Paul Freeman's Blue Mountains Bigfoot sighting and the dermal-ridge casts

The Mill Creek watershed lies in the Blue Mountains of the Umatilla National Forest, about 25 miles east of Walla Walla, Washington, near the Oregon line. It was a restricted Forest Service area. Paul Freeman patrolled it for the U.S. Forest Service.

June 10, 1982. Freeman reported an upright, bipedal, ape-like creature nearly 8 feet tall. It was covered in reddish-brown hair. It carried a strong, foul odor. No one else saw it.

His description of what happened next has been repeated ever since. "He was 60 yards away. I watched him walk the length of two football fields. He'd take a few steps, look back at me, and take a few more steps. Then he went up over a hill and disappeared."

Freeman and staff from the Walla Walla Ranger District cast the footprints that same day. They measured about 14 by 7 inches. A search-and-rescue team cast more on June 11. Days later, a second trackway turned up at a spot called Elk Wallow. In all, 11 casts were recovered.

Grover Krantz, an anthropologist at Washington State University, measured a stride of about 1.2 metres and prints pressed deeper than a man's. Then he looked closer. "The fine-grained soil preserved many impressions of dermal ridges and sweat pores," he wrote. He showed the casts to about thirty police fingerprint workers and published his analysis in Cryptozoology in 1983. To Krantz, a hoax made no sense. Someone would have had to get into a restricted watershed unseen, lay about three-quarters of a mile of track, and reproduce microscopic skin detail.

The Forest Service sent its own investigators. Wildlife biologist Rodney L. Johnson noted an "incongruous lack of organic matter in the bottom of the supposed Bigfoot tracks." Border Patrol man-tracker Joel Hardin concluded that an animal had not made them. In his book Tracker, Hardin went further. He wrote that local sheriff's deputies confronted Freeman, and that Freeman admitted he had made up the story and built "feet" to make tracks. That is Hardin's account. No police record or statement from Freeman confirming it has surfaced. Freeman did not stay on as a watershed patrolman.

Rival researchers were blunt. René Dahinden called the tracks "100 percent fakes, absolutely fakes." Bob Titmus also accused Freeman of hoaxing. Dennett, writing for the Skeptical Inquirer, reported that several hair samples Freeman later supplied were artificial fibres. Matt Crowley reproduced ridge-like patterns with plaster and soil, though his tests targeted another cast. A 2025 Skeptical Inquirer article by Crowley argued that the Elk Wallow print had been dug out and shaped, not pressed in by a foot.

The casts kept their defenders. Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University holds Freeman casts in his lab collection and studied them for signs of a flexible midfoot. He warned against stretching Crowley's results beyond the conditions tested.

Freeman never left Bigfoot behind. In 1994 he shot the film most people now know him for. In 1995 he and two companions reported another creature in the same watershed. He died in 2003. The 1982 casts outlived him. Believers see skin that could not be faked. Sceptics see a hoax and a casting artifact. Either way, the dermal ridges question still runs through Mill Creek.