Ray Wallace

On November 26, 2002, 84-year-old Raymond L Wallace, the man in the 1950s who you could say, “started” the Bigfoot phenomenon, died of heart failure. Wallace had been a man of immense vigor, creativity, and good humor. Born in Clarksdale, Missouri on April 21, 1918, he grew up with the American West. He worked in logging and building remote roads for much of his life, all throughout much of Washington, Oregon and California, including the construction of California's Highway 1. He served in the United States Army during World War II as an aircraft gunner. Ray adopted four boys (Mike, Gary{my father}, Larry{Gary's twin} & Rick) and married Elna Sorenson, finally settling in Toledo, Washington during 1961. Mike went on to have two boys. Gary had 3 boys, of two separate mothers, both named Cherie. His children were Kris, Lisa & (I forgot, but he may have been Chris, as well). Rick had one boy, Jeremiah Ray Wallace. Larry had a handful of children with his wife Barbara. Ray was preceded in death by his son, Gary

Humboldt County, California, 1958

The wild apes of northern California had only been a local legend until Ray Wallace was looking for a way to deter thieves and vandals from messing with his construction equipment at a job near the Hoopa Indian Reservation in Humboldt County in Northern California in the summer of 1958.

“People were sabotaging his equipment,” said Mike Wallace, 69, one of Ray’s sons who grew up living in logging camps and now lives in Castle Rock, just south of Toledo. Mike said the vandals were basically drunks who went out and destroyed stuff after the workers left for the day. “Dad got this great idea to get these feet carved up and make some prints around to scare people off,” Wallace said. Ray asked his neighbor Rant Mullins to carve some large feet and send them to him, with the idea that once a rumor got started the vandals would quit bothering their equipment.

Jerry Crew was working for the Wallace Brothers Logging Company near Bluff Creek in the summer of 1958. One morning, Crew discovered large footprints near his bulldozer and reported the incident to foreman Wilbur “Shorty” Wallace, Ray’s brother and Mike’s uncle. Wilbur reportedly told Crew to get back to work but to stay alert for unusual activity. Crew’s boss, Ray Wallace also was involved in the discovery. They knew that these massive footprints were unusual and had no clue who’s prints they were. They decided that “Bigfoot” would be a suitable name for whatever creature created these prints.

Crew and Wallace decided to go down into the small town below their construction site to speak with a taxidermist. The taxidermist they came in contact with was, Bob Titmus. Titmus did not want any publicity, because of that, this part of the story many people do not know. Titmus gave Crew, and Wallace instructions on how to create plasters of the giant prints. Back at camp, Crew made the first plaster casts of the prints and took them down to the town. The newspaper editors took pictures of Crew holding the plaster casts and they got spread all over the world. Crew, Wallace and the rest of their construction crew claimed to see more footprints, and even droppings from about August through November. 

A Different Story

Mike Wallace has a different version of the story: “Dad went out and waited for Jerry (Crew) to shut down the cat and leave,” he said. “As soon as Jerry was gone, (Ray) started up the cat and went over and squeezed a barrel of oil and threw it over the bank.” Ray parked the cat in its original place, then got out and made the footprints around the cat using the wooden feet Mullins had sent him.

“When Jerry came back in the morning, he saw those tracks around the cat and just freaked out,” Mike said. “He went into Willow Creek to tell everyone and somebody called the newspaper in Eureka. The head reporter came out, took some photographs and wrote up a story.” The Humboldt Times newspaper of Eureka, California, was the first to call the creature Bigfoot, and eventually the story was distributed by the Associated Press nationwide.

“That was a decision time for Dad,” Mike Wallace said. “He realized this was huge and all of a sudden the world was talking about this sighting. It wasn’t his fault that people latched onto it,” Mike continued. “But right from the beginning, he was Bigfoot.” The joke was part of an arsenal of pranks Wallace developed over the years.

A Harmless Prankster

His close friends said Ray was known for doing harmless pranks for fun, like dropping a firecracker down a chimney to scare his friends after a long day of working in the woods. “These guys would come in to the camp at night and would be sitting by the stove playing cards and Dad would go up on the roof,” Mike said. “He’d get one of those M-80s, he’d wrap it in wet newspaper with a long fuse so it wouldn’t go off right away and he’d drop it down the chimney into the stove. Then he’d come in and sit down with everyone at the card table and a few minutes later, BOOM! The lids would fly off the stove.” Ray would act surprised and say it must be the firewood, Mike said, adding that Ray would never confess to doing any of his pranks.

So when the Bigfoot story broke, “he just ran with it,” Mike said. “It was a great opportunity to have a ball. He would select people – cousins and relatives who were working for him – and they'd get in on it together. Those guys didn't have television in those days so they made their own fun. They weren’t hurting anyone. They were flat out having a ball and laughing. We’re still laughing.”

Don Buswell still recalls helping Ray make tracks in the thick dust by strapping the wooden feet over his boots. “The dust was so thick in Northern California it ran like water down the road,” Buswell said, adding that it didn't rain from April to Thanksgiving. “I put the feet on and then I hung on to the back of his pickup and we went real slow down this dusty road, taking long steps. I tell you they are eerie even if you make them yourself. You look back and see them and they're kind of weird.”

Dale Lee Wallace remembers one time in the late 1950s, the Wallace Brothers cleared a flat part of the forest near Weitchpec in Humboldt County to park the trailers for the people who were working for them and apparently the dusty ground was too tempting of an opportunity to pass up.

“Ray put them feet on and walked around the trailers at night and looked in the windows,” Dale Lee said. “The women came out the next morning and seen them big footprints and it just scared them to death. Ray got scared to tell the truth because he figured they’d be madder than hell at him. Ray said, ‘Now don’t be telling anyone that, you damn fool, you’ll get me in trouble.’”

The 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Film

Nine years after the famous footprints were discovered at the Wallace work site in 1958, Bigfoot enthusiast and former cowboy Robert Patterson showed the world the first known film footage of Bigfoot striding across a river bed into the forest. Known as the Patterson-Gimlin film, the grainy, shaky footage lasts less than a minute. The film contains one frame of a hairy biped looking back at the camera that has become the iconic image associated with Bigfoot. Allegedly, that film had Ray’s wife, Elna in a hairy suit they'd put together.

The Toledo Bigfoot group remembers a fellow named Patterson who spent years searching the Willow Creek/Bluff Creek area for signs of Bigfoot. “Patterson was trying to get the feet (from Ray) all the time,” said Dale Lee Wallace, 85, who also lives in Toledo. Dale Lee was a nephew of Ray Wallace and worked on a lot of the Wallace logging jobs in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He said Patterson was obsessed with finding evidence of Bigfoot. “Patterson went up Bluff Creek trying to find Bigfoot. He brought some mules down there and he went right past us where we was working on Red Creek. We was all laughing at him, calling him crazy.”

Mike said his dad Ray spent a lot of time feeding Bigfoot stories to Patterson but stopped once he realized Patterson’s motives were for profit and not just for fun. “Patterson was in it for money,” Dale Lee Wallace said. “He was going to make a big movie and he was always trying to get more information from Ray, but Ray wouldn't give it to him. Ray didn't want to tell the truth about it.”

Then Wallace began getting into Bigfoot research. He reported Bigfoot sightings. He recorded Bigfoot sounds. He played the faithful like a violin and giggled behind his hand the whole time, said his son Michael. “He was a prankster, but never malicious. He just liked playing jokes.”

The Later Years 

When Ray got too old to stomp around the woods making footprints, he tried making his own 16mm Bigfoot movies by dressing up his friends and family members in a gorilla suit, and he even helped produce a 1971 country album in Nashville called “Bigfoot: Northwest’s Abominable Snowman,” featuring singer Don Jones.

In later years, Michael Wallace said, his father ran a menagerie of wild animals -- from cougars to skunks -- that reflected his penchant for the unusual. He also got into the petting-zoo business. He stocked the one he built in Lewis County, Washington, with cougars, raccoons, deer, and bear cubs. His wife, Elna, to whom he was married for sixty-two years, passed a few years after Ray. She ran the concession stand. If a family turned up looking poor, they got free food.“ 

The zoo went out of business when the state decided to remove the off ramp which was it's only access. Ray later informed his grandson, Kris, that the government disliked him accepting Canadian currency and giving away food to the hungry, so they conspired to take away his zoo by removing the access ramp from I-5.

He made a lot of people laugh, It was a fun family to grow up in.” Mike Wallace continued,  “Some people have made lives out of this,” Mike Wallace said. “We’re not trying to hurt those people. The world believed in Bigfoot because they wanted to believe. It really made it easy to pique people's interest.”

Mike said he was looking through one such book where the author diligently recorded the dates and locations of reported Bigfoot sightings and it occurred to him that many of those records perfectly coincided with the dates and locations of logging and construction jobs by Toledo’s Wallace and Buswell families. “We're not here to disprove yetis or Sasquatch or the abominable snowman,” Mike Wallace said. “We're just telling you we know who Bigfoot is, and Bigfoot is Ray L. Wallace.”

Mike called his dad “cool crazy” and described how Ray was fascinated by UFOs, digging gold mines and searching for oil wells. “From daylight to dark. For a guy with an eighth-grade education he was pretty smart. It's funny how people in Toledo either loved him or thought he was a nut bag. There's no in-between.”

And so, there you have it, Ray Wallace helped create an American legend that now dwarfs the geographically limited Loch Ness Monster. So here's to you, Grandpa Wallace: Thanks for putting so much fun and excitement into our lives and igniting our curiosity of the unexplained. You will always be missed.

1. https://www.nabigfootsearch.com/Guestcolumnist.html

Our conversation merged into talking about the human factor and how that related to Bigfoot. I explained that there are many members of the public that ridicule the idea of a Bigfoot being alive in our forests and refuse to entertain the idea that it may be feasible that they exist. John said, ”There is no logic to the human attitude to this thing. Ray Wallace can’t still be making all of these tracks.” 

Green’s thought is that certain members of the public still believe that all of the large human looking tracks discovered in almost every major forest in the United States are forgeries, or, the entire story is fabrication. Ray Wallace is a famous person in Bigfoot circles for making giant footprints in an area where Bigfoot was known to roam, but, that was for a very confined period of time in the 1960’s, he is now deceased. 

Green’s other implication is that there are thousands of Bigfoot sightings from people of every race, sex and nationality and both Native American’s, foreign nationals and everything in between. How could all of these people be fabricating a story? How could they assist in a forensic drawing and have the drawing be almost identical to other drawings from people they have never met?

2. https://www.nabigfootsearch.com/bigfootblog.html

Our commitment to educating the public and keeping them informed on this topic will not stop with the Bigfoot Bulletin. In the near future we will be posting a revolutionary new category, some that will cause a stir in our arena. NABS has dozens of original letters that were written by Ray Wallace to Ray Crowe. Mr. Wallace owned a construction company that built roads in the Bluff Creek and Mt. St. Helens regions. Yes, it is an odd coincidence that the Wallace team built roads into some of the hottest bigfoot areas in the country, but, from that emanated some very interesting letters, we will be posting the letters. Ray has much notoriety for forging bigfoot tracks and claiming they were originals, understood. 

Once NABS read the letters that Wallace wrote, most written about his exploits in the 50’s and 60’s, the reader will immediately understand why we are posting these. Mr. Wallace has intimate knowledge of bigfoot behavior that was not widely known when he wrote the letters. He writes about conversations he has with Indian Chiefs about bigfoot behavior and what the chief informs him about the bipeds, it is very enlightening. Few people in the 50’s and 60’s chose to listen to the Native American about bigfoot, Ray did, and, he documented those conversations. Mr. Wallace did have a special insight into bigfoot and we will give the public the first look at these letters in the weeks to come.

Across the river from our base camp in Cascade Locks is Skamania County, Washington. It’s home to Mt. St. Helens and the stories that go with Ray Wallace and Datus Perry fame. Ray claimed that there were several families of Bigfoot that lived on the mountain and Datus claimed that he had multiple encounters over a lifetime. It is a fact that Ray did fake a series of tracks in his lifetime but as a group that has his private notes from a lifetime in the woods, Ray knew some things that only a keep observer of the biped would know.

3. http://www.cryptozoonews.com/wallace-10/

The story told of how a recently deceased road construction company owner, Ray Wallace of Washington State, appeared to have been behind hoaxing Bigfoot footprints in the Pacific Northwest. His family members told the reporter that they found the wooden tools he used to create his alleged “pranks” in his possessions. (As it turns out, other of Wallace’s “wooden fake feet” were revealed later, see below, to be owned by other relatives.)

The well-known trickster Wallace became the focus of media attention for weeks and months later, in which he was blamed for every Bigfoot track ever found in California, Oregon, and Washington State, to being the author of the Patterson-Gimlin film, with his wife in the suit. (The fake Bigfoot film Wallace had made was created in the 1970s, however.)

As many of you know, I consider there is reality in the notion that Ray Wallace had a central role in promoting various incidents of hoaxing at Bluff Creek in 1958-1960, and later, it became well-established he had, beginning with Young’s article. Faking occurred, no doubt about it. This is not to say that the mistake that the media made in 2002, to declare Wallace as “Bigfoot’s Father,” was helpful. In 1958, at Bluff Creek, actual footprint evidence for a large unknown hominoid was found, it seems certain. But then, after Jerry Crew’s initial encounters, Ray Wallace hoaxed various easily-found tracks and supported fictional scenarios by his relatives and friends.

4. http://www.cryptozoonews.com/elna-as-bf/

In 2002, this was labeled as a frame of film showing Elna Wallace reportedly inside this Bigfoot suit, or did a photo editor mixed up the old Ray Wallace footage with the old Ivan Marx fake Bigfoot footage to talk about the Patterson-Gimlin film? Of course, this was not the first time that newspapers confused their Bigfoot films, now was it?

Mark Hall notes in his overview published here today, that in 2002, I brought to the attention of the Bigfoot community the media’s poor unfolding of Ray Wallace’s history. I stated especially newspapers were totally confusing the Wallace family’s claims of Ray hoaxing footprints and the making of his own 1970s’ films with the filming of the Roger Patterson-Bob Gimlin footage in 1967.

Even though I first told the Seattle Times’ Bob Young about Ray Wallace’s death, that Wallace was a trickster, and that Young might wish to talk to the family about Ray’s prank tracks that a few of us had known about for years, the reporter decided to interview and quote others beyond the business of Wallace’s fake footprints.

5. http://www.cryptozoonews.com/hall-ii/

The seekers of Bigfoot in the North American West have been unable to put the Wallace Problem behind them. At the end of 2002 the time had arrived to accept the meaning of the fake feet possessed by the heirs of Ray Wallace, a wealthy contractor who had started planting fake Bigfoot tracks in 1958 and saw his ruse succeed only too well to the time of his death in November of 2002. While always discrediting himself with extravagant claims to have film, recordings, and colorful stories of Bigfoot activity, Wallace nevertheless was one of the people who saw genuine Bigfoot tracks at the start of the Bigfoot publicity that began in 1958. The distinctive fakes that Wallace put into circulation can be sorted out from the record and disposed of. I addressed this issue in Volume 7 of Wonders. [1] There I related the history from 1958 onward when what appear to be genuine tracks were first given widespread publicity.

Some faked impressions, made in imitation of genuinely large footprints, were discovered in at least three instances, in 1958, in 1960, and in 1967.

In short, after the initial sensational interest in Bigfoot was sparked by a genuine set of strange footprints, Ray Wallace hired two men to look into the matter. Soon thereafter he began to deposit false footprints along creeks and roads in Northern California. Those carved tools for hoaxing appear to me to have been based upon a find of genuine footprints made by his employees. Bigfoot seekers, who had little experience with Bigfoot prints in 1958, were fooled by those bogus impressions. Until the presentation of the hoaxing tools in December of 2002 one particular set of fake feet has had a significant impact on the record of Bigfoot.

6. http://www.cryptozoonews.com/wallace-line/

Misinformed individuals in the media do exist who don’t understand the Wallace Line exists between these factions. To harsh and skeptic reporters who have understudied the Wallace fakes, these media writers have swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, that “Wallace was Bigfoot” and have overlooked the glaring differences between, for example, the Wallace fakes presented as being used in 1958 and the Jerry Crew cast from Bluff Creek, 1958. Moving on from this agreement within both pro-Bigfoot camps on each side of the Wallace Line, the media has missed that there are these two camps within the field that see the role of Ray Wallace quite differently.

7. http://www.cryptozoonews.com/wallace-iv/

How can anyone not see that, indeed, Ray Wallace and/or his associates did use the carved wooden tools, such as this left foot fake (seen here on the right) in the series from Blue Creek Mountain, 1967 (one example track is shown here)? Blue Creek Mountain is near Bluff Creek, California, of course.

John Auman, 71, of Glenoma, Washington State, "who worked in the northern California forests with the late Ray Wallace says the 16-inch footprints Wallace made — using big, wooden feet strapped to his boots — weren’t a prank at all…[Auman] remembers the tracks as a theft deterrent, not just a joke…the big footprints scared off vandals who’d been coming to worksites and stealing fuel, batteries, engines — whatever wasn’t nailed down." (Source: Seattle Times, December 9, 2002.)

You see, if the stories came from the associates of Wallace in the 1950s, they have become part of Bigfoot testimony and are believed. The road-crossing sighting on October 12, 1958, of a Bigfoot by Wallace-hired men, Ray Kerr, 43, and Leslie Breazeale, 35, is taken as gossip. The story of Bigfoot throwing a huge tire and drum down a gully, and other parts of the Bluff Creek story that have been repeated as further evidence of the Bigfoot encounter issued from, humm, Ray’s brother, more often than not.

8. http://www.cryptozoonews.com/ray-wallace-1/

Next, in a light-hearted matter, we are told by John to believe the fact that Ray Wallace was a fun-loving trickster. John supports that claim, but draws a line at Bluff Creek. And the surrounding mountains, it seems. Why can John have it both ways? Why does John believe Ray Wallace was a prankster but not see that Wallace’s mischief would have extended to planted footprints?

9. http://www.bigfootproject.org/articles/green_keynote.html

I am referring to the claim made last year by his family that the late Ray Wallace the contractor on the road construction job where the first “Bigfoot” track was cast, made those footprints by walking around wearing a pair of wooden feet.

Had the first newspaper to carry the story behaved responsibly, and asked the Wallaces to demonstrate that they could duplicate those tracks with the wooden feet that they displayed as proof, that story would never have been printed. Instead it was treated as revealed truth, and it was republished and broadcast all over the world, with some wonderful embellishments.

One newspaper quoted a Wallace nephew saying that Ray had sent younger members of the clan out to make all of the big tracks that have been reported all over the continent. Others took a mention of Ray making movies of his wife in a fur suit and twisted it to include the Patterson movie.

Even the newspaper in Eureka, which had printed the original stories that introduced “Bigfoot” to the world, got on the bandwagon with a yarn about how the publisher at the time had known all along it was a Ray Wallace hoax. It was a totally irresponsible performance by the media, and frankly a lot of people involved in Bigfoot research weren’t any better. Their reaction might be summed up as: “Okay, Ray Wallace faked the Bluff Creek tracks but we have other tracks that are genuine.”

They didn’t bother to find out, any more than the media did, whether the Wallace claims were true, and seemed perfectly willing to discard as evidence tracks that are the most thoroughly investigated and best authenticated of any that have ever been found.

The current Wallaces actually don’t show any sign of knowing much about the Bluff Creek tracks and may even believe that what they are saying is true, although one of them told Rick Noll that his father never actually said he had faked the tracks, they just grew up knowing he had.

The wooden feet that they showed the media, as you can see in the full-size photos of them on display here, do not match the original “Bigfoot”. They do appear to be attempts to duplicate the casts made by Bob Titmus of the different set of tracks he found on a Bluff Creek sandbar, but one of them is so crudely carved that they would not likely fool anybody.

I expect those feet were just made to see whether tracks could be faked with them, something that probably, like myself, some of you have also tried. The answer, of course, is that you can make passable tracks in flat ground if it is soft enough, but in firm materials or up and down slopes, forget it. Some of the original tracks were in very firm materials, and some went up and down steep slopes. This museum has had an offer in circulation for several months now of $100,000 for anyone who can show how they could have been faked.

So far there is no sign that any Wallace cares to try for the money, but perhaps they haven’t heard of it. The same editors that swallowed whole their nonsensical story refused to believe a real one. Priding themselves, I suppose, on not falling for a publicity stunt, they gave the $100,000 offer no publicity at all.

Granted that the $100,000 was put up in an attempt to get publicity, since all other attempts to get the media to counteract the damage they had done had failed, but it is a genuine offer. The first person who can demonstrate how the Bluff Creek tracks could have been faked will be paid $100,000. Tomorrow, you when you hear the people who were involved at the time describe what they observed; I think you will agree that there is no cause for concern that the money will ever be claimed.  

What is the story about Ray Wallace? I never met him, because he was never around Willow Creek the times I was here, but I was told early on about his reputation as a practical joker, and in later years I got occasional letters and phone calls from him.

According to newspaper stories he was pretty upset in 1958 about people suggesting he had faked the tracks, pointing out, undoubtedly correctly, that the whole thing was interfering with his contract and costing him money.

It wasn’t long, though, until he began to try to get in on the action, telling outlandish tales about his adventures with Bigfoot. He even tried to sell Tom Slick a movie of Bigfoot he that claimed to have taken. I wasn’t there, but I was told that Ray asked for $10,000 and wouldn’t show Tom the film until he had the money.

We had learned by then that Tom could be very gullible at times, but that wasn’t one of the times, so we never knew what would have happened if he had agreed to pay. We thought then that it was an attempted swindle, but having learned more of Ray’s reputation from people who knew him well and admired him I feel sure now that it would have turned out to be just one of his pranks.

A while later, after he had returned to the area in Washington where he came from, Ray got involved in selling very odd looking footprint casts, supposedly from the Mount Saint Helen’s apes. I never heard that he had casts from Bluff Creek, and I’m sure he never claimed publicly that he had faked the tracks there; because he would certainly have been called on to prove it.

To give you something of the flavor of the man, I’ll quote a couple of passages from of his letters.

• In 1961 he wrote to the Klam-ity Kourier, here in Willow Creek, as follows:

Big foot used to be very tame, as I have seen him almost every morning on my way to work… I would sit in my pickup and toss apples out of the window to him. He never did catch an apple but he sure tried. Then as he ate the apples I would have my movie camera clipping off more footage of him… I have talked to several movie companies about selling my movies which would last for three hours. The best offer I’ve had so far is $250,000.

• A letter to me in April 1979, included the following:

… everyone says who has heard Big Foots screams in northern California, before all the Big Foots were killed and hauled down the Klamath River in a tug boat and out into the ocean 12 miles to where there was a small ship anchored in international waters and frozen into a block of ice and then transported to Hong Kong and sold, so now there aren’t any more left in northern California, or is there if they are being let out of flying saucers.

Everything Ray did was so transparently bogus that it seemed obvious he was just having fun. It is hard to imagine he expected his yarns to be believed, and although some writers back East swallowed the bait I don’t know of anyone involved in the sasquatch search in the West who took him seriously or felt that he was causing any sort of problem.

10. https://www.nabigfootsearch.com/Guestcolumnist.html

Our conversation merged into talking about the human factor and how that related to Bigfoot. I explained that there are many members of the public that ridicule the idea of a Bigfoot being alive in our forests and refuse to entertain the idea that it may be feasible that they exist. John said, ”There is no logic to the human attitude to this thing. Ray Wallace can’t still be making all of these tracks.” Green’s thought is that certain members of the public still believe that all of the large human looking tracks discovered in almost every major forest in the United States are forgeries, or, the entire story is fabrication. Ray Wallace is a famous person in Bigfoot circles for making giant footprints in an area where Bigfoot was known to roam, but, that was for a very confined period of time in the 1960’s, he is now deceased. Green’s other implication is that there are thousands of Bigfoot sightings from people of every race, sex and nationality and both Native American’s, foreign nationals and everything in between. How could all of these people be fabricating a story? How could they assist in a forensic drawing and have the drawing be almost identical to other drawings from people they have never met?

11. https://www.bfro.net/news/wallace.asp#achievements

Other significant achievements claimed by Ray Wallace, as collected over the years by journalist and author, John Green:

• Ray Wallace letter to the Klam-ity Kourier, Oct. 1, 1969 

"Big Foot used to be very tame, as I have seen him almost every morning on the way to work..I would sit in my pickup and toss apples out of the window to him. He never did catch an apple but he sure tried. Then as he ate the apples I would have my movie camera clipping off more footage of him..I have talked to several movie companies about selling my movies which would last for three hours. The best offer I've had so far is $250,000."

• Ray Wallace letter to John Green, Feb. 6, 1967

"The first day we went out in search of the Mt. St. Helens apes we saw five different-sized tracks..the first day out from our camp we saw where five of the giant-sized apes had crossed a small creek, the water was still muddy in their tracks..We found the ape cave. I sent my pack crew out after a hundred pounds of plaster of Paris and I made some of the nicest casts of those Mt. St. Helens apes tracks that I have ever saw..I don't think I could ever find the ape cave that my guide showed me where the Mt. St. Helens Apes have stayed for possibly several thousand years."

• Ray Wallace, letter to John Green, Dec. 2, 1984 

(John Green sent the address but never received any pictures) "Please send me your correct address..I want to send you a picture of one of the male Mt. St. Helens apes that the loggers took this spring as they were feeding apples to an old pair of BFs and the female was carrying a baby, but she never came close enough for them to get a good picture, they got some close up pictures of this 9 foot tall male, I just borrowed the negatives..I want to send all of the BF researchers a picture."

• Ray Wallace, letter to John Green, Oct. 20, 1989

"I sent you a tape of the songs about Big Foot plus some of his high-pitched screams, I would like for you to set up a meeting with scientists from all over the world to listen to those screams.Our government thinks these Big Foots are being let out of flying saucers. In 1975 I was interviewed by some government officials for 4 hours.. This government official said to me 'Mr. Wallace we think these big foots are being let out of flying saucers' .. This Bob, I don't dare mention his name I don't think, anyway he got up out of his chair and came over to me and shook his fore finger in my face..I say why don't you tell the public that instead of lying to them and saying there are no such things as flying saucers. Bob called me several times after that meeting and he has retired now but he still sends me reports of flying saucers that are being seen all over the world..The last thing Bob said our government are really worried about what those flying saucers are here for. I said its nothing to worry about and its just the full filment of the Bible as it says there will be all types of objects in the skies in the last days."

• Ray Wallace, letter to Dennis Gates, May 24, 1978

"I just want to inform you Big Foot hunters that Big Footed creatures are people, they speak a language. I could tell you more about the Sasquatch or Bigfoot than anyone else, I told Roger Patterson where to go in California to see Big Foots. I made ten thousand feet of movies of the Big Foots before I told Roger Patterson where to go..I logged the Bluff Creek area for ten years and the whole crew has seen as many as 13 of the Big Foot people at one time..I could take you to a cave in Northern California where the Big Foots live in a very rich gold mine cave.Did you know that Tom Slick bought Big Foot skeletons for many years and turned them over to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.? legs bones four inches diameter, two and a half feet long between the ankle and knee.I have talked to the Big Foots many times..they didn't understand me and I didn't understand them, but their brown eyes told the story that they are very sad because the bear hunters are killing all their people."

• Ray Wallace, letter to the Klam-ity Kourier, March 25, 1970

"Some of you Big Foot readers probably wonder how I got the Big Foot scream on tape...in 1958 before the bear hunters got to chasing Big Foot with their hounds and made him so wild, I used to see one of the Big Foots almost every morning, eating elderberries along the road..I have seen Big Foot several hundred times..I didn't ever tell anyone about seeing those large, hairy type creatures as I was having a hard enough time keeping men on the job..Most of the men would quit the first time they saw those huge shaped human bare foot tracks. Then I would; have to start looking for a new crew.I lost $40,000 on that road job..After having two of the Big Foots captured and getting loose, I have always said not to underestimate the great strength of old Big Foot."

• Ray Wallace, letter to the University of British Columbia, Jan. 26, 1981

"Back in 1947 when I had my logging crew on a free moose hunting trip to Canada near Vanderhoof, B.C. we saw a family of six Sasquatches and they were as interested in us as we were in them. I have seen the Big Foots in Northern California and around Mt. Hood in Oregon and around Mt. St. Helens and they all look alike so I know that Big Foot and Sasquatches are all brothers or sisters..the largest BF I have ever seen at least four feet acrossed the chest and very large arms and carrying a large round rock in each hand. I have a movie of one throwing a rock and killing a deer."

• Ray Wallace, letter to John Green, April 15, 1979

"Everyone says who has heard Big Foots screams in northern California, before all the Big Foots were killed and hauled down the Klamath River in a tug boat and out into the ocean 12 miles to where was a small ship anchored in international waters and frozen into a block of ice and then transported to Hong Kong and sold, so now there aren't any more left in northern California. or is there if they are being let out of flying saucers."