William Roe's Mica Mountain Sasquatch, 1955

William Roe lived in Edmonton, Alberta. Since boyhood in the forests of Michigan, he said, he had studied the lives and habits of wild animals. In October 1955 he was working on the highway near Tête Jaune Cache, British Columbia. One day he climbed five miles up Mica Mountain toward an old deserted mine.

He was hidden at the edge of a clearing. In the bush on the other side, about 75 yards away, he saw what he thought was a grizzly bear. He sat down on a small rock, rifle in his hands, and watched. Then it stepped out into the opening and walked straight toward him.

It placed the heel of its foot down first. His first impression was of a huge man, about six feet tall, almost three feet wide, probably near three hundred pounds. Its arms reached almost to its knees. Its hair was dark brown and silver-tipped. Its eyes were small and black like a bear's. It had breasts. Roe judged it female.

About 20 feet away, it squatted on its haunches. It pulled branches toward it and stripped the leaves with its teeth. Then it noticed him. A look of amazement crossed its face. It backed up three or four short steps, straightened to its full height and walked rapidly away. It threw its head back and made a peculiar noise. Half laugh, half language. "A kind of a whinny."

Roe levelled his rifle. Then he lowered it. He felt now that it was a human being, and he knew he would never forgive himself if he killed it. On a ridge a couple of hundred yards away, the creature tipped its head back and called once more. Then it disappeared.

Roe later found where it had slept for a couple of nights under a tree, and droppings in five different places. Nothing was collected. August 1957. In the City of Edmonton, he swore his account before W. H. Clark, Assistant Claims Agent. Sources differ on whether it was the 26th or the 27th. He had wondered whether he was watching an actor in a film. "But as I observed it more, I decided it would be impossible to fake such a specimen." His daughter drew the creature under his direction.

John Green printed the affidavit in The Advance, his newspaper in Agassiz, British Columbia. According to Ivan T. Sanderson, it prompted Albert Ostman to write to Green about his claimed 1924 abduction by Sasquatches. Sanderson reprinted Roe's statement in 1961, and Green included it in On the Track of the Sasquatch.

There was no official investigation. Roe was the only witness, and he swore his statement about two years after the event. Daniel Loxton noted that no cryptozoologist had ever met him. Sceptics point to his first impression, a grizzly bear, though his account goes well beyond a glimpse. No hoax finding against him has been published, and biologist John Bindernagel treated the case as serious evidence.

Darren Naish raised another question. He wrote that Roger Patterson described Roe's female creature in 1966 and drew a scene just about identical to the one he filmed at Bluff Creek in 1967. For sceptics, Roe's account may have been the template for the Patterson-Gimlin film. That is an argument about the film, not a finding against Roe.

Commentators often call the Mica Mountain account the point where Canadian Sasquatch reports moved away from a giant Indigenous man and toward the ape-like Bigfoot. For decades Roe was little more than a name on a sworn page. In 2013, researchers reportedly traced his family, and a photograph of him in his mid 30s surfaced.