Dr. Robert Benson believes in evidence. The Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi physics professor and director of the university’s Center for Bioacoustics won’t allow himself to believe in anything unless there is strong evidence. Benson did not believe in Big Foot, which is why the world-renowned bioacoustician was tapped by a Whitewolf Entertainment producer to analyze possible audio evidence for a documentary co-produced by the Discovery Channel called, “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.” “It’s interesting,” he said Saturday, sitting in front of his audio equipment on a short break from filming his segment of the documentary.
…
‘Visual picture’ of sound
“It’s a visual picture of the sound, so we can make measurements of the temporal frequencies,” he said. With the help of a graduate student, Benson is also gathering background material for comparison with such sounds as those of coyotes, wolves, elk and primates.
“This is a mammal, at least we suspect,” he said. “We’re still analyzing that.”
So far, Benson’s study hasn’t yielded a concrete answer. He may take his work into a sound studio in the next couple of weeks if he is able to learn more about the unidentified cry. “There is a whole range of things that it might possibly be,” he said. “In all possibilities, there is the possibility that this could be human.”
It was a trail of human-like footprints found in a desolate area of the Arctic in 1992 that prompted Minneapolis-based producer Doug Hajicek to pursue the project. While filming another project for the Canadian government, Hajicek and his guide stumbled on the trail and followed it for about a mile.
‘No skin’
“They were 17- to 18-inch footprints that traveled through sand, tundra and gravel,” he said. “I was amazed. I saw it with my own eyes.” But the question remained. What had created the trail in the first place?
His mind turned to a cover story about the Sasquatch that he had seen as a young man in the magazine Boys Life. “We considered everything that could have made this and we couldn’t figure it out,” he said. “It was fresh.” With the footage of the footprints, Hajicek embarked on 18 months of field research, talking with scientists, exploring claims of evidence and checking out other documentaries of the phenomenon, he said.
What he found was little science. “Wouldn’t it be interesting to put the evidence in front of mainstream scientists and forensic scientists and let them go at it,” he said that he wondered. “Here’s a case where there are photos of this thing and there is film of this thing but there’s no body, no skin.”
‘It might be negative’
Benson is one of more than a dozen experts from mainstream sciences such as forensics, primatology and behavioral science to examine potential evidence that could prove or disprove the mammoth being’s existence. For now, Benson said he can only address the acoustical evidence. “We have recordings but what the source might be, we don’t know,” he said. “It is evidence but it might be negative evidence.”
