Ep:153 Fort Bragg Bigfoot

We're talking old growth, big stuff, a tree and crashing down for no reason, absolutely no reason that I could figure out, and kind of made me wonder what the heck was going on there, And I started to get out of the canoe, and you know, this is not very smart. I think, I think I'll just let this situation timmer and go the other way. And I've had that premonition a couple of times, and I'm kind of wondering if those are the kind of warnings or situations

that had come across. On a different level, it says, Jack, you need, you need to just go home and be done with it.

to me. When I came home from Vietnam and sixty eight a seven. Rather, I courted my sweetheart and we got married in nineteen sixty eight, sixty seven home, sixty eight, got married and started on that life's journey and it's been good, been very good for me. I don't know if it's germane to the conversation, but I became a believer. And I'm not just a Bigfoot believer. I was there before that, but Christian, and so I've kind of patterned my life around that, that philosophy, and that that's part

of what it takes to be who I am. Way back, I remember nineteen cent burgers, fries and cokes, and nineteen cent gas gallon gas. So that's that's almost just right fresh off the arc, you know what I mean. We raised a couple of boys, and one of them is an adopted son from Vietnam, half Vietnam Asian and half adventurous soldier. Good men. They're just good men. And it's

been a pleasure to have them. And and when I started on the the bigfoot thing a little later in life in a sense, because you know how it is, you're raising a family and trying to make things work, and you haven't got time for a lot of the extraneous things that you'd like to pursue. I didn't even know I like to pursue them originally, except that in

nineteen sixty two. Now that goes back previous. My aunt and her folks had the Port Bragg incident we call it, and we'll get into that here in a couple of minutes. But anyway, that's where that's where I've come from, as far as that part of my life is concerned, been good. I don't complain. I've been a hunter all my life up until the last few years, and I can no longer hunt, get out there like I want to and do those things. And I find it very interesting in

one respect. For all the time that I've been out hunting, there have been a few times when something told me don't go here, and I don't belong here, and I'm not afraid of bear cougars and all the other paraphernalia that lives out there. But after some rethinking and some adding in and out of different situations, I've come to the conclusion that I've been a lot closer to mister bigbut than I realize. And of course I have got all kinds of stories that I've collected over the years

and that type of thing. So yeah, I've been around that rascal and I know of him well. I don't know if anybody really knows the guy. I want to start right out by saying that I go back and forth on whether it's just another animal or if it's what is Meldrum would say, a relic commented or something in between. I don't know that any of that has really been nailed down, so I kind of go back and forth. I want to insult anybody. I just am what I am, and I say what I say, and it comes out that way.

Pruitt on his phenomenal Sasquatch. And I've got to say that there's only two or three books that I would hold up as stellar accounts of things going on and Matt Really he really shines for me. I really like the way he put things and and kind of nails it for me. I'm at this juncture until I know different. I consider Mishter Bigfoot a biological entity, just like I am. Some people call me more animal than I need to be, but so that fit's well. But anyway, so I treend

to separate the phenomenal with the biological. And I know there's parts of there's people that are solidly in other camp, and I think it's great, go ahead, you know, bring the evidence. We'll put it in one big bucket, come out with what he really is eventually. So what I collect and then we'll get into it here. What I collect over the years are stories that and I call them accounts, where their stories of relationships that people have had, good, bad,

or otherwise with mister Bigfoot. And I've had the privilege of starting out on the positive in other words, I didn't have any negative problems as far as big Foot or concerns. Some people do. I mean they start out, they started, the first words out of their mouth is I don't believe it. It's a myth and all that kind of stuff. And that's okay. That's what they want. But I started out with my aunt's folks, and that's

where we'll get into this. And just a second here, my aunt's folks their accounting of of in nineteen sixty two Bigfoot, and I think, so far as I'm concerned, it's an account of major importance, but not well and I don't want to say advertised, but we're not well known up and down the Bigfoot community. So there'll be my opportunity to share and hopefully we'll get somewhere with this.

I guess I'll start with the nineteen sixty two one because that's the anchor point for me. Is one of the most I think interesting stories that I have out there, and I just happened to be privileged to be in the family when it was told. So I'm going to start out with reading a book. Just happened to pick it up last night. It's a book by Larry Canute

of Alaska Bear Tales. But he's got one line in here that really kind of fits a situation that I think is appropriate for all of us, no matter where we're at in the Bigfoot community, and it says, unfortunately, sensationalistic accounts of man bear accounters are often the public's main source of information on bruins. Not only are these accounts exaggerated, but they instill unnecessary fears about the wilderness outdoor experience. Now, if you transpose that and put a

big Foot in there, I think that fits. We have an overlay of strange and weird stuff going on out there, and we look, we look at big Foot rather through that limbs, And I've had to a couple of times back up and say, what am I looking at? What am I thinking here? As far as Bigfoot is concerned in that you, is he really that mister ferocious wants to rip our head off? Well, there's I'm sure there's

a few out there that would do that. But in the main, if indeed they were as violent and capable as we are often led to believe, I don't think there be very many of us left.

up missing. Everybody's come home save for the two hunters recently in Washington that you know succumbed to the elements, and a few stories here and there, But for the most part, you don't really have any stories like that.

and is the setting for in Fort Bragg, California. And there I know that you're the Fort Bragg back easter wise, but this is Fort Bragg, California, in the northern side of the state. Now I was sixteen when I first heard it. I never wrote a thing down. I just listened to my aunt's folks story. They came from down there up here to Washington State to visit, and they brought their story with them and the account with them, and they sat down in our living room and went

through it. And the only person that wasn't there was Uncle Bob, great Uncle Bob, I'll call him. But everybody else was there. And of course I'm sitting there a sixteen year old with a slack jaw looking and listening to everything that's going on and absorbing all of this as much as possible. So my account might differ a little bit from what John Green wrote in his book, and he got into some of that on page thirteen.

I think it is Bud Nanjie Jenkins was their name, and Bob I think McKendrick was his was Bob's name. I don't know why that's so, but anyway, so there's

that and Bob. Bud and Bob were truck drivers, long haul truck drivers, and they would leave from l A and travel all the way up to Canada, and the midpoint for them at that time was right around Fort Bragg, So they would swing in at night and camp out for a few hours before they jumped in the rig and went north or vice or south, vice versa, depending on which direction they were going. And this particular night and Bud or rather Bob, are you confused yet.

And apparently the clouds were sifting in and out, and there was a moon kind of in between, and she's going through the living room toward the toward the bathroom. She looked out her front room window and here's this bear. She was convinced it was a bear at the time, and crawled over the fence and was getting in her garden. And if you know anything about bears and ladies and gardens, you know that bear was in trouble anyway, so she asked. She ran back to the bedroom and told Bud to

get the shotgun. There's a bear in my garden. And so he's he's looking for the shotgun, which she had moved, and he then has to look for the shelves, which they never did find. And oh, I wish I'm thankful for quite frankly, but in the hubub and the chaos, Bob got up and said, what's going on, and of course she told him, and he said, oh, my goodness, I'll just run out of her and yell at it. It'll go away, no big deal. So he goes out through the front room door and to do what he

needs to do. In the meantime, Bud comes out and says, where's Bob. He's down around the corner of the house or something. He's yelling at the bear. So they both walked up to the front room door and there's a screen door, kind of an alcove type of thing. Anyway, it was the front door, and they look down the sidewalk and here's Bob. He's on his hands and knees, crawling back into the house. And right behind him, literally right behind him, was this tall, eight foot tall bigfoot.

Now they didn't know that by name, what a bigfoot was. They had never encountered such a thing, knew nothing about it. It was all brand new experience, absolutely new. And but Bob is crawling in, he crawls in the door of the house, and as he gets there, Bud and Angie, of course, they're in shock themselves. They don't know what's going on. They both are hanging onto the screen door and they want to shut shut the screen door. Well, the bigfoot sasquatch, whatever you want to call him. He

walks right up there. He was there, and he was bent over to look inside at the place. And the doorframes on those were seventy eight inches I think standard. I you know, it might be an insure too different, but that's pretty standard. So it had to bend over

quite a ways to look in. And they're looking at each other across the space of a couple of feet, I mean they're they're right there where they can count the cavities in his teeth, and and the the animal had that look on his face of just super curios curious curiosity all over him and going through the motions there and bent over and everything else like that. Well at that particular point, but and Angie did weren't curious at all. They just were away and their curiosity was gone.

They're trying to shut the door and it wouldn't shut, and they didn't or the screener wasn't shut. They couldn't understand what was going on, and they're in a state of shock and any number of things of that nature. And so pretty soon they got wise and they just backed away and shut the main door. And after they shut the main door, they the animals stood there for a couple of seconds, a few minutes whatever. I don't know. I wouldn't, I don't. I didn't have a stopwatch on it.

I wasn't there. But then it turned and left and it faded off into the dark, and it was gone. Well it took They called the They called the sheriff out of fair, out of Fort Bragg, and told them what had gone on. And that was about four in the morning, I guess all this transpired. And so there they're waiting there for the sheriff to come out, which what didn't take very long, and it was fading to day.

I was beginning to get daylight anyway, and poor poor Uncle Bob, he couldn't hold a cup of coffee for about half an hour. She shaken so bad. And anyway, they came out. They took some plaster casts of the feet and took the information down, and and this that and the other thing. And I'm not one hundred percent sure they believed everything. Could it'd be pretty hard not to believe some family like that caught in that situation.

I mean, you may not know what to take make of it, but believing that they had the encounter was very real and and uh that type of thing. So within a day or two or something, I don't know exact exact time frame, but there was a professor Edward I think is his name, out of Ashland, Oregon, which is you know, due north there a bit, and I

think he was an art professor. Some of those things are very vague, but they're known, and if you want more information, if you want specific information, you could get hold of Daniel Perez of Bigfoot Times or Cliff Barrickman. They've got they've got a copy of the handprint inside the museum there. I've seen it three different times. But anyway, he came down and he traced he traced the hand on the that was left the print that was left

on the door sill. It's pretty mighty enough enough what do you call it dirt on the hand of the print to make a pretty good print out of it, and from the heel by the wrist to the top of the farthest finger, who was eleven and a half or eleven and three quarters long.

is just about an absolute impossibility. They may have found track another track somewhere five miles out, but they didn't track it that if, I don't think. But anyway, that's the upshot of that whole situation. And it'd been written up and talked about, and I listened. I listened to it with rapt attention.

wasn't sure of it myself. And that's when Bob went out to chase the bear off. He stuffed his face right in the chest of this animal.

And you know, I think that between between that and the fact that the animal never never made a move that was it could have been construed as vicious or mad or mean or whatever, and it still had its presence of mind whatever that is, to come up to the door and look inside the house full of curiosity. That's one of the reasons that I am convinced they're

not They're not what we think they are. There's there's there's a little bit more to them than that, and and I've always so anyway, they validated that, and I said, are you sure. He says, oh no, We've all talked about that exact same thing for years. And I said, okay, I'm going to let that information out. And but I didn't want to throw something out there that nobody would willing to buy into, you know what I mean, Yeah, for sure. I was looking for clarity, not chaos and

the real as opposed to false. So all of that has to fit into that matrix of the of the story and what I would give or have given to been a little closer, And they have taken the time. Now today we use BFRO and other research people and they would ask different questions and they would ferret out different lines of inquiry and maybe add or subtract from the story in a different way. But that's the gist

of the story as it was told to me. And I feel honored and complimented in a very real way that these folks that I know, and they weren't given to storytelling anyway. My aunt Surety says, now, Bud might exaggerate a little bit, but my mom she wouldn't. If it was black, it was black. If it was white, it was white, and there's nothing in between. So and she told the story just like the rest of them.

And I will say that their eye size must have went up a little, yeah, I mean I would there may not have may not have been a good odor there for a while either. Well. The rest of that story, which rarely gets told hardly if at all, is that over the next couple of weeks, you know, things settled down, of course, and they saw the footprints in the garden and YadA, YadA, YadA. But over the next couple of weeks they but noticed that the dog food was going

down way too fast. He had a fifty pound bag of dog food and opened the top of it and to feed the dogs. And again I don't know what the dog's response was to this crater around the place. I never heard anything about that, or if I did, I forgot, But anyway, that it was down to from a full open down to half and almost overnight, so that was very uncommon. And somebody else said, well, the bear could get in there or not bother anything. Well not really, a bear would just drew that stuff all

over the place. I've hunted bear myself for years, and bear are not good housekeepers by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway, So there was that. And they also had on the as you walked in the door, there was a two by four part of the two by four structure they kept an egg carton and they would take eggs off the hands and put them in there, and if it was two or three eggs, they just leave it. When they got up to eight nine eggs, ten a dozen whatever.

They would take that into the house and replace the egg carton. Well, they noticed that the bud went out one time and there was a half a dozen eggs in there, and he walked out to the next in there was none, I mean, yeah, none cleaned out. He kind of what was going on, But he looked around and there was no shells on the on the floor. The eggs were just missing vanished. As the time went on, I mean it was a short time. Within a couple of weeks, there was an occasional bigfoot track that they

either hadn't noticed or showed up fresh. They weren't sure, So that that told them that whatever this critter was, he's hanging around a bit. Yeah, And and Angie because Shirley Aunt Shirley's mom, because she's there alone. She'd had enough. So they either I don't know if they rented, were renting the place or it bought it or whatever, but they they made an effort to get out of there and go somewhere else. And that was the end of

that whole chapter. But I always thought that that was an interesting tag on to the to the original story.

And over the years there's been numerous cases where for whatever reason, husband's gone for a while, no men are around, and Bigfoot starts coming up around the house. That's not something these people would have known about. That's not something you know that would really get picked up on all

that much. But then you have a situation, like you're saying, where she was alone at the house a lot of time, and that might have made the bigfoot felm more secure about coming up that close to the house or whatever and taking advantage of like the dog food and the

eggs in the garden and everything else. And then one of the first things that popped in my mind while you were telling the story was the Bigfoot's behavior, the curiosity and everything, and why would it act that way, and why was Uncle Bob crawling on his hands and knees and so running into it like that. It sounds totally believable because it explains those aspects of the story. It explains why he's on his knees like that, poor

Uncle Bob. He explains why the Bigfoot might have followed him back to the house and been like, what is going on here? You know, a human just ran into me. One of those little hairless things just hit me.

kinds of things that and hunted. He was an extremely good hunter and that type of thing. And he said, oh, I've never had a problem, I've never had that kind of a situation. Well, I wonder how many times we just erased that out of our mind, even if we did have this situation, a strange noise, a tree being pushed over, a rock being thrown, and you don't know where it comes from, so you kind of dismiss it. You're thinking it must have fell off of overturned stump or any number of things.

fascinating sideline on it. There's where we my wife and I built an off grid home out of a little place on the west side pack of Packwood, Washington, which is also the west side Highway, not highway but Highway

twelve and White Pass. Anyway, we had an off grid home and above our place, the forest service road that we lived on went up an additional thirteen miles to the top, made a hook, there's a there's a little lake up there, and it's just beautiful country and death definitely wilderness all the way from the from the my back, my back door to the end of it was wilderness. And there's a place up there where the road runs

tight along kind of a rock wall. If you're coming down, it would be on the left side and for a couple of hundred yards, and then on the right side of that it just goes off into nothing with the bottom of the canyon. And we used to hunt up there all the time, and this gentleman from the area hunts up there an awful lot as well, and he was, well, he was past that point going up and when he came back down, that's the only way it comes. You either go buy that or you don't. There's no other

You don't get an option. So he's coming back down the logging road, the poor service road, and in front of him, just passed the wall, there's a bigfoot is

standing right smack in the middle of the road. He's a big guy to all of eight foot are better, and he's not paying attention to this gentleman coming down the road because he's got something in his hand and he's sniffing it and going through those motions and tearing this thing apart and ripping it apart, and he is bellering at the top of his lungs and just having

a fit and that type of thing. So this gentleman, he's been all over those hills, he's never had an experience anywhere even close to this, and he's scared spitless, quite frankly, and I think I'm getting dry mouth just thinking about it. Anyway. Anyway, so he's stuck. Here's no

place for him to go. And after a bit, the animal realized that there was somebody else in the vicinity, which was him, only a couple hundred yards away, and he drops what he has in his hand and took a couple of steps and went over the bank down into no man's land, and that was it. Well, the guy got him hisself together and he starts driving down the road and he looks down. He was wondering what

was going on in his helf. By that time. What had happened was there was a lady's feminine napkin that this ad up on his face and sniffing in the odor and everything else like that. I don't think I need a lot of explanation about what was going on there, but it had lit him up, and that type of thing. You know, maybe he's looking for a date. I don't know.

But the upshot of the whole thing is, I think the gal's perfume you might say, has has accommodated and has gone along with any number of outings, other different situations and ladies, ladies who have had, like you say, encounters around their own where men aren't around. So it's hard to say. I mean, that might be real far fetched. But whatever it was, this gentleman says, I'm think going there again, and which I think is kind of foolish

because the animals they move on. It doesn't make any difference. But anyway, he'd had enough, he had enough experience right there without without going any farther than that.

talking about. But that doesn't erase it, it doesn't make it go away, It doesn't make it anymore untrue.

and I'm a fly fisherman and everything. Sometimes the only thing I catch is flies. But anyway, I'm out on the lake and it was absolutely dead calm. I mean, there wasn't a wrinkle on the water, There was not a puff in the air. Even there was no Normally there's a crows and other birds and other situations making noise, but nothing was going on. It was toward the evening. It was a it was just before it really gets

serious about getting dark and out of nowhere. On the other on the other end of the light, now, this little lake was a pothole lake and probably five acres okay, But at the other end of it in the big timber, and we're talking old growth, big stuff, and away from the lake itself came a tree and crashing down, and

I know it was. It was a tree and maybe the somewhere between six and eight inch diameter at the blot something of that nature came crashing down for no reason, absolutely no reason that I could figure out, and it kind of made me wonder what the heck was going on there. So I paddled down to that end of the lake, and I was going to pull the canoe up on the shore and go up through the through

the timber. It wasn't very far through there, and it's fairly open, and then at the backside of it dropped off into down to what called Jackpot Creek and at the far end, and that may be or some eight hundred thousand feet below, but it was pretty well straight up and down, and I started to get out of the canoe, and you know, this is not very smart. I think, I think I'll just let this situation simmer and go the other way. And I've had that premonition

a couple of times. Again, A bear or cougar no longer bothers me. You know, you've been around them along enough that you know when when to push and when to not push, and or I have anyway, and so I've kind of stayed away from him a little bit. But I don't they don't bother me. I see, I see bear. I considered the highlight of my evening to see a bear walk around in the area, or see cougar tracks or that type of thing. And so they don't bother me. But there's all I've said before. There's

something else out there that definitely catches my attention. And I don't know if the bigfoot, that's where I would call the infrasound, or the or the growling or something of that nature, is that we can't pick up with our own hair. Shoot, I can't hear a bomb blast anymore, but those types of things is and I'm kind of wondering if those are the kind of warnings or situations that come across on a different level, it says, Jack, you need you need to just go home and be

done with it. Also, at the same time, just down below that a little bit, there's a swamp. And when I'm coming back down where it crosses the creek and there is a they like water and this there's a stream that runs kind of through the edge of the swamp and out the backside down And in the springtime, I go up there because I lived at the bottom of the road, so nobody would bother going up that road until there was enough spring and enough summer to open keep the road open. I just go up there.

I would be looking for a boat making material and just to visit. Well. We also used to collect firewood up there too, so that was another reason to be up there before anybody in town got up there, so at least I would have my stuff marked. But anyway, I come across a couple of situations. There were the scat on the edge of that swamp was of a diameter and size was put that way that you knew it was no common bear in there, and there was

something much much bigger than that. And I came across that in two different spots, and both both of them had that same sensation Jack, you just don't belong here. And yet at the same time, I go through a week later and that would would not be there, The sensation would not be there, it would not bother me. I go right off and do whatever I was going

to do up there. So and I think, if you're sensitive to what's around you, and I developed that sensitivity, by the way, because I bow hunt with the old English longbow, I've done it for thirty some years, and that means you're by yourself if you're going to be effective at all. And I was very effective, almost too effective, but very effective with that. And so I had to pay attention to what was going around me on a different level than just blundering through with a red coat

and a rifle. You get the idea. I mean, I'm watching for every little thing I could to detect. I wasn't looking for danger, but I was looking for animals or signs of things, and whatever the case is. That's often the case for me anyway, that that I would bump into things that the average guy with a glow coat and a rifle would never see. They don't, they're not, they're not. They could shoot two hundred yards or better. Me, I kept my limits down at twenty or thirty yards max.

And so I'd have to be I'd have to be pretty sensitive to what's going on around me. So with that, those things kind of disturbed me differently. And at the same the same area now, by the way, and I know of other people who have seen them up there, but the same area. There was a lookout up there during during World War Two. There was lookouts all over that country, and I could name a bunch of them,

but it won't. But the south the ridge was called south Point, one of the highest little ridges in there, and it was right at about sixty one hundred feet where they put the the uh the lookout, and man, you could see a lot of country anyway. The upshot of that is that. My wife and I went up there a couple of times and back it never had a problem. It's quite a little height, and come at it from a couple of different directions on two different trails. And then the next time we went up there, she

looked at me. I looked at her and I said, you know, this ain't and she she said, at first, she says, I don't think this is not right. Something's haywire here that it doesn't I don't feel comfortable. And I said, well, I've had the same feeling we're being watched or or we're being whatever. And so we backed out of there. The next next time we go back up there, it goes right through there like it was

open seasons, you know, no problem. So from that perspective, I've been around them, and I've been around all kinds of people. I've ferried out any any uh uh story or any experienced people had I want to know more about these critters and that type of thing. The last

few years I've really kind of leaned into it. And like I said, after I got married, you know, we're busy raising a family and I don't have I don't have a lot of time or and other interests and things of that nature take up the spare time, the slack time, and that type of thing. So I kind of stay away from that. But I've shared a lot of this with Sarah and John. She says, I got tons of stories. Well, I'm down to pounds.

It's just beautiful country east of Mountain goat hunt in a close proximity that you can't hunt legally in the park period, end of the subject. But we'd always we'd always run the edges, and because you know, the park itself is I don't know how many square miles it is is pretty good, pretty good size. You got Mount

Rainier plugged right in the middle of it. And the upshot of all of that is it's it's not only primitive and remote and that's type of thing, but it becomes a sanctuary for any of the animals that live there, and so from time to time they'll come out. But anyway, I can't. I was leaving a Carbonado driving toward pew All Up and it's a half of my half hour drive, and just as I left the town of Carbonato, I

picked up a guy kind of looked half lost. And I normally don't pick up hitchhikers, but this was years and years ago when that it seem to be quite a problem. Anyway, I picked him up and we introduced each other who we were. I'd never met him before, and we're driving along and he was he was a veteran like I am. He was a Vietnam veterano, although he apparently had some rougher times than I did. But anyway, and I says, well, what are you, where are you going?

What are you doing? All that kind of stuff, And apparently he had took a large stump, cedar stump that was inside the park. You're not supposed to have done this, but anyway, had a large stump inside the park that he had. The bottom of it was sort of hollow, so he finished hollowing it out and made a kind of a cabin out of it so he could stay there. And he managed to stay a couple of winters in that thing. I would never would have done that myself, but he needed to be alone and that was his

way of It's kind of a sanctuary for him. And so we got to talking about that he would bring He brought in a crossbow. Well, crossbows were illegal, but he liked that because it was quiet and he can make sure he had meat. And I did again, I didn't question it. That was his deal. But anything anyway, So we're driving along and I asked, I asked him. I said, listen, I says, what do you know about Bigfoot? And I'll tell you what. And I've said this a

number of times before. He went from a casual, open kind of a conversation, he just turned into a different man right there in front of me. He was two different people. He was dead serious when he got to that point of the conversation, and he says, well, I had one run in with one. I said to run in and he says, well, not really. I saw it,

and I said, well, tell me about it. So he explained that he was on one little ridge that drops off into the canyon where his cabin was and her stump cabin you'd call what you want anyway, and he looked across the way and there was He thought it was a bear, and he says, I've seen lots of bear up there, and he did. I know he did, but anyway, because I used to hunt bear right off the edges of that myself. Anyway, he said, he said, was kind of up against the stump, and it was,

and it was eating berries, huckleberries. So it must have been in the fall of the air late August early September, before he had decided to go in for the winter. And he says it was so odd it reach it would reach out and actually take take the berries and the limb and everything and eat it. And he says, I was fascinated because I hadn't seen a bear that was doing, not standing on its hinde and legs like that.

And it was a far enough away that it wasn't a real clear picture apparently, and and he says, I watched it, watch it, and he says, all of a sudden, it senses it knew I was looking at it, and it turned and looked right at me, and he says, it's just scared me spitless, and it gathered itself together and walked off toward the park, up into the timber. And he says, I watched it the whole way. It was not a bear. It was definitely a big pot of sasquatch. And he says, I never went back to

my cabin. That was it. He did he wouldn't take a chance on it. And I asked him, I said, well, do you think it meant you harm? He said no, I don't think so. But I wasn't going to stay there and find out what's what was going on. He said, I couldn't handle it. And you know, I never caught the guys. He told me his name, but I never caught the guy's name. We lived in Carbonado at the time, and apparently he was one of those pass throughs that

back and forth through there. But I always consider that one of my more fascinating bigfoot stories because of the not so much that he saw it, but how it affected him. And his psyche was already damaged because of his war years, and I'm certain that didn't help. That didn't help at all. So I don't know whatever happened to him. It's been long enough. He's probably passed away or gone off into who knows where. But that was interesting.

And then on the same edge of that park, I have a friend of mine whose son I guess he was eighteen or nineteen. I thought it was older at the time, but it wasn't come to find out. But anyway, they were in there for an elk hunting trip. As a large flat area we used to go in there. I never hunted elk in there, but I did hunt deer in there because it was kind of a gathering spot for elk, a deer rather at that time of year,

and the elk were in there all the time. Anyway, the upshot is and the guy was a rifle hunter. They had bootleg the camp in there, and they weren't supposed to do that. But a lot of things that we're not supposed to do get done, if you know.

around see if I can't find a bull. I don't think he was actually going to shoot anything, because the season hadn't open to the next day. But he was doing a little scouting just before dark, kind of wet his whistle on it, you might say. And he'd walked away from camp quite a little ways and out of no worry, he just happened to look it up and he's looking at an eight foot animal standing there looking at him. It was a sasquatch, and he again was

not that was the last thing on his mind. And I don't think he was burst in sasquatch lower because that's some hazard I guess thirty five years forty years ago. Maybe with the scope on it right away and he was lining up on it, and he looked at it and he couldn't. He had no reason to pull the trigger right, so he didn't. On the one hand, on the other hand, it was so it was so much difference, and what he expected was definitely not a bear. It was standing

on his hind legs looking at him. And he looked at it long enough to know that he was in the company of something that was very uncomfortable, let's put that way. So he turned around to leave. He brought his rifle back to his side, turned around to leave, and he started a hurry off, and he realized this may not be a good deal. He should have walked backwards for a waist. And he turned around real quick and it was just gone. And he's never been back,

never been back. Scared him spallless, wow, and couldn't handle. But he was looking at and I feel bad for him. That's the other thing, too, We're not If you see a bear in an uncomfortable position situation, you know enough about bears to know that you can go right back in there later and not have a problem. You'll be looking, you'll be watching for what's going on, but not necessarily a situation where you felt like you were in danger.

But bigfoot, because they're so rare, the sightings so quick and so surprising, we don't get acclimated to them. In other words, we don't have enough access to their face and to what's going on, what they're thinking, and how they're functioning, so that we can say, yeah, I can, I can, I can be comfortable in the company of a bigfoot A couple hundred yards off is that. I

think Sarah and Jonathan are of that ilk. They they have had enough exposure that you know, they're not going to run up a bear hug one, but they're not going to be petrified or taken back. And most of us have not had that. We don't haven't had that level of experience experience. You and I probably if we see one once in a lifetime. We've seen one once in a lifetime, and that makes all the difference in the world. The first first bear I killed and that

was that was that experience. But after that and others that I've taken over the years, they don't. They just don't affect me. I'm that way at all. And it includes cougar and other things I've been you know, I've been a handshaken distance from any number of animals over the years, and because I know what they are, they don't affect me the same way as they would a newcomer. I take a neophyte out there and show them the bear for the very first time, he might have racing

streaks in the shorts. Yeah, yeah, you know, because that's the first time. With the second or third time that it gets in or after some if he's with people who have had those experiences, things fall into place in a different level.

I called my dog back to me. She didn't see the bear, fortunately, and I got a hold of her. And to make a long story short, we made leashes out of what we had and decided to get out of there, and we didn't. We didn't have a pocket knife between us, and if I did, I had cut my throat and handed the knife to my wife because because had it decided to do us in that we had no we had no defense. But anyway, so yeah, that But I've seen lots of sense, and I watch

what they do. I don't they don't bother me that much. But but a bear, again, is a whole lot different than his asquatch. The animals you rarely see always always get catch you by by whatever. So I don't see if I got anything else to add to the file before before you throw me out of my own house.

western corner of the park. Which happened why I don't know, but we just happened to govitate to the park area when we moved around a little bit, and there there was nobody there. I mean when we first moved out there there was nobody. And now it's kind of a metropolis. It's kind of a shame to see that. But we we knew the area very well. And again I hunted by myself. I was all over the place there, footprints down and any any number of that places in there,

and knew it very well. One of the few people that even did that, because nobody else would would waste their time there. But it was productive for me. After we moved out, I heard there was a called air Capus and air sports. I think it is. They had a parachute drop zone at the end of the airport that was at the airport was maybe less than a quarter of a mile from our house, that end of

it and everything. Now, one of the guys UH had dropped a load of parachooters off and and was coming in for landing to pick up another load of UH. I call him idiots because there's no way I get out of a perfectly running airplane.

in its own right. Anyway, he dropped down to get another load of parachuters, and just as he was dropping over the end edge of the the runway, he noticed a bigfoot and it was off in the brush a little bit and making a bee line to get out of there. So he pulled a throttle back and went made a big turn around there and to go back, and by that time the bigfoot had disappeared. Gone. But that was right in our backyard. Another gentleman up there,

he went out to check his fence line. Something was raising a hob with everything he had and his pitch black. I don't think he even had a flashlight. And he's out there, an older fellow, and something literally cuffed him hard. And it wasn't It couldn't have been. I don't think it could have been a bear, and it wasn't an There's a lot of elk in area too. I don't think it was an elk or a deer because they don't have the means to cuffya. You know, they could run over the top of you, I guess, but I

kind of wonder about that. It was about the same time that a scape a Roman or a local sheriff whatever one of the two had seen one across the road as well, and that was very close to the same viea. So it makes you wonder, you know, how many of these things are living in and around us that we not only don't see, we'll never see. And unless they make a strange move. We're not going to know that either.

happy to leave it when I left. But as far as being out there were where I h what do you call it? Had exposure to that I did, and I know nothing about it at all until recently. I read a few books and articles and whatnot on that, So that's as far as I can go there. I was. I was attached to the veterinary. Our officers were veterinarians, and everybody underneath that were just like myself, were we did the grunt work and this, that and the other thing.

So anywhere we were at we had a veterinary clinic, even in Vietnam, and that's kind of didn't I send you a picture of me holding a bear, Yeah, cub bear. That's an Asian cub bear, cub Asian bear cup And I liked that little guy. I'd been able to keep him there. He came in and they and they took him out. I don't know where he went after that, because we had a lot, we had pythons and you name it. Everything came through the clinic. But I saw no monsters come through there, and nobody talked of them.

I have no idea. Although I do have friends from high school that went in the service at the same time ended up over there, and they they did talk about tigers and and things of that nature. But the rock apes or anything else like that, I have no idea.

put it this way. Of all the books I've read, and I've read a pilum, almost every one of them either starts or ends with it if they're there, if there really are existence, if this and that and the other thing. And I always started with there are they are there? So now let's get the rest of the information so we know what they are instead of always dealing with the if. And I just think it's what's the when I go hunting, I'll use it my another one of these sayings. When I go hunting, I assume

that I'm going to find something. Other people hunt and they're going to ssume they don't find anything. So it is a whole different mindset, right, And I think I think the mindset either will either the mindset will verify where you're coming from or take away, so I just go the other direction there anyway.

things and looking for them on a regular basis. And after that happened, it, in my opinion, opened a lot of doors for me to see different things that were possibly evidence at least. Yeah, things that I was convinced were evidence regardless, because I now knew these things are real and they're out there, I already have that answer, so I don't need to worry about that anymore. So if they're out there, how are they impacting the environment?

What kind of sounds are they making? You know, this really could be a trap because I know they're out here right exactly.

A couple three months ago, a guy in a dump truck we drive down the road and one of the logging roads along the river, and a bigfoot stepped out in front of him and ran down the road for one hundred yards. Now, that guy there, quite frankly, he's not going to say I never saw it. It never happened because he did see it, and it did happen. And so this guy here up until that time, my guy that was putting the floor in, I thought, well, maybe he's maybe he's spinning the yarn here that I

don't want to buy into, because he told me. He says, I can go down to Tata Pam, for instance, and this was ten years before this latest event. He said, I can take you down there and I can show you a bigfoot tracks anytime you want to see him, and you know you have it. I took that with a grain of salt. Okay, fine, sure, yeah and once and then when Sarah and Jonathan's article came out on that same thing or video, I said, uh huh, maybe

that guy doesn't know what he's talking about. And at the same time, my old buddy that hunted up there lived up there and hunted up there. He told me about him climbing a little well, it's a pretty good size hill. It takes have the day to get there to the top called tomb water and which means falling water in the Native anyway, key and an incident worth one at the top of the hill. Now at the bottom of the hill was the Tainapan incident at the

top of the hill. My friend had this incident. So between the two, I'm pretty convinced they had incidents and evidence enough for me. And as I went in a straight line north of that, I talked to two people that had had incidents at their place and amid the straight line with maybe four or five miles due north, and one of them had a bigfoot would come down, and a family come down from time to time and

get into their apples and just make themselves known. You might say, nothing big until another till another house was built above them. There's only two houses on the road, the other one, and then that changed the dynamics of whether the animals could be coming in or out and anyway. So we got to talking and she she had had a grage sale there, that's why I pulled in and everything, and so somebody else came up there and we were talking and she says, well, when I was a little girl,

this is an over gal. When I was a little girl, my folks who just lived just about a quarter of a mile away had a and this this is way back. I'd have to hazard a guess based on her her age and my age and everything else. It must have been fifty sixty years ago. They had an outhouse off off the edge of the house, off the edge of the some corner of the property was handy whatever, and they didn't have a door on it, which out there

in the puckerbrush. Who cares anyway. So this she was about ten at the time, eight to ten, and she says, I went on there. I had to go to the bathroom, and I'm sitting there and this big hairy guy walked right in front of me, turned looked at me, and then they looked at each other for a few seconds and then turned back and walked away. Well, she went up told her granddad. She says he was big. He was really tall, And so Grandpa started to question her about it to find out what was going on. And

he says, then he occurred to him. He says, they're here all the time, money, don't worry about it. They go through all the time. And it was a bigfoot. So just everything depends on the situation who you're talking to. But if I had the time and the money and a situation where I could go right down the house to house to house with some kind of an official badge hanging on me, so they would stare him off,

and I let to talk bigfoot. I got a suspicion that that would be a lifelong pursuit all by itself.

bigfoot stuff. And I just kind of thought for a second. I asked him, I said, you ever runningto any bigfoot down there growing up? And he said, kind of looks up at me, no, looks back at the outlet and starts working again, And a few seconds he says, but

my cousin did. Whenever he was fishing, he saw one cross the creek right down from where he was sitting at fishing, and he ran over there real fast, and it was already gone, but he saw the tracks and everything and just went on about his work like it was no big deal, you know, And that's kind of the deal. There's a lot more people who have experienced these things or know someone who has experienced these things than you would ever realize.

I heard footballs on the trail, and though I know he's near anticipation, grips me tightly and still, and yet there is no fear. Well over eight feet tall, four hundred pounds or more. I'll know this bigfoot better before this night is ore. So many years of hoping to see that lonesome face, to know the myth is real, I cannot, I cannot. That's a race. The moon is casting shadows and how I strain to see is that

he among the willows? What else can it be? My heart is pounding lightly, My knees are weak, they shake. I wish a word to utter, but no sound can I make. The moon is full in silver, the light this night is full. I'm in the presence of a legend, and he is in full control. What a great confliction? Should I stay or go? My camera all but useless, I've forgotten all I know. Still he stands there in the willows, rocking slowly, rocking left and right? What is

he thinking on this moon and silvery night? Like others long before me? Caught up in the lore, My heart says he's real, and still I need much more. I have no desire to arm him, and I hope he of me yet to touch and know he's real, and then just leave him be behind a cloud. It's darkening. The waiting is so long, and with the lights returning, the legend is now gone. Alone. I stand there, listening to night sounds coming through. Was this mere aperation or

his bigfoot really true? Consider all the stories, put them to the test. You alone must decide on where your heart must rest. For me, I've heard the footfalls on the night of the Silvery Moon. I've seen him in the shadows and won't forget him.