JEFFREY Meldrum, the scientist who stalked Bigfoot, has died at the age of 67.
The professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University died on September 9 in Pocatello, Idaho.
His wife, Lauren Stewart, posted on social media, saying that his cause of death was brain cancer.
Meldrum became known for the scientific rigor he brought to the study of Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, who may be nothing more than folklore and part of the popular culture of the Pacific Northwest.
He was admired both by enthusiasts who claimed to have sighted the creature and a number of people trying to debunk its existence.
His interest started when he was a boy but his serious investigations started in 1996, having examined a set of 15-inch footprints outside Walla Walla, Washington.
His lab eventually housed more than 300 footprint casts, as well as samples of hair and feces.
Dr Meldrum said in 2006: “I’m not out to proselytize that Bigfoot exists.
“I place legend under scrutiny, and my conclusion is, absolutely, Bigfoot exists.”
The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in Bigfoot following a number of supposed sightings and even the FBI launched an investigation.
However, his research was labelled pseudoscience by many of his fellow scientists, who said he was fanning the flame of distrust that had given rise to the belief in alien abductions.
Even a senior lecturer in the physics department of the university, Martin Hackworth, branded Dr Medrum’s research as a “joke”.
“He believes he’s taken up the cause of people who have been shut out by the scientific community,” Mr. Hackworth said. “He’s lionized there. He’s worshiped. He walks on water. It’s embarrassing.”
However, coming to Dr. Meldrum’s defence was the university’s dean of arts and sciences, John Kijinski.
“He provides a form of open discussion and dissenting viewpoints that may not be popular with the scientific community,” Dr. Kijinksi said, “but that’s what academics is all about.”
While he admitted that some Sasquatch “evidence” had been produced by hoaxers he argued in his 2006 book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science that much of it was too sophisticated to be produced by pranksters.
He maintained that the purported Bigfoot in a famous film snippet made in Northern California in 1967, which skeptics have said is a person in a costume, walked in too apelike a manner to be fake.
Don Jeffrey Meldrum was born on May 24, 1958, in Salt Lake City, the eldest of three children of Don and Marilyn Meldrum.
He became interested in Bigfoot as a child, telling his friends that someday he would find one in the wild.
“Good luck hunting for Bigfoot,” a friend wrote in his yearbook when he graduated in 1976 from Capital High School in Boise, Idaho.
He earned his PhD in anatomical sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1989.
One respected scientist who did not reject Medrum’s ideas was the famous primatologist Jane Goodall, who died earlier this month.
In a blurb for Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, Dr. Goodall wrote that it brought “a much needed level of scientific analysis” to the topic.
“I think I have read every article and every book about these creatures,” Dr. Goodall added, “and while most scientists are not satisfied with existing evidence, I have an open mind.”
