1958: The Bigfoot Hoax That Wasn't

Artwork by Rick Spears, I think?

Raymond Wallace was born in Clarksdale, Missouri on April 21, 1918 - and has since posthumously risen to fame as one of the most prolific Bigfoot hoaxers the world has ever known. He was known to use large, badly-crafted foot-shaped wooden shoes to create the tracks supposedly left by the unknown primate. He is also even said to have been behind the famous clip of a hairy humanoid filmed by Roger Patterson on October 20, 1967. These claims to fame were made after his death by his nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, after his uncle's death in 2002. He had allegedly started hoaxing the world in 1958, when he went stomping around one of the construction sites he owned in Northern California. It was the tracks he left on this occasion which became the first to mean that the creature behind them was referred to as Bigfoot. However, some evidence suggests that Wallace's hoax in 1958 might've outgrown its creator - and that the creature might've somehow sprung to life...

Calling His Bluff (Creek)

A photo of Jerry Crew holding his famous footprint cast

Jerry Crew arrived to work on a Wallace-owned construction site in Bluff Creek, California on August 27, 1958. He was busy bulldozing some nearby brush to make space for a new road when he caught sight of some odd footprints pressed deeply into the ground beneath him. He got down off his bulldozer and took a closer look at the prints - and it would be this action that would ultimately launch Bigfoot into the public consciousness. Crew and his... well... crew decided that the tracks were perhaps the work of a prankster - and apparently already knew to point the finger at their boss Ray Wallace. They knew that he was 'demented' and would probably have been the one behind the unconvincing tracks. A county sheriff even went as far as to publicly accuse Wallace of creating the tracks. However, a longer line of tracks would appear that year in September, and would convince Crew and the other workers that there was perhaps more to the story than they had initially thought. Casts were taken of these prints after a taxidermist named Bob Titmus declared that they were too faint to be used as evidence just by themselves and the story made the front page of the local newspaper, and this is technically the first time the term 'Bigfoot' was used to describe the culprit critter.

Ray and Elna Wallace as of 1947

Although the crew had originally settled on the assumption that the tracks were naught more than hoaxes, there were some interesting anomalies which seemed to show the holes in this conclusion. After the original tracks had been found - the workers on the site decided that the monster making the footprints must've also been behind some other disturbances on the construction site. For example, a 450-pound drum of diesel had vanished one summer previously - leaving only its imprint and some odd footprints in the dust behind. It had obviously been picked up and moved as opposed to dragged. It later reappeared at the bottom of a nearby gulley. The foliage on the other side of the gulley had been broken by something large, suggesting that perhaps something had thrown the drum into the gulley. Another example of this odd phenomenon was brought to the crew's attention by one of the Wallace brothers - Wilbur 'Shorty' Wallace. A 700-pound spare tire meant for a road-grading machine had found its way into a ditch thanks to some mysterious force. Some of the footprints found around the moved equipment varied in depth, indicating that whatever had left the prints was actually carrying the objects - something which Ray Wallace might not have been able to do.

The condition of the second trail of tracks (the ones which resulted in Titmus coming to the scene) is also worth mentioning here when discussing the possibility that perhaps the Bigfoot activity in the area wasn't just the work of an opportunistic hoaxer. The tracks made a trail of several miles in length, which went deep into a steep and mountainous forested area. Bob Titmus and Edward Patrick, another man on the site, decided to follow the trail into the woods. As they made their way along this impressive trail (even more impressive if we're to assume that the then-skinny Raymond Wallace made it), they came across yards worth of coiled 3x16 inch steel-braided wire. This wire would've weighed over 100 pounds, and had apparently been dropped in an area covered with brush of sufficient density that the two men couldn't continue past it. Patrick was left with the distinct impression that it wouldn't have been possible for Ray Wallace to have carried this wire up such a sharp incline and to have dropped it in such a well-forested area. The only tracks leading to or away from the wire were the ones supposedly made by Wallace's cast, and these prints allegedly continued off into terrain that even Titmus couldn't brave. Patrick had been initially skeptical, but now he felt that something mysterious was almost certainly afoot.

While there is no doubt that Wallace was behind quite a lot of hoaxery during the genesis years of the Bigfoot phenomenon, there also seems to be at least some doubt that he was behind all of it. He was aided by a man named Rant Mullins who constructed the crude stamps he used to create Bigfoot tracks, and he even possessed a Bigfoot suit which was worn by his wife to make fake photographs. After Ray's death in 2002, his family decided to release the information regarding the tools he had used to 'invent Bigfoot' - and it turns out that not one of the foot-shaped stamps matches up with the cast taken of Crew's trail of mystery footprints. The holotype Bigfoot cast taken of one of the prints found by Crew is just over 16 inches in length, while none of Wallace's stamps come close to this measurement.

Ray Wallace's stamp (right) against Crew's trail (left)

Realistically, all we can say is that Ray Wallace may have been responsible for the find that resulted in the coinage of the name 'Bigfoot' - and that's not even for certain. He was a prolific hoaxer, but the father of Bigfoot he was not. So if Mr. Wallace wasn't behind all of the destructive phenomena taking place around his construction sites, then what was? Perhaps a real monstrous creature was summoned into existence by the certainty of its existence held by some of the workers - like a Tibetan Tulpa? Then again, it seems as if something was throwing tires around the site at least a year before Wallace stepped into some exceptionally large shoes. There are certainly plenty of reports of hairy humanoid monsters that predate 1958, and so perhaps a Sasquatch really was wandering around Bluff Creek all those years ago, and the opportunistic practical joker decided to expand on its activity? It's a mystery that will likely go unsolved, despite what the public at large may believe. Ray Wallace did not invent Bigfoot.

Sources

Raymond L. Wallace - Wikipedia

'Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend' by Joshua Blu Bluhs

'The Ray Wallace/Rant Mullins Mess' - bigfootencounters.com

'Bigfoot - The Curiosities of 1958' by Bob Gymlan on YouTube