I could only claim to have had one sighting of them, physical sighting, that being the original one in ninety three. But I can tell you too that I've spoke about it here and there. I don't speak about a lot, but I but I about two and a half years ago during COVID, I had probably the most amazing sighting, and only my second in twenty eight years, So it's more than just a single sighting for me. I can say that, but it took a hell of a long time for that second one then, but that second was well,
that's a good story of itself. But why don't we just get this rolling and let me know when we're taping, and we'll just my wife will tell you. I got no problem talking. So thank you. It's great to be with you again, Daniel. It's been a long time, gosh, several years back when I spoke at one of your conferences, and now it's it's good to good to see you and to be able to catch up on a few
things that have been going on in my life. I have to start with, you know, putting out the fact that I've spent my at least sixty of my years living in the Pacific Northwest, mainly the state of Oregon. And you don't live in the Pacific Northwest without having, you know, heard a bigfoot or sasquatch. It's it's kind of part of the culture, I suppose. But for me, I had written an off as some sort of urban legend or just a campfire tale to keep kids in line,
or what have you. I having been a hunter and fisherman, hiker, mountain climbing, been out and spent a lot of time both on land and in the water, and and you know, I I would have thought I would have seen something in all those years. But at this time of my life when I got had my epiphany, if you will, I was thirty four years old. I was a combat
engineer in the Oregon Army National Guard. And for those of you who may not be aware, a lot of what combat engineering does is it includes explosives, in many cases very large explosives. And so on April third of nineteen ninety three, I was with by unit, the twelve forty ninth Combat Engineers, and we had gone out into the Oregon Coast Range, not far from the coastal town of Seaside, Oregon, where we were going to practice our trade,
if you will. We had three rock quarries on private timberland that we had obtained access to and just you can imagine based on the activity we're involved in, and we had considerable security in the area to make sure that civilians didn't wander into the area. We had blasted at two of the three sites, moved on to the third, which was a cratering charge about two hundred and fifty pounds of ammonium nitrate that we've been soaking in diesel
fuel for a few hours. We got that in the ground, put in the blasting caps, the timing fuse, and lit the fuses, giving us roughly fifteen minutes maybe to get in our vehicles and reach a safe area where we would await the explosion and then go back and check our work see how we did standard as right. So on that particular day it was probably I won't see, about three in the afternoon. It was fairly decent day, being April in the coast range. When we boarded our
vehicles after having lit the fuse. A I was a passenger behind the driver in a second vehicle. We had five vehicles in all, and as we descended down the hill on this windy logging road to get ourselves some distance between the explosion and ourselves. I had the opportunity to look about the countryside. Like I said, it was a nice day. I had the window open, and so
I'm looking for deer and elp. I had hunted that particular hunting unit to Saddle Mountain unit for years, and so it was just natural for me to since I didn't have to focus on driving down this windy road, that just kind of it's about the countryside. But we rounded a corner, uh so I recall, just a wide sweeping corner. This. As we did, the second last site
came into view. Now this was a last site, a rock quarry if you will, that we had detonated a sizable explosion mostly c four plastic explosives at that one. As I recall, maybe an hour or so earlier. And as the as the quarry came into my view, I noticed three very distinct, very dark figures standing right out in the in the open, in in the middle of this gravel quarry. And something wasn't right. Uh. My first thought was, what the hell are those people doing down there?
And I say that because we weren't allowed to wander off onesie tuoesie or you know. We had what we call one hundred percent accountability For safety reasons, everybody had to be within an eyesight of the of the unit. So for having to have a couple, two or three individuals off on their own just did not make sense. And my concern was that they may have been civilians that somehow got around got through our security perimeter. But it took me only a couple seconds to realize that
what I was looking at were not human. And by that I mean they were too big. They were like I said, they were black from head to foot, didn't show any signs of clothing at all. The profile they showed was not human. And by that I mean that these it was the arms that really struck me initially. The arms were way too long for humans. That where our hands rest pretty much spread about our hip. The these arms extended all the way down to their knees.
And like I said, there were three of them. And so just to give your audience an idea of how it appeared to me, there was the largest of the three, and I estimated at least eight to nine feet in height. It was a huge, huge individual that one stood there just almost like a statue. And you really, I didn't distact any movement from it per se. But the two that flanked it on its right left were engaged in
this unusual activity. They were rocking to their left and to their right, shifting weight from one foot to the other, and in the process, these these long, pendulous arms were swinging down all the way at their knees. And so, I mean, you know, I could go on. I mean, the size was not human, the shape was not human. These things were built like bodybuilders, all three of them.
The barrel chested, broad shoulders, a tapered waist, but the arms, and I'd have to say the legs too, just seem disproportionately long compared to a human Torso anyway, I stood there, sat there, I should say, stunned at what I was looking at. I watched them for a pretty decent period of time, the entire time they were doing this rocking side to sided activity, at least two of them, and I watched them I would estimate about twenty five seconds,
which is which when it comes to bigfoot side. As you know, Daniel, it's it's a pretty good long view. And uh again, they just they were doing this, this walk to see or whatever you want to call it. They were just swinging side to side and and then twenty five seconds elapse, we turned the corner, I lost sight of them, and I just slumped back into my into my seat and tried to wrap my head around
what what I just saw. It's it's a weird feeling to have something like that, something that's not supposed to be suddenly be. You know, I can't unsee it, And you know, I make no apologies for it. I I fact, I feel quite fortunate for having had that that that sighting, that that encounter. Yeah, just curious, sure.
Yeah, just curious. Did to any any of the other soldier as witnesses or was it just you? By any chance?
So that's a good question. And at the time, I'm being a passenger sitting behind the driver, there were there were two individuals sitting up front in the humby, and I know they didn't see it. I was the only passenger sitting back directly behind the driver, and so at the time I assumed that I was the only one that had seen it. And we were getting pretty close to that safety area where we were going to get out of our vehicles. And wait for that that impending explosion.
And when we did get down there, I took the opportunity to jog back in the direction we had just come from. It was my hope that I could stay within sight of the of the unit and still get far enough away to where I could get another view of them, and that was my objective, as the rest of the other three trucks were coming in behind us. But I went as far as I could, and I just there was this stupid berm, you know, just a slight hill that was blocking my direct view of the
of the quarry, and it was frustrating. But while I was standing there looking off in the distance, I'm sure I was on my tiptoes with my hand up to my forehead as you could probably picture, trying to look off in the distance to see if I could get another view of them. Somebody called out my name. I heard somebody and some of my rights, you know, hey, niece. Okay. So I looked to my right and it's Sergeant Martin and he's he's walking my directions, and I said, yeah,
what's up? And he said, just what are you looking at? And of course I said nothing, and he proceeded to come up to where I was at, and the last of the trucks were rolling in behind us, and he came right up to where I was at and looked me right in the eyes and said, I don't suppose you saw what I saw down at that second blast. S Well, you can imagine. I'm like, oh, dear God, please do what I hope you're going to say. But you know, being the brave guy I was, I said,
I don't know, Jeff, what didn't you see? And I remember he took a drag off his cigarette and he looked over his shoulder to the left and over to the right, and he made sure nobody else was within earshot, and he exhaled and just said I saw three dark, huge bigfoot I think. And of course, upon hearing that, I I'm very that's a gadget. Yeah, I saw him too.
I saw him too. You know. It was great for me, you know, not that I had any questions about what I had seen, and frankly, without his corroboration it would have changed anything. Necessarily, I cannot see what I saw, but it was kind of cool to know somebody else had shared that experience with me. So that's an answer to your question, Yes, at that point I knew that I wasn't alone in what I had seen. As I stated at the beginning, I was with the at that time,
I was in the Army National Guard. Now I finished up my twenty years of service with a little over fifteen years of active duty. But I started out a National Guard and so we being a traditional guardsman, as you probably are aware, we all have day jobs, right, So we we get together one weekend out of the month to do our training, and it would be early May before we got back together to do some more training that I would come to find out that two more soldiers had come forward at that drill, as we
called them. Two more soldiers came forward and admitted to seeing exactly what Sergeant Martin, Jeff Martin, and I had seen. So it's a total of four eyewitnesses, and that's just
the ones we know of. I mean, I have to think that if there were four eyewitnesses and there were five vehicles full of troops, that there probably were more eyewitnesses, but four that we knew of coming forward, which takes that signing rather unique in and of itself, because multiple eyewitnesses account for a portion of of the sightings, encounters made multiple animals are even more rare, as you know,
usually it's a single individual. And then of course we got to think about the activity that we are engaged in that day. We were we were blowing up the woods Man. We were putting up mushroom clouds like two thousand feet in the air, blowing up hundreds of pounds of ammonium nitrate or plastic explosive, creating a small earthquake in the process. Right, So those three things combined to make it a very unique sighting, and it's it's kind
of stood the test of time over the years. It's been thirty two years now and I've been researching ever since.
Yeah, that's very awesome. Yeah, I could now from from what I understand. You know, apart from this, a lot of your research consisted of cruising the shorelines of the Pacific Northwest. If you want to pull every a little bit on that or what lends all that.
Well, I tend to be one of these researchers that that that things outside the box. There's a lot of us doing the same things repeatedly, and you know what what they say about people doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result right. So nobody's got it right yet, and so I try to use some more what I would call unconventional modes of research. You know. Of course I incorporate my hunting skills which I've honed over many decades, also some just standard research techniques,
if you will. But I do try to think outside the box. And one of the things I have looked into is researching from a maritime platform at night. Excuse me. In two thousand and sixteen September, late September, I put together a very unique expedition. We dubbed it Operation Sea Monkey. You may have heard of it. We raised some money to and put together a team. It was real who's
who I think? You know. I had very little time to put it together, but I was fortunate enough to get names such as Ron moorehead Gunner Monson with Sasquatch Coffee. We had Thomas Steinberg, a renowned author and researcher from British Columbia, and Tom Seawood some others. That we had total of six team members in an eight total, including two videographers cameramen that we had brought with us as well.
And what we did was to charter a fifty foot trawler out of Campbell River on Vancouver Island and British Columbia. What we had learned is the Native Americans north of there inhabited some islands known as the BroadOn Archipelago. And this is a cluster of nearly one hundred small islands. They're forested islands, very unique, rocky forested islands, some very small,
others there's a few that are pretty good sized. But literally the archipelago is so thick with islands in the northern stretch along that that's that that straight that western street there that some claim that a good swimmer and even some of the wildlife could literally swim from the mainland of British Columbia through the islands obviously resting between
and and quite possibly reached Vancouver Island. And so we thought, what better place to go to than these uninhabited islands that were once inhabited by the quakwa Quiwalk tribe hundreds
of years ago. And the objective was in this case a short term expedition just to basically look at the feasibility of doing a much longer one, one, being perhaps three months in length at the time, I owned a coastal cruising about forty foot yacht that I had lived on for several years and my term my thought was when I retired from the army, to take it up, to cruise it up to British Columbia and spend an entire summer searching the coastlines, both the mainland and the island,
but those islands in between. Specifically, in this case, we only had about a week to do this exploratory expedition again just to look at the feasibility of getting up there in all the logistics that it would involved to go up there a longer term. So every what we did is every evening we would we traveled probably seventy miles north of Campbell River through the Johnson Straits, and we had two inflatable zodiacs that we could use to leave the quote unquote mothership, if you will, and day
every day we would visit a for an island. We would anchor offshore, take the zodiacs to the beach, look for areas where we thought they may access the beaches to collect clams, shellfish, cockles, mussels and whatnot which had just come into season about late September early October and so we would take shifts every night throughout the night using some very expensive infrared an infrared camera and wash the shoreline because we the stories we had heard from
the natives where they would access the beaches at night and dig these clams up. So I would take maybe midnight to two am and wake up run Morehead he would do two to four, he'd wake up you know, Thomas Steamer, he'd do four to six. And we'd do this around o'clock. And during the day we'd go ashore looking for tracks, any sort of evidence we could find.
We would set up game cameras. I carried a kid of four seismic ground sensors that would trigger if they were if they detected any vibration in the ground, and send a signal back to the to the triller we were on. So it was a great exercise that we were again. We spent I think a total of six days investigating five different islands. We had a great time, a lot of work, and we came away believing that we can in the future do a much longer, much
longer expedition up there. I should say the actual original concept game from Peter Burn. I'm sure most of your listeners probably recognize him as one of the pioneer researchers in the big foot field. Yeah half the way. Yeah, Peter passed away about about two years ago this month at the age of well, he was just a couple
of weeks shy of ninety eight years old. But Peter lived on the on the coast in Oregon in a town of Pacific City, and he came up with this idea of us going out in a large inflatable out into the ocean from an estuary of the Salmon River just north of Lincoln City and south of Pacific City
where he lived. And so he contracted this guy that had this this it must have been about a twenty five foot inflatable with a center console, and we all jumped in at the docks in the river and we literally went straight out of the mouth of the river into the ocean, and we cruised several miles north and south looking at that time for different avenues of ingress should Bigfoot want to access the coast, and we found a number of places that were completely uninhabited, absolutely wild
accesses where we could see trails that would come down to the beach game trails. So it's kind of where I stole the idea because that was done I think a couple of years before that. But anyway, so yeah, I think, you know, we've got to as researchers think outside the box. And like I say, nobody's got it right yet, so why not.
Absolutely, that's awesome. Oh no, I'm sorry, Uh nah, I'm listening and everything. I was just away from the phone, all right, William.
Yeah, so yeah, Now this is interesting because you know you're talking about you know, when we experiment and try these different techniques, you know, like you said, thinking outside the box.
I mean, over the years, I've had my share of receiving criticism over what I've done, even in recent times with my group when we go camping and we go exploring. You know, people see the video footage. One of the couple that comes with me, one of my team members, David David and Melissa Lester. You know David, he's also retired from the army and also from the local one of the local police departments here. He's got two he's got two careers that he's retired from. He's currently six
around sixty five years old. And uh, you know, David Wilsa, they have a German shepherd. I remember when they first started bringing the jury. You know. Her name's Luna by the way, and she's two years old. We love having her out there. It's interesting because we've had her in several different locations out there and you know, just to watch her become alert to what's out there, you know, because a lot of it's.
New to her.
But she's she's becoming accustomed, she's getting you know, she's getting really used to, you know, being out there with us. And she does a great job. And so one of the one of the criticism remarks I got from one individual and I never thought I would get this from anybody, but I did, and it's like, yeah, you guys are going out there with a group of people and you got you got a dog with you. You're not going
to find nothing with dog. I was like, what is this, I mean, especially and they go on and say like, yeah, there's no hunting done with dogs from where I'm originally from. Yes, even down here in the on the East coast in the south hunters, there's bear hunters. They run your dogs for bear hunters up nor if you can run dogs for deer unlike that here.
Yeah, they use an Oregon for for hunting down cougar all kinds of things. But I've heard that argument. I've heard that argument before, and I've it seems to me that more times than not that dogs refuse to to trail these things. And I that's just my experience that there seems to be perhaps a love hate relationship between
canines and the sasquatch or bigfoot. And it may go back just to the fact that in more primal times that they were direct competitors for the same resources, the same game that they would be in carnivores both, that they would have to compete with each other. I don't know. I don't know, Daniel, that's a good question. What's been your experience.
Well, you know, it's just ever since we've had Luna with us, you know, it just mainly sitting around the base camp is when we more we more or less pay attention to her because you know where our base camp is. You know, of course we're surrounded by the woods. But our base camp where we've been camping lately, you know, it's it is on the edge of an open field.
Of course, the fields surrounded by the National Force, all the woods and everything, but you know, of course, canine'es they pick up things and they send things that we don't always sense, and like a lot of times we do try to pay attention to her, even though when we're when we're sitting around the base camp, you know, you know, enjoying the campfire or just shooting ship whatever
it may be. You know, you either she stops and looks in a certain direction, or she might start have this low little grawl, you know, like she's growling at something like what the heck she's picking up on? You know, well, that's great thing, Yeah, it's interesting.
Well it's what dogs. Dogs are not only very naturally intuitive, but their senses are far more attuned, a lot more i should say, acute than ours. For instance, dogs can hear between well humans here, between twenty herts and twenty thousand herts generally speaking, with few exceptions, dogs can hear as low as fifteen herts and as high as thirty
five herds. So, for instance, when you blow a dog whistle, it just sounds like, you know, nothing, like we're blowing air, but dogs hear that because it produces a very high pitched whistle above that twenty thousand hertz range. So it's great to have a companion with you that has the ability to dick to detect things that are outside of our brain of hearing as well, a dog can hear. Dogs can hear ten times better than humans. And I take it back now dogs dogs can hear ranges above
and below human hearing. But at the same time, they can smell. Their smell detection is ten times that of a human. So imagine whatever you smell, they can smell it ten times farther away. So it just makes sense, especially I would say perhaps in a camp setting to have them along just for you know, as a century years as an animal that's going to be able to alert you should anything happen that maybe you may or may not be aware of. So I don't have a
problem with that. I'm just thinking in the field, when you're on the move tracking Personally, I wouldn't take a dog in the field, And by that I mean when you're tracking around, but around camp went on. But that's just my two.
Cents, right, I mean, like I said, it's fun having her there. She's a pleasure. She's you know, she's a pleasure to have there. You know, most deadly she is she's a really well behaved dog, you know, And a lot of that comes from David's training, David and Melissa David when he was when he was in the army. That was part of his assignment. He was training canines in the army. You know, Yeah, she was, she was well behaved. She is a well behaved dog, you know.
I mean, of course she's you know, we've got to keep a leash and everything, because I mean, in this trict of video, the coyotes, there's tons of deer. I mean at nighttime when we're sitting around the camp, you know, we're observing with our night vision or our frmal flurs. Yeah, we're picking up deer and everything all surrounding you know, the camp area. So and then plus we've got bobcats around.
I know there's bobcats around this particular. I've got one of my trail camera that was out there and we and we have reason to believe, even though they deny it. Here on the East Coast, there's mountain lions here. But your your game departments and your authorities will done, I am. But there's so many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of eyewitnesses, especially in the area we're focusing in right now, this area. It's in Virginia, but it's not far from the West
Virginia line. But yeah, there's many eyewitnesses accounts of mountain lions in this area, and yeah, we get that.
We get that here as well. In Arkansas there I have literally seen photographs that have been taken on game cameras, uh, and they've been brought to the attention of authorities, and and like you say, fishing game, they will deny that. I think for what they're really kind of tinging on is that there was not an established breeding population of them,
but they are aware that. In fact, there was an article a couple of months back in the Newton County Times where the author said that in twenty five years that there have been twenty three established in other words, officially recognized sightings of cougar mountain lion in Arkansas, so almost one a year. And those are the ones that they say, yeah, we're okay, we can't deny it, We've
got the evidence. But I think their point is that there may be some some single individuals, but not a very large breeding population that would necessarily have them be officially established as an indigenous species. In the area. But they're out there, I guarantee, and of course where I lived in Oregon they were everywhere.
So but anyway, yeah, you know out of the Pacific northwest, Yeah, they're widely acknowledged up there. And then of course if you drop all the way down to the south southeast coast here down in Florida, you get what they you know, they titled the Florida Panther, which is well acknowledge down there. And so you have them down south, you have them out west. But you know, my my thing is, they puzzled me why they are going to deny them here
on the East coast. And the biggest thing I could come up with my conclusion, is that they don't want the public to know because they will cause or create the fear factor.
You know. Well, you know, well, Daniel, for probably you probably just hit the nail on the head when it comes to Bigfoot as well. I think for the very same reasons that they do not want to acknowledge. What they probably already are aware of is that because they don't want to generate fear, they don't want to cause undue stress. You know, people ask me, do you think the government knows about them. Well, I'm not a conspiratoriist, and I don't believe they are necessarily hiding things from us.
But there's a difference between hiding something, you know, intentionally hiding something versus admitting something. And I think in the case of the government, you know, it all comes down to consequence, right, or probably better said no consequence, because when you put it on a scale, if I were the government, and I've got this scale on this side, if I say something, if I bring this information that we have with regards to Bigfoot in this case too
public attention, there are going to be consequence. There are going to be repercussions. And they really don't know. I'm sure they probably uh role played that out this scenario, what would what could possibly go wrong here? But the bottom line is there would be some fairly severe consequences. Now, on this hand, I have a different button to push, and that's a different choice to make, and that's to say nothing, and to say nothing comes with you've got
it zero consequences. So given those two choices, it's it's it's it's a very it's a lot easier to side on a let's just say nothing and then not worry about the consequences until that time comes where they're not going to have a choice but to deal with it. So it's one of those one of those taboo things that that you know, it's that third rail of science that nobody wants to step on unless they absolutely have to.
And I firmly believe that that's what's going on. There's two any civilians out there, you and me included, that that know the truth. So to say that with all the sciences we have, and especially with the technology they have at their disposal, excuse me that that they they're not aware of them. I think they are.
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