The Rainier Connection | Oregon

every week? Well there is now. If you become a supporting member over at Patreon, you get a special members only episode every single week on Wednesdays, and sometimes even more episodes. Head on over to patreon dot com. Forward slash the Bigfoot Society and now let's get on with the show. All right, Bigfoot Society. I've got the privilege of talking to a bigfoot researcher you may have heard of before. He is pretty well known. His name is

Dwayne Pintoff. But it's a privilege to have on the show. Dwayne, how's it going.

eighty three. And I grew up in South Carolina, lived in North and South Carolina through those through the early sixties, seventies, eighties, in the early nineties, and in eighty three, I was working in Georgetown, South Carolina, which is at the coast between Myrtle Beach and Charleston, South Carolina, as a electrical engineer field engineer on the paper on the International Paper Plant, which was about an eight nine month project. Thousands of

people working there well. At that time, I lived a three and a half hour trip from my home in the foothills upper part of South Carolina, and we would work thirteen days on ten twelve hour days and then get two to three days off. Well, this particular weekend in August of eighty three, my middle brother's father in law was also an employee there. He was working as a Union pipefitter, and both of us lived within miles of each other back in the hills of Spartanburg County,

and this particular weekend, his name was Brady. He had to take the same trip, the same commute points to go home as I did. On this particular Friday night, he didn't come through. It was called Watery Recreation Area. It's near the Sumter National Forest. It's about as the Crow Flies. It's twenty five miles from Columbia, South Carolina. It's twenty miles north of Shaw Air Force Base. That gives you the locality. It was very, very very isolated

in the early eighties. Swampland thick thick wilderness area, lots of habitation, lots of wilderness wildlife. You had wild pigs, bears, numerous deer, and all other indigenous animals living in here. So in that time period, there wasn't hardly any commercialism between the town of Camden and the town of Liberty Hill, which was about a twenty mile stretch. And that's where Brady had his initial account encounter as he was driving home and he told me this story on the following Monday.

He went out of his way to tell me because back then we had no cell phones or internet or any other communication, so he had to wait till he returned physically to the job to tell me that. On that Friday night, as he was passing through this very isolated location, he comes up on a car and the car,

for no reason swerved. It was on a very straight area on the road itself where you could see like almost a mile ahead of you, and this car swerved suddenly and went off to the side of the road and over and then down a three four foot and

slope of embankment. Well, Brady and I were both on the rescue squad back home, and he thinking, hey, someone's had a medical emergency, he said, he stopped his truck, got out of the truck, grabbed a flashlight, went up to the car and theywards he's knocking on the window, and there was two elderly ladies and they were very excited. Did you He got on the roll the window down there, yelling did you see it? Did you see it? Did you you see it? And I said, what did they see?

Brady said, I'll tell you a minute. But he said, I wasn't worried about that. He said, I asked him. I offered him if they needed any help, if anyone had a medical emergency. They didn't, so he offered he had a four wheel drive pickup truck. He said, I think I can pull your car back up on the road so you can continue your drive home. And that was all he knew at that moment, And he said he walked back up to his truck, which was still

on the side of the road. As he went around the back of the truck to opened the cap he had on the back to get the rope. That's when the flash light hit this thing right in the face. It was standing there within thirty I laiter, not this thirty feet from his position, and he's looking at his square. It's looking at him. He's looking at it, he said, and I'm like, what was it? Brady, wasn't the heck

did you see? And he said, Dwayne, it was a monster. Well, we didn't ever talk about Bigfoot back in the eighties, even though I had seen those things at the movies and on television. Brady and I had never ever ever talked about any that he had zero. He was a down to earth guy, a deacon in the church. He was not the kind of talk about nonsense or anything science fiction. And I said, what did you see? And he said, Dwayne, he at that time he held both his

arms out and his hands out. He said, it was bigger than any wrestler, or any bodybuild or any football player. Said, Dwayne, it was massive, and it was covered head to toe with black hair. And I said, what I'm the standing of looking, Well, the first thing that come to my mind is the falk Arkansas Monster, the Boggy Creek Monster. Again, neither one of us said Bigfoot. And I said, what in the heck did you see? He said, Dwayne, I don't know, but it was horrible. And he said I

must have went in the shock. And I said why, He said, because I don't know how long I stood there. And I don't know why I didn't slam the back of the truck lid and run. He said, I don't know, but he said he some reason, this thing turned and it walked up to the wood edge, the wood tree edge of the woods, stopped for a second, and he said it turned back around and looked at him, and it made this gurgling.

a gorilla. He said it was not a gorilla. He said it walked like us. He said, it was not like I've seen gorillas walk. I said, okay, well, then what was it? He said, I don't know, and he said it had a pungent odor. He said it smelled like between a landfill. And he was a hunter at the time. He said that if I left a deer hanging in the woods in South Carolina for two or three days or roadkill, he said, that's what hit me

when I stood there looking at it. And he said the hair was jet black from the head to the as far as he could see, down to the ankles, because it was down below the edge of the embankment. And he said it hung off its arms and was wet, like it had been in the swamp or been in something that was wet. All of it was glittening and wet. And he said, but other than it being huge, and that being the description of the smell and the behavior,

it didn't do anything toward him. So he said when it went into the woods, he turned around and grabbed the rope and went over and managed to get the car back up on the road. And he never told the ladies what he had just witnessed. And he said, he said, he asked him again, what did you see what made you swirl off the road, and they said, as they were driving, a deer ran in front of their car, and this black thing they didn't know what it was, was right behind the deer and they almost

hit and that's what they swerved to miss. So this was intrinching to me because I'm like, you know, I was like twenty four years old at the time, only I had always been an outdoors person, always done hunting and fishing and hiking and camping and the Boy Scouts and Explorer Scouts. I always had a passion for the woods. But I had never tied Bigfoot together with any of my wilderness activities up until that time in south of North Carolina, and this got me very interested. I want

to know what Brady had witnessed. So he told the ladies, he asked me, that's what they call him. And so they drove off, and then he said he got into his truck was continuing to drive home, and they said that's when maybe reality set in because he got the shaking so badly he had to sit there and recompose himself for like thirty forty minutes before he could continue driving. So then on Monday morning, he's back at work, and you got to physically realize this guy wasn't. He wasn't

the kind of pranksters and hoaxes. Did like the joke occasionally, but he would never have gotten into this and didn't even know enough to do a prank on this. He had walked this paper meal that we were working on was about the size of two big malls store commercial malls.

His business of work was the pipe fitting work he was doing was like the other end of the mall, and he walked the distance to come to my work area where I was working on the probox and Modicon control systems, to make sure if I was going to drive through that area that I was aware of what he had seen on that previous Friday, so that I wouldn't end up in the situation he did, and that

was the last time. He passed away two years ago at seventy eight years old, and that was the last time he ever willingly talked about it was at the job and after that I tried to catch him and get more information. He said, I'm not talking about it. It was a demon, it was a monster. I'm not talking about it, and none of we never told I talk

about Bigfoot. But I went to that area. I ended up relocating and moving officially of Columbia in March of nineteen eighty four, and it became my first research location. I went through those woods. I had a forty four magnumum my hip, whereas I thought, if I run into something like this, I don't know what is capable of, even though it didn't do anything aggressive toward Brady. But I never saw anything. I walked through those woods by

myself several miles and I wasn't a researcher. No one had ever advised me of how to be a researcher, what to look for, what clues to study, and what to get information. I just figured, if this thing's out there, it would just make its appearance like it did to him, and I'll get the chance to see what he saw, and then I'll figure it out. But unfortunately, from eighty

four until eighty nine I lived in there. I had a condo down there, and I lived and I went through those woods and all the surrounding areas of that area. Never came across anything that I can say, even now, knowing what I know as a researcher, anything to be conclusive,

concrete evidence. And one time I had a year at pause of that area because I ended up out in the Pacific Northwest and I was working in near Oregon at a nuclear facility as I was a nuclear engineer in I became involved in nuclear power as an engineer in eighty four and I ended up taking a break in eighty six eighty seven. I moved out there worked out there, not knowing anything about Bigfoot other than Brady's encounter and what I'd seen on television in the movies.

I couldn't find any research information in my libraries in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I couldn't find There was no one to have a conversation with about it, and I didn't know what I know now. Like I say, if I hadn't known them in what I'm knowing now, it would have been I may have ended up relocating permanently out there and ended up being another cliff Backman or something. But instead I was bumping around just being an engineer at

a power plant. And of course I could not mention my hobby, my interest, because they would have gave me the crazy alarm and I would have been not be working at a nuclear plant. But so I had to keep a low profile. But I still managed to do my research when I had time. So I'm out there, and God knows, I wish I had known who Peter Burns was. Then. I wish I would have known how close I was to Bob jim Win at the time. I mean Yakama, Washington. I wasn't two hours away from

the man. I would have driven to his farm and met with him if i'd have known he was that close to me. But I didn't know those things. So I went out on excursions for my own self because of loving the woods, and went hiking and horseback riding and had I had five guys in my office that were pilots, and we were in the air practically every weekend, flying somewhere, either up to Seattle, up to Mountain Neer, out to the coast down in northern California, or over

to Idaho. We were flying somewhere practically every weekend, and in the air. I was amazed to how many things I could see from the as a visual from the air, as long as we stayed within three or four thousand feet elevation, I could see pretty good. I mean we couldn't get down tree top level and study anything, but it still gave me an open perspective of the wooded areas around that location.

It tells a little bit about my history out there. Some of the guys in the office knew that I was doing these excursions and photography and they said, hey, Dwayne, have you made it up to Mount Saint Helens yet? And I said no, I didn't even think I could

get close to it. They said, yeah, they just opened a two mile red zone a couple months ago, and you can get in within that distance and you can get some fairly good pictures of the dome where it's blown off, and see just how devastated it is in that area, and said you'll enjoy probably hiking around there. Well that was all I knew. It's all they told me.

Nothing in the language of Bigfoot. So I'm driving up five or four kid Highway, which is coming out of Castle Castle Rock, and I'm going just through the wilderness, just beautiful, beautiful Douglas Fair wilderness up through there, and I come up on this souvenir stand, this souvenir facility, and it's the buried a frame and it had a souvenir shop up on the little rise on New Knoll up above it. And then there was this big, thirty foot Bigfoot statue standing at the corner of the parking lot,

and I'm like wow, I thought that's amazing. So I pulled in. I had to see this and get a picture. Well, when I did that, I'm kind of just scooping out the area and I look up towards the souvenir building and it looks like they built this facility out around where a porch might have been on this old house and closed it in. They had these cartoon looking caricatures of a monkey or a bigfoot. It turned out painted or decount around the building and I'm looking at it.

I'm looking at this statue and I'm thinking, man, that's that's pretty amazing. Must know something about bigfoot. I gotta go check it out. So I because I'm already just my whole mind was to get up to the trails and start hiking and filming. Wasn't thinking about a souvenir shop at the time. So I walk in. Nobody was there, and I just browse around a second. It was typical

souvenir key shirt, hats, trinkets, nothing of interest. As I turn around and start to go out, that's when I noticed off to the left was this turnstile and it looked like a glass display like cases inside the annex of this building. So I walk over and lean in to see what it is. That's something I need to

pay attention to. And as far down the length of it and on both sides of it are these looks like jewelry glass jewelry display cases, and these china looking displayed glass cases, and they're just stuffed in them every inch of the way down. So I thought, okay, And it cost a dollar to get in this extra section, and I put my dollar in I go in, and I got to tell you, Jeremiah, I felt like a kid in a in a let's say, star trek or something that I would have been so fascinated by at

that time. But it was unbelievable. This guy had, the owner had all these castings of feet and hand and hair samples and newspaper and magazine clippings and pictures. He had just a plenty of them down through there, and I'm just walking through there and I'm circling around. Now I'm going back down and I'm circling around because I want to read and see everything gets in there, because

it was just unbelievable. And he stuck. He realized I was in there for a while, and he come over and he says, uh, I couldn't help, but see you were very interested, and he starts. We just had a general conversation. I ended up telling him about my experience with Brady and Brady having his encounter, and he was amazed by day. He said, oh really, He said, I didn't think those creatures might be in South Carolina, but

I know they're here. He said, I've had experiences and encounters and he said, what you see here is a collection of everyone who's from this area has bought their evidence and bought it to have it displayed here, which it did. It had names and years and locations where these castings had all been made, which a lot were Spirit Lake and Mount Saint Helens before the volcanic explosion. So I'm just going to I'm just like a kid.

And it turned in an hour plus conversation. At the end of that, as I'm trying to kind of work my way out, this young guy who I don't know where he come from, he comes in and he's just kind of meandering along and shaking his head and just on huns and not really chiming in. And as I'm about to leave, he says, I couldn't help me. Hear you say you're going up to take pictures of the mountain of the volcano. I said, that's exactly where I'm

hit it. He said, I can do something better than that, He said, I got a helicopter parked up the road about a mile. He said, if you are okay with it, he said, uh, I'd take you up and put you take you into the mouth of the volcano. And I'm like looking at him, like okay, And so I said, oh, that sounds cool with me, and it turned out at fifty dollars and I thought, well, that's a lot of money back in eighty six, but I didn't think much

about it. So I followed this guy up the road and sitting there's this nice looking, brand new looking helicopter sitting there. It looks like any like something really expensive. And there wasn't anyone else up there. It was just him and I and we get in crawl in. I had my camera equipment and we put the headphones on. And that was only the second time I had been in a helicopter, and the other time was for up in Gatlinburg and I did just a quick tour circle. So this guy, he sets it up, gets us in

the air, and I was like wow. I never really realized how easy it was to see so many things as we were only flying about five six hundred feet that we were not even now hi maybe And he would just pull up every once in a while, because as we got away from the parking lot where he had this thing, the pad he had this thing sitting on, I'm looking out through the foot viewpoint and then I'm looking out the window and I can easily see all these elchre down there on the tundra grazing, and I

couldn't believe how good I could see him, and I was making comments about it. I was looking. I said, wow, I didn't know you could see this much as easy from a helicopter compared to a plane. So he would hover, he would just pull up and let me take some pictures, and all that time we're looking straight at the mountain. I mean, I'm looking at unbelievable devastation of Mount Saint Helen right square in front of me, about a mile

ahead of me, and that caught my eye. But I'm being a jokester because I was like twenty twenty seven, twenty eight years old then, and I wasn't being mean strut. And I had no idea who this guy was, except I do. He had had me in his hand of the helicopter, and he was really doing good so far, and he was in a bigfoot souvenir shop. But I had no idea if this guy had anything to do with any of that, because he didn't come in and join in any of the conversation with me and the owner.

So I looked at him, and I'm talking to him you know it hits it. And I said, I didn't know you could see as well from the helicopter. I said, did you ever see a bigfoot? I said, I got to ask you, did you ever see any bigfoot before the mountain blew? I figured he just laughed me off for it, you know, tell me to get lost, and he looked right at me. He said, yes I did, and I was like, really. He said I did see too, just a few weeks before the mountain exploded. And I said,

no kidding. And that's when he told me. He said he was coming back from bringing in the john Town Johnston Observatory Science as geologists. He had taken a couple of them up to do something with their seismic equipment where they had a place located at the I think I was the eastern edge of the mountaintop and they were monitoring the volcano. They were up there doing monitoring seismic activity. And he said, as he was flying back down, he said, the north side of the Lake of Spirit

Lake that was grassy. All this salt grass was there and it was very no vegetation to sept grass. And he's flying at about one hundred and fifty feet elevation right across the water to pick up another group of people that wanted to come up for a tour. And as he's doing that, he looked down through he had again he had this opening in his feet, and he saw movement. He saw, he said, he saw this dark figures and he thought it was bears at first, he said.

He pulled up the helicopter and he's hovering above them, and then he's studying down looking at him, and he realized they're walking and not on four it they're on two lakes, side by side. And he realized because he had been in the air so many times, he had had quite a bit of experience, he knew he had a mental judgment of size, and he knew these things were massive compared to humans by what he was able to see features from the air at one hundred and

fifty feet or thereabouts. And he said, he just hovered and they never one time looked up at him. They just kept their course, walking side by side, and he had to keep backing the helicopter up because they were walking. He was facing them, he said, and he had to

back the helicopter up. But they never looked up to see what was above them or cared about what was above them, And he said they walked several yards and then finally they both turned and went into the wood wine and wilderness and just kind of disappeared out of sight. So I'm like, wow, no kidding. I thought, this guy's either full of it or he is really telling me something. I don't think anybody else at that time had seen

anything from the air. So he flies me around and takes me up to where the observatory is and then starts showing me some other features and explaining what it had looked like to what I mean, it looked like the surface of the moon when I was there. There was no vegetation on that area. It was horrible, just

pure ash everywhere. So as we're flying back down to where we had first come back from the across from the pad and stopped and hovered for the elk, we were down at the right side there, and it was called the Tootle Creek Fork, and that's where the Spirit Lake, which is a reservoir, would still into Tootle Creek and then it would feed the water down to Kelso and Castle Rock and I don't know what other little tributaries it filled down there, But anyway, he said, he looked.

I said, did you ever see Bigfoot anymore? Before the mountain blue? And he looked at me real serious, and he said, yes I did. But if I tell you what I'm about to tell you, you got to give me your word that you keep it confidentially. He said, I don't want to lose my pilot license. Well he must have.

He must have still had his license because it was six years later since the mountain had blown in eighty nineteen eighty that I'm in the helicopter now, and he pulls us up right over this little tributary where this fork to the creek fork is at and we're hovering looking down, and he said after the mountain blew, he had to stay out of the air for two or three weeks because of the air quality would have killed the engine on the helicopter and caused the crash. So

until air quality was reachieved, the state grounded. So no big deal. When he went back up and started taking people that wanted to witness the explosion of the volcano, he was just doing his normal thing and no big deal until one day, a couple of weeks into his flying, they were clearing. They had brought these steam shovels in the big wedges, and Army Corps engineers and the local construction contractors had all come in. They were eagerly trying

to open up that fork at Spiel Way. It was just he said, it was just a collection of trees and debris and silt and ash and mud, and it couldn't. They wanted to get the water going down so the communities that need at that reservoir could get the water back. So Klitch River, that's the other one. Is it spillst

Tutle Creek and it dumps into Klitch River. So anyway, he he's sitting there and we're sitting there together in the chopper and he said, I'm watching this activity as I was up flying, and no big deal, he said.

There was just tons of things being hauled off. They had the big Shinook double blade helicopters in there, and they were dropping a big transport whatever cargo nets and they were hauling a lot of that out on the cargo nets to someplace, and they were hauling it out on trucks just to get all this debris out and there at that time, he said, that was what he watched until one day, a couple weeks in, he comes through there and he decided to pull up and watch

because they were just about to lift this big cargo net. And that's when he noticed what looked like an arm, a hand hanging out, and a massive and a foot and a leg hanging out. And he said, these he knew was not there. He could easily see they looked like all those human appendages, and that's when he thought Bigfoot.

But the thing is, just to give a little backstory, the one thing the guy in the souvenir shop said, as we're talking big he said, you can ask anybody that lives around here about Bigfoot and you'll have a two hour conversation. He said, people up here love Bigfoot. They don't mind talking about it. He said, you want to get a conversation going in Washington, in this part

of Washington, state of Washington, he said, just mention Bigfoot. Well, this guy's thinking was the same way he's watching this thinking. As a matter of fact, yeah, it was burned, deer, burned, elk burned, other indigenous animals found there was all this debris and damage. Why not Bigfoot?

about his business. After they took that Army Corps engineer helicopter took off with that net. He went back, got his fair, his people that he was going to bring up, and he kept doing that for a couple of days, two or three days. He's telling people that he's hauling out for the tours about this experience, he said, and nobody really made big deals about it. They were not

amazed because they were the locals. And he said, three days into him telling the stories, some guy, a reporter from the Kelso Gazette or whatever it was called, called him, found a way to call him, got in touch, wanted to do a report again, this guy's thinking, as a matter of fact, no big deal. He invites him down to his farm in Castle Rock. He gives this guy the report. The report ends up in the newspaper, and

that's when he's looking at me and telling me. Within a day, this government, this sedan shows up at his farm with these two guys in suits saying they worked for the government. But he never got a name who they were. They just flashed two cards at him, and they're looking at him and saying, you need to retract your story. Change it that that was bears or something you didn't recognize but not Bigfoot and you were mistaken,

or you're going to lose your pilot's license. And I later found out he was threatened to lose his pension, his military pension, and he still was telling me. Well, I found out after the internet went live and I was doing other research there was another similar report from Klitch River area, which I don't know if somebody deliberately changed the location to throw people law from the Tudle

River Fork, I don't know that. But they were telling that they were finding Bigfoot bodies and being hauled off, and then they were telling how the army Corps engineer allegedly had captured a bigfoot that was injured and they were going in and collecting other bodies. I don't know about all that part, but this guy, he was very sincere. But then after I started reading other reports, I found his alleging his nephew filed a report on I believe it was a Bflo's site, if I'm right about that.

He wrote a notation report that this person who I believe was my pilot, had died from cancer. Here. I guess he was in Vietnam War and he might have died from agent orange exposure. I don't know that, but he was a decorated soldier because of his missions. He had fallen behind enemy lines to retrieve injured soldiers and captured or soldiers that couldn't get out on their own.

And when he came out, retired out of the military or Vietnam War ended, he came back to where he was from and he opened up this helicopter tourist business and I got to meet the guy. So that was exceptional in me because I didn't have a lot of background in bigfoot at the time except from what I knew from Brady. So that's what I can tell you about.

these other stories that I've had on the show. But so you were actually were you actually spending time in the ver near Oregon area itself to research in that area? Was it more up near Mount Saint Helens.

a museum down there. I never no one told me about it, and no one led me to him because I wasn't speaking about my interest. And then there was I know, I had to be very very close because it's just like a feeling I get when I'm around any locations that I used to travel all over the country for my field engineering experience. If I would get in an area, because again didn't have internet, didn't have until later, didn't have internet, didn't have any resource people

to communicate with this to lead me somewhere. It was all gut feeling, and I would go in those woods when something told me there might be something there in that place that you were telling me that was in the near area. I know, I was on those roads and walking in those woods without the knowledge of knowing that this guy was virtually living amongst them.

later and coaching unfortunately got knocked down. It's gone and there's no going back to that because I was once I got in bobed with bigfoot researches adamantly, as I did once I come to Pennsylvania in nineteen ninety two, but I didn't get involved with a group in a group concept. I didn't get into bobbed in that until two thousand, well actually ninety nine, as I was part of the Bigfoot Network of Ohio, but that was purely

phone and email. There was no physical persons. And they were leading me to one or two different places up here on the mountain and Chestnut Ridge that they knew about, but no one. I had no one to communicate about in a personal way about Bigfoot. But when Matt Moneymaker put the big BFRO website together in ninety five, I found it, like in ninety six, and I submitted Brady's report. He wouldn't do it because I contacted him and I said, Brady,

are you willing? Because I contacted two of the early members of the BFRO who were living in Washington, and they were a man and White team and they were very eager to hear about Brady's experience and encounter, and Brady wouldn't talk to him. So I said, do you give me your permission to share your story with them? And he said, you do whatever you want. I don't want to think about it anymore. But he wouldn't talk

about it ever. So that's how it it up. If you go on the BFLO website under reports, and go to South Carolina and go to Kershaw County, you'll find a B report. Because I submitted it instead of Brady, they call it a B report, and there was now another. That's why when you I kind of got excited when you had your guest on the other day for Newbery

in Lake Murray. Because again, now as the road, as the road goes, it's sixty miles to where Brady had his encounter from Lake Murray and Newbery, but as the crew flies across the country, it's only like twenty two miles from Newberry to water Ree, and it's only like twenty five miles from Lake Murray to Water Reed. So there's been a lot of reports over the years that we've had internets and Bigfoot websites groups develop that's come

out of that area. So there's a I think there's a healthy population a Bigfoot in that area, although we know just from our experience up here, we think they do migrate for food or maybe they do that to say to stay out of sight. If they have a tribe or whatever you want to call them, a group of them. If they start populating too explicitly, eventually too many people are going to see them, so they got to spread out, or they've got to divide and move

out of a given area. Too much activity start showing up, even if it doesn't get close to home, the den, or wherever they're homesteading, they know that it's just a matter of time some human is going to get too close, so they can only avoid human interaction by moving around and maybe coming back to that location at a later date. At least that's my concept and feelings.

him at, and he didn't respond to me. I wanted to know if he had interacted, but I heard the guy died that I had interacted with, and now the helicopter guy I believe as the same guy died, so there's nobody up there that I interacted with, which I'm very sad, and I'm sad I mean, you gotta realize my lifestyle when I was out there was it was unimaginable. I had all these guys who were pilots. I had two guys that had sailboat fishing boats that had me

out in the river still had fishing. If I wasn't flying, and if I wasn't hiking and doing horseback riding on the down at Cannon Beach and surfsids Beach and that story. If I wasn't doing stuff like that, I was doing my But I didn't have as much free time. Plus we worked on backsides off trying to do the modifications that we were doing in the plant at the time. So I was working average fifty hours a week, sometimes

sixty hours a week. But I made time, fortunately to enjoy my life out there, and Bigfoot got factored in. It wasn't even one of my planned activities out there when I went out there. It's like, Okay, I'm gonna enjoy the Pacific Northwest and see what the heck gets all about. Never thinking I was going to bring Bigfoot research into the mix of my activities, but I had no choice. After I met this guy and he's telling me all this stuff that went on out there. Oh yeah, I had to be part of it.

They got mountain lions, and they've got well they didn't have grizzly bears back then, but I thought these bears are more aggressive than what we have in South and North Carolina. So I was very cautious. So I had that apprehension, like because I didn't carry a weapon out there, even though I did have my forty four bag, I didn't carry that. When I went in the woods. I

had bear, I mean not bear fray. I had pepper pepper spray, military canisters of pepper spray on both of my hips, and a hunting knife on my on my belt.

and attack me. I was just caustable. I never saw a felt bigfoot when I was out there, which is like I said, if you run the clock ahead, run the calendar ahead to when I came up here in ninety two and then started exploring southwestern Pennsylvania and section of Ohio and West Virginia, I would have been a different person out there if it would have just been less than ten more years, which actually I can only say really eight ninety nine when I met when I

got in touch with the people from Bigfoot Research and then I there was two there was three groups, well, the Bigfoot Network Resource Organization. They didn't help me very much with how to be a researcher. They just told me where to go and look for tracks and listen for and if I smell or see anything unusual, just keep a do a ledger. I always took a notebook with me, a little spiral notebook, and they said, anything you see her here, just write it down, call us

let us know. Okay. These two guys were Kent State University professors who had grown up in Fayette County, owned up at the area where a lot of activity has happened over the years, and they had had encounters and they had always had an interest in but Bigfoot since as teenagers when they went out hunting, had had encounters in Fayette County up on the mountain, and when they went to Kent State where they were professors at they still had an interest in Bigfoot, but they didn't pursue

it until the Internet came out, and that's when they created the Bigfoot Network of Ohio. But they didn't have any active members that were gathering physically to go to areas and I became there. When I contacted them, they said, you're going to be our Pittsburgh connection. If we get any reports, if we know about anything activity wise, we'll

call you. You'll get the information and the witness name that they're willing to meet with you, and if you want to explore that area, we'll tell you how to get to it. So I was in ninety eight, in ninety nine and I got two or three good reports, but nothing developed, and I still didn't know enough about

bigfoot research. He said, Hey, if i'm bumping myself along up here, in something steps out throughs a rock at me, which I didn't even think about rocks then until later, But I just figured, hey, if they're here, i'll know they're here. Theyn't let me know they're here. I didn't realize how difficult it is to enhance or intrigue bigfoot wanting to contact you. I'll be physically made aware of

your presence and its presence. But anyway, in ninety nine, the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization gf GCBRO came online and they had a contact point on there. Didn't know any of these people. They were in Kentucky and Tennessee and all the way down in the Louisiana. The two founders, one was in Louisiana and one was in Tennessee, which

was Mary Green. I don't know how old you are, and I don't know what you know or ever heard her name mentioned, but she was a renowned on the East Coast anyway, a renowned Bigfoot researcher, and she had had her and her group in Tennessee had had several encounters and they that's why they were in the Bigfoot website and research because they wanted to collect other people's reports and try to figure out something about these get

some connectivity, some confirmation of what other people were researching and finding. So I emailed her and she ended up wanting to talk to me, So we ended up making

we became friends. She was older than me by a lot, by a very nice lady, and she was willing to share her information on what they were doing as research efforts, what kind of they were baiting, what kind of food items, what were they doing, and what were they getting results of And the one she was telling me, they were using garlic and onions and that was the most effective thing that they could bait and get the bigfoot to

come together. They seemed to have some real real interest in garlic and onions spicy like that or something with a rich flavor. So I was trying that and she was kind of coaching me and say, and then she said her teenage son and her had an encounter with two of them. He brought his boombox and he was into like AC DC, Metallica and all of that, and

she even cared for that. She like country, I think if I remember, and she was critiquing him, but he was playing his rock music, putting his boombox up on top of the jeep that she had, and they were in this isolated area where they had already had some other activity before this, and two of these things come.

They watched them come down the side of the hill, a big one in a medium size one, and they never came down close enough to really be right in front of them, but they were like rocking back and forth on behind a tree, and they were staying there for a couple of hours while this music is booming out across the woodlands. I did never try that. I had guys that wanted to do guitar guitars on the outline night outings. But I didn't do the boom box.

But she said that was effective for their bigfoot, doesn't mean it was going to be for everybody's big foot. And then she asked me, and late to ninety nine, two thousand, she said, Dwayne, have you been noticing any tree structures, any stack trees, tree stackings, or anything interwoven? And I said, Mary, where I go the woods that I go in? I said, but here in southern of southwestern Pennsylvania. I said, we get a lot of ice, a lot of windstorms, and these trees are very brittle.

And I said there is bad fault everywhere. I said, no, I don't pay attention to any of that. She said, just do me a favor next time you're in the woods. Just and she sent me some pictures of what she was talking about, which one was a big X and another one was the tripod was a little tripod. And I said, sure, if I get in the woods soon, I'll start paying attention. There was a place called Pine

Ridge State Park. That's where I sent you some pictures from, and I had been I knew about this place because we had golf tournaments at the country club down the street from there which bordered this area, and it was very intriguing to me because I just thought it was a beautiful wooded area and this was the headway of the Chestnut Ridge. It started in Blairsville in this Pine Ridge State Park and then that merged into the game lands,

which was Chestnut Ridge. Well, I had been just for entertainment purposes, just for loving nature, had been clear walking that area and enjoying the beauty of it. Hadn't seen really anything that made me think Bigfoot was even there. But that was one of my spots that I enjoyed going out on Sunday or Saturday hikes until Mary tells me to look for tree stuff. And I don't know

how just by incidents. I went out like a week after our phone our phone call, and I'm walking one of the pathways that I had previously done two or three or four times over a several month period, and I'm looking and off to the left, I see what I can only say is a symmetrical stacking of trees that were about three to four inches in diameter, about four feet in length, stacked symmetrically around the base of

a tree. And I'm like, Okay, maybe some kids did that because it was off the footpath I was on. But it was off in the kind of brushy, kind of thirty nasty little places. Nobody really would have wanted to do this for the heck of it, for fun and ninety, including me. Had I not heard her ask me to start looking for things, I would have just walked right pyot and ignored it and never paid any attention to it. So I went over and I took some pictures, and I thought, okay, wait, do I show

this to Mary? So I go over with my height. I do like two or three more miles, and I didn't see too much of anything in press of the rest of that little two or three miles. And I come back around where the power line is the firebreak, and I see what looked like some twists, a little twisted saplings, and I thought, well, there's got to be kids, but they were just not looking like kids would have done.

And I didn't see any footprints, But it was it was kind of as Jeff Mildram says about the substrate. The soil. The substrate was very conpounded that actually had cold like a coal pile of coal had been there, and there was no way anything was going to leaving a deep impression, so I didn't think much. Took a couple of pictures and that was like on a Sunday. That was the weekend, and it was a Sunday, and this is in February, and I didn't think about it, So it was like a week. Two weeks went by.

I went back there because we had had a windstorm and we had had ice in the area, so I really knew I was going to probably see a lot of down trees. And when I got back, I did the same to start with, I did the same footpath the trail coming where my car was at in the

parking lot. And the week two weeks before I had been there, there was nothing out there other than these things I just described a second ago, and I'm going up this trailhead to go back into Chestnut Ridge into the game lands, and something had took all these tree lambs. That's what one of the pictures I sent to you. It's a it's a natural. It looks like a big

dream catcher. They had taken all these two three inch diameter trees and limbs and brought them over on the trailhead that I had gone up that earlier, two weeks earlier, and they had intricately twisted them inside of each art so that they were the width of the trail and about the height that I am about six ft. I'm six to two, and it was about the same hike is me and it was all delicate stuff. But they had made a screen, a fence, a barricade across the trail,

and I thought, well, what the heck? Who did this? What kind of irritated me? Again, I'm just still an end. I was just a novice. I mean, I was just still learning and hoping that something was going to give me something. And I just tore it apart. I usually don't do that. I don't do it now because it's bad. Things happen when you tear their structures down. They don't

like that if they're still in the area. So I tore it down, threw it off to the side and kind of laughed it off and said, hey, I let me see that they like that, and they see if it comes back. So I did my hike out two or three miles a couple hours, and I'm not seeing too much of anything. And I come back this time walking following there's a spring fed Creek. It's a stream that runs at the base of the hill mountain and

I'm hiking on the trail. I'm off and if you go left, it goes over to the Polo Line firebreak, and this stream falls parallel with the firebreak, and I'm following that and I find some oreld trees pulled over, but they were bigger trees this time. They were snapped and twisted from about three to four inches off the ground and something had just obliterated them. I don't know what it was, but it didn't look like wind damage

compared to other natural stuff. And that's when instead of going all the way down to the furthest distance before I would have cut back left and come back into the parking lot, I decided to take a cut through, and that would have got me back to the first path where i'd started out at. And that's probably about I don't know, three four hundred yards through the woods, maybe somewhere in that distance, and it's pretty dense, and

there was a lot of down trees. And that's when I came up on those shelters, and I have to call them shelters. They were primitive looking, something like I would have built as a kid. But it didn't look like anything, and it shouldn't have been any adults in their building or kids. But there's no houses around this park, and nobody's ever there. I mean back in those days, back in two thousand and ninety nine, there was nobody ever. I never ran into a soul in this park anytime

I was there, weekday or weekend. I don't know why. So I'm studying this one that was just some stacked wood up against a tree that had been turned over, and it was like a leing to blind and I go up and I'm looking at because by now I'm starting to get the ideas of what you're supposed to

look at, so I'm looking for human activity. There was no gum wrappers, no cigarette butts or paper, no boot tracks, there was no sign of anything that had been there to make that wing to I'm taking pictures, thinking about it, writing it down in a little notebook, thinking I'm going to send this to Mary. She's going to get a

kick out of this. And I walk about another fifty feet and that's when I see the one that's complete, that looks like the size of a pup tent made out of the stacked sticks logs that had been there had been a full grown tree. Something had taken the root base and wedged it down in the fork of another tree and left the tipped end of it down

on the ground. And they had taken the stacked the sticks, the logs and stacked them all the way down and then kind of intricate and then twisted them together at the back of it. And I'm looking at this thing, and I'm like, wow, somebody, maybe primitive campers had done this, or somebody that was having fun. Well, I took my pictures and I'm walking. I did like a three sixty around it, and I just spread out another twenty feet and did another three sixty just to see if I

could find any tracks. I couldn't find any. So I'm getting intrigued by it because i want to see what's you know, I'm kind of curious how big this thing did It looked like I could fit inside of it. And sure enough, I take and again, this is February, and it was probably it was below freezing. We're talking like twenty eight twenty nine degrees, but it was cold. And I get I take my backpack off and I drop my gear, take my coat off and I get

down and do like a commando crawl. It was actually big enough that I could have just crawled in easy on hands and feet. It wasn't that that tight, and I crawled up inside this thing. It ended up being tons of room inside. I had another two feet above my head and plenty of elbow space.

though it was February. I heard a couple of different birds, but this particular time it was that you're e quiet, And as I'm standing there getting this weird oppressive feeling, I started itching like somebody had poured itching powder on me. I felt like my skin was being eaten. And all I can think of, and I have no proof of

it because you can't see it. I think there was a living animal and I don't know if it was a bail or a bigfoot in that space I had just crawled into, but I think I had mites on my body and I was itching like something crazy, to the point I had to go home. I'm going to take two showers to get it over of me. It was a miserable feeling, but I was head to toe itching, and I believe a bigfoot or something was height. It was in that dwelling, and I think these mites were

own it because it was the living host. And then when it escaped out of there to misseeing me or me seeing it, I must have been the next host that had decided to get on and that was horrible. So now I'm feeling this oppressive feeling and I don't know what's going on, and I can't hear or see anything at that moment that makes me think there's some reason to get the heck out of there. So I put my gear back on and I'm going to walk

over where a whole lot of trees have fallen. And that's where that one picture you have, you can study it later. It's another tree that's been pushed down, and you can tell where something had scraped out about five foot in length, about two feet deep and about three feet wide under this fallen log. A little somebody, a little person could go in and crawl in under that and hide. And what got my attention was is what

you see in that one picture. Something with claws or sharp fingernails had gouged out the dead tree on top of this this scooped out area. And again we're in February and twenty something degree weather, and these termite larva were crawling around in this scooped out area. So something was trying to get to these termites in the middle of winter, which is not normal. So that's a bizarre situation for me to find those shelters that had never been seen by me. And I went back and I

did share them with Mary, and she was amazed. And then I come back a couple of weeks later and all but one of those were knocked down. They were gone, something had knocked them down, but the one I had crawled in was still in place. As I'm leaving this particular time, I was back to my car, the park ranger drove in. I had never seen him before, and by coincidence, he pulls in and he was an older fellow, and I go over and have a chat with him, and I mentioned this whole ordeal to him and he's

just standing there looking at me. He says, well, that's wrong right there. He said, no one is allowed, no overnight camping, no hunting, no anything is allowed in this park after dark. He said, I'll go back and check and make note of it. But he said, trust me, there's no primitive campers here. If they are, they're breaking the wall. He said, there's kids camping, they're breaking the wall. He said, I'm going to go back and make note of it. But he said, yeah, there's no one that

should be legally in this park after dark. So that's that was a big introduction for me into my research in Chestnut Ridge, and and Mary introduced me to Stan Gordon. She knew of him through conversations with people she had learned through the Internet, and I didn't know who he was.

We didn't have any body local that I was aware of Bigfoot all the five years six years i'd already been here, So I was basically independent on my own, just doing the best I could, hoping something if it was as many reports as the guys from Kent State were saying that, hey, Pennsylvania has a good history of Bigfoot, but I couldn't find any written reports to back up

what they were saying verbally. So I was just out there in the areas that they kind of gave me hints to go to and hoping something would make itself present.

But then I met Stan and I met the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society, and I became a member, and they introduced me to some hotspots own Chestnut Ridge, and that's where a lot of activity that I was involved in or followed up on active investigations within days or hours following uh following that, that's where it all kicked off at I was, and then, like I said, I sent you a paper of documentation and of some of the activities that I pursued and wanted. I really was intrigued by

because again a lot of these people other people. At the time, there was no Internet sites like there are now to use for reference. There was no conferences, there were no of until two thousand and five was the first time I ever went to a conference in Ohio and met other people that were like minded. Before that and before the Pennsylvania Big for Society, I didn't really

have anybody but Mary in Tennessee. She was from Higby, Tennessee, which is northern up near Daniel Boone's National Force, which is where she had some encounters at the Radowski Brothers were up in Fayette County, which I hadn't even ventured up to yet. I didn't know about those locations, so I'm just in other places. Later there was activity occurred in those places. The two thousand and three the January three, that one was really an amazing event for me and

three other guys. We went up to top of Dairy Ridge, which is the third or fourth highest elevation in Pennsylvania and on the east probably like the seventh highest elevation in the East Coast. It's a twenty six hundred and ten feet elevation. I believe where we were at that we had our well, we now have an encounter, but we had evidence that we know was a big foot. It had snowed really really big, and one of the guys had a jeep Cherokee scout and no, it was

a chief. It was a Cherokee chief that was a beast,

had the big eighties cylinder engine, knobby tires. That was the only reason we made it to the top of the mountain because we were driving eight nine inches of snow and we get up to the fire tower, the abandoned fire tower at the top, and we all get out and we're standing up to almost our knees in about fifteen inches of snow, and we spread out, and all of these guys were bigfoot research guys, had been doing it for several years with the PBS, and they

were very smart about their background. One guy actually had navigated been the mapping navigating guy for this whole for like twenty five one hundred acres back in the sixties. In the early seventies, he had mapped this area for the landowners and later for the Game Commission, so he knew and he had had several big foot encounters over those years. He knew that area like the back of his hand, so hey, he was up there with us.

Another guy was I think he was here. He was a Native American and full blooded and we had him there in case we had something he needed. And it was good he was with us because the tracks we found he confirmed them. And then the other guy was just a regular researcher that had been doing it years before me, and it was a little older than me. So we get out and we right out of the air, right out of the car, we find what we later discovered was ninety nine percent sure it was cougar tracks.

They were three and a half inch diameter, big as your fist, basically a loose fist, and they were about three and a half footr lint between the rear left rear and the front right. And we followed these tracks off the top of the mountain, and we knew it was a cougar because there was a distinctive two inch drag mark in that snow at periods of time where

it was letting its tail down in the snow. So we're following this cougar down what we believed the cougar down this fire break off the top of the mountain to a logging road, and when we get down to the logging road, which is probably a good hundred yards down this hillside the slope, suddenly the cougar tracks just vanish in the thin air. We're walking along on the logging trail watching these cougar tracks and they just disappear in the thin air, and we're all standing there like, well,

where does thee thing go? He kind of just vanished. And so we spread out and the best we could in this thick snow and just general knowledge it was all around us. We're walking in the diameter around these last tracks we have visual of and one of the guy's spots, it turns out the best big foot tracks any of us had ever seen. It was seventeen by

eight and a half wide, seventeen length. You could see the distinctive toe marks, you could see the footprint, and it was so heavy, and it was walking parallel with the trail with the logging road. It was off to the side in the grunge in the fifteen plus inches of snow, and it was so heavy that it was crushing the snow down to about an inch two inches to the ground. And when it was stepping. We measured

all this and I actually tried to recreate it. It was stepping about four and a half feet to the next right foot track to the left foot track was a distinctive four and a half foot stride, and it was crushing. Every one of its steps were the same from its successive weight, and it didn't lead drag marks.

these sets of this trackway. We took pictures. I can actually send you one of the pictures, and we followed it for about I say, two hundred yards eighth of a mile whatever it's come without too But we walked and followed this trackway and we all knew this area because we were up there a lot, and they had been up there a lot since ninety nine before I

met them. But when I was with them, we were up there several times from two thousand to two thousand and three, in the period of time during summer, fall, other good months, not in the snow. This was the first time, I mean, boy had made the venture up there in the extreme weather. So we get out to where this suddenly we're in an open area. It's like a glade. It's like the size of maybe four living rooms,

five living rooms. It's like a twenty by twenty five times in this grassy, tall grass area, very pretty in the summer when it grows up. And as we're getting into that, the tracks just vanished. They just stopped. It didn't go anywhere. And then this would people like, hold, maybe it backed up in its own tracks. I'm like, there's no way that it backed up in those tracks, as perfect as those tracks are. I said, it just stopped.

And then that's where you got these people that want to start talking about quantum physics or portals or UFOs. I mean, I was never a believer of that, but I'm not a person to challenge anything I can't prove otherwise, and I don't want anybody challenging my research that I've been able to accomplish, So I try to be as professional and diplomatic as I can when something like that happens. But I witnessed that with my own eyes. I'm like, Okay,

this is amazing. And unfortunately we couldn't cast anything back then because they didn't have anything that would hold together and form a cast in snow. In two thousand and three, the military and the law enforcement did, but the public had not received that product until I think it was twenty can or twenty thirteen that something came out, because Jeff Meldrum is the one who told me later when I met him. Into met him at Cabbulas at another

event we had. He in twenty I think it was twenty thirteen, he said there was now a spray that would freeze hardened snow that the military and law enforcement had used. It's called snow blow or snow something, and it's in a spray can and it will freeze the particles of snow around the track so that you can cast it. Because when the the track's dry and it's creating heat. It's a it's a friction, so it melts the snow. But he said, this stuff is it's like

liquid nitrogen or spray nitrogen. And he says it's so cold it'll keep the snow condensed so that you get a decent track out of it. But we haven't got a chance to try it out that I know of. So that's another one for.

love to know more info about. And I think definitely it warrants you coming back on the show if you would be interested in that at a later time.

He said, wait, you've got to tell some of your stuff to somebody. You can't keep it hidden all this time. I said, okay, all right, that's fine. So yeah, I started doing podcasts or documentaries in that case in twenty seventeen. I've done probably six or seven since then. And that's why I'm very intrigued to do yours, because I like how your audience, how your followers are very informed and very professional. They they don't bash people like me that

have I can't help I have experiences I have. It just seems to drop in my lap. I wish I knew, because the other thing is so frustrating is are not frustrating but interesting is I go looking for bigfoot to get immigration and evidence on bigfoot, and I end up with all these strangers, which is the thing. It is. That's a want of tile, a strange, rare and unusual other events. And I could have a whole session on that because I've done presentations just on that element.

by anybody. Tell them me he don't don't judge anyone that does this unless you're willing to come out and experience it for yourself. Because it's a different environment than sitting in your house looking at the computer. You there are unforl to a lot of people that want to grandstand and get up a publicity and they put they embellish their experience or they have none, and they they steal experiences like I've had a couple of stolen from

me that people want to own for themselves. And it's probably my own fault that I've shared open, been too open with people and they ended up trying to own the uh own the experience then, and it wasn't them. Some of them had never even been in the woods before. So those I don't want to participate with. But anybody that has a genuine, sincere, honest interest, I'll be glad to talk with them for hours, take them to the points that I can take them to, and they will

be amazed. I know they're going to be amazed.

sincerely followed. But I if I've had exposures and that one paper I sent you with the illuminated object, that's the only thing I got this close to a UFO, and I was out bigfooting when that happened. Wow, and that was very special. So I don't follow those other areas of interest as much as I did big food.

it's all about sharing the show wherever you can. If you've had a Bigfoot encounter related to the following, or know someone who has, please reach out to me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com or pass on my email. Here's the list. The Subtle Lake area of Oregon, Rainbow, Oregon, McKinsey Bridge area, Sweet Home, pretty much that entire area, the north part. If you get what I mean, I'll see you back next time. Listeners. Sasat Summerfest this year

July eleventh through the twelfth. It's going to be fantastic July eleventh through twelfth in Greenwaters Park and Oakridge, Oregon and listeners, if you're going to go, you can get two day ticket for the cost of one if you use the code b f S like Bigfoot Society but BFS, and it'll get you some off your cost. Priscilla was nice enough to provide that for my listeners, So there

you go. I look forward to seeing you there, so make sure you head over to www dot Sasquatch Summerfest dot com and pick up your tickets today