Comparing spectrograms is an easy scientific method to prove or disprove the source of recorded howlings.
John Bidernagel, a retired professional biologist, has been studying Sasquatch since 1963 and has written two books on the subject. He continues to create videos (available for viewing on YouTube) chronicling his findings and those of other biologists and cryptozoologists who have collected information on sasquatch sightings around the world.
Aside from archiving his extensive collection of sasquatch artifacts, Bindernagel has also been busy analyzing findings from a sighting in Alert Bay on Cormorant Island last summer. He returned to the Island in September and October of this year to talk to residents again, and explore the heavily forested area. Another resident came forward with a better audio recording of unexplained howlings, and Bindernagel has had them converted to a spectrogram. There was another recording that came out of Norway House, northern Manitoba, that had a similar spectrogram pattern as the one in Alert Bay, and it was even clearer than the Alert Bay sample.
These spectrograms allowed him to compare the visual “map” of the sounds with other spectrograms of known sounds on record at the Macaulay Library of Sounds from Cornell University in New York. Critics speculated the howlings were really a bellowing moose, or a growling bear. Bindernagel has been able to rule out several of the guesses, including black bear, based on spectrogram technology. Comparing spectrograms is an easy scientific method to prove or disprove the source of the howlings, and Bindernagel said it frustrates him generally that more of his former scientific colleagues will not even entertain the idea. “We have good prints, all sorts of tree damage, but there’s no link to all of that,” he said of all the sasquatch evidence gathered throughout the years. “But now there’s another form of evidence being documented (audio recordings), if we can attract the relevant specialists to examine the material.”
Could a Sasquatch whose footprints Comox Valley biologist John Bindernagel discovered in 1988 near Mount Washington Alpine Resort be the same Sasquatch whose footprints were discovered in Sayward in 1993? Bindernagel thinks it might be. Bindernagel discovered a footprint he attributes to Sasquatch in October, 1988 while chaperoning a school hike at Lake Helen Mackenzie in Strathcona Provincial Park. The group was walking along a trail when one of the students pointed out five tracks in a muddy spot. It took Bindernagel and his wife three days to return to the spot with plaster to cast the prints, and by then all but one was obliterated.
Earlier this year he bought three original casts of footprints from someone in Campbell River who took his casts from prints near Sayward. “He puts scientists to shame with the recording he did,” Bindernagel said of the Campbell River man, whose name he declined to share. “There are photographs with measurements where they were found.”
Bindernagel’s Lake Helen Mackenzie cast is 15 inches long and one-third longer than a normal human footprint. The step was about 40 inches, he recalled in a 2002 Marmot Newspaper interview, much longer than a human step. When the Strathcona cast is placed beside the Sayward cast, they look quite similar, Bindernagel pointed out. Both prints have similar toe structure, size and shape