Sasquatch hair color distribution
Data from BFRO and TBRC

East of the Mississippi

The Southeast, (FL GA SC NC Miss AL TN KY.)
Black/brown 136 66.3%
Red/brown 34 16.6%
Tan/blonde 9 4.4%
Grey/white 26 12.7%

The Middle Atlantic (VA, WV, MD, and DE)
Black/brown 25 59.5%
Red/brown 4 9.5%
Tan/blonde 6 14.3%
Grey/white 7 16.7%

The Northeast. (PA, NJ, RI, VT, NH, Mass, CT, ME, NY )
Black/brown 80 68.9%
Red/brown 11 9.5%
Tan/blonde 9 7.8%
Grey/white 16 13.8%

Old NW Territories (OH, IL, IN, WI, and MI)
Black/brown 126 68.1%
Red/brown 23 12.4%
Tan/blonde 7 3.8%
Grey/white 29 15.7%

West of the Mississippi

The Arklatex (Ark, LA, TX, and OK)
Black/brown 139 56.2%
Red/brown 54 21.8%
Tan/blonde 16 6.6%
Grey/white 38 15.4%




The Upper Midwest (KS, MO, NE, Iowa, ND, SD, MN, &WI)
Black/brown 49 62.0%
Red/brown 16 20.2%
Tan/blonde 7 8.9%
Grey/white 7 8.9%

The Mountain West (AZ, CO, ID MT, NM, UT, NV, and WY)
Black/brown 95 73.7%
Red/brown 11 8.5%
Tan/blonde 11 8.5%
Grey/white 11 9.3%

The West Coast (CA)
Black/brown 75 74.3%
Red/brown 13 12.8%
Tan/blonde 10 9.9%
Grey/white 3 3.0%

(OR)
Black/brown 61 73.5%
Red/brown 7 17%
Tan/blonde 2 5%
Grey/white 2 5%

(WA and AK)
Black/brown 75 75%
Red/brown 13 13%
Tan/blonde 2 2%
Grey/white 10 10%

(BC)
Black/brown 30 73%
Red/brown 7 17%
Tan/blonde 2 5%
Grey/white 2 5%

Canadian Provinces east of BC
Black/brown 40 67.8%
Red/brown 7 11.8%
Tan/blonde 6 10.1%
Grey/white 6 10.1%

Grand Totals, all regions

Black/brown 931 68.1%
Red/brown 209 15.3%
Tan/blonde 90 6.6%
Grey/white 137 10.0%
Total 1367 100%

It should be noted that there is a little wiggle room in these figures because not all color descriptions are exact. Some witnesses describe a grey brown or a dark grey sasquatch. Others describe a sasquatch that is partly red/brown and darker brown. In these cases I had to make choices about how to record the sighting. Also I expect that the black/brown or red/brown category is under represented. Many witnesses say they thought they saw a bear at first but never mention color. In these cases it is unlikely that the sasquatch was anything but black/brown or red/brown. However, I didn’t count these in my totals. These are updated figures, including new sightings which have been posted since I began mining the accounts for these statistics.
For what it’s worth, as you move west the incidence of grey/white or tan/blonde sasquatch seems to go down slightly and the incidence of black/brown sasquatch seems to increase. Also there seems to be a slightly higher incidence of red/brown sasquatch in the center of the country.

Mike Phillips

Hey

Rather interesting numbers and some thoughts maybe worth considering. In the overall population which tends to be black/dark brown would not be unlike that of many apes. The white/gray animals in area's where there is less population and therefore only older more mature specimans are seen. The red/brown may be just a slight variation of the Black/Brown group and of course there is blond/tan group which seems unusually large in the mid-atlantic area, maybe a form of albino sasquatch (inbreeding).

With humans, I think it's safe to say that dark hair (brunette) would be number one and slightly lighter hair next. Ovbiously as people get older then they get gray/white hair and then of course there is blonds/sandy blond hair. Sometime hair color is very similar but appears different due to the skins pigmentation. I believe most squatch sightings, pigmentation is mentioned as black or dark brown (but what about in blonds/tan reports)

Too bad we don't have more regular sightings to where one could make more out of this information than just statistical numbers.

Well, Wylie, that is one heckuva first post and we appreciate sharing your findings with us!

Fascinating survey, Wylee. I can see a lot of work went into it. I have a couple of questions for you. Hope you don't mind.

When you list "grey/white", are you meaning that the witness reported the coat as a greyish white colour, or are you grouping the grey and white individuals together?

What about greyish black or black/grey? Did you run into that category at all?

I guess what I'd like to see is more colours listed. Instead of just grouping black/brown together, list Black, Brown, and Black/brown. The same with Grey, and Grey/Black, etc. Would that be possible?

The other thing is the coverage for Canada. I know you probably didn't have as much data to work with for us, but grouping the provinces east of B.C. together into one unit is like grouping the states east of the rockies into one large unit.

One last comment in answer to Pete's post. I wouldn't like to make assumptions that grey or white hair in this creature necessarily means it's old. Many animals have grey or white hair naturally in their coats, at any given age, and it has nothing to do with aging, as it typically does in humans. We should be careful about forming opinions about these creatures based on our knowledge of human characteristics, until we know more about them.

I am shocked on how many white/grey sightings there have been. I had no clue there had been that many...more even than tan/blond! Excellent work! I too would like to know though, as Pat mentioned above, why the categories are labeled the way they are...is that black/dark brown; red/light brown or ??

P.S. Pat I'd like to see a drawing of a white bigfoot...I can't even think how that would look!

Thanks for sharing that write up.

In the past I have been put off by the variation of hair color in alleged sasquatch sightings, and it has been used in that past to discredit sasquatch reports (Whylie's old book case in point). Lately I have been thinking the exact opposite though, since color variation does seem to come up more often than not in reports, and shouldn't be ignored.

It has interesting implications, though I am skeptical of the possibility that some of it is due to inbreeding. Color polymorphism is of course seen in humans, specifically caucasians and in some australian aborigines, so maybe there is a parallel. It also seems to have appeared naturally in mammoths as well (another large northern mammal?). Here are some interesting links on this matter, the first covering the problem of hair color variations in humans in some depth:

cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Frost_06.html

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sc...154892.stm

I think the topic needs a closer look, I'm really glad you have worked out this survey. The percentages of each color appear somewhat stable, how much of the changes in percentages of specific traits across different regions do you think is significant?

Thanks, and great work!
~David

Great post Wylee. Thanks for the links Dave, they were very interesting.

KH

.

David: thank very much for the thoughtful response to my little study. I enjoyed both the articles you sent. My working hypothesis (if a retired English teacher can have an haypothesis) is that we are dealing with homonids which might have hair coloration patterns similar to humans. I began this study because, after reading all the BFRO sightings in order from east to west, I noticed that the grey/white sasquatch seemed to be reported less on the West Coast than in the East, that seems to have been proved out by the study.
Of course, as I say, there is a lot of wiggle room in these figures because of the way people characterize what they have seen. But I do think the 70% average of black/brown sasquatch is pretty accurate from region to region and this gives me more confidence that the sighting reports represent encounters with real animals and are not just hoaxes or delusions. This to me is similar to a study of the dimensions of sasquatch footprint castings where the width and length are shown to describe a bell curve from smallest to largest just as you would expect in a population of living creatures.
Let me also say that there were plenty of reports of sasquatch with slightly different hair coloration on various parts of their bodies. For instnace they might have a sort of cape of lighter hair around their heads and shoulders or their bellies might be grayer than than backs. But I didn't have any way of recording those cases so I just made them fit into one category or another.
The paper you sent about variation in European hair and eye color just gave me an idea. One thing that is often mentioned in the sighting reports is the color that the eyes reflect, and there is variation in these colors as well. Some people report red eyes while others report yellow or even blue eyes. Maybe I'll go back and run through it all again this time looking for mentions of eye color.
Thanks again for the paper on European eye and hair color. That's exactly the sort of information I would like to develop about sasquatch. WC

Glad you found the link of interest, I too am extremely interested in color variation in alleged sasquatch sightings. I was a bit worried links weren't allowed to be posted.

Such studies might be used one day to study the possible genetic history of sasquatch populations, and it certainly provides a lot of interesting speculation now (though I am not pround of my knowledge of genetics, need to hit the books I guess!).

Eye-shine is another thing that really bothers me in sasquatch reports, particularly with the lack of a tapetum lucidum in hominoids. I did once read of some anecdotal cases of eyeshine in some H. sapian individuals, but I could not find any research done empirically on this matter. I hope there is some though?

The reports of individuals with non-uniform hair color is also of interesting, and not unheard of in hominoids. Did you feel the color patterns of this were uniform throughout a given population while going over the reports?

I once saw a picture of a subadult male orangutan (I believe in Anne E. Russon's "Wizards of the Forest" book) that had dark brown hair on his head and shoulders and the normal reddish brown on the rest of his body. Chimpanzee's seem to occasionally get a beige tinge to them (those filmed on the Planet Eart miniseries really showed this), but I have no idea why. And of course there is the Silver-Back Gorilla.

Do to this, the appearence of different hair colors on a single sasquatch shouldn't seem too ridiculous (Whylie used this as well to discredit reports in his book).

Good luck on going back over eyeshine colors, sounds like it could be insightful.
~David

David, Who is this guy Whylie? and what did he write?
I chose to do hair color because I thought that would be more reliably reported by witnesses than things like weight and height. Non uniform hair color on a single sasquatch occurs at random and only rarely as far as I could tell. One difference that comes up a lot is hair type. Some people describe a creature with hair no more than 2 or 3 inches long all over its body. Other people report seeing long hair along the arms and around the shoulders which moves in the "wind" as the sasquatch moves away. This is very like what you can see on some adult orangutans. Others see very matted or tangled hair, and a few speak of beautiful hair that looks almost like it had been brushed.
As far as eye shine goes, it would make sense that sasquatch would have the sort of eyes that would be associated with nocturnal habits. But I think some reports of eye shine are suspect. Sometimes all the witness sees is glowing eyes looking at him from 7 or 8 feet up back in the bushes. If I was going to go back over the sightings I would have trouble including those types of sightings in my figures. There's just too much chance that wishful thinking had something to do with seeing those eyes.
It would be nice to think that studies like this one might some day help a scientist study the genetic history of sasquatch, but have you ever thought how ironic it is that when sasquatch finally make it to the REAL ANIMAL list, the scientists will have to come to us amateurs for information on the species? WC

I don't think it's too ironic at all, it should be remembered that the like of Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey were both amateurs, but their observations of ape behavior revolutionized the field of anthropology!

www.bigfootencounters..../wylie.htm
Wylie's book is the only one on the top of my head that I know listed those problems with alleged sasquatch sightings, though they keep coming up from those skeptical of explanations for this mystery that involve a living animal.
In the back of the book he lists why what people say they observe is inaccurate in describing a living animal. A lot of what he says here seems to be suspect, since those same observations apply to apes that we obviously know are living animals.

The hair length differences do seem very much like what is seen on Orangutans, which is intriguing, particularly with Gigantopithecus and the extant genus Pongo both being in the subfamily Ponginae. I'm sort of dangling on a limb here though...

The subject of eyeshine probably is out of place here, but I don't have enough self control to not discuss it.
Perhaps the best comparative animal we have for the sasquatches nocturnality would be the Owl Monkeys in S. America, since they are the only known Haplorrhine nocturnal primate. They have not evloved any thing similar to a Tapetum lucidum that would give them eyeshine though, as far as I know.
Dr. Meldrum brings has mentioned (LMS pg. 192) that Owen Caddy observed noturnal behavior in a group of chimps, though I have not been able to find more information on this.

I understand how difficult it is to chatagorize aspects of reports, I once tried to do something similar to what you are doing here but with facial features, it was a real drag.
Does there exist some trick to do this in a more confident manner?

~David

Interesting thread. I cannot begin to remember where I read it, but I remember reading in the past that the reddish Sasquatch were believed to be more aggressive than the others. Anybody else ever read/heard anything like that? I know I've read on the BFF where there is some that believe the Eastern Sasquatch to be more aggressive than those on the West coast, but that's not what I'm talking about. It was specifically stated the color and not the location.

Thanks,
S.S.

Hmmm, weird. I cannot say I am familar with that idea. Can't imagine why that should be the case though, do you know of any reports in particular?

David, no I can't remember anything in particular about it. It "seems" like it had something to do with a sighting or two in Texas that I was reading about, but it's been a good while since I read it, and don't really remember anything more.

There very well might not be anything to it, but I just thought it was kind of interesting.

David and Southersquatch, in reguard to red/brown sasaquatch being more agressive, it would be interesting to know what some folks with the TBRC thought about that. They are having their big convention whoop ti do in November. Par Barker did the poster for them. It's on their site and worth a look. A very nice job. BTW, don't know if there is any connection, but the Scotch clansmen (many with red hair) were renowed for their fierceness in battle. (See "Braveheart" the movie.) WC

I dont know about grey, but I'd think white would be pretty rare. Of course this is only for deer, but I've read that only 1 in 10,000 deer are white. Not sure how this would coincide with the coloring of a Sasquatch. Are there any other primates that get gray hair as they age except us? I mean alot of grey hair? Enough where someone would describe it as being "gray"?

Chimpanzee's will go gray partcular parts of their bodies (like Goodalls "Greybeard" or however she spelled it in The Chimpanzees of Gombe). Male Eastern Gorillas develop lighter hair across their backs, hence the name "silver back".

There was also an all white female gorilla, Snowflake, that was kept at the Barcelona Zoo.

It should be considered that perhaps lighter colored sasquatches are reported as frequently as they are not because they are more common within populations of sasquatches, but merely because they are easier for us humans to spot, making them seem more common than they actually are.

We have the same coloured animals here in Oz, I seen one a few monthas ago that was redish/brown with grey streaks through the entire coat.

Hello Yowie, I just read a report from OZ that makes the point that, while the skeptics can claim that us Yanks are just seeing bears and mistaking them for Bigfoot, they can't say that about you guys down under. No bears around down there. Just great white sharks. WC