In the photo: Sapunov shows a tree that was stripped by a yeti.
Valentin Sapunov is one of the few scientists in Russia who has been seriously studying Bigfoot for many years. The professor talks about him as if he had lived side by side with him all his life. His conviction in the existence of Bigfoot is as unshakable as a Darwinist scientist can be adamant who is sure that man descended from ape and nothing else
Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor, Academician of the Petrovskaya Academy of Sciences and Arts, full member of the New York Academy of Sciences, Valentin Borisovich Sapunov does not pursue the glory of a discoverer, since for him the question of the existence of Bigfoot has long been resolved, in the knowledge of this phenomenon he is driven by purely scientific interest: “I’m not a journalist for whom the main question is whether the Bigfoot was caught or not. I want to understand what it is, how it appeared, how it developed, how it interacts with the human race, what place it occupies in the system of biospheric connections …"
And for the first time Valentin Borisovich went after the Bigfoot in 1984 under the auspices of the Znanie-Sila magazine. He was the only biologist on the expedition. We worked in the Tien Shan.
“In the course of preparing for this expedition, I realized that this is a very serious matter,” says the professor. - And I got carried away with this topic so seriously that it actually became my profession. The fact is that I saw in Bigfoot a way of knowing the basic laws of the development of the human race and the existence of the biosphere. Bigfoot became for me a kind of model object, studying which I could raise fundamental questions.
And recently at some conference a priest attacked me. “How can you,” he says, “declare that we are descended from a monkey ?! Man is God's creation! I immediately remembered Lunacharsky's joke, who suggested that if a person descended from a monkey, then this is kind of like progress, and if from God, it is regression.
Sapunov remains a loner in his research. Experts (the same biologists) are very skeptical about this topic. Only once, in 1958, Bigfoot was a planned object of the USSR Academy of Sciences. An expedition to the Pamirs was even organized. They say that the initiative belonged to Nikita Khrushchev: they say, in a conversation with Nesmeyanov, the then president of the Academy, he first heard about the existence of Bigfoot, instantly caught fire with the idea of catching him and thus again being ahead of the rest of the planet. But Bigfoot was not caught, and Khrushchev calmed down on that, switching to more promising developments.
Since then, the organizers of such expeditions (absolutely amateur in form) were only a few researchers, with the persistence of the obsessed looking for an unknown creature in the Pamir mountains and the forests of the Novgorod region.
And Valentin Sapunov went in search every time with a new hope for a meeting …
“He came to the camp,” Sapunov recalls the 1989 expedition. “He was attracted by the bait: pieces of cloth soaked in the sex secretions of a female chimpanzee were hung on the bushes around our base. After all, we proceeded from the assumption that all primates should have some general physiological reactions, including sexual ones. And this assumption was justified. First they found traces. Then the camp duty officer heard footsteps at night and smelled some unpleasant odor. Bigfoot wandered around the camp for several nights. The tracks were getting closer and closer … He even went up to the tent. But then no one saw him.
The professor keeps these rags in his home archive, as well as casts of footprints. “The Bigfoot, by the way, is one of the most studied species on earth today,” Sapunov says.
The arguments are really myriad. Testimonies of people who saw, heard, and even smelled (!) Bigfoot is the main inexhaustible source of information. According to Sapunov, 70 percent of the evidence deserves at least verification. In addition, traces left by a giant animal, biological damage (the same scratches on a tree) and even … some parts of the body should not be disregarded. Only, that's bad luck, all the "evidence" befell the fate of either being stolen or lost. For example, a Bigfoot tooth found in the Caucasus lay for a long time in the Museum of Anthropology on Vasilievsky Island, and then it was allegedly lost. There were also Bigfoot's legs, they were kept in the Prague Museum (Professor Sapunov even traveled to Prague, studied them), but then disappeared somewhere. There was also a hand in the Nepalese museum. But it was also stolen for purposes unknown to science.
Sapunov complains about the lack of an organization that would monitor all these findings. But it so happened that the scientific world categorically does not accept the subject of Bigfoot for development. No wonder, probably, Bigfoot has turned into a hero of jokes. Indeed, it is difficult to believe in him, if only because there are no clear photographs or intelligible video filming. Sapunov shows very blurry pictures of the troglodyte, but it is very difficult to take them for the truth even for an amateur, they are so conditional.
- Valentin Borisovich, how can you tell the world (say so that it believes) that Bigfoot really exists?
- Let's look at this issue from the opposite point of view. Let's say it doesn't exist. Then please explain to me where these thousands of similar readings come from. Where do these footprints come from if Bigfoot doesn't exist? Where do the photos come from? At least the reliability of some video footage has been proven. Of course, people can make mistakes and give out all sorts of nonsense, but they cannot be wrong a thousand times in the same way.
- But why was he himself never presented to society as living proof? Why was Bigfoot, despite all these thousands of testimonies, so no one grabbed the paw?
- In fact, he was caught. And they caught it many times. But since it was of no use to anyone, the corpse of Bigfoot did not reach science. It is known that about ten years ago, a Bigfoot was caught somewhere in the Trans-Volga steppes near Saratov. In the garden, he allegedly picked apples. There was a lot of noise in the media. I do not know if it was in reality or not (I have doubts). But here's a fact that I personally have no doubt about: when the Bigfoot was caught, they began to call all Saratov research institutes …
And not a single specialist went to the scene! No one! And when a Bigfoot was seen on the Karelian Isthmus, no one, except me and my closest friends, went there. None of the St. Petersburg specialists! Didn't even bother to check.
Sapunov tells the following story. The late director of the Zoological Institute, Academician Scarlato, hearing about this case, invited Professor Potapov to his place and ordered him to draw up a memorandum on whether it was necessary to deal with this issue. Potapov, without further ado, wrote such a memorandum, indicating that Bigfoot exists on the Karelian Isthmus, but since it belongs to the field of not zoological, but anomalous phenomena, it cannot be a subject of study. Everything, this topic was closed.
The scientists' reaction is, by and large, unsurprising. Having finally got confused in defining what Bigfoot is and whether he exists in nature at all, researchers begin to talk about the anomalous nature of the phenomenon.
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“I haven't gotten to this stage yet,” the professor says. - I still think that everything can be explained from a scientific point of view. Well, there are no miracles! Although … In 1995, a friend of mine met a Bigfoot in … the elevator of his house on Grazhdanka. There were also witnesses who confirmed: yes, Bigfoot was riding in an elevator, then disappeared, disappeared. And if some degenerate had said this … But this is the testimony of a city council deputy, now he is a school director, by the way, a brilliant artist, he painted a portrait of Bigfoot.
I repeat once again: there are no miracles! But nevertheless, I consider this evidence to be reliable. And that's why. This is most likely about some kind of telepathic contact. As I later established, Bigfoot was seen not far from Aspen Grove, and perhaps he threw some kind of telepathic beam. This no longer refers to zoology, but to the mysterious properties of the human psyche - such an induced hallucination, but induced by Bigfoot. While I stand on the position that it is - a monkey, a real element of the biosphere, but a creature that is in an unusual relationship with a reasonable man.
Unfortunately, Professor Sapunov has not yet managed to personally contemplate the Bigfoot. However, he is not discouraged by this fact, it is enough that thousands of other people have seen the troglodyte.
