HONEY ISLAND

Opening

In 1974 two air traffic controllers, Harlan Ford and his friend Billy Mills, came out of the Honey Island Swamp in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, with plaster casts of tracks they said they had found near a wild boar with its throat gashed. The prints were webbed and four-toed. The men added that in 1963 they had met the maker: seven feet tall, grey-haired, with large amber eyes. It ran off, and rain washed out its tracks.

Ford told the story on the television series In Search of..., and the Honey Island Swamp Monster became a fixture of Louisiana lore and swamp tours. Ford kept looking until his death in 1980. Long afterwards his widow found a reel of Super 8 film among his things showing a dark upright figure. Since then a track-making shoe has turned up near his old camp, and the casts have been compared to alligator feet.

Timeline

1963Ford and Mills later say they saw the creature this year. Nothing was reported at the time.

1974Ford and Mills bring out casts of unusual tracks found near a dead boar. The story reaches the outside world.

Late 1970sFord appears on In Search of... The episode sets off what his granddaughter called monster mania. Ford hunts on, once tethering a goat as bait below a tree blind.

1980Ford dies.

1999His granddaughter Dana Holyfield publishes Encounters with the Honey Island Swamp Monster.

December 2000Joe Nickell tours the swamp and examines a plaster copy of one of Ford's casts. His report appears in Skeptical Inquirer in 2001.

2003The bigfoot researcher M. K. Davis presents footage of a shoe fitted with a clawed sole, said to have been recovered by a local man from mud near Ford's former hunting camp.

2007Holyfield releases a documentary DVD including Ford's Super 8 footage.

2014Nickell and Tom Flynn of the Center for Inquiry examine the film frame by frame and call it a probable costume.

Key figures

Harlan E. Ford, a retired air traffic controller and amateur wildlife photographer, who made the casts and the film.

Billy Mills, his friend and fellow controller, the other witness to the 1963 sighting and the 1974 tracks.

Dana Holyfield (later Holyfield-Evans), Ford's granddaughter, author and keeper of his story.

Joe Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer investigator, who argued the case is a hoax.

Paul and Sue Wagner, who run swamp tours, and their Cajun guide Robbie Charbonnet, who had spent 45 years in the swamp and told Nickell he had never seen anything he could not identify.

Physical and documentary trail

The physical evidence is Ford's casts, his Super 8 reel, and the shoe. The casts are small for a bigfoot: the copy Nickell measured is about nine and three-quarter inches, against the fourteen to sixteen usual in bigfoot reports, and the webbed toes look more reptile than primate. The film shows a figure for about seven seconds within a short roll. The shoe was shown on video, not tested against the casts in any published study, and M. K. Davis's description gives it a three-toed claw while the casts have four toes.

Ford's own family recorded that fake tracks were common after he went public.

Then there were the monster impersonators who made fake bigfoot shoes and tromped through the swamp. This went on for years. Harlan didn't worry about the jokers because he knew the difference.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The first claimed sighting is dated 1963, not the 1970s, and the casts date from 1974. Mills was also an air traffic controller. The swamp lies between the East Pearl and West Pearl rivers. The film was found by Ford's widow long after his death, not merely "circulated". The quoted line in the old summary, "Then it turned around", has no source that could be found and has been dropped.

Things you might not know

• It is not a bigfoot. Nickell pointed out that bigfoot tracks are roughly human; Ford's were described even by his granddaughter as a cross between a primate and a large alligator.
• Someone fired at it. On a fishing trip, by family accounts, one of Ford's workmates took a rifle after it and fired two shots.
• A guide suspected the motive. Charbonnet suggested scary stories could keep outsiders off good hunting grounds or away from moonshine stills.
• Television tried to fake the film. Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files recreated Ford's footage with a man in a hunter's ghillie suit.
• The film may be late. An undated, unpublished article by Ford cites events up to 1974 and does not mention any film, so Nickell dates it between 1974 and 1980.

Competing explanations

An unknown animal. Ford's family maintain he was honest, and the Super 8 film, if genuine, shows something upright. It has no body, no hair, and tracks that fit no known primate.

A hoax by Ford and Mills. This is Nickell's reading: repeated lucky sightings, unprimate-like tracks of an easily faked type, a story that appeared after The Legend of Boggy Creek and Swamp Thing, and a track-making shoe near the camp. Neither man confessed, and the shoe's origin and match to the casts have not been independently shown.

Misidentification plus hoaxers. Alligator prints, the swamp's real wildlife, and the copycat track-makers Holyfield describes would generate a monster without any one planner.

Later life of the case

The monster sells swamp tours, books and documentaries, and has appeared in Swamp People, Mysteries at the Museum and as a Monster High character. Nickell's verdict and the shoe have not displaced it locally.

Finding

There is no specimen, and the evidence offered in place of one is weak. The casts are small, reptilian and of a kind easily faked, the film is brief and unclear, and a track-making shoe surfaced near Ford's camp. That is strong reason to doubt the tracks, but no one confessed and the shoe has never been tested against the casts, so it falls short of a demonstrated hoax.

What still will not resolve: who made the 1974 tracks, and what Ford filmed. Only a test of the shoe against the original casts, or a statement from someone who was there, would settle either.