Hi, guys. <P>I have seen the actual ass cast!<P>Jeff Meldrum, the guy who was featured in the Feb '01 Field & Stream, is a professor at the university here in town. I've talked with him quite a bit - our oldest sons have played together on several soccer teams, and we've spent time talking on the sidelines and such. <P>He's interesting to talk with, because he's obviously not a wack job, and doesn't really have a missionary fervor to prove the existence of this creature. He actually started out to disprove its existence, and he's been patiently assembling evidence for years now, subjecting every bit of it to the most rigorous analysis possible. Some of the stuff he has is damned fascinating, like the hair samples, for example: they don't match any known species, but are closest in composition to primates. (Of course, I've pulled crap like that out of my shower drain. [Linked Image])<P>Do I believe in the existence of Bigfoot? <P>Nah...It's just too much of a stretch.<P>Cryptozoologists point to discoveries like the new species of deer found in Cambodia last year as lending weight to the theory that Bigfoot could exist. <P>Where that falls apart, of course, is that the locals in Cambodia probably knew of this deer's existence, and just accepted it as nothing out of the ordinary. It simply hadn't been cataloged by academics. <P>Somehow, I don't think anyone living around Bigfoot is going to accept its presence as nothing out of the ordinary. "Oh, that? That's 'Bigfoot'? Hell, we got those freakin' apemen all over the place - they're a pest. We thought everyone had 'em around."<P>Greggun<P> <P>