements would have been hard to fake in the 1960s. The 2026 documentary Capturing Bigfoot presents footage it calls a 1966 rehearsal and frames the film as a hoax. The debate continues.

Books

• Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? (1966)

1927–2016 · died

John Green

Journalist called 'Mr. Sasquatch'; built a database of more than 3,000 sighting and track reports.

John Green was a Canadian newspaperman. After a degree from UBC he earned a master's in journalism at Columbia at age 20. He worked at the Globe and Mail and served in the navy. He then bought and edited the Agassiz-Harrison Advance in British Columbia and was elected mayor of Harrison Hot Springs in 1963.

Around 1957 he looked into an account from Jeannie Chapman, who said she saw a giant creature at Ruby Creek in the Fraser Valley in 1941. He met René Dahinden around the same time. In 1958 he examined 15-inch tracks near Bluff Creek, California, and was hooked. He sold his paper in 1972 to research full time.

Green handled the subject like a reporter. He found sources, recorded and transcribed interviews, sometimes took sworn statements, and searched old newspapers for accounts going back to 1904. His books, starting with On the Track of the Sasquatch (1968), and his large sighting database became core resources.

He is counted among the "Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery" with Dahinden, Peter Byrne and Grover Krantz. He was named BC Senior of the Year in 2000, and a 2011 Sasquatch Summit in Harrison Hot Springs was held in his honor.

Books

• On the Track of the Sasquatch (1968)
• Year of the Sasquatch (1970)
• The Sasquatch File (1973)
• Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978)
• Encounters with Bigfoot (1980)
• The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot (2004)

1930–2001 · died

René Dahinden

Swiss-Canadian field investigator; long-time champion of the Patterson-Gimlin film.

René Dahinden was born in Weggis, Switzerland, and moved to British Columbia in October 1953. He lived there the rest of his life.

He became fascinated with Sasquatch soon after arriving in Canada. For decades he followed reports, interviewed witnesses and walked the back country of the Pacific Northwest.

Dahinden became one of the strongest defenders of the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, which he saw as photographic proof. With Don Hunter he co-wrote Sasquatch (1973), later revised as Sasquatch/Bigfoot (1993). His blunt, stubborn style was well known. He is said to have inspired the Bigfoot hunter played by David Suchet in the 1987 film Harry and the Hendersons, and he once appeared in Kokanee beer ads.

He is counted among the "Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery" with John Green, Peter Byrne and Grover Krantz.

Books

• Sasquatch (with Don Hunter) (1973)
• Sasquatch/Bigfoot: The Search for North America's Incredible Creature (revised edition, with Don Hunter) (1993)

1925–2023 · died

Peter Byrne

Big-game hunter turned conservationist who led Tom Slick's yeti expeditions and later ran Bigfoot projects in Oregon.

Peter Byrne was born in Dublin and served in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, piloting rescue boats in the Indian Ocean. Afterward he worked on a tea plantation in northern India and opened a tiger-hunting business in Nepal. In 1968 he turned to conservation and helped convince Nepal to create the reserve now known as Shuklaphanta. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Explorers Club.

In the 1950s Texas oil heir Tom Slick funded Himalayan expeditions to look for the yeti, with Byrne in the field in 1958-59. They found no clear proof. During that time Byrne obtained a finger from the so-called Pangboche hand kept at a monastery. Much later, DNA testing found the finger was human, and geneticist Bryan Sykes reported its DNA matched Byrne's own, suggesting contamination.

After Slick died in a 1962 plane crash, Byrne turned to Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. He ran the Bigfoot Information Center near The Dalles, Oregon, in the 1970s and the Bigfoot Research Project near Parkdale, Oregon, from 1992 to 1997. He sent hair samples to the FBI in the 1970s. He appeared on In Search of... and other shows and wrote some 20 books, including The Hunt for Bigfoot.

He is counted among the "Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery." His later years were not without controversy: in 2013 he pleaded guilty to Social Security fraud for hiding travel abroad while getting benefits. He died in Oregon in 2023 at 97.

Books

• The Hunt for Bigfoot (2nd edition) (2016)

1924–1987 · died

Tim Dinsdale

Aeronautical engineer whose 1960 film of a moving hump on Loch Ness is one of the best-known pieces of Nessie footage.

Tim Dinsdale was born in Wales and spent his early childhood in China, where his father worked in shipping. In 1935 pirates seized his school ship, and the children were rescued by the Royal Navy. He trained as an aeronautical engineer, flew with the RAF, and later worked for Avro in Toronto and Rolls-Royce in Montreal before settling in Reading in 1956.

A 1959 magazine article drew him to the Loch Ness story. In April 1960 he went to the loch alone and, on two days, filmed what he believed was the monster: a dark hump moving across the water and leaving a wake.

The film ran in the Daily Mail and on BBC Panorama. An RAF photo-analysis unit, JARIC, said the object was "probably animate." The film helped launch the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau (1962-1972). Dinsdale went on to make dozens of trips to the loch and wrote seven books on the subject between 1961 and 1977.

Later analysts have argued the object was most likely a boat, possibly with a person visible at the stern, and that the original size estimates were inflated. Researchers generally do not accuse Dinsdale of hoaxing. They see a sincere man who may have seen what he hoped to see. He never filmed anything like it again. The International Society of Cryptozoology made him an honorary member in 1987.

1922–2009 · died

Robert H. Rines

Patent lawyer and inventor who led decades of sonar and underwater-camera searches at Loch Ness; source of the 1972 'flipper' photos.

Robert Rines was a Boston-born inventor and intellectual property lawyer. During the Second World War he worked on radar as an Army Signal Corps officer. He held around 72 U.S. patents, founded the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire, lectured at MIT and Harvard, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994. He founded the Academy of Applied Science, which promotes science among students.

Rines reported seeing a large dark hump on Loch Ness during a 1972 visit. For more than 35 years after that he brought sonar and underwater photography to the loch, much of it designed by his own team.

His 1972 underwater photos seemed to show a diamond-shaped flipper and became world news. He received the Dinsdale Memorial Award in 2004.

Critics later found the famous flipper photos had been heavily enhanced, and the unretouched originals were far less clear. His later "gargoyle head" photo was identified as a tree stump, which is now displayed at the Loch Ness exhibition. Supporters point to his technical skill and persistence.

1925–1984 · died

Gray Barker

West Virginia writer who reported on the Flatwoods Monster and brought the 'Men in Black' to UFO lore.

Gray Barker grew up in Braxton County, West Virginia, and graduated from Glenville State in 1947. He taught and worked as a theater booking agent in Clarksburg.

In 1952 he investigated the Flatwoods Monster reports in his home county, writing them up for Fate magazine. That case pulled him into the world of flying saucers.

His 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers was the first to introduce the "Men in Black" to UFO readers, building on claims by Albert K. Bender. He ran his own publishing house, Saucerian Books. In 1970 he wrote The Silver Bridge, which linked strange events at Point Pleasant to the bridge collapse and helped spread the Mothman story.

Barker's legacy is mixed. Friends and family later said he wrote mostly for money and treated much of ufology as a joke, and he took part in hoaxes such as the 1957 "Straith letter" sent to contactee George Adamski. His papers, files and books are kept in the Gray Barker Room at the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, which is open to visitors.

Books

• They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956)
• Flying Saucers and the Three Men (with Albert K. Bender) (1962)
• The Silver Bridge (1970)
• MIB: The Secret Terror Among Us (1983)