Peter Byrne(1925-2023)

Bigfoot researcher Peter Byrne was born in Ireland. Following service in the Royal Air Force during World War II, Byrne went to Northern India to work on a tea plantation. Peter discovered his first yeti footprint in Nepal in 1948. In 1953 he started his own safari company which he ran for eighteen years. In 1957 Byrne embarked on a three year expedition to hunt and track down the yeti; said expedition was funded by Texas oilman Tom Slick. In 1960 Peter headed another expedition to uncover Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest of Northern California; other members of the team briefly included fellow Sasquatch researchers John Green and Rene Dahinden (both of whom would later deride Byrne as a fraud). This expedition was also funded by Slick. In 1968 Byrne co-founded the International Wildlife Conservation Society, Inc. and serves as the executive director to this very day. In the 1990s Peter devised the Bigfoot Research Project, which was a full-scale scientific investigation centered on proving the existence of Sasquatch. The Mt. Hood, Oregon-based operation was ahead of its time in its use of helicopters, state-of-the-art infra-red sensors, and a 1-800-BIGFOOT phone number. Byrne was interviewed in the documentaries "The Force Beyond" and the delightfully quirky "Sasquatch Odyssey: The Hunt for Bigfoot." He's also the author of the book "The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Myth, or Man?". Now retired, Peter Byrne lives in Los Angeles, California.