Speaker 1: So we go a little bit farther. He comes back
over to me and he says, somebody's over there and
they're talking. Then I stop and I started looking around again.
I look at him. I said, well, there's no way
there's people up here, and he goes, yeah, I know,
and then he goes and there's somebody over there too,
and you can hear it in the distance. It's like
you know when you can hear somebody talking but you
can't hear what they're saying. And I can't make out
any words, but it's like, yeah, that's definitely talking. So
I'm starting to get creeped out because it's on both
sides of us. We can't see it. Whatever it is,
it's talking, and we're both thinking what we're thinking.
Speaker 2: You know, this is Bigfoot Crossroads. My name is Matt
and i'd like to welcome James to the show. James,
thanks again for joining me. Man, we've kind of already
gotten started, so I guess just go on and tell
me the story that you were about to tell.
Speaker 1: I guess a good place to start. That's kind of
where we were headed. Was I live in a little
town house kind of on the edge of the city,
on the north side of a river, the Scadget River,
and I'm surrounded by trees, woods.
Speaker 2: It's just.
Speaker 1: The whole area here is just like immense wilderness with
a little town thrown in the middle of it. And
so I guess the story that we were heading at was.
I come out. I come out of my house one night,
and I'd been smoking fish. I do a lot of
fishing in the fall. Caught a bunch of co host
silver salmon in the river. And my smoker had been
running twenty four hours a day, seven days a week
for I don't know, maybe a couple of weeks at
that point. And so I come out my back door,
down the stairs, out into the garage and I'm doing chips,
soaking chips for the smoker. I get the chips out,
drain them, start swapping. I hear all this noise outside.
And I had this crazy neighbor across the street, and
he'd get up in the middle of the night, two
o'clock in the morning and chop a wood on his
front porch, throw the garage door open, and sitting there
and mess with his car of his engine. You know,
just all kinds of noise, all kinds of crazy stuff
all the time. Uh and uh, so I just figured, well,
it's my neighbor across the street, you know. And so
this noise goes on for a while and I thought,
I got to go out and see what's going on.
And I walk out and uh, look down the look
down the street at his house and there's no lights on, garage,
doors closed, everything, It's just dead quiet down the street.
And I thought, Wow, that's weird, wor where's all that
noise coming from? And then I realized, because we're up
against the side of this hill, the noise is echoing
off the side of the hill and making it sound
like it's coming from his house, but it's out in
the woods. And I'm like, I was like, that's just crazy.
I mean, it was like, yeah, I thought he was
on his porch. Chop in wood is what I thought.
And I thought, oh, I'm going to run inside the house,
grab the flashlight. And I've got this big shape like
the old mag flashlights, you know, big long flash it's
led and it's super super bright. And so I grabbed
the flashlight, go out and I shine. I start shining
it around in the woods trying to figure out where
this noise is coming from and I see this, this
pair of eyes looking at me, and it kind of
they're staring straight at me, and then they kind of
dip down and turn to look away. And I thought, well,
that's kind of weird, because you know, I see elk, bears,
all kinds of stuff out in the woods out there
all the time. Uh, and these eyes were they were
totally different. And it was two eyes that were looking
at me with the light reflecting on them, and as
the head dip down and turn and it was like
both eyes kind of disappeared at the same time. Where
when you're looking at an elk or a deer or
something to that effect, you know you're going to lose
visual within the reflection out of one eye, and then
you're going to lose the reflection out of the other eye,
right because they got you know, the big head the
eyes around this. So I thought, well, this is like
some kind of predator. I turned, I turned the light off,
the flashlight up, and I wait a second, and I
turn it back on and I and I look and
it's staring right straight at me again. And I thought,
and it did the same thing, kind of dropped his
head down and turned and I thought, ow. I stepped
back a little bit and I look at the house.
The bedroom window upstairs is open, and my son's upstairs,
and I hollered him. I said, hey, hey, come out here,
you know, and it's the middle of the night on
a weekend. I'm hollering. He thinks something's wrong, you know,
or something comes round I did while something kind of was.
He comes running down and he goes, what's going on?
What's going on? I said, hey, look out here, and
I kind of gave him the layout, you know, because
he could kind of see some of the trees out
in the woods. I said, look between these two trees,
only look way off at the base of that big
cedar tree out there. I'm going to turn the flashlight on.
Tell me what you see. And I turned the flashlight
on and you could see he did it again, pretty
much exactly the same thing. Is looking right at us
and drops his head, turns his eyes away, and I
turned the flashlight off and I said, what did you
see it? And he says, well, I see the eyes
staring at me. And I was like yeah, and he goes, yeah,
they're awfully, awfully tall. And we staid there for a second,
I turned the lights back on again. He's seen it,
and then kind of went through the whole thing again.
Then my wife comes out the back door and she
kind of you know, what are you guys doing? What
are you guys doing? And I told her about it,
and Nate's all excited, you know, my son, he's all
excited stuff. And and she goes, well, are you going
to go out there and see what it is? And
I said, no, wait until morning. Because it's like when
animals when you when you look at their eyes and
you get the light reflecting off of them, they're usually
a blue green And I mean, it's it's I've got
to I've hunted my whole life and living up here
and and stuff. I've hunted pretty much every animal on
on the continent that people hunt, you know, except for moose.
I've never gone up to Cannon and hunted moose. But
seeing the eyes, they always give off this green blue
tint to them, you know, and these it they were
totally different. Looking at the eyes that were reflecting back
at that at first they had they had this real
funny reflection to them that I'm going to equate to
a brown red color. It's kind of an orange brown
red color. Not not the color of any eyes that
I've ever seen on anything, right, you know, you know,
right outside my back door. But we've had we've had
other Well, I went out the next day. I'll keep
going with that story before I changed focus. We go
out the next day and we're we walk out there
and look around and can't find any olk prints. I
can't find any deer prints, nothing. Can't find any footprints
or anything. The only thing that we could find was
a log that was kind of nearby, and it had
some moss knocked off of it, like something had stepped
over the top or stepped on it or something. But
I reached up to the branch that the eyes were
looking over the top of and didn't quite have to
fully extend my arm, but reached up and put my
hand on that branch. And I mean, I'm not a
big tall guy. I'm five foot nine and so reaching up,
I'm gonna say it was looking over a branch that
was six and a half seven feet high.
Speaker 2: I mean that's pretty up there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, we've had things moving through the woods
behind the house where I've never seen them before. But
the dogs freak out and the dogs all around. It's
like when there's something around, they do the you know,
the bark, like you know, there's a bear, you know
whatever out in the woods and they'll bark at it
and stuff. Well, from the end of the valley where
we're at kind of where we live at, there's dogs
all around up across the top of the hill and
stuff at different houses. And one night the dog started barking.
They were doing this whimpery bark like they were scared.
It was a totally different bark, and it kind of
it kind of traveled along. It's like these dogs over
here start barking, and then these dogs are over here,
and then it kind of traveled along and that that
happens a few times here and there, which is kind
of kind of odd, you know, at the house.
Speaker 2: That's pretty funny. That's actually one of the first conversations
I remember having with the Browns, which you interviewed with
you know them, we're mutual friends, was we were talking
about mapping their movements around their property based on the
dogs barking, because like you're talking about, as they'll travel
through the area, you know, the first set of dogs
that they run across will start barking, then the next
and so on and so forth, and you can kind
of tell at least the direction that they're moving by
the reaction of the dogs. Right, Yeah, Have you noticed
anything like missing around your property? Do they take anything
or go through trash cans or anything like that?
Speaker 1: No, I don't think so. They might have been, you know,
we really don't have a problem with trash cans or
anything with any of the animals, even the bears. There's
only been one year that we really had problems with
the trash cans with the bears, even But it's not
just it's not just around the house. I mean, that's
just kind of that's the story that was the closest
to my house, right you know. But yeah, I mean
people around here they don't really talk about it, but
there's several people we've got. We've got a guy in
town that used to be kind of a big foot
chaser kind of guy, and I think he still takes
reports once in a while. I told him that story
years ago. I told him that story when it happened.
Probably that was probably, oh, I don't know, that one
wasn't that long ago. I guess it was probably five,
maybe six years ago.
Speaker 2: So when did this whole bigfoot thing really start for you?
Speaker 1: I guess as a kid running around in the woods
and stuff I spent. I grew up more down towards
more down towards the city, and moved around quite a
bit as a kid, so i'd come, i'd stay with
my grandparents and stuff off and on. Most of the
summers are spent with my grandparents, and so I'd spent
a lot of time out in the woods. And then
I grew up kind of near Vancouver, Washington. We lived
down there for a while, and so I had some
I don't know, some odd things as a kid happening
in the woods, but you know, I didn't really relate
it to anything, and I guess I don't have any
real big stories about that. I think the first, the
first real incident that I can say, oh, gee, this
is like a bigfoot thing was I was in an
area up above Index, which is off of Highway to
in Washington, little town called Index, and you go up
into the mountains to the north of the town and
there's an area they call it Jack's Pass, and it's
a dirt road and you cut off on one of
the spur roads and you go up that road and
there's this really neat waterfall. I think they call it
Deer Falls or Deer Creek Falls or something. I can't
remember the name of it. This would have been back
early nineties, and went out black powder hunting most of
these most things happen, seems to be when I'm out hunting,
and with a couple of buddies of mine. This was
probably early nineties. So we drove in hike down to
this spot, went hunting for the day, out and about
and all of that, and came back, set up a
little camp more like a cowboy camp, no tents or anything,
you know, just kinda set up and spent the night
by this waterfall. In the morning, when it started getting
light out, the sun's hitting the hillside, these rocks start
falling off the hillside, and you know, we just kind
of attributed it to you know, like you get the
frost and heating up and the expansion of the rocks
and all of that, rocks are falling off the hillside,
so we kind of didn't kind of blew it off.
And so we're sitting there making coffee, cooking breakfast, you know,
kind of banner around with each other, you know, the
typical guy stuff in the morning, and these rocks keep
coming down the hillside, and then all of a sudden,
one splashes in the middle of the pool, at the
bottom of the bottom of the waterfall, and it's like
we all kind of look at each other, and then
we sit there and then we're quiet. We're sitting there
watching and right out of the woodline comes one it's
probably the size of a large grapefruit, comes flying out
of the woodline, clears everything, and splashes into the water again.
And then we're all like and kind of freaking out.
One of my buddies was like, oh, it's bigfoot, you know, yeah,
you know. And so, I mean, we all kind of
came to that consensus. We didn't see anything. There weren't
any roars, there was no crazy banging bushes, breaking trees,
no nothing. Probably I think maybe three four more rocks
came out, and then we just decided, well, we're probably
not going to go hunting today, you know, I mean,
because realistically, I mean, we all had handguns with us
and stuff too, but I mean our hunting equipment were
black powdered rifles, and yeah, I don't yeah, I wasn't
going to go out the woods running around with black
pottered rifles with something that was throwing rocks that big
off the hill.
Speaker 2: I mean, whenever you're faced with that situation, Yeah, I
think the most logical conclusion to reach is it's time
to retreat. Yeah, that ain't people. And if it is,
for some reason, people, they're clearly you know, they're throwing
rocks at a group of armed men. Yeah, then you
probably don't want to tangle with them anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm probably not, you know, I mean by that point,
I mean I'd spent I served in the army for
thirty years, and at that point, I been in the
army for ten, probably twelve years, and I'd come back home,
you know, whenever i'd have leave or i'd you know,
have some kind of break or something, and I'd come
home go hunting. And then since since I retired, I've
had a lot of my buddies coming up here, and
you know, they they come up and we go hunting
or go fishing, or go do something, you know, because
they like the quiet, the being away from the city,
the all the stuff. Some downtime, you know, some real
relaxing downtime and We've got some pretty nice lakes up here,
and so I've got a couple of jet skis. We
go up jet ski and play on the boats, go fishing,
camp out, do you know, depending on whatever time of
year it is, you know. So it's kind of like
it's kind of like a chill spot vacation place to
online for some of my buddies.
Speaker 2: You know, until grapefruit sized rocks start getting thrown at you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was. That was That's got to be.
That's got to be about sixty miles maybe give or
take south of where I'm at here, you know, so
it's a lot different part of the state. Well, it's
not different, it's just farther south. The mountains are a
little more rugged up here where I'm at. So to
give to throw it into context to where I'm at,
it's I'm I'm in a little town along Highway twenty
North Cascades in Washington, and from Highway twenty it's you
go all the way up through thousands. Probably it's gonna
be it's gonna be sixty miles I think up to
the next major highway going north and then any road
that you're going to cross if you come out of
my town and you go straight north, the only roads
that you're going to cross after you cross Highway are
gonna be dirt logging roads. Until you're well into Canada,
there's there's nothing that you're going to cross. And going
to the west of US, the little cities get progressively
progressively larger. They're not huge, no major cities up here,
kind of where I'm at Bellingham up to the north
north of US, but going going to the east side, it's, uh,
you're going to be one hundred miles before you get
to another town that's at least as big as mine,
and that'd be Winthrop. To the east, and on the
south side of US, there's just it's just wilderness. I
mean we're up in the Cascade Mountain Range and it's uh,
it's just there's literally millions of acres of land that
have no houses, no development, no nothing. It's just straight
up wilderness land. If you look on a map, Google
Earth or something, it's just wide open for just just miles,
I mean literally millions of acres of land.
Speaker 2: That kind of expanse is just crazy for me to
think about even now. I mean, I know it's there,
you know, we all know it's there, but we get
so caught up. I see people on the internet, especially,
you know, talking about you know, the population is much
too large. There's no way these things could remain hidden.
But I don't think people really understand how just wild
and remote a lot of the United States still is. Yeah,
I mean most people live in the cities, you know,
and the towns and everything, but in between all those
places is just wilderness.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm in northeastern Oklahoma, and if I drive for an
hour and a half or so west, I hit Oklahoma City,
you know, the largest city in the state. If I
go south for four hours, I'm in the middle of
downtown Dallas, you know. But out there you're just in
the forest in the mountains. There's nothing out there.
Speaker 1: I mean you really have to just like get on
a map or Google Earth does it the best because
you can kind of zoom in and look at the
highways and stuff and see what's along them. And then
as you zoom out, you start realizing the massive expanse
that there is with nothing here, I mean nothing, It's
just immense. And the people talk about the Rocky Mountains
and and all of that, Well, the Rocky Mountains are cool,
but they're they're high, and they're gradually high above sea level,
and they're not nearly as rugged as the mountains up here.
The North Cascades are like the they're like the Alps.
They're they're rugged, uh sharp steep peaks, and it's uh,
it's it's a whole different mountain range. It's hard to
get into the woods. You know, you're going to follow
a You're gonna have to follow a creek or a
river or something to travel off into the woods. And
there's there's there's some trails in here, and you know,
the Pacific Crestrail runs through from Canada down, but that's
that's ways to the east of US. But I mean,
you're going to get on that from a highway and
then you're gonna go you're going to go from basically
up here Highway twenty. You're going to go south. If
you're going south, you're going to go to highway too.
So you're going to go sixty miles overland with nothing
in between. And then from there you're going to go
overland again down to A ninety, which is going to
be another forty to fifty miles with nothing. I mean,
it's just the wilderness is just vast, and it's thick,
and it's full of it's full of stuff. These these
high valleys are loaded with blueberries up here, just loaded
with them in the summer, in the fall, and the
fish in the river. I mean, I took I took
my wife one year. She's never been much of a fisherman.
She's like, well, she finally wanted to go fish the
river with me, you know, and stuff. And so I
took her to the spot one year and we stood
up up on this high bank and I and I
pointed down to the river to her. I said, hey,
I said, what do you see down there? And she
goes the bottom of the river. I said, yeah, I said, well,
what are you see? And she goes a bunch of
rocks and I go, you need to look a little closer,
look at those rocks. And she's looking down there and
she goes, oh my god, I can't see the bottom
of the river. She says, things that I thought were
rocks were salmon.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: You know. So there's plenty for them to eat. The berries,
the blackberries, the salmon berries, the huckleberries, the blueberries. The
I mean, there's just tons of stuff and then there's
different types of ferns and things and stuff. So I mean,
if you're sticking to a vegetarian diet, you're and you're
actually good at foraging, you're not going to starve to death.
Then then you start getting into the into the other game,
the deer, the rabbits, the grouse, the all of that.
I mean, yeah, it's pretty pretty extensive.
Speaker 2: Is this a place that you had been to before
previously for hunting?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was a spot that we'd go to.
I mean I took my wife there and showed her
this beautiful waterfall. You know, this was years later. I
took her there and showed her the waterfall and stuff.
And I've never had any other experiences around there, particularly
at that spot. But I mean we've had some. We've
had some pretty good ones. I guess. The one, the
one that Sarah called about or that I we got
in touch about, was we had this this encounter up
here at this little lake. And uh, it's it's a
spot where my wife had been camping for years as
she grew up. And it's a little place they call
it Depression Lake. They used to stock it with fish
for the kids to make it a spot can take
kids and they'd catch fish pretty easily. And a lot
of people used to go up there and camp. It
was free camping, kind of disperse camping like BLM camp
type stuff. And there were a bunch of people camped
up there, and we went up for a weekend and thought,
you know, so did the regular camping thing. Took the
kids out fishing for the day, sat around the fire
at night, all of that went to bed and in
the motor room. We had our motor room up there.
And I'm like I said, I was in the army,
I served thirty years. I've got PTSD issues. I don't
want to go down that road too far, but I
get nightmares and stuff. And so I'm laying there sleeping
and I'm trying to blow off this nightmare that I've
gotten go back to sleep, and then my wife starts
poking at me, and I start realizing, well, I'm not
having a nightmare. All of this noise and all of
this stuff going on is is real. It's happening in
the real world. I'm actually awake, and my wife's pushing
on me, and she says, since you hear that, I said, yeah.
We sat there and listened to it, and it was
it was so loud. We're we're inside the motor home
and it's a a permeating noise. I mean, you can
you can feel the sound of these things on the
hill right behind where we're camped, and it's going and
it's just it's cora. It's just crazy. I mean, I've
heard I've heard cougar's fighting, which is probably the second
craziest scariest type noise that I've heard out the woods,
tungers fighting, bears, you know, all all of that. This
thing was so it was so deep, it was it
was like you you've felt the sound in your body
and it's like all my hair started standing up. And
I was just like, I can't I can't place and
couldn't place the noise. Can't place the noise to any
kind of and it was it was angry, loud, violent,
just overwhelming and uh uh, my wife. That's when my
wife says, uh, it's it stopped. And as it stopped,
all the coyotes there's all kinds of coyotes were going
off and stuff. And that's when my wife says to me,
we we we don't belong here. We got to go
and uh I And I said to her, and I'm
being the the consummate smart ass that I am. I mean,
it's just up. I looked at her and I said,
all right, honey, I said, I'll start the motor home
and you run outside and grabbed the lawn chairs, right.
And she looks at me in total fear and says,
I'm not going out there, and I said either the
am I and uh so we we didn't go out.
But there's all these other campers out there, and they
start lights are coming on, cars, trucks are starting up. It. Uh.
People were just at that point, it was like people
intents were packing up to leave. Wow. Uh, it was
crazy bye bye probably And this was probably three o'clock
in the morning. By seven o'clock in the morning there
was there There were us, another guy in a camp
or with his three dogs. And then on the other
end of the campground there was a gal who'd camped
in a tent with her three kids. And I didn't
I didn't know any of this until the next day
when we talked to her. She camped there with her
three kids, and her husband worked the night shift at
a place down in town, and so they'd stay up there.
He'd come up for the day, spend the whole day
up there. Then he'd go work from midnight until like,
I don't know, eight o'clock in the morning, and then
he'd come back sleep for a couple hours. And then
so they were doing that, they'd been camping up there
for a week. Oh wow, was all alone in the
tent with those kids. Well, all of that was going on.
And the next morning she comes walking over and she's
walking along the road and she's real meek, and she goes,
she's like hi, and my wife's like hi, you know,
we got a little fire going. And she goes, she goes,
did did you guys hear that last night? And my
wife was like yeah, it wasn't that crazy. And then
they're both like, I mean, just going on and on
and on about it and stuff. And so we had
planned to leave that day. We were just going to
spend the one night. But my wife was like, oh, yeah,
we're not going anywhere until your husband gets back, and
we're probably not going anywhere real soon anyway, And we
promised to leave her all of our camp, all of
our firewood and stuff that we had and all of that,
you know, so yeah, when her husband got back, I
think it was probably still it was probably three four
hours and then we finally left. But it was it
was crazy. The guy in the camphor with the three dogs,
he wouldn't even talk about it. He wouldn't even talk
about We were just like, do you hear all that
last night? You know? And he's like, yep, I mean
that was it. It was just like yep. Then he
just like turned around walked off like you know, and
then he packed up. He left before we did.
Speaker 2: Well, was it more of screaming or roaring? How would
you describe the sound?
Speaker 1: It was a screaming, roaring, violent screaming. I mean it
was like it was like, I'm I'm I'm totally convinced
that that that whatever, whatever it was, because I didn't
see it, I'm totally convinced it's it's press. What it
was doing was trumck was chasing us out of there.
It was to chase all of us out of there
because it was it was so intense and there was
more than one there. There was more than one. I
don't oh how.
Speaker 2: Many were they all in the same area, all in.
Speaker 1: The same area. It's uh, they were on top of
this hill that's at the end of this little lake,
And they were on top of this hill behind where
everybody was camped at, And it kind of makes like
a quarter of the little camp makes like a quarter
of a circle around the bottom of that hill. Yeah,
they were right on top of it, right on top
of that hill, right behind us. They couldn't have been
one hundred yards from the camp. And I can't think
of anything, I mean, I can't think of any creature
that I can relate it to that could make that
much noise, that loud, that long, that sustained that. I mean,
just absolute crazy noise.
Speaker 2: Did it sound more human or more animalty?
Speaker 1: It sounded more I'm gonna say more like but not
a gorilla, but like that kind of solidness to this,
to the noise, you know, I mean, it's like the
vocal strength of whatever it was that was making that
noise was absolutely incredible, absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2: I mean, whenever it comes to people, anytime we scream
or shout or get loud, it's a very quick duration.
And and what you heard was much more sustained than that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah, I mean it was. Boy, some
of the some of those haulers I'm gonna say, went
on for twenty fifteen twenty seconds. Oh wow, loud, I
mean loud, but it was it was more like it
was like there were there had to have been multiples
of them because they were made, because you could hear
you could hear the overlays in the sounds. It wasn't
like one of them just stood up and did some
kind of you know and then another one did it
or something. It was like it sounded like they were
fighting each other kind of you know, where it was
one was making some big, violent, loud scream and another
one to join in right over the top of it,
and another one in there, you know, and I mean
it just kept going back and forth and back and forth.
I mean, it was just it was just crazy crazy.
Speaker 2: Once you kind of woke up and realized what was
going on and had time to process everything, did you
instantly think that's bigfoot?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I thought. I totally agreed with my wife.
It was monsters. Monsters we don't belong here. Yeah, I
mean yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not I'm not kidding.
I mean, I've done a lot of hunting and I've
I've heard lots of stuff. I mean, I've been I've
been tracked by cougars in the woods. I've heard cougar's fighting.
I've heard bears fighting. I've heard you know. I mean
I sat on the back porch here the elk scream
and rattling antlers and you know, and I uh, it's
uh yeah, it was uncomparable. I have it was. It
was uncomparable hearing cougar's fight. Have you ever heard a
recording of two cougars fighting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's scary, it is.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's okay, that's nothing. That's nothing, I mean,
nothing compared to this amount of this amount of craziness. Nothing.
Speaker 2: So we have two different situations here. We have a
situation where you're with a couple of armed individuals hunting,
and then we have a situation where you're camping with
your wife and there's other people camping. In one situation,
you have rock throwing, but the rock throwing it didn't
seem like you guys were targeted necessarily definitely trying to
get your attention, but they weren't throwing the rocks at you,
is what I mean by that, But no vocalizations. And
then you have this other scenario where no rock throwing
that we know of, and just intense vocalizations. I would guess,
you know, tell me if you agree or disagree that
both of these scenarios, although completely different, had the same
purpose behind.
Speaker 1: Them, right absolutely.
Speaker 2: Why do you think one handled it one way and
one handled it the other?
Speaker 1: Well, if my opinion on that's going to be one
was three guys and the other one was probably thirty
to forty people. There had to have been between between
the people that were camped there, their kids and everything.
There had to have been thirty plus people in that campground.
You know, it's not a very big campground, but there
had to have been thirty plus people in there, and
you know, people having campfires at night and all that,
and just the amount of people that were there. If
they were trying to drive something away, well I think,
you know, it's kind of the they needed more backup.
Speaker 2: I don't know any idea why they would want to
drive you out of the area in either scenario.
Speaker 1: I think the first and the first one where we
were at the waterfall, I think that one, uh, that
one was more like, hey, this is kind of our place,
you know, I just want you to know that we're
here and maybe we kind of don't appreciate people being
around and I the second one was more like, boy,
I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, pissed off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it was. It was an angry thing. Now,
I'm not sure, you know, it's like I've joked around
with the story in this experience a few times. It
like it's like, you know, it's like, hey, Freddy, what
do you say? You and me and Scotty and we
get together and we go down and scare a bunch
of campers, you know. Yeah, I mean, you know, or
or maybe they really were trying to drive us out
of there or what. But I mean, yeah, it was.
I mean I've been back to that lake plenty of
times since then. It's you know, I've gone up there
and gone fishing since since then, though it's probably been
I think it was, Oh, it probably took him five
years or so. But they closed that campground.
Speaker 2: Oh, they closed it.
Speaker 1: Completely, put big boulders at the end of the road
so you can't turn off the main road to even
drive down in there. And then the other end of
the lake is kind of over by the dam on
Baker Lake and it's got an actual gate put across
the other end. Of the lake so that you can't
get in from the other end at all.
Speaker 2: Huh makes you wonder. Yeah, in that first event, whenever
you were hunting and they are throwing the rocks and
you guys decided to go ahead and leave, anything happened
on your way out, did the rock throwing just instantly stop?
Speaker 1: No, it just it just it pretty much stopped after
those few that were thrown, after the initial ones that
we noticed that went into the into the pool. I mean,
it was kind of obvious that we were going to
pack up and leave. I mean, we pretty much just
started packing up and leaving. I mean, none of us
were going to wander off into the woods that day.
You know, I'm not uh, I'm not. I guess I'm
a little bit fatter than I used to be, but
I'm not a big guy, you know. Uh. And I
didn't feel comfortable going off into the woods that day
with a black powdered rifle, you know, I mean I just, uh, yeah,
it wasn't gonna happen, you know, after that. And it's
and it's not because I saw anything. It's that it's
that sense of whatever it is growing up here in
Sasquat stories all of that, you know, I just didn't
feel comfortable right going out separated from you know, I mean,
and we'd had separate, separate spur logging roads area that
we were going to go off into different areas, you know,
and had it all mapped out how we were going
to do it that day and circle back in and
you know, in what we were going to do, the
different places that we had picked out that each one
of us were going to go. It wasn't like we
were going to walk off, you know, three guys together
walk off, you know, I mean, that's kind of not productive.
Speaker 2: Interestingly enough, there was in my younger years I used
to go out and do actual bigfoot investigations and look
for these things. And the area I would go to
was a National park, a big camp ground site, and
just south of there there was another campground area by
a lake that kind of connected to it. It was
about seven miles south of where I was normally at
this place, it's called Buckhorn, and we I've camped down
there before. Nothing happened while I was there, but we
would hear stories every now and then because I was
friends with some of the people that lived in the
local town nearby. And these campgrounds would have a camp host,
usually a retired couple that lived in, you know, an
RV at the campsites and just kind of look after
the place, and we befriended them and they would tell
us stories and everything. And one of the things that happened,
and again I did not experience this, so this is
only second hen but it was in the summer, and
there was quite a few people in the campgrounds. I'm
not sure how many, but it was, you know, pretty
well occupied, and something which the people that were there
and witnessed it believe it was a bigfoot around three
o'clock in the morning, just like you're describing, just started
screaming and roaring and walking right through the middle of
the campgrounds, and it wreaked everybody out, and the majority
of them all packed up and hauled it out there
in the middle of the night, just like you're talking
about another campground with another very similar situation. So I
wonder if that's just maybe a tactic they use in
those situations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, they want you to know it's their place,
and I don't know, we don't want you here. I've
got so many theories about a lot of that and
a lot of their behaviors, you know, because I mean
and those are by no means the only two experiences
I've had. I had one right on the other side
of the river from where we're at. There's another spot
that I go. I used to go grouse hunting all
the time. I don't go up there by myself anymore,
but it used to be one of my favorite spots
to go up and go grouse hunting alone. You know,
it's all wilderness. It's another big area, and there's old
logging roads. There's a couple of forest service roads that
go all the way through, and then there's these old
spur roads that go off and they're all rocked and
they have been for years, and they've got trees grown
up through the roads and all of that. And so
I go up there and walk these roads and go
grouse hunting. And on one of the first times into
this one area, I walked down this road and this was, oh,
this was probably ten years ago, I think, the first
time I started hunting in there. And I walk in
this road and I remember this spot very clearly because
I walked down this road and I walked around the
corner and heading down this road and there's trees. It's
a conifer forest area, you know, and the trees are
kind of grown in over the top of the road.
And I don't know if you've ever grouse on it
or any experience with grouse when when they take off
and it's like an explosion with their wings, their wings
slap above them and below them, so they're slapping their
wings as they're flapping their wings. So I walk into
this area and I'm looking down the road and I'm
looking around, and I walk under this tree, and four
feet from my head is this grouse that I missed
seeing on this branch. And he just explodes into his
wing flapping to take off, you know, and he flew
down the road in front of me. His mistake, you know.
So I ate him for dinner that night. But I
remember this spot specifically, and I've got a little Forest
Tracks GPS that I wear on my wrists, and so
I'll mark all of these spots that I've shot a
grouse because they're generally you can almost you can almost
guarantee if you find grouse in one spot, you're gonna
find more grouse in that spot next year, and the
year after, and the year after within you know, one
hundred feet of that spot. For some reason, it's like
the type of clover that they're eating, or the berries
or something. But so I always mark those spots. And
on the other side of the road from where I
was at, and I'm talking an overgrown, old logging road,
it was probably thirty feet wide, and on the other
side there was this tree stump on the other side
of the road right there. And so I'd gone up
there probably five six times after I shot that grouse,
And the last time I went up there, I walked
down that road and there was this big rock that
had always been at the bottom of this tree stump,
and it was on top of the tree stump. And
it's a rock. It's probably slightly larger around than an
average garbage can lid. And it was picked out of
the hole, picked out of the spot that it was
sitting in, and set on the top of the stump.
And I mean, you can't you can't drive back in
there because there's trees growing up through the road. Yeah,
there was no sign of anybody, you know, like wrestling
this rock out. It was literally like, you know, you
reach down, you pick up a rock that's like half
buried in the ground and you pluck it out of
the hole. It was just like that. There was no
disturbance around the area. It wasn't like the rock was
rolled or levered out of that hole. It was like
somebody plucked that rock out of that hole and stuck
it on the top of that tree stump.
Speaker 2: And how tall is the tree stump?
Speaker 1: Oh, it's uh. If I walked up onto the root
ball and put my hand up, it was about about
that tall. I could just reach up and touch that rock.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's requiring heavy machinery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it'd take I mean, if it was
guys doing it, you know, a bunch of guys together.
I got to figure it'd take ten fifteen guys to
wrestle that thing around realistically to be able to pick
it out of that hole like that. I don't know
how you do that without.
Speaker 2: You know, And what would be the point exactly exactly?
Speaker 1: And then I still wonder that exactly too, Really what
is the point? What's the point of the rocks on
the stump? Because I've seen that, and I've heard people
talk about that, and I've and I don't know, is
it a territory marker? Is it a pathway marker? Is it?
You know, I don't get it because I've seen other
rocks on stumps. Yeah, and I've heard other people talking
about rocks on stumps, you know, but I never really
I always kind of I've always in the past. You know,
it's like I come through the woods. You know, it's like, oh,
here's the spot, you know, it had been logged off
years ago, and here's a rock on the stump, you know,
and I've always been like, oh, you know, it's always
been a something the loggers do to mess with people
or something, you know. I've always been semi skeptical about it,
you know, and and stuff. But no, no, no, well
I'll tell you what firsthand. I've said. I've seen that
rock sitting there for years that I walked through there,
and I always remember that spot. It was marked on
my GPS, you know, I've shot grouse right there, and
then here I am years later, and that rock's plucked
out of that hole and stuck on the top of
that stump.
Speaker 2: And and other than the rock, there was no other
sign or anything that you can recall while being in
that area that would ever alarm you.
Speaker 1: No, that's one of those spots, you know, you always
get kind of the creeps, like something's watching me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I get to a lot of those
spots out in the woods. You know, a lot of
people are into the big foot thing and want to
go out and chase around and find a big foot,
come face to face with sasquatch and all of that.
I guess I get that, but I don't. I'm not
that guy, you know, I'm I'm not out in the
woods looking, you know, for him. I'm not chasing after him.
I mean, I think it's cool. I wish somebody had
come up with some really good proof, you know, short
of killing one, you know something, you know that way,
But I'm not the bigfoot guy. I've I've had enough experiences.
I've I've done a crazy stuff in my life. I mean,
I I went to the Army in the eighties and
I've I've jumped out of airplanes, I've repelled from helicopters.
I've done what they call stable extractions, where you know,
you yank a bunch of guys out of the jungle
on a rope to to a helicopter. You know, I've
done I've done uh helicast where you jump out of
helicopters into the water. I've I've you know, halo, high altitude,
low opening parachute jumps, I've I've just I've done, I've done,
and I've been you know, uh Central South America, drug wars,
wars in the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Just I mean, I've I've done it, you know, And uh,
I just uh, I'm just not I'm I I've got
a really uncomfortable story on on one of these that
I haven't told yet. And uh, I'm just not I'm
just not that guy. I'm not gonna I'm just not
the Bigfoot guy.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't think, I mean, I think that's perfectly fine.
I Mean, my own personal story was I was just
kind of always interested in the stuff, just in general,
anything unexplained. Bigfoot just happened to be one of the
things that I'd read about, you know, growing up and everything,
and got curious one night on the Internet and looked
up Bigfoot and kind of went down the rabbit hole,
found a group of people, you know, here in Oklahoma
that was going out and looking and ended up meeting
up with them, and just I wanted to go out
and Okay, well, let's see if there's anything to this,
because the idea of it was really cool to me.
But then you get out there and find out that
it's not just a myth and there really is something
to it, and things start to change. And for a
person that isn't going down that rabbit hole intentionally and
just kind of has the curtain jerk back in front
of them, I mean, that can be pretty overwhelming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and I think that that experience up
at the lake with all the campers and everything that
was that was pretty intense. That was pretty spooky. That
sold me one hundred percent on the Big Foot one
hundred percent. I mean, it's it's just like the rock
throwing thing, the other stuff, you know, all of that,
all the things that I've seen, you know, a little
weirdness as a kid, the being watched in the woods,
hearing the tree knocking, you know, all of that kind
of stuff. I mean, my son and I were in
a canoe going along the edge of the lake trolling flies.
It was like the water was like glass. They're just
perfect reflection of the mountains off of the water, with
that little bit of mist that floats on the top
of the water. Just absolutely calm, still beautiful morning, know,
and something's following us along the bank, and every once
in a while it did bang a tree, and it
was far enough back in the woods we never got
a look to see what it was, but there was
something there, and it followed us. Probably that was probably
only oh, I don't know, half mile, maybe maybe three
quarters of a mile it followed us, but I mean,
it was clearly there, but it wouldn't show itself, which
kind of, I guess, kind of leads me into the
other story. I guess the one that's the one that
pretty much drove me out of the woods.
Speaker 2: I mean, nobody's forced to tell anything they don't want to,
so I of course would love to hear the story.
I'm sure the listeners would love to hear the story.
But if you're not comfortable with telling it, I don't
want you to tell it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I uh, well, I'm going to tell it. I
mean a good portion of it enough to figure out,
you know why I don't go up into the deep woods,
especially by myself anymore. You know, when I was younger,
I used to go out in the woods all the time.
All the time, I'd go out in the woods I'd
spend days out in the woods, me and my dog.
I had a wolf husky hybrid dog. He was the
greatest dog for the woods. I'd lay down, make a
bed someplace, and he'd pick out a spot where he
could overwatch stuff at night and he'd do his thing.
I'd do mine, you know, and if there was anything weird,
he would come down to where I was at real quiet,
wake me up with his nose in my sleeping bag,
and then he'd look off in the direction of something
that he hurt or something, and he'd go buff, and
then he'd look back over there. Then he'd look back
down at me again and he'd do this real quiet
buff and then look back over like there's something over there,
you know. And he'd always he was the greatest dog
to go out in the woods. And so I used
to spend a lot of time, I mean, the majority
of my free time. If I didn't have, you know,
no responsibilities that I hadn't take care of it home
or with family or anything, you know, and I just
pack up and go to the woods, disappear and places
with no trails or anything. I didn't want to go
where there were trails, you know, because I didn't want
to be around other people. You know. I'd pick out
a spot, find some little lake up in the top
of the up in some little top of the mountain
someplace or something that had specifically no road, no trail,
no nothing to and hike into it and spend at
least a night around in the area. But yeah, so
this one, this goes back to another another event with
buddies of mine that had come up and go hunting.
And so I had a friend of mine and we're
still friends. It's not like had a friend nobody of mine.
He come up and he was still active in the
army and had just come back from a deployment in Syria,
and he wanted to spend a little time hanging out
with me and stuff, you know. And I'd retired two years,
I think two years before this, and he just wanted
to come hang out, go hunt and relax, play in
the woods. You know. He was a hunter too. And
so I had this old friend of mine that I
that I knew lived in the valley up here, and
he'd told me, oh, there's a spot you know, he
used to go hunting all the time up here, And
I thought, oh, yeah, I know, that place. I fly
fished that little creek, but I'd never gotten excuse me,
never gone up that creek. And he's telling me, oh, yeah, well,
I used to go up there and go hunting all
the time, and I always got, you know, my dear
that I was after whatever, you know, and he'd kind
of chuckle and stuff, you know, and I've seen I've
seen the racks that from the deers, that he's got
a deer that he's got up there and stuff, and
you know, so I was like, all right, I'm gonna
check it out. I mean, at this time, he was
probably seventy five push and eighty years old. He didn't
go hunting or anything anymore either, you know, so he
was kind of giving up some of his spots to
people that he trusted, you know. So I tell my
buddy and we check it out on the map and
figure it all out, and he gets up here and
we get all all set everything, and then the next
day we take off and go out and we go
this is to the east of me where I live,
and you go up Highway twenty, you cut off to
the south down another little highway, and then you get
on a dirt road you go nineteen miles up this
dirt road into the woods and gets up on top
of all of these peaks on the pretty much on
the edge of the National Park. Up here, we're still
outside of the park, but we're in the North Cascades,
the you know, right on the edge of the National Park.
And so we parked the jeep and stuff at the
little bridge that goes over the creek, and we brought
our brought our waiters because we figured, well, we're going
to go up this valley about five miles through the
woods and then it's going to open up into where
all the little headwater streams come into this little river,
and it opens up into this whole great big bowl
and it's and it is. It's like a big bowl
with one side broken off. It's just got these real
high peaks all the way around this valley. And there's
really no other way in there other than to go
up this creek. And so we're walking up the creek
and heading up into there and walking along and uh,
I stepped down, I almost step on this fish darts
out from in front of me and goes up the river.
And I was like, hey, he said, that was a
big fish. You know, and he's like, oh, you know,
told him I almost stepped on and he's like, oh, yeah, whatever,
you know, stepping on fish, and uh, I go a
little bit farther and another one darts out and I said,
now I almost stepped on another one. He's like, oh,
you know, get a little bit farther up the creek
and he's like, oh, big fish. And I'm like, yeah, sure,
you know, yeah, buddy, whatever, you know. But there's so
many fish in this creek. And this is uh, oh,
I don't know. It was modern deer season, so it
must have been uh, October, October, late October, I'm not sure,
early November then uh and uh. So we keep going
up the up this creek and climbing over stuff and everything,
and we make it almost up into where it starts
to open up into the big We're starting to come
out of the trees and it's starting to open up
into this alpine meadow valley, and my buddy says, he says, hey,
I feel like we're being watched. And I was like, yeah,
you know, I get that feeling a lot when we're
up here, you know, and you know, up in the
woods and stuff, and I kind of blow it off,
and we go a little bit farther and we're kind
of away from the creek by the time we get
up there because it had opened up enough that we
can move away from the creek. We'd changed into regular boots,
kind of dropped our heavy gear and stuff because we
figured we're going back out that way anyway and keep
heading up aways. And he comes over to me a
little bit. He's probably about ten feet off from me,
and he comes over and he gets right next to
my shoulder and he goes, there's somebody over there. I
go somebody and he goes, well something somebody not sure,
and so we stop and we're looking looking around, looking around.
We stand there for a minute. It's like, yeah, I
don't see nothing, hear anything, nothing. So we start start
moving because we're still trying to get up into this valley.
Before we split off and try to go one was
going to go around one side of the valley and
one was going to go around the other side. Kind
of work our way around, and we'd figure we'd set
a time to meet back up and see if we
can flush something out, chase something to one or the other,
get a good you know whatever, and so we go
a little bit farther and uh, I've got really bad tonight.
It's my ears ring constantly, so I don't detail noises.
He comes back over to me and he says, somebody's
over there and they're talking, and I'm like, then I stop,
and I start looking around. And by this time, I'm
I mean, we're five miles plus up this valley, A
good five miles up this valley. There's no trail. I've
had absolutely zero sign of any human activity at all whatsoever.
I mean, you can get off in the woods out here,
and as you kind of move off into the woods,
sometimes you'll come across something that says, hey, people have
been here. I hadn't seen a rapper, I hadn't seen
a beer bottle, I hadn't seen nothing. I seen no
sign whatsoever of any kind of human activity at all, period.
And so I'm thinking. I look at him. I said, well,
there's no way there's people up here, and he goes, yeah,
I know, and then he goes and there's somebody over
there too, and points to the other side of the valley.
So we sit there for a little bit, we're looking around,
and then I start hearing and you can hear it
in the distance. It's like, you know, when you can
hear somebody talking, but you can't hear what they're saying.
It's this really deep, gruff, rumbly, solid sounding voice. I mean,
it's you know, I mean, it's just deep and I
can't make out any words, but it's like, yeah, that's
definitely talking. And so we're looking around and then we
start hearing things moving and I can't you can't. I
couldn't see anything because they're up in the edge of
the bushes and it's like it's that whole thing where
it's like it's right at the edge of where you
can't see it, but you can tell where it's at,
you know. And it's heavy movement. I mean it's heavy movement,
like bear heavy movement. And so I'm starting to get
creeped out because it's on both sides of us. We
can't see it. Whatever it is, it's talking, and we're
both thinking what we're thinking, you know, yeah, And so
we decided, looking in the valley up where we're at,
we're going to go. We're going to move into an
area where it's full of blueberry bushes that are about
four feet tall, and you can you can walk through them,
you know. And it's like it's like we're both kind
of old schoo when it comes to hunting stuff, and
because we've done so much stuff that way. It's like,
I've got a brand of hunting gear that's made by
a company called Filson's. It's old world oil skin stuff,
so it's real. It's they call it a tin cloth,
so it's real heavy snag resistant canvas, and so you
can walk through the thickest, nastiest, craziest briers and you
don't get stuck. You just walk through it. It's not
like modern material where it hangs up on everything, so
you can you can move through the bushes real freely,
real easy. But I'm thinking we're moving up into this
area where I'm just going to be maybe head above
the bushes, and I'm not comfortable walking out into this
valley where I can see over the top of everything,
but everything can move underneath the bushes. Even though I
can to the bushes, i can't see really what's in
the bushes ten feet in front of me. Yeah, you know,
and we've got at least three things that are big
that are in that valley with us that aren't showing themselves,
but are talking with each other.
Speaker 2: I would assume that they would be aware that you
guys are there.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm one hundred percent convinced.
Speaker 2: So your training, both of yours training would dictate that
this is not a good situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're on the low ground. They've got the high
ground on both sides of us. There's three of them,
there's two of us. They clearly can move faster than
we can, and have proven that already, mostly moving fairly silently,
but at a couple of spots they started well, and
this is when they started making the noise. No no hollering, no, no,
nothing like that. No verbalization towards us at all. I
swear they were talking to each other. But they would
charge through the bushes and and it was so fast,
and they wouldn't they weren't coming towards us. Now a
barrel do a false charge or even charge right at you.
I mean, but they'll do a false charge where they
charge at it is scaria, you know, and then they
back off to see what you're going to do. But
these things weren't doing that. They were charging in flanking
moves like they were like they were maneuvering on us,
flanking us and like, and it was like they were
trying to prove to us. Now we hit each had rifles,
we were armed. And I was carrying a forty five
cold pistol with plus p's and my buddy was carrying
his forty five magnum or forty four magnum, you know,
and rifles, and he's carrying a scope rifle of I
don't remember what it was, probably a Remington seven hundred.
He's into Remington's. Now. I was carrying an old Winchester
ninety four thirty thirty caliber, and so I mean, we've
got we're armed. And so that's kind of the thing
that I was looking at is that I was wondering
if they thought we were up there hunting them, or
if we were up there hunting or what. But they
were they I'm one hundred percent percent convinced that Sasquatch
they're they're intelligent. They're not just some dumb animal. Right,
So they they know we're armed, they know what we're
capable of. They all know, you know, they've been around
people and seen enough. They all know. So they're not
gonna they're not going to show themselves. They're not going
to charge in. They're not going to do something where
they can get close enough, but they're going to do
whatever they could do intimidate us and chase us out
of that valley. And boy, I'll tell you what they
sure did. They sure did, and they followed us all
the way we went. We were coming back out of
that valley and going down and moved down. We went back,
got our packs everything, and it just it's it just
killed me because my buddy had a rifle of scope
on it, and I don't I don't know hunters hunting,
I don't care what you do. It's just not it's
not the thing to go scope in the woods with
a rifle. So he did it very limited, you know.
And we didn't want to be pointing our guns at them,
our rifles at them, you know, because I figured if
it was a big foot, they knew well, we knew
it was bigfoot. I mean it was. We were well
sold into that, but we didn't want them to perceive
that we were trying to get them, you know what
I mean. I mean, we'd already made it clear that
we were leaving, but I didn't have a pair of
monoculars with me, and I always take monoculars with me, always, always, always,
and I didn't have them. I didn't even have them
in my pack. We just brought minimal because we were
moving so deep, five miles up into the air, and
then we figured we were going to go another couple miles.
If we, you know, actually scored a good a good dear,
then you know we were going to have to pack
it out. We were going to have to pack it
out a long way, so we were going to have
to have to gut and quarter and pro you know,
and everything to pack it out. Split it up between
the two of us, because I'm not going to sled
drag something that far. And you couldn't through all that anyway,
So we minimalize the gear that we were taking and
I and I still get to this day, I keep
kicking myself for not having my binoculars. But anyway, we start,
we start moving out, we're moving down. He's scanned a
couple of times with his scope. I've been watching stuff.
We've gotten to a couple of spots where we've moved
off from the creek so that we could sit down
and just listen and see if we could see anything.
And and it was pretty apparent they were still around us.
You'd hear a branch snap, you'd hear heavy thumping noises,
you know how you know how bear does that where
they bounce, and they bounced their front seat onto the stomp. Okay,
it was like that, but it wasn't exactly that noise,
you know, but it sounded like it really sounded to
me a lot like that, like something was stomping to
let us know, hey, we're still here.
Speaker 2: Like something fleshy hitting the ground hard.
Speaker 1: Something fleshy hitting the ground hard, like something like they're
stomping a foot, you know. But so we keep moving
and we're going down, and we we've already we've well
resigned ourselves so that we're being tracked by sasquatch and
I'm and moving down, but we still wanted to see
if we could get a look at anything, and we
jump over this little uh. There were a couple of
them coming up, but this one was as we came
up the river, but this one was the best. It's
like a logjam. You get all these logs across and
it kind of plugs it up, almost like a beaver dam,
and then over the years the silt fills in behind it,
so it raises it up. So it's like you're walking
in the river bed and you come to the and
then you can drop down a couple feet. Yeah, like
a little waterfall over. Well, this one was about four
to five feet tall, and so we kept talking about
that and that when we got there, we were going
to drop over that and we were going to take
off into different directions, just straight out of the sides
and see if we could see anything, you know, flush
something up, if we could charge up the side and
see anything. And uh, this always cracks me up. So
my buddy he goes, he goes, well, I'll go up
to the west, you go up to the east. That
always cracked me up because the west side was the
side that had one on it, and the east side
of the valley had two.
Speaker 2: Go get the lawn chairs.
Speaker 1: And so I was like, oh yeah, send me into
the two. All right, Well I was. I was up
for it anyway. So we did. We did the charge,
and you could hear them. You could hear them. They
took off through the woods. Uh, and the there was
one on each side of me when I went up.
When I went up, they went through the woods and
one and they went at an angle to where I
was at, down towards the river on each side, uh,
down towards the river, and and so then I started
getting nervous because I was thinking, they're going to cut
me off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the one way in and out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're going to cut me off from the river.
And and so I immediately turned around and headed back down.
But I headed back down at an angle towards the
one that was down river from me, so that I
wasn't going to go straight back to where I came from.
I went down I paralleled that path down to the river,
so that if something happened, I was going to be
up against one, not having both of them, yes, and
and uh so I get back down to the river,
and when I get back down by the river, everything's
dead quiet. My buddy come down the river and he's like,
you know, he he had seen that I'd come back
down to the river, you know, heard everything going on.
And I'm haulering at him at this point everything and uh,
I was just like, no, no, I'm done. I'm not
coming out of the river again. I'm not coming out
of the river again. I'm staying in the river all
the way to the jeep. And that's what we did.
And they followed us all the way peril but you know,
just uh parallel this all the way all the way
back to the jeep, all the way back to the jeep,
and like five you know, is a good five miles
and they were with us the whole way back to
the jeep. And when when we were at the jeep,
it was like everything up there and you know it's
got you got cracket's, you know, all that stuff up
in the woods. There's always some kind of bird noise something.
And this was and this was getting to be late afternoon,
it wasn't getting dark yet, but it was dead quiet.
I mean it was dead quiet. There was no there
were no bird noises, there were no nothing, nothing. It
was just whatever little bit of sound we were making
and a little bit of breeze it was going through
the woods and everything was just dead quiet, dead quiet.
And yeah, I mean after we got back to the jeep,
never heard another noise, never heard nothing, nothing, nothing at all.
I'll tell you what, that's the last time I ever
went up there. If those things wanted to get us,
I am one hundred percent convinced, one hundred percent convinced
that they would have gotten us if they wanted to.
One hundred percent. I have zero, no doubt whatsoever, zero none,
no doubt. Zero. It was to drive us out of
there and to make sure that we didn't come back.
And I'll tell you what, I ain't going back.
Speaker 2: Was there a certain point something that triggered the decision
to leave the area for you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they hearing them talking and them moving around us
when we were up there. It was the it was
the fact that it was. It was how fast they
were moving and the fact that they were moving around
us yet you know, it's like it's like I felt
like the dog with the wolf, the sheep dog and
the wolves circling around me. Yeah, you know, I mean
that was that was the feeling and the fact that
we couldn't figure out at that time, you know, at
couldn't figure out what was going on. But it was
it was the fact that we heard them talking, heard
them talking before they ever made any noises, that really
exposed the positions that they were in. You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that would implay planning, yeah, oh yeah,
oh yeah, and animals don't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, but these things, these things did absolutely, one
hundred percent. No, absolutely one hundred percent planned their whole
thing and did a very well execution of it and
the amount of movement and noise and everything that they made.
And I never saw one. I never saw it. That's
that's what gets me. I never saw it. I've I've
never I just and that's that's what gets me. It's like,
you know, it's like they are. It's so they can
be so overt with all the noise and commotion and
everything without exposing themselves to where you can see them. Yeah,
it's uh, it's the most elusive. Just crazy. Man, I'm shivering.
I got goosebumps. It's uh man, it was nuts. It
was just nuts. I I don't care, you know. It's
like I think, I'm I'm I'm convinced with oh, rifles, pistols,
it don't matter, it don't matter what we had. It
just it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you can't see it, you can't shoot it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But I mean I think I think they could have.
They could have maneuvered on us and gotten one of us.
A couple of times when we were separated, they could
have gotten one of us. Hell, they could have maneuvered
on on the two of us together. I think and
and gotten us when we were together without us being
able to I don't know. Maybe we might have shot one,
but I don't. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously you don't have to go too far
into this, but with your military background and training and everything,
you know, you mentioned some of the things that you
are involved in, is there anything in your training or
anything that you faced in adversaries that you can compare
like their movements and strategy to.
Speaker 1: Nothing, well, their strategies are I mean, as far as
the maneuvering and being able to being able to get
a goals on us and everything, I can equate that
to stuff that we did maneuvering, combat maneuvering and stuff
that way. But as far as staying hidden and all
of that, I mean, it's it was like going up
against one of the most skilled opponents that I would
have ever faced in any situation that way at all, whatsoever.
I mean, if it would have been an armed conflict,
I wouldn't have come out of that up against whatever
that was. I never saw them, and they clearly knew
where we were every second, and I never saw them.
Neither one of us ever saw one.
Speaker 2: What do you equate that to just their ability to
blend in or just their speed. How do you think
they can pull that off? Because I've been in situations
myself where there would be There was this one situation
in particular down in Texas as a matter of fact,
where we're in a very remote area and we're on
this old oil road is what they are called. And
on one side of the road is some sort of
like down in Texas, there'll be these expanses of thousands
of acres where they have like exotic game hunting and
deer hunting and stuff, and they build these huge perimeter
fences around where the game can't get out. And so
that's on one side of this. On the other side
is just woods, thick woods, and there was something man
that this thing it sounded like a bull coming through
the woods, an elephant, huge, just crashing, breaking limbs, tearing
towards us, and it's coming directly at us. There's a
large cedar tree between the edge of the road where
we're at and there's maybe five or six of us there,
and this thing's on the opposite side of the cedar tree,
and it charges right up to the opposite side of
that cedar tree. This cedar tree might have been eight
feet in diameter. We kind of form a semicircle around it,
start moving around as much as we could on the edges,
trying to see this thing. We've got flashlights on and everything. Nothing,
couldn't see a single thing, never heard anything walk off. Yeah,
and it's just like, how does something that big just
move around like that, just effortlessly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I've watched cougars walk behind a tree and
never come out, disappear. They just walk behind a tree
and they're gone. Yeah, but something that big like that, Yeah, yeah, no, no,
I hundred percent believe that.
Speaker 2: And then the talking also, I only experienced that one time.
I think it was a bigfoot. I don't know. I
never saw anything, but I heard two individuals talking. Couldn't
make out anything they were saying. I would have to
assume they know that you can hear them. Yeah, and
they just don't care, and they're just talking to one another.
And just to be completely honest, I mean, that situation
to me sounds terrifying. I've heard a lot of bigfoot stories,
but that one is one that I would personally have
worried about if I were in your scenario for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I'm the smart ass to the end,
and I've been I've been shot at, mortars coming in
on me, all that kind of stuff. And one of
the things and this is, yeah, I had I had
a one hundred and twenty milimeter mortar hit right behind me,
and I got wounded from it hit, but it was
far enough away. My best took everything. Luckily. All the
shrapnel that flew hit from my waist up and I've
got a he could chunk of shrapnel that I pulled
out of my vest that I kept. But it went
off and I was directly between it and a buddy
of mine. And when that hit, all this dust comes flying,
and it made like this car like you'd see in
the cartoons. It made like this cartoon cut out where
I'm looking through a tunnel of dust and it's perfectly
clean between me and my buddy. And I looked at
him and I said, well, you don't see that every day,
you know. You know, I could not at any point
of this entire situation, I couldn't. I couldn't. I there
was no smart ass in me at all, whatsoever. It was.
It was so that whole situation once it led up
to the intensity was so intense. I couldn't muster up
a single comment. And that's that was always my thing
with with my guys when we were in any kind
of situation, was always I kind of do that to
break tension in it, you know. I mean, and that
was kind of our thing in the military, that picking
on each other and stuff all the time. It's all
to it's all to break the tension of the situation, right,
to get every focused back onto Okay, this is what
we got to do. This is what's going on, you know,
But to break that stress of the situation. And I couldn't.
I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.
I was I was so stressed that whole time.
Speaker 2: I mean, five miles is a long way, yeah, and
plenty of time, yeah, to figure things out and get
a glimpse of something, you know, and kind of figure
out a way to take control of the situation. And
it sounds like the emotions you were experiencing was just
not being in control completely at the mercy of whatever
they wanted.
Speaker 1: Yep. Man, it was so crazy.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've heard lots of stories about you know,
people being paralleled in the woods. You know, I've had
I have a good friend of mine that's been on
the podcast that was paralleled out of the woods for
a ways. And usually it's like, I mean, I may
have heard a couple of stories about a mile or
two miles, and it's typically just one other individual and
it's just doing the whole you know, paralleling with the footsteps,
not making any vocalizations. They take a step and they
hear another step before it stops, that sort of thing.
But yeah, but this is different, This is way different.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it was. Uh, it was one of those
I mean, I've been in a couple of tight spots,
but it was like this was like, man, it was intense.
It was it was I'm one hundred percent convinced. I
am one hundred percent convinced that if they wanted to
stop us from getting out of there, we were done.
That was all there was to it. That was all
there was to it, and that was that was the
only thing. As we got down the when we got
to being within about a mile of the jeep, was
when I was feeling like they were gonna let us
get to the jeep and get out of there. Is
that That's when I when I really had started to
have the feeling that they were gonna let us get
out of there, that all they wanted to do was
get us out of there and to make sure that
they caused enough that maybe we would never come back,
you know. And boy, I'll tell you what, I ain't
ever going back up there. You can't. I'll tell you
where it's at.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'll leave that one alone. Yeah, did
your buddy have any problems coming to the realization that
Bigfoot's real?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he won't talk about it period to this day.
He won't talk about that. And uh, yeah, he totally
swore me to secrecy on the thing because he was
still he was still in and he was still running
missions and doing stuff, you know, and he didn't want
that stigma of anything getting back to anybody. And then,
you know, he's a big dude. He's a he's a
big dude, and he's you know, over over six feet tall,
very broad shouldered, very big dude. And he didn't want
the oh yeah, here comes the bigfoot hunter, you know. Yeah,
you know, I mean he didn't want any of that stigma,
stigma having to do with it. He won't he won't nothing,
not a word to this day, won't nothing nothing.
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody has to, you know, cope in their
own way. And like I certainly get it that that
would have been a terrifying scenario for anybody, let alone
people that were trained and aware enough to actually know
what was going on.
Speaker 1: And and he's the one that he's the one that
caught what was going on first, you know, I don't know.
Maybe it's because his head st up high enough that
he could hear things that I couldn't a lot, bigger,
lot taller.
Speaker 2: I think it's also kind of important to mention, at
least in fairness, that I agree with you if they
didn't want you to leave, you weren't going to leave,
but they did let you leave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, which which after all of that, I'm pretty
convinced was their intention the whole time was just to
drive us out of there. But when it was going
on at first, when we were all the way up
in there, I didn't have that feeling at all, not
at all. It was so I thought I was dinner,
you know.
Speaker 2: For my interesting you didn't even tell your wife about this?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, we didn't tell anybody about it. For
years years. Yeah, my wife just recently found out. And
then she's like, she was kind of like, oh, well,
a lot of this makes a lot of sense now
looking back on things and looking back on your actions
and your lack of going to places that you used
to go fishing, and lack of going to you know,
this spot over here and not being out in the
woods so deep by yourself. And yeah, and then then
she was teasing me last night too because uh we
listened to uh who was it. Oh, it was Sarah's
one of Sarah's new newest videos and that she put out.
There was a guy on there talking about a bunch
of stuff and bigfoot experiences and he's had a lot
of them, uh says sasquatch, and uh he's a bigfoot researcher.
And he was talking about cameras and game cameras and
stuff and all of this, and my wife goes, oh, oh,
I get it. I get it. So that's why, uh,
that's why you put the motion sensor lights up and
why uh you've got the cameras up and all of
that stuff. She's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. Keep
them away from the house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well we call him booger lights out here,
booger lights. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But that's another thing too that that gets me is
a lot of people are like, oh, you know, there's
there's great I'm gonna switch to a lighter side. I
want to de stress from that story and be kind
of done with that. Yeah, because that really gets me
talking about that. It's like, man, but uh, talking about
the cameras and stuff, a lot of people do a
lot of a lot of bigfoot stuff and and uh,
I'm one hundred percent convinced they see in for red light.
I have no doubt. And that's the thing with the
game cameras, the motion lights, the all that kind of
stuff is they're all triggered with ir. It's like people,
people don't realize you you carry your cell phone in
your pocket and if you've got if you've got some
kind of a some kind of a starlight vision scope
or something, Uh, take your cell phone out at night
and set it someplace and look through your starlight scope
at it, because it'll if you've got if you've got
a smartphone, almost every smartphone I know, Samsung iPhones, there's
a there's a bunch of them. They they're flashlight does
an infrared strobe about every one to three seconds, depending
on the brand. So wherever you're going with your cell
phone in your pocket, you're putting off an infrared strobe.
So I think with a lot of this modern technology
trail cams, they're triggered by infrared. You know, all all
of this stuff that uses infrared, they can see it.
And I think, I'm I'm I'm convinced they can because
I've I've I've hunted coyotes and stuff at night and
lots of varmint animals and stuff, and so I use
night vision and an IR laser for hunting varments. And
so I was sitting in a spot one time, sitting there,
and I'm watching this owl on this tree branch and
he was probably fifteen maybe twenty feet away from me,
and I'm watching him, uh with my with the set
with a PVS fourteen military grade Gen three night vision
and I'm watching him, and I thought, I'm going to
turn on that illuminator, and so I turned on the
infrared illuminator on it, you know, which boosts your vision.
It's like if youre's someplace that has like zero light,
you can turn on the illuminator and it gives an
infrared light off right, So I and as soon as
I clicked that on, he spun his head around and
looked right straight at me, and I thought, wow, I wonder,
I wonder if that was a coincident, if coincidence or something,
if he heard the click or something, you know, but
I'd been made that he would have. So I shut
it off, and he kind of goes back to looking
around and looking out across the field, you know, looking
back out and the you know, in the edge of
the woodlines, and looking around and looking around. And I
clicked it back on again. He spun his head back
around instantly and looked at me, and I turned it off.
I sat there and the third the third time I
turned it on, he spun around, looked at me, and
then he flew away. But so that was the first time,
and I thought, he sees that in for red light.
He can see it straight up. Now, I've I've shined
it around coyotes, I've shined it around bears, I've used possums, raccoons,
just all all kinds of animals, elk, deer, all kinds
of animals, and nothing pays any attention to it. Nothing.
The only animal that I've seen that pays attention to that.
Our light is the owl, our owls, and and and
I just kind of do it all the time now
as anytime I see an owl, I'll turn my laser
on or click the illuminator or something to see what
they do. And every single species of owl that I've
come across will spin their head around and look right
at me instantly, no no hesitation, instantly spin around, look
at me. And no other animal seems to pay any
attention to it at all. And so I'm convinced that
the sasquatch see the infrared. I'm convinced that's what it is.
And so they avoid it like the plague, because it's
a technology that they know that we use, that we're
trying to trap them with in some way. Even though
it's just a picture, they know it comes from us,
and that it's a weird thing that that permeates. It's
the area that we've put something in and they won't
get near it.
Speaker 2: That could very well be there's something going on, because
the way those things, again, at the size that they
are and the speed that they move in pitch black conditions,
I mean, we couldn't do it we'd be running into
trees and knocking ourselves out left and right, tripping over
our own feet. And these things don't seem to have
any problem seeing in the dark.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. And it's like it's like there's
so many technologies out with your camera on your phone
or any digital camera focuses with an infrared beam. It
uses that ir to range whatever you're pointing the camera
at to do its focus. So you pick up your
cell phone, it's using that. That's what maybe gives it
the focus, like a rangefinder like guys use on the
golf course or used for shooting or whatever. It uses
that infrared laser to range, so then the camera focuses
in on it. So every every digital camera, every cell phone,
everything like that uses that infrared. He mits that infrared.
So I don't know. That's that's my crazy sasquatch theory
thing that I'm pretty well stuck on.
Speaker 2: I know. I mean, that's a theory that a lot
of people have, and there's nothing crazy about it at all.
That's one of the problems with this whole thing is
once you hit that realization and become a knower and
that these things are out there, then you start trying
to figure them out and trying to understand why they
haven't been discovered and why they're so hard to see
and everything else. And it never stops. Man, it just
never stops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know. And I've got family members that are like, oh, sasquatch,
you know, and they're like, oh, I've spent spent plenty
of time out woods and I've hiked and done this
and done that. Well, you know, I hear that from
so many people. But it's like it's like, you know,
you get all these people that are like, oh, you know,
I'm the experienced hiker, but I'll always no, they're trail walkers. Yeah,
their trail walkers. They find a trail in a guide
book and hiked to some little lake on the trail
that's like a road through the woods, you know. You know,
and it's like, I know, I know several people that
around here that man, they've had things, sightings, stuff loggers
up here that won't talk about stuff. They're like, yeah,
same things. Yeah, well you want to know, you know,
I mean, people, so so many people. There's so many
people that are like, oh, yeah, Sasquatches are a well
have you ever seen anything?
Speaker 2: Yep, Yeah, and that's it. That's all you're getting out
of them.
Speaker 1: That's all you're getting, you know. But you know, and
then you get the other ones that are just like
you know, it's like my family. I've got several people
in my family that are just like so n but
they don't live up here, they don't at the time,
out of the woods, they don't. You know.
Speaker 2: Well, James, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing
your stories.
Speaker 1: Oh you bet, man, Yeah, absolutely, no, it's fun. I'm
gonna tell you straight up. And I'm not kidding. This
is the last time I'm telling that story right there.
That's it. I'm I'm you know, I might tell somebody whatever.
I'm not going on any more podcasts, I'm not doing
any more interviews, nothing. That's it. You and Sarah got
my stories and that's it.
Speaker 2: Well. I feel honored, sir, really do. It's quite an
experience that you went through. And yeah, I'm very appreciative
that you were willing to share it with me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've been, You've been. It's just like you know,
it's just people have to share some of their stories
that way because they're real and they're out there, and
people have to come out and share it so that
the other people that are doubters can actually look at
the experiences that people have really had so that they
can understand that, yeah, there's man, there's something out there,
you know, for real,