Laura Krantz

All of them have seen something that they can't explain any other way.

I'm Laura Krantz, and this is Wild Thing, a series about Sasquatch science and society, the search for Bigfoot, and why we want so badly for it to be real.

Eyewitness accounts, these stories of people's personal Bigfoot encounters, they're completely fascinating.

While I believe that many of these witnesses saw something, I also know that their stories are hard to verify.

So did my cousin Grover Krantz, one of the world's most respected Bigfoot researchers.

At a Sasquatch conference way back in 1978, he spoke about his hesitation in relying on eyewitnesses.

I found this tape of Grover in the Smithsonian's archives, and it illustrates how wary he was about these stories.

But his papers also contained a list of supposed Sasquatch sightings, so it seems like he couldn't completely dismiss them either.

For each sighting, he'd note the date, the location, the name of the witness, and whether he thought the stories were legit.

He'd put a big red X by most of them, ones he'd checked out and that didn't pass muster.

but about a handful had question marks or a maddening maybe scribbled next to them.

And that's it.

No additional information.

If he took more detailed notes, they're not with the rest of his papers.

Diane Horton, Grover's fourth wife, we met her in the first episode, she remembers collecting eyewitness accounts with him.

He also got testimonials in the mail.

And he had hundreds of those letters.

But he didn't keep any of those either.

Horton says he didn't think they were sufficient enough evidence on their own, although he still checked them out, just in case.

Yeah.