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“I want the truth to come out,” he said Thursday.

Standing said he’s lined up several scientists, including a professor at Idaho State University, to provide evidence, including footprint and genetic analysis of materials found in B.C., Alberta and across the Western U.S. He’s also asking anyone who has encountered a sasquatch to contact him through his website, sylvanic.com, to testify.

“This is our chance,” he said. “We’re only going to get one shot at this and we need to succeed.”

Standing said his ultimate goal is to protect the species, which “likes to be left alone, but will accept a person they trust.”

He said the sasquatch near Golden Ears and Harrison Hot Springs haven’t been receptive to his investigations, but he’s had success filming and interacting with creatures in the Kootenay area. He told a story about a group he was studying near Morley Creek that got “skinny and weak, and eventually disappeared.”

“When I explored the area further I discovered that there had been extensive logging,” he said.

Standing, who once took Les Stroud, TV’s Survivorman, into the backcountry to search for sasquatch, studied wildlife at the University of Alberta. He said he set out to prove that sasquatch couldn’t exist because there was no space in the ecosystem for them, but soon became convinced of the opposite.

But the sasquatch tracker has also attracted his fair share of controversy, even among Bigfoot believers.

Photo by Todd Standing submitted / PNG

Team Sasquatchin’ USA, a website devoted to Bigfoot, questioned Standing’s credentials in a 2014 blog post asking if he was a “legit Bigfoot researcher or hoaxer?” The B.C. man’s video footage of a sasquatch has been both dismissed and praised in online Bigfoot communities.