HILLSBORO, Ore. -- Ray Crowe knows Bigfoot exists and he has a fist-sized piece of poop to prove it.
He also has the red hair, plaster casts of tracks and plenty of eyewitnesses. He has heard the piercing cries and seen the tree branches broken off too high to be snapped by a human.
All he needs is a body.
Crowe, who runs the International Bigfoot Society out of his Hillsboro ranch house and holds an annual Bigfoot conference that draws about 200, is that close, that close, to proving the existence of the legendary Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch.
But the latest news doesn't help.
When Ray Wallace died in late November in a Centralia, Wash., nursing home, his family and friends came forward to say Bigfoot died with him.
In 1958, Wallace used a pair of 16-inch wooden feet to fake huge prints in the forest of Humboldt County, Calif. The term Bigfoot was coined and became part of popular culture.
Crowe, 64, says the news doesn't call into question his own 11-year search for Bigfoot. He claims Wallace's hoax was no secret among Bigfooters who pride themselves on sniffing out the wannabes. Just look at Wallace's amateurish attempt, Crowe says. The foot folds aren't even in the right place, for heaven's sake.
"Wallace is a phony," Crowe says. "We've known it all along. He was a nice old guy, but we considered him a dotty old man."
Instead, Crowe is concerned the news about Wallace will make people who see Bigfoot -- or even someone who finds a body -- scared to come forward for fear of being labeled a kook.
Still, with Crowe, it's not a matter of if: "When we find it, it will be all over then."
People have found bodies, from Happy Camp, Calif., to Penticton, British Columbia. But somehow the remains always disappeared. Maybe wild animals pick apart the bodies before people can return. Nature cleans up after itself pretty fast, Crowe points out.
He also theorizes that Bigfoot's relatives carry off and bury their dead.
Since Wallace's death, Crowe has been interviewed about a dozen times. A Sydney radio station wanted him to talk about Australia's version of Bigfoot, the Yowie.
Crowe says he is a big fish in the society's small pond of 250 members worldwide. There are about 50 in his area, with an "inner core" of about 25, Crowe says. Those are the folks who can be counted on to go into the woods and investigate a sighting.
Crowe produces a 20-page newsletter, The Track Record, 10 times a year. He warns readers in each edition to keep their "skepticals" on as they read it. The latest edition includes a review of a book by a woman whose grandfather befriended a Bigfoot in Tennessee. The book includes a CD with the spelling and pronunciation of 200 Bigfoot vocalizations she and her grandfather used to communicate with Bigfoot.
"I'm willing to give everybody a fair chance," Crowe says.
He first became interested in Bigfoot in 1991, when he owned a bookstore in Portland.
A Native American friend told him about the legend. Crowe was dubious, but it sounded as if it might make for a good short story. And it didn't hurt that a Vancouver, Wash., group of Bigfoot hunters had a charismatic leader and several pretty girls as members, Crowe says.
He joined them to look for Bigfoot in southwest Washington state but was put off by the military clothes, the racing up and down the backroads and the blaring tape recording of what was supposed to be a Bigfoot call.
"Actually, these weren't my kind of people," Crowe says. "It wasn't my style of studying things."
Crowe is all about the science. Although he has no college degree, Crowe collected fritillary butterflies, studied the ice-age Missoula Flood and presided over the Geological Society of the Oregon Country.
And when he found tracks, broken trees and 8.1/2-inch red hair on his first Bigfoot hunt, he decided to apply scientific method to his madness.
Crowe's theory is that Bigfoot is crepuscular -- active at twilight and just before sunrise. His latest study sets out to find whether Bigfoot is more morning person or night owl. It also involves weather patterns and moon phases.
Crowe also has experts who examine hair and dung. Bigfoot's hair, unlike that of other wild animals, doesn't have a central hollow chamber, he says.
As for the feces, well, that's a matter of fascination because it might reveal a parasite unique to Bigfoot. So far it's just full of garden-variety worms.
At the society's next conference at the Washington County Fair Complex in May, Crowe planned a memorial to Wallace. But that was before the "Bigfoot is dead" hoopla. Now he probably won't honor Wallace.
"Because," Crowe says, "I'll probably end up looking foolish."
