Extremely Rare NAPE Track Cast. Loren Coleman 1962 Decatur, Illinois Sasquatch case.
This is Zack Clothier's Reconstruction of Loren Coleman's "NAPE" (North American Ape) Footprint/track cast replica.
This footprint was allegedly discovered in a side branch (a dry creek bed) of Steven's Creek, near Decatur, Illinois, and was documented by Loren Coleman in 1962. Believed to be North American Ape (NAPE). During his investigation of a wave of sightings of an upright bipedal chimpanzee-like creature. The track Coleman documented was old and heavily weathered. See Loren Coleman's "Cryptozoology A to Z" for full case details.
This is a reconstruction of the track as it might have originally appeared, based on the original weathered track. It was created and sold by Zack Clothier many years ago
The track cast measures 9 1/2 inches long by 6 inches wide and 1 inch thick.
The following text comes from Loren Coleman's book "Cryptozoology A to Z"
"NAPES
North American Apes, or Napes (a name coined by Loren Coleman in the 1960s), have been reported from the southeastern and midwestern United States from at least the 1800s to the present. Other reports speak of similar apelike animals in specific bottomland swamps. For example, Howard Dreeson gave bananas to a "chimpanzee" who visited him regularly near his Oklahoma home from 1967 through 1970. During 1979, North Carolina witnesses claimed encounters with "Knobby."
Napes appear to be a population of chimpanzee-like apes that inhabit the bottomlands and vast network of closed-canopy deciduous and mixed forests of the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries. Some are dimlym remembered in regional folklore and twentieth-century reports of " rillas" and "chimps."
In 1962, Jerry, Bill, and Loren Coleman found a footprint complete with an opposed left toe (characteristic of the footprint of a mountain gorilla or a chimpanzee) in a dry creek bed near Decatur, Illinois. Similar prints have been reported from such diverse locations as Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. During a series of August 1971 sightings of two chimpanzee-like apes (termed Skunk Apes in some press accounts), a Broward County, Florida, rabies control officer "found nothing but a bunch of strange tracks, like someone was walking around on his knuckles." Of course, this is far from "nothing"-knuckle-walking is exactly what would be expected of an unknown anthropoid ape.
Loren Coleman has proposed a theory that this and similar footprints found in the South belong to Napes, possible specimens of the genus Dryopithecus. From their own independent research into comparable evidence around the world, Bernard Heuvelmans and Mark A. Hall have come to much the same conclusion for other forms of similar apes."
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Evidence for the Napes, or North American Apes, takes many forms, but perhaps the best is their footprints. Loren Coleman found one such series of apelike tracks in a creek bed near Decatur, Illinois, in 1962. (Photo: Loren Coleman)
It is very possible that the Decatur Bigfoot could be related to the Big Muddy Monster, which is also in Illinois.