Why would the government or anyone want to discourage the Sasquatch from being discovered?

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by William Jevning (@bukwas01), 38 year veteran sasquatch investigator, and author of "Notes From the Field, Tracking North America's Sasquatch". Read more about Jevning at his Bigfoot blog, Bigfoot Researcher.

This is becoming an increasingly frequently asked question. I myself never considered such a thing, and having been a close personal friend of the late Rene' Dahinden was in a position to have known of such activities had they been perpetrated, but had not heard of such things.

I was reading comments on a blog last year about just this, and the people chatting there were asking rather excellent questions. This discussion got me thinking about my own experiences, and I have them written on my own website and blog, and began seeking accounts from anyone else who may have experienced similar situations.

I began receiving responses from people all along the west coast of the United States with similar stories. So the question is not "if" such cover-ups and outright destruction of evidence is taking place, but "why"?

I am certain that there are numerous reasons for why anyone would wish the Sasquatch to remain in limbo as far as being officially recognized, but one stands out in my mind as likely the strongest reason.

Many investigators over the years attempting to uncover government actions successfully follow the same path, and that is to follow the money. In this case taking a close look at the financial impact that proving the Sasquatch to exist would have on local communities which are in the vicinity of national or state forest lands would have.

I have not completed my investigation into this probable impact, but enough so that it would be devastating on a wide scale.

How do we know this would be a problem? We already have a much smaller example with the Northern Spotted owl, remember this?

I have placed an article here that was written about the impact the owl controversy had on communities, I have yet to hear any major studies done on the impact on communities and humans as a result of the Spotted Owl decision.

In June 1990 the government set aside 15% (20 million acres) of old growth forest for the owl habitat, and all the neighboring communities never recovered from this. Below is the article from a site called "One voice working for the forests".

It was 20 years ago — June 26, 1990 — that the spotted owl was listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The Oregonian has taken an in-depth look at what that decision has meant for the timber industry and the spotted owl itself. The results, especially for the industry, are not pretty, and environmental groups might have a few things they’d rather forget too.

As this graphic shows, the owl listing ended up cutting Oregon’s total timber harvest in half. And the Northwest timber industry was decimated.

Here is a description from Jonathan Raban’s op-ed this week in the New York Times:

(In 1994) the Northwest Forest Plan came into effect, protecting around 20 million acres of federal land from logging, and offering financial compensation and job retraining to the timber towns. As mill after mill closed, the stench of steam and pulp vanished from the Northwestern air; trucks carrying massive tree trunks, which used to cause mile-long tailbacks on the Olympic Peninsula, became rarities; and the ubiquitous slow-moving tugboats, dragging rafts of freshly felled firs, gradually faded from view on Puget Sound.

Raban, whose op-ed is generally supportive of the owl’s listing, said the sting still lingers in timber communities:

The battle over the owl has been just one engagement in the war over nature in the Northwest…The struggle has set class against class and countryside against city, and turned lifelong rural Democrats into staunch Republicans.

In the old timber towns, many people still echo the August 1994 speech by Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, to the Senate on the human cost of the spotted owl listing: “The U.S. government, driven by sophisticated, well-financed national environmental organizations and supported by the media and urban opinion leaders, has betrayed rural communities and destroyed — yes, destroyed — the lives and careers of tens of thousands of honest working families in the Pacific Northwest.” Or, as the city attorney for Forks, Wash., (once a roaring town that declared itself the Logging Capital of the World) said when I called to remind him of last week’s anniversary: “That’s not a day we celebrate. At any time.”

And yet — this is the real kicker — all sides of the debate agree that the listing has done nothing to improve the spotted owl’s numbers from 20 years ago. In fact, after two decades of the owl being federally listed as “threatened,” there are actually fewer spotted owls than there were in 1990.

How can this possibly be? The absurdity of the situation is almost comical if it wasn’t so painful. The reason — and apparently no one anticipated this 20 years ago — is a larger, more efficient species called the barred owl has migrated to the Pacific Northwest from the East and is squeezing out the spotted owl population. In the Olympic National Forest, for example, researchers counted just 13 spotted owls last year, whereas in 1990 they counted 150.

Now it doesn't take much imagination to multiply the effects of the Sasquatch being proven to exist to see what would happen. There would be no 15% of forest old growth closed, "ALL" forests would be closed, and until scientists could determine all the aspects of Sasquatch life, range, feeding habits, family structure and how they relate to range areas, etc. The endangered species act clearly defines this, and all state DNR, state forest, national forest lands would be frozen. This could potentially include national parks as Sasquatch encounters happen in them also.

While logging has been cut off a great deal from before the spotted owl decision, which makes one wonder "did they do this to soften the economic impact in case the Sasquatch inadvertently were proven to exist"?

Of course this is speculation, but I am certain if the economic impact were thoroughly studied, the picture would become clear as to this motive.

This issue would not be the first one in which we know for fact the government has kept from the public.

William Jevning