(Historic) René Dahinden
René Dahinden was born on August 23, 1930, in the town of Weggis, Switzerland. He moved to British Columbia in 1953 where he heard a radio report about an upcoming 1954 Daily Mail expedition to the Himalayas to search for the yeti. As Rene Dahinden recalls, after listening to the CBS news broadcast, he turned to his boss, Wilbur Willich, and said, "Now wouldn’t that be something to be on the hunt for that thing?" Mr. Willich’s response would change Rene’s life forever; he said, "Hell, you don’t have to go that far. They got them things in British Columbia."
Dahinden was the first researcher to show the Patterson-Gimlin film in the former Soviet Union and he worked hard to see that the film got the scientific attention he felt it deserved. He wrote one book (with Don Hunter) during the course of his research entitled "Sasquatch," which was published in 1975.
In the award winning 1999 documentary Sasquatch Odyssey, Dahinden was portrayed as one of the Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery, along with Grover Krantz, Peter Byrne and John Green, a British Columbian researcher who joined René on many of his field excursions. Before he passed away Dahinden acquired rights to some of the photographic images from the Patterson-Gimlin film, a process that occupied much of his time in legal and copyright affairs. Today his estate still owns significant rights to the film.
René Dahinden died in 2001.
Published Works
Sasquatch (1975) - with Don Hunter
