Archive 149 Stuck in a Cave with Bigfoot

How the past year has changed my life. I cannot begin to express, but I will give it my best shot. My name is Jenna, and I'm a twenty nine year old female geologist spileeologist, and I was working for the government within the Department of Geological Survey up until recently. We were responsible to explore and map out old mind

chefs and k systems in the eastern United States. There are several of these teams working throughout the country in places like the Rockies, Texas, the Midwest, and in Washington State. I've heard that there are also teams in Canada and Mexico as well. I have been spilunking since I was five years old with my father and older brothers, so it became who I was and not just what I did. My experience through the years made me useful to this project.

I was recruited in my last year of graduate school at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire by Joseph, who had become my supervisor and mentor. My eight teammates were all roughly the same age, and we had various degrees of interest of study, including engineering, archaeology, biology, herpetology and volcanology, as well as other fields. We were a mixture of seven men and two women, and all have a love for the world below the surface, resulting in our pale

skin in very thin frames. Because we spent most of the days in the dark out of the sunlight, it wasn't all that bad for me being a pale skinned ginger and ten minutes in the sun I would turn into a lobster. The meals that we take are mostly small protein bars and water. It's easier to carry with us, especially when we stayed in the cave system overnight. During the expeditions there were sometimes ten miles deeper more. We have done many of these over the past four years.

We have made some remarkable discoveries and we've mapped out miles of cave systems in West Virginia and Kentucky using a combination of GPR oor, ground penetration radar and light are from the surface, as well as some new technology that will make for some amazing new discoveries in the future. Our average expedition would start when we entered a cave or a small hole in a mountainside and started to

evaluate if it was safe. Understand that we have left more caves than we explored due to what appeared to be unsafe, or when our equipment detected gas. Once we determine that it is safe, we begin to move deeper into the cave and into the twilight zone. There is no presence of light in the dark zone, and we see nothing if we turn out the lights. Often we find chambers and passages off to the sides, or even

drop offs in sinkholes. We can use special drones with lights and cameras to fly over the drop offs or down the sinkholes, or on top of shelves or ledges above our reach to see if there are any points of interest below or above us that we need to explore.

Using those drones have given us access to new passages and chambers that no human has ever seen, some of which have led to miles of passages and enormous chambers, one of which was over one hundred feet tall and three football feels long fifty yards wide, and we nicknamed that one the Ballroom. We have discovered entrances to cave systems that were not noticeable from the top side or

outside the cave. Some of the entrances have been behind waterfalls, crevices, and cliffs, and under roots of large trees, and even behind some dead falls that appear to have been pushed up against it to conceal the entrance. We have mapped some systems that will travel miles into another exit or entrance, with the longest one being twenty seven miles in southeast Kentucky and it goes into Tennessee and that required us to stay in the cave for over two weeks. We

have scanner units mounted onto our helmet. It's that capture three D imagery of the cave as we travel, and we also use GPS signals that rarely are detected above the surface, but we still have them and occasionally get close enough to the surface to get our data to the base camp to be collected. We have other tools that we have used in the past. One includes a

buoy with a GPS unit. We dropped one in a fast moving underground river near the West Virginia Kentucky state line to see where or if it would ever surface. To our amazement, it reappeared five weeks later, almost three hundred miles away in the Clinch River near Kingston, Tennessee. We were astonished it must have traveled under another river

system to arrive to the Clinch River. We are now developing equipment that we can capture imagery of the underground river system without our team having to dive into those underground rivers, with the hopes of capturing the constant location of the device and the depth under the sea level as well that will be able to explain how these

rivers are crossing. Other findings are also worth mentioning. We've found several species of animals or insects that were unknown or thought to not inhabit this region, as well as numerous cave drawings that date back over ten thousand years, along with artifacts such as pottery from the early fourteen hundreds, spears and arrow heads, muskets or black powder rifles. A couple of swords. We found knives, shells, some gold and silver coins from seventeen hundred Europe, along with bones and

I mean a lot of bones. These discoveries found miles underground, far from known entry points. We report our findings before moving further, and it slows down the exploration process because we have to wait for another team to go in and gather the artifacts. Without us, we would contaminate the scene. The real question was how did someone get this far into the cave system with torches, as they would have to have burnt out well before they got that deep.

They would have had to carry extra torches with them, and why would they have traveled this deep while the other team was in our cave. We would go to another cave for several weeks until we were given the go ahead to continue our explanation of the original cave.

Rarely were we given any information on what the other team's findings revealed, especially when it was about bones or modern day items like a shiny new shotgun we had found, or the backpack with a West Virginia Park map that was printed in twenty eighteen and it was over seven thousand feet into the cave system. We would write it off to people going beyond their limits and getting lost in the cave and losing their belongings as they roamed

about in the darkness. And as for the other team, they were a dull bunch of people with no personality. Forget trying to talk to them. They were tight left about their business. They were almost what we would think of as a stiff government or maybe a CIA personality type. There were occasions where we would pass them coming or going and they wouldn't take the time to speak to anyone. They wouldn't drop any clues or share any findings, absolutely nothing.

Using our newest technology that we had developed was the sphere, which was a mobile GPR light hoar sphere that set up on a tripod in the middle of chambers, which we would leave overnight to scan. The results were beyond belief. We have found new tunnels that are blocked by large rocks or boulders. The stones are so heavy that several men working together could not move them for us to

explore further. But we knew the boulders had been placed there because the scars remained on the floors and walls. They had been rolled into position. We had a heavy hydraulic jack designed to lift rocks off of us should we become trapped, and we found that this jack could move the boulders enough to gain entrance into hidden chambers

or caverns. And now that I've given you a brief description of what we do and how we do it, I want to tell you of my account that began on Friday, August the thirteenth of all days in twenty twenty one. We had been mapping out a cave system south of Grayson, Kentucky, and we were five miles deep into the system when we dropped off of a shelf about twenty feet using our climbing gear to discover a

new passage. It led back east to half a mile to an oval shaped chamber and and at the far end of the chamber was a large boulder blocking another passage that we found by setting up our sphere overnight. The following Monday was August the sixteenth, and we analyzed the data and we determined it was worth exploring. After moving the rock, we followed the passage for another half mile and then we decided to back out and call

it a day. We returned on the seventeenth to the oval chamber, and we found the rock had rolled back to block the entrance. We jacked it back open again and placed smaller rocks under it to keep it from rolling back while we were in there exploring. We then entered the passage and began to map out the system where we left off. Through the day, we discovered a labyrinth of passages going in all directions. Some were dead ends and some were working their way back to the

main cavern. The areas that didn't reconnect, we would follow those for five hundred feet and then turned back. There were so many that we wanted to see, but this system could be thoroughly explored. Later. We were getting our bearings and taking notes, and we were excited about this discovery. We started noticing different items, such as fresh leaves and small twigs on the cave floor. They were green, they weren't dead, but they shouldn't have been there in the

first place. In the largest passage, we found a shallow stream with a mud and a swet bottom and bank, and in that mud we found tracks of all sizes. They were human looking tracks. Some were smaller than my feet and others were twenty four inches long and ten inches wide. Laurie, my female teammate, carefully examined the toes to see if there were claw marks, because that would lead us to believe that it was a bear, but

she found none. Well, the day was late and we pulled out again, marking our route with illuminated paint of different colors, as we always did when exploring new systems. The footprints gave us all concern, but it also was exciting. The passage was nine feet high and we could not imagine a giant of a man walking around in there. But this raised questions beyond belief, so we all decided to keep this finding to our selves for the time being.

On Wednesday, the eighteenth, we found that the rock had again been rolled back over the entrance and we had to move it with Jacks. Rodney, the archaeologist, said that he was going to bust it into pieces if it happened again, and we proceeded to the stream where we had left off the previous day to find more tracks. We slowly moved along the stream, following the direction of the footprints as it flowed down the center of the cavern, a quarter of a mile through the passage and into

the chamber. We discovered some of the most disturbing items we had ever found. There were numerous shoes of different sizes, including boots and children's sneakers, some clothing that appeared to be torn, and some looked like it had dried blood on it, and they were all in piles like someone had been sleeping on them. There were backpacks and coats. There was a hatchet and some knives, a couple of firearms, and children's toys such as dolls and barbies and action figures.

There were balls and toy cars lying all about the chamber, and then we found a pile of human bones of all sizes, including children's, all piled up against the wall at the far end of the chamber. Laurie screamed at the top of her lungs and began crying uncontrollably, And as the others tried to comfort her, out of the darkness of a passage at the far end of the chamber, near the pile of bones, came a scream or a

roar of a monstrous volume that shook my insides. It lasted a long time and was immediately answered by another roar from a different cavern, and then several more The team instantly began to run toward the exit, with me bringing up the rear. I had a feeling that something was behind me, and I quickly looked back over my shoulder with my high intensity LED light, and I illuminated the face of a beast that was the size of

a refrigerator, only ten feet behind me. In that brief instant, I could see the beast's lips were curled back, bearing large teeth which were like ours except for the canines, which were larger in proportion than a human. It had large round of black evil eyes and a flat nose, and everything around the face was covered with hair. The animal covered its eyes from the light with its hands and screamed in pain as if the light heard it,

and it shrank away from me and my light. It curled up into a ball onto the floor of the cave, wailing in pain. I was now backing out of the chamber, trying to keep the light on the beast when I must have passed the exit and tumbled into a sinkhole. I got lucky it was only five feet below the chamber floor. It could have been deeper and I would

have never gotten out of there. I am only five foot four to start with, and I weighed less than one hundred and ten pounds fully clothed, and I knew if I couldn't do something quick, I would end up in that bone pile. In front of me. I saw a small crevice that looked to me about my size, so I dove into it headfirst, and I began to

crawl on my belly back into the darkness. I was ten feet into the crevice when I heard the monster scream into the mouth of the crevice behind me, and I could feel it reaching into the hole as it started to claw at the walls. The creature was so close I could smell its foul breath, and this gave me a surge of strength to move ahead faster. I crawled ahead without thinking. I was in survival mode and I wanted to get as far from this thing as possible.

The roars began to fade the further into the passage I went, and after an hour, I dropped into a room stalactites hung from the low ceiling and I had to walk hunched over, but at least I could stand. I tried to reach my team on the radio, but I got nothing in response. If I was going to get out of there. I had to move upward while avoiding these creatures. I had to get to the surface. That's all I could think of. I turned down the intensity of my light to get more life from my batteries,

and I continued walking and crawling. I wandered the uncharted passages and caverns alone for hours, not knowing where I was or if I was moving to freedom. I lost all sense of time, and I didn't know if it was day or night. And to make matters worse, not long after that, I was down to my last spare battery pack. The only light I would have after those batteries died was my cell phone. I had turned it off long ago to save it as a last resort

for light. And the exhaustion set in, and I clicked off my light and I sat in the blackness, and I fell asleep. I woke to the distant sounds of clicking and some sort of gibberish that I didn't understand. The sounds weren't close, thank goodness, but they were looking for me. Once it sounded so human that I thought it might be in my team members calling for me, and I almost shouted to them, but I waited to make sure, and I'm glad I did, because minutes later

another roar came from the same direction. I drank the last of my water and I ate the final protein bar. I then turned my light off and I curled into a fetal position, hoping the sounds would stop so I could move again. Strangely, I felt an evil presence near me, and I knew the creatures were near, but still I waited. Hours later, the noises stopped, and I assumed they had given up their search for me. So I got moving, always trying to move upward. Freedom was above me, and

I had to get there. Two maybe three days later, I felt hope slipping away. I had lost all sense of time, and I was weakened now from hydration, and I was starving to death. I only used my headlamp briefly. I would click it on, look ahead as far as I could see, and then turn it on, and then I would feel my way to something until I needed light again. While alone in a place this silent, your sense of hearing heightens. There are no other noises to

interfere with what you were hearing. While taking a break, and without the noise of my movements, I heard the hum of traffic. I moved toward the sound until I saw a faint rays of light penetrating the passage wall. I was overjoyed, and I was filled with a surge of energy. There was a small crevice that would be tight even for my small body to escape through, but

I pushed through it anyway into the sunlight. I was standing at the base of a cliff that I would later find out was next to Kentucky State Route seven. Cars were speeding past below me. I had made it out alive. My phone still had a charge, and I call my supervisor. Well. She was ecstatic to hear from me. She said they picked up my GPS tracker twenty minutes ago. My tracker must have started broadcasting when I got near the crevice, and state troopers were on their way, she said.

The police took me back to my hotel room, and I felt like I drank a gallon of water while we drove. Now, I wanted to get a shower in something to eat, but as I got out of the car, four men approached and ushered me into a small hotel conference room. I assumed they knew I was exhausted and hungary and that this meeting would not take long, but

I was wrong. Two of the men were from the Department of the Interior, one was a Federal Game and Fish official, and the last was with the US Geological Survey. The date was August twenty second, and they wanted me to recount the last ninety six hours my scanner was still operating. From that data, we found that I had traveled eleven miles underground from the point at which I fell into the sinkhole. They began asking me about the

bear we had encountered. Well, I was a biology major, but I knew damn well that the creature was not a bear, and I said so. I described the creature in great detail, but still they continued calling it a bear. They questioned me for three hours. At some point I told them I had answered every question and that I was done, and after walking out, I headed to my room and I took a long shower. Some food was brought to me, so I ate like I had never

tasted food, and then I went to sleep. I was still a bit confused when I woke, but I felt rested and ready to find my teammates. I went to all their rooms and the only one who remained there was Tony. He told me that Laurie was so upset after the event that she had to be sedated and was taken to a local hospital. She had been released and sent home. The other members of the team had

been put on leaving sent home. They had all been notified that I made it out, and Tony said they allowed him to stay because he was the only one who wasn't freaking out. I think that came from his military training. I later learned that a task force had come in and Tony guided them back into the cave. There were way too many people there to be looking for a bear, though their main mission, Tony later decided

was to gather the human remains in clothing. Tony searched the area with those men, and he found no sign of a bear, and then they made castings of several tracks in the mud before they destroyed all the evidence they could find. They spent days in that cave system for that bear, they said, but they never found an animal. And then it occurred to me that I may have been the only one who had seen this creature, because

Tony never mentioned it. He kept saying they searched for a bear, and I think that is what he thought we were dealing with, and I had never told him about the creature. I had seen only the men in the conference room. I was going to leave the next day, but that evening we went to the bar, and there we found two members of the task force drinking. After several drinks, one of them began to talk. This fellow told us that this team was a unit of special

forces that were used to hunt down Bigfoot. I had yet to think of a Bigfoot, and I was stuck on an unknown monster until then, and bigfoot was a myth, wasn't it. He continued to tell us that this was only the second underground assignment they had been on, and that his unit hated the darkness of the cave systems, even though they were equipped with special equipment that allowed them to see in the dark zone, or the part of the cave where there was a complete absence of light.

He said, we were some of the luckiest people he had ever met, and my falling into that sinkhole gave all my friends an opportunity to escape because it had captured the interest of the bigfoot trying to catch me. He admitted that the government has proof that these animals are traveling underground as much as they are in the moonlight, and there is also evidence of them kidnapping people and eating them. That was obvious to me. I had seen the chamber with a pile of bones. He was about

to continue with more information. I mean, this guy was a real bliber mouth. But one of the men who questioned me grabbed a hold of him by the shoulder and said that that was enough, soldier, and you should try This fellow then sat down and he asked us what we were told. Well, at first we were hesitant to tell him, but we did so any way, to which he told us that the soldier was drunk and he was telling tall tales to scare us, and we

shouldn't put much faith in what he was saying. The next day, we were informed that our project had lost its funding and we were all terminated and were given a year's wages a severance pay. I've kept in touch with the others, and it seems that I'm the only one who has been able to find work in this field. Currently, I do geological and soul analysis for a general contractor for building foundations. None of our group have returned to the darkness of the underworld and its secrets that we

loved and cherished up until that August week. I have been left with more questions than I care to imagine. Was that a Bigfoot we encountered in that cave? Are they using the cave systems to travel undetected? Do they really kidnap people and eat them? What does the government know? What was the real purpose of the government funding of our expeditions and mapping out the cave systems in the first place. Why won't the government inform people of these

animals and the dangers? And that's the end of her story. Have y'all ever heard a story like that. I've never heard anything like that. Now Again, like I said in my last video, I don't know if any of these stories that I read are true, but this was a sure enough story email to me. She has enough information on the job and the spielunking equipment and all that stuff that adds a little bit of credibility to the story. But you know who knows either way, It was a

real good story. And I tell you what, you couldn't pay me to go into one of those caves. And it's not because I think Bigfoot is in there. I am not terribly claustrophobic, but I've read articles and I've seen videos where people get stuck in these caves. They can send in twenty or thirty men and they cannot get them unstuck, and the people just have to lay there and die. What a horrible, horrible way to die. And I just I can't. And I've seen other videos

with these guys. They squeak through these real type rock formations, or they'll be flat on their stomach and the rock is just right down on them. I always think, man, if that rock formation shifted just a fraction of an inch, it would just squash you right there. I know everything you know. I know that's probably not the way it works, but it could anyway. I don't want to get stuck in a dark cave somewhere and die in the dark. That's just me anyway. Jenna, thank you for sending this story.

I really admire your profession. You're a pretty brave girl. All right, that's gonna wind this podcast up. I hope you guys enjoyed it, and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you.