British Columbia has had its fair share of sasquatch hoaxes over the decades and it would be remiss of the BCSCC to not address these wild tales that some in the sasquatch field accept without thoroughly and exhaustively examining the claims of those who promote these hoaxes.

We are pleased to be able to take on these hoaxes and to present the facts rather than letting them misguide and feed misinformation to the sasquatch public. The first hoax we will look at concerns a sasquatch kidnapping that is so ludicrous that John Green and Rene Dahinden found the whole story hard to swallow but left it to the world to decide whether it was true or not. We will be adding further hoax examinations in future.

ALBERT OSTMAN

As many will know, in 1957 Albert Ostman responded to an article in the Province newspaper in which William Roe told of his 1955 sighting of a female sasquatch on Mica Mountain near Tete Jaune Cache, British Columbia. Roe was prompted to tell of his sighting because the village of Harrison Hot Springs had garnered huge attention around the world for wanting to put on a sasquatch hunt as part of the 1958 Centenary celebrations around the 100th anniversary of the founding of British Columbia. Roe thought he would share his experience as sasquatch had become quite the hot topic locally and globally. Ostman read of Roe’s experience and then contacted the Province to relate how he had been kidnapped by a sasquatch near Toba Inlet, B.C. and had finally escaped from a sasquatch family after spending six days trapped by them.

Ostman was interviewed by both Rene Dahinden and John Green and Green even had Ostman swear an affidavit before a justice of the peace named Naismith who signed off on a document that stated he could not find anything in Ostman’s testimony about the kidnapping that would indicate Ostman was not being truthful. We do not know if Naismith had the requisite professional competencies that would allow him to determine whether Ostman was being truthful. At best, Naismith was offering a personal opinion and not a qualified legal assessment of the Ostman tale.

Green and Dahinden both told BCSCC chairman John Kirk that they found Ostman’s story hard to believe, but noted that he was very consistent about the details of the story and did not waver from them. However, we did find numerous inconsistencies in Ostman’s story which we present below as part of our case against Albert Ostman’s claims.

Years ago we determined this story to be so unlikely that we at the BCSCC became motivated to use tools that Green and Dahinden did not have to help us in determining whether the Ostman story was true. We were aided in our determination by Albert Ostman’s own great niece in Sweden and another great niece in Canada. The findings we received from the Swedish great niece were particularly important and we believe they negatively affect Ostman’s story.

Let us look at the aspects of Ostman’s tale that are of real concern to us in terms of just how truthful they are.

Thanks to the internet, we were able to find a ton of information in regard to Ostman’s life that is not present in any of the articles or passages in books written about him or in the recorded film and radio interviews he was featured in. We have a ton of personal info on him, including his birth date; place of birth; where he lived; where he died; who his parents, siblings, wife and daughter were; when he came to America and then Canada and the kinds of ventures he was involved in. We also found letters that he had written to various newspapers that are not about sasquatch, but show an eccentricity that might just be behind what we have concluded is his sasquatch fable.

Let us look at the aspects of Ostman’s tale that are of real concern to us in terms of just how truthful they are:

1) Ostman tells of how he felt he needed a vacation after working too hard and had read about there being lost gold mines around Toba Inlet where he could go on holiday and prospect. He booked passage to Lund on the Union Steamship Line where he would take on a native guide who would convey him by canoe to his destination at the head of the inlet. We searched for any info we could on the supposed gold mine in Toba Inlet and we could find nothing of the sort. There were lost Spanish mines in Jervis Inlet - to the north - which continue to be searched for to this day, but not one of the BC gold mining sites on the internet and books about the topic speak of there ever being gold to be found in Toba Inlet.

2) Ostman claims that he was told about sasquatch by an old Indian in Lund, BC that he had hired to take him to Toba Inlet. This is Ostman’s description of the conversation:

This old Indian was a very talkative old gentleman. He told me stories about gold brought out by a white man from this lost mine. This white man was a very heavy drinker — spent his money freely in saloons. But he had no trouble in getting more money. He would be away a few days, then come back with a bag of gold. But one time he went to his mine and never came back. Some people said a Sasquatch had killed him.

At that time I had never heard of Sasquatch. So I asked what kind of an animal he called a Sasquatch. The Indian said, “They have hair all over their bodies, but they are not animals. They are people. Big people living in the mountains. My uncle saw the tracks of one that were two feet long. One old Indian saw one over eight feet tall.”

This patent nonsense. The word sasquatch was not coined by John Walter Burns of Portacloy, County Mayo, Ireland and later the Chehalis reservation in BC until 1929 some five years after Ostman was supposedly told of the creature. Some have argued that he might have meant that the Indian told him about a sasquatch without using the name, but we do not see from his own writings that Ostman meant this at all. He used the word sasquatch and it is clear he heard that from a Native who would not have known the word in 1924.

3) Albert Ostman stated in his account that early in the journey he climbed to 1,000 feet in Toba Inlet and was able to see the straits of Georgia - now the Salish Sea - from his location and observed boats plying the waves. This is patent nonsense because the head of Toba Inlet is 35 kilometers from the mouth and the inlet bends southward into Desolation sound so what Ostman claimed was a view of the strait could not possibly be that. Ostman’s story contains a gross factual error that indicates he does not know the area at all - much like someone who has never been there.

4) Ostman contradicted himself in March, 1958 when he and John Green attended the annual Agassiz Board of Trade banquet attended by some 75 people. In a Chilliwack Progress article we see that rather than give a speech on his adventures, John Green fed Ostman questions concerning his adventure. Ostman states there that he was about 30 miles north of  Toba Inlet when he was abducted. That is in stark contrast to the 75 miles he stated in several earlier retellings of his story. Which was the right distance? He also claimed to be carrying a 90 pound backpack so how far could he have possible travelled with such a heavy burden? Seventy-five miles is a long way to lug so much baggage while also carrying a rifle.

5) While escaping from the sasquatch which kidnapped him, Ostman says he saw Mt. Baker in Washington state from the area near Toba Inlet. This is impossible because the coast range of mountains would have obstructed his view. He was on the west side of those mountains and Mt. Baker is over a hundred kilometres to the east. Ostman was clearly bad at geography and topography. He also appears to have completed his escape from the sasquatch family by moving from somewhere near Toba Inlet to Salmon Arm Inlet in a single day. The distance is about sixty miles as the crow flies, but mountains and inlets form formidable barriers to progress. It would have taken at least 3 -4 days to reach Salmon Arm Inlet from Toba Inlet.

6) When Ostman finally arrived at Sechelt Inlet after allegedly fleeing from the sasquatch family, he claims he was found by loggers who came to his aid. Ostman was Swedish and yet his story - if it were true - fails to relate that he should have run into Swedish loggers in that area. In the book The Sunshine Coast: A Place to be by Rosella M. Leslie, about the history of logging in Jervis and Salmon Inlets we learn that the loggers in these areas were Swedish! Ostman claimed to have come down to Sechelt Inlet so he must have exited at Salmon Inlet where the Gustavsson family and the Swansons had  logging camps. Leslie’s book describes the total Swedishness of the camps where NO English was spoken. In fact some of the Swedish loggers were stunned when they met some non-Swedish speaking workers in the area because they assumed everyone in the region was a Swedish speaker.

Why did Ostman not mention he had met fellow Swedes? He was pretty detailed in virtually every aspect of his story, but yet he makes no mention that the loggers in Salmon Inlet were people of his own national origin. He mentions hearing a logging donkey and running into the loggers who helped nurse him back to health before he was taken down to Sechelt and sent back to Vancouver, but he does not mention that the conveyance out of this logging camp was most unusual. The Gustavssons ran their own railway out of the area down to the perimeter of civilization in Sechelt.  This railway included  a portion where a wild 45 degree slope was part of the system. No mention of any of this by Ostman. He clearly had never been in the area.

7) in our search for evidence to support or disprove Ostman’s story, we came across a U.S. immigration document indicating that Albert Ostman entered the United States on May 27, 1924 in Blaine, Washington just weeks before his supposed trip to Toba Inlet and had stated to American immigration officers that he intended to establish permanent United States residency at a farm in Auburn, Washington where he planned to work as a labourer.

He was admitted to the United States by U.S. immigration officials.

When we first found this document, we believed that he had made a land crossing. It was not until we received an entry from the Swedish language version of Ancestry.com that we discovered he had arrived by sea. His Swedish great niece supplied us with an entry on a passenger list that showed Albert Ostman returning to North America aboard The Empress of Asia steamship which had just travelled back from Hong Kong and was making for its final stop in Vancouver. Passengers heading for the United States were examined at Blaine and among them was none other than Albert Ostman. A subsequent immigration document we uncovered shows that Ostman was a passenger on a ship when he entered the United States.

Ostman made no mention about his adventure to Hong Kong or his subsequent permanent move to the United States in any of the interviews with sasquatch investigators or the media that we have looked into. His narrative instead says that he needed a holiday from work in British Columbia, found out about Toba Inlet and the gold mine and then headed out there with a First Nations guide. We find it highly unlikely that after moving to the United States in May, 1924 that he would suddenly return to Canada, go back to work, find himself worn out and then decide to go prospecting in Toba Inlet while needing to equip himself to do so properly all in the space of a few weeks.

We do not know when Ostman actually returned to Canada - prior to moving to America he was living in Bowser, Vancouver Island according to the US immigration docket of May 27, 1924 - but by the spring of 1925 he was back in Canada and busy raising capital for a venture called Esperanza Fisheries. Ostman was one of the principals behind this fish resource business and stated in an advertisement in a Vancouver newspaper that he was a resident of Victoria, the BC provincial capital on Vancouver Island.

We know from a reliable source, that Ostman was telling his kidnap story to people well before 1957. Alex Solunac a sasquatch investigator from British Columbia spoke to a book shop owner in Duncan, BC and was told that the owner used to hear Ostman talk about his kidnapping while they worked together in logging operations on Grouse Mountain, North Vancouver during the 1940s. It is clear that Ostman’s claim that he never told anyone his story prior to telling the Province, Dahinden and Green is patently false.

In their haste to get sasquatch details from Ostman’s story, neither Green nor Dahinden questioned Ostman about who he worked for, where he was living and working before he went to Toba Inlet and what he did after he came back from his encounter. They did not elicit names of people who could confirm some details of Ostman’s story such as who helped him at Sechelt Inlet or the name of the native that allegedly took him to Toba Inlet. Green and Dahinden simply wanted to know what information and details Ostman had about the sasquatch, but surely they must have known anybody can make up stories about sasquatch and pass them off as real. Talking to others that may have been involved in the Ostman story - if they existed - could have exposed Ostman’s acoount as a hoax at that time rather than nearly seventy years later.

So what inspired Ostman’s story? We have some possibilities for readers to consider.

In 1931, Mrs. Susan Allison - who was the first settler to have seen Ogopogo, the unknown serpentine anaimal inhabiting Okanagan Lake in BC - wrote a number of articles in the Province newspaper about Okanagan valley stories she had collected from the First Nations people over the years. One of these tales was about the kidnapping of a native by a giant named Stenwyken. Sasquatch is known as Stenwyken in some parts of the Okanagan valley. Ostman may have gotten his idea from this piece of folklore or he may well have read of the purported kidnapping of a Port Douglas native, Serephine Long, who was abducted by a sasquatch while visiting relatives at the Chehalis reservation. Sasquatch kidnapping stories are also well known among various First Nations and Ostman had a huge variety of them to pick from. His story is by no means unique nor original.

Ostman had some strange habits. According to his Canadian niece, he allowed his horse to live with him in his cabin near Fort Langley, BC. The niece was witness to this strange behaviour and noted to us that Albert never talked to his family about his sasquatch encounter and would steer clear of the subject. He also wrote letters to newspapers suggesting tunnels be built in Vancouver to shelter people in case “the communists” dropped nuclear bombs on the city. He also complained to a Langley newspaper about the wages dair workers received and suggested they be paid less. He had eccentric ideas on schooling and childcare as well. Would he be able to concoct a story about being kidnapped by a sasquatch? We are of the opinion that he was quite capable of that.

In conclusion, it is our opinion is that the Albert Ostman story is a concoction of a mischievous mind and that anything he had to say about sasquatch-like creatures was acquired from elsewhere and not his own personal experiences. By the time he “confessed” to his encounter, nearly 30 years of sasquatch stories were to be found in numerous publications and many details of their appearance could have been gleaned from these reports.

His life was a sad one as his wife passed away from tuberculosis at the age of 31 and his daughter met a similar fate when she died of the same disease at the age of just 14. Ostman lived for many years after, passing away at the age of 84 on January 16, 1975 in a retirement home in Fort Langley which is still there to this day. He was buried in an unmarked grave which we were very fortunate to find a few years ago. His property is still standing in Fort Langley and although some buildings have been added, some of the structures Ostman lived in are still standing to this day. Because of his made up tale of sasquatch he will be remembered for many more years, but we hope people will see him not as a sasquach contactee, but as a spinner of wild yarns.

The information presented here previously appeared in various issues of the BCSCC Quarterly. Authorship is ascribed to John Kirk, Chairman of the BCSCC.

Visit us again as we update this page with the hoaxed stories of Muchalat Harry and Jacko of Yale.