Speaker 1: I have a story to tell of a Bigfoot non encounter,
more like a sensory evidence event than anything else. It
is both unusual and entertaining in that it took place
before I knew of the reality of Bigfoot. There I
was in the woods, confronted with the evidence of that
exact reality, and was utterly unable to process it. It
was a summer of nineteen seventy five in the northeastern
United States. I was hiking the Northville Lake Placid Trail
in New York's Adirondack State Park. Just for scale, I'll
tell you that the Adirondack State Park is a bit
larger than the entire state of New Jersey, where I
was living then. I was hiking alone for a few days,
letting my pioneer spirit have its way. I was on
my first day. I was in good physical shape and
the miles melted under me. The hike was fantastic, and
the trail was in very good repair. I felt as
though I was bounding along. Nature was all around me,
and thankfully the black flies had not yet appeared. As
long as I kept moving, the sweat I produced evaporated
nicely with the occasional forest to breeze. So far, I
had met no one, My pack didn't feel too heavy,
and I was really enjoying myself. I had arrived on
the trail around one PM after the drive up from
New Jersey, and I walked the afternoon until near dusk,
and then I set up camp. I didn't build a fire,
so I was able to watch and see the forest
around me without the glare of the fire's bright wall
holding back the night. No need for a tent fly.
The weather was perfect, the stars were everywhere. So far,
what a trip to evade some persistent mosquitoes, I went
into the tent and zipped the mess shut. I settled
on top of a sleeping bag, and I took out
my map and pen like for a once over of
tomorrow's trek. Reading the contour lines, I saw that there
were some interesting looking spaces along the way, a little
over three miles off the trail. I really don't know
the reason I chose to go there. It just looked interesting,
that's all. Looking back, I like to feel that I
was drawn there for some reason. I don't know. I
loved orienteering and I just needed somewhere to go. Perhaps subconsciously,
I hoped I would find something later. After I cooked
my supper on a white gas stove inside the vestibule
of the tent, I removed my compass from its leather case,
and I began to develop bearings away from the trail
for the next day's height. When I'm alone, I like
to do things to break up the monotony, and for
tomorrow this would be it. I settled back into a
happy sleep and awaited the dawn, anticipating the map adventure
to come. I awoke alert and rested, and I felt
as though I had been sleeping on a cloud. It
was more of a recollection of a night than a feeling.
If you can imagine that, it's something you strive to
get again. Usually there's a noisy dawn chorus of birds
to start the day, but all I heard that morning
were crows. I ate a fast breakfast of coffee, cold
hard bulled egg, washed up, packed up, and I was
eager to get on the bushwhack, as we called it
back then, when one leaves the trail and goes off
into the woods, fading into the tree line. I hiked
on down to a stream which showed up on the
map as crossing the trail, and I filled up my
gray water bottle for boiling later. I had enough water
for the trip off trail and back. I turned right,
walked a few steps, turned around, and took a back
bearing on the trail, using it as my baseline for
the return. I had everything well mapped out on paper,
but there's nothing like being really sure of things when
you're alone. So I ducked my head and left the trail,
taking a bearing on a large oak, and I started
walking towards it. That's what you do when you're hiking
off trail. You go via object bearing, object bearing, object
bearing until you can see further. Then it's still the same,
only the objects such as a tree, a large rock,
or some other feature on the landscape stands out. The
course wasn't exactly a straight line. I had planned it
that way to add a little more of a challenge
to it, so I had to pace off a few
out of view objects until I was back in line
and back on course to the terminus of my bushwhack.
I was playing soldier and I was really enjoying myself.
After I left the trail, I started hearing the birds again,
also scurrying squirrels, who hated the stranger that was in
their world. Now, when you're off trail, you can tell
a whole lot better what kind of woods you're in.
The briars and berry bushes get culled from the trail
during routine trail maintenance. Sometimes that sort of gives the
trail a generic park kind of look. I don't like that,
but the walking is easier. I guess we humans liked
to make parks, but parks in the woods seem out
of place. The trees were fairly dense, and vines were about,
and the leaf litter was pretty noisy. As I walked.
There were humid areas in some of the darker, more
sheltered gullies, but as long as I moved along, it
wasn't too much of a discomfort. I stopped often to
admire and investigate the flora and the fauna along the way.
There were flowers, there were vultures up high, birds, bugs
and rodents, and they all worth a look. By now,
I was about an hour and a half into the
trip and was a bit tired from all the stooping
I had been doing with the now heavy pack. I'm
six foot six, and in some places I had a
lot of bending to do. I needed to drink and
took off my pack to sit down. I was a
little more winded than I thought I was, and wasn't
really paying attention too much. I just wanted a little
rest in a drink of cool water. I flopped down
on a high rock and excelled in relief. I raised
my water bottle to drink, and as the cool, clean
water went down my parched throat, I saw a dark
shape up in the air, just a little off to
my right. Gradually, as I began to get rested and
gather my humidified wits about me again, I could see
that I was just on the edge of, and a
little above, what could be described as a clearing in
the loosest of terms. Actually, it looked like someone had
tried to build a fort or something, but they just
couldn't get it right. There were tree trunks which looked
like they were deliberately placed, but not in the right
way to make them into something definite. Wait a minute,
I was looking off to the left now and was
really a bit amazed at the same time and disturbed
by what I saw. There was a tree about a
foot and a half or so across which had its
bark scraped off. I think it was an oak, but
it could have been something else. I was looking at
the scraped part. It was lighter than the rest of
the tree, which went from about four feet off the
ground to about a foot path where I could reach,
making it ten or eleven feet up, no problem, except
there were claw marks on it, four claws together at
nearly right angles to the trunk all the way up.
I was astounded when I saw that. My hackles immediately
went up, as I thought it may have been a
grizzly or a large brown bear. I started looking around
in real earnest. It had gotten very very quiet. Those
claw marks were at least I would say, a minimum
of a quarter inch wide, sometimes a little more into
the wood. The tree was green, it was not rotted
in the least. I couldn't make those marks easily with
a saw and an axe if I had to. What
was I looking at? What made those marks? I never
found out. Today I would have taken pictures with my
cell phone, but back then we didn't have cell phones.
I've never seen anything like that again, and I had
never seen it before that. At that point, I needed
to look at this thing closer. I had successfully gotten
my jaw back into place from looking at the tree
trunk when it fell open again, this time by virtue
of what I saw up in the crutch of a tree.
There again, ten or eleven feet up in the air
was a very big heavy tree stump dirt, and all
that thing weighed three hundred pounds if it weighed an ounce.
I had done some logging as a teenager, and I
knew my wood weights. They could kill you if you
misjudged them. You can rely on it that I got
the stumps weight right. It was a biggin. I look
for more stumps in the air, but there were none.
By now you can imagine how all was feeling, not
quite flight or fight yet, but approaching something close to it.
None of the large, close to one foot or more
diameter logs which were stuck up in trees or crisscross
standing on the ground had been sawn. They had been
broken off and placed there. I couldn't find the sockets
that they belonged in either back when I was logging.
If we were to have done such a thing, it
would have taken a log skiter and many feet of
cable and chain to get the logs up there. I
took my time. I walked about the area and I
looked for signs. I really had no idea what to
look for, and I poked and I searched. Then I
sniffed the air, and I did all the chemo sabby
stuff and came up just as clueless as when I started.
I kept telling myself that there has to be something,
but I never found it. The crime scene was clean,
the bodies were there, but there was no sign of
a weapon. It looked like the perpetrator got away. Remember
this was nineteen seventy five and there was no internet.
There were no cell phones, no way to snap a picture.
I had no idea what I was observing. I just
knew it was darned odd. So I sat down on
that rock and surmised and contemplated, and I guessed and
formulated and worried at what I was seeing. At that time.
In those years, everything was supposed to have a logical, scientific,
exit explanation, so I sat down to make one. And
my theory was that it was a micro tornado. Yeah,
that was the ticket. But wait, there was too much
mass thrown about in too little of an area, with
too little damage to the surrounding trees, so it couldn't
be that. After sitting there and pondering and wondering for
most of the afternoon, I had to return to the
trail and I needed to get going. I burned my
brain for days after trying to come up with something
to explain it, but I couldn't. Everyone I explained it
to couldn't grasp the scale of the scene, so no
new offerings or explanations arose. Today, I would almost immediately
say it was definitely a bigfoot. Time is a funny thing.
I hope your audience can understand the land of Oz
I found myself in so suddenly on that day. Even
back then, it was obvious that something big had happened there,
and whatever did it could just as easily do it again.
And no, I definitely do not have an explanation for
the scratches either. Over the years, I have noticed that
possibly the only thing that could have made the marks
like that was a giant tree sloth. But why, I'd
like to apologize and say that I cannot give this
story a more cogent ending like seeing a bigfoot, But
I like to think that maybe he or she was
there somewhere watching and laughing at me the whole time.
My name is Joe, and I live in East Texas.
We have a small farm where we keep cattle, goats,
and a few horses and other small animals. And we
grow of vegetables for our family and ourselves, and a
couple of big fields of millet or corn to help
feed our stock. I'm not a big farmer or rancher.
I just love this life. I grew up this way
on a larger farm my grandfather runs to this day.
I bought a few acres from him when I was
in my twenties and just carried on with what I
grew up doing. All that said, I don't make a
living off this like my family does. I travel and
I work pipelines. I'm a welder. Sometimes I'm gone for
a month or more, traveling to wherever the money is
at the time. My wife is able to take care
of things at home with my two sons and my
father's help. I have one neighbor about a mile down
the road. I tried to get to know the guy,
but he is one of these homesteadter types, you know,
the people who never worked the land or animals in
their life. They buy ten acres in the country and
set up a house, and they try to go back
to the early nineteen hundreds or eighteen hundreds by working
the land with a hoe, yes, I know the type.
They buy a few chickens and goats, and then they
tell you how hard they were and how much they
know about everything agricultural. Don't get me wrong, I'm all
for folks going back to the land and living that way.
But a lot of these homesteaders are real goofball know
it alls, and they annoy me. There are probably a
few good ones. I have asked him to be available
to help my wife with things she might need if
she gets in a buying I mean we are neighbors.
He says he will, But when she called him once
to help her catch one of our horses that had
gotten out, he refused because he said he was down
in his back. That is all it took from my
wife to nix that idea. But he sure has no
problems asking me to use one of my tractors to
do a job the very next weekend. Then he does
a YouTube video showing everyone how hard his life was
getting that hundred by hundred foot field ready to plant.
I watched the video, and his back seemed fine to me.
It may sound like I'm going off on a tangent
here with these homesteaders, but I'll get back to him
in a minute. Here's the thing. We have wild pigs
in our county. We have a lot of them. On
winter nights, my sons and I like to scope out
a field with our night vision scopes and shoot them.
We try to kill as many as we can. First,
it's a lot of fun. Second, they are a very
destructive animal around here and all over Texas. Really, last,
who wouldn't like shooting feral pigs at night with an
effing night vision scope? Last January, around New Year's I
had taken off a few weeks to spend with my
family over the holidays. My two teenage boys were getting
rowdy and wanting to go to some party one of
their buddies was throwing a few miles away. I didn't
like the idea. They had gone to several parties in
the past, but for some reason, my wife and I
both didn't feel good about this one and told them
I was going to shoot up a field that night
and they were welcome to come along. Look, these boys
are seventeen year old twins by the way, and they
lived to hunt, and they canceled their party plans right there.
I knew they would, and my wife smiled at me
when she saw their response. Boy, do I know how
to work those teenagers. We got to one of my
grandfather's fields around ten pm and set up under an
irrigation system. The field has a slightly downhill slope with
a line of sight all the way to the woods
that line the bottom land about three hundred yards away. Oh,
and we had piled up corn in that field for bait.
That always guarantees a good shoot. We threw out some
square haybells for rifle rest, and we set up. There
had been pigs there when we drove in, and it
took an hour or so for them to all come back.
After the distraction we caused driving in and setting up,
the first half dozen trotted back to the corn pile.
It was not long before there were a third thirty
or forty pigs chowing down on the bait. I let
my boys start shooting, and they knocked down four or
maybe six pigs. We could clearly see our targets with
these scopes. Most of the pigs left and we waited.
We knew they would be back soon and we would
start the process all over again. The boys were drinking
cokes in the interim, and I was sipping on coffee
from a thermous and we were all eating some of
my wife's world famous pecan pie. It was a good night.
I loved doing these things with my boys, and life
was really good that night. One of the boys leaned
back over the bail and scope the field. I just
happened to look over at him, and he lowered his
rifle to the bail and looked into the field intently.
Are they back for more? I asked him. He didn't answer.
I just watched him move his head back into position
to look through his scope. Everything got really quiet. We
figured it was shooting time again, and we headed back
to the bells. Then my son raised his head again
in the darkness, and he said, Dad, there's something in
that field, but it's not a pig. I looked through
my scope and illuminated in white was a large figure
close to the ground. These scopes do not show images
that are not there. There was something crawling on the
ground in the mud, towards the pigs we had killed
thirty minutes before. Everything about it was strange, but mostly
the way it moved. It acted like it was sneaking
up on the dead pigs. It was hard to make
out exactly what this thing was, and none of us
even thought about taking a shot at it, just our
luck it would be some sort of endangered predator and
we would go to jail for killing it. But it
was the way it moved it was hard to explain.
The only way I can convey it to you is
to refer back to some horror movies I've seen, were
these ghosts and people move in a real jerky type
stop motion. It would creep slowly on all fours and
then speed up, then slow down, and it looked like
it would turn its head and body back towards the
tree line, as if it was looking at something behind it. Well,
needless to say, the pigs that were there all scattered.
It soon made it to the dead pigs, which were
also illuminated in our scopes. They were still warm on
this cold night. It reached out and grabbed a pig
and started back to the woods. We just watched it,
and then it stopped fifty or sixty yards from the
tree line. It stood straight up and through the pig
by the leg. The whole distance back to the trees.
We could see the pig lofted in the air, flipping
end over end, and I could actually hear it break
through the limbs and hit the ground. Then this thing
stood up and was standing on two legs like a man.
It stood fully erect and through the pig like it
was a softball, with a long, arcing side arm motion.
I don't know how tall it was, but it was big.
I moved my rifle a few inches to the right,
and I could see several more of these things inside
the thick woods, rushing towards the pig that had just
landed in the mud. They were all standing straight up,
they weren't crawling like this one. There were maybe four
or five of them, And the boys saw all of
this too, and never said a word. This thing then
turned back on all fours. It began making its way
back to the dead pig still laying in the field,
moving at a greater rate of speed than before, in
that freaky, jerking sort of way. It looked like it
was a crab. Actually, what the hell is that thing? Dad,
one of the boys to ask, I don't know, just
be quiet. Let's see what this thing does. We watched
as the thing went through the whole process of reving
pigs one at a time and returning to throw it
into the woods for its buddies. I could see one
last pig in the field, and the creature was moving
towards it. One of the boys must have moved because
a coke can fell off the bail and landed on
an AMMO box laying on the ground, making a clanking sound.
I looked over at my son and he was looking
down at the ground. No big deal, I thought, No
way this thing heard that as far away as we were.
When I leaned over to get my eye back in
the scope, I saw the creature standing beside the last pig.
But he was standing upright, and he was looking straight
at us. None of us said a word, but we
all knew we had been made. It dropped to all
fours and started moving at a very fast rate of
speed right at us. It was running on four limbs
like a gorilla does, sometimes skipping one arm or the other,
like it was run on three legs instead of four. Boys.
Get in the truck and get it started, I said.
I never took my eye out of that scope. The
boys didn't need encouragement. I could hear them moving quickly
to the truck a few yards behind us. Then I
heard the truck start, and I began a backwards creep
while keeping my eye in the scope. I didn't want
to lose sight of this thing. I was going to
have to take a shot to stop it. It was
moving too fast for me to make it to the
truck in time. I lowered the mill dot to a
few feet in front of the charging animal and squeezed
off three rounds, kicking up mud into the oncoming beast.
It stopped its charged about thirty yards in front of
the bales. By this time I was even with the
lowered tailgate, and I rolled over into the bed of
the truck and slammed my hand on the sidewalls. My
son punched the gas pedal, and off we shot down
the gravel road. I finally got myself upright in the
bed of the moving truck and tried to look through
the darkness and my scope, but there was no way
to get a good field of view. As my son
tore down the gravel road, the back window opened and
one of the boys asked if I was okay. I
yelled for them to stop the truck, and we came
to a slow stop. I looked back into the field
at what I thought was a safe distance, and acquired
the beast again. As it walked slowly back to the woods,
it picked up the last dead pig by its rear
leg and continued to walk in a confident manner all
the way back to the woods, where, illuminated and white
again were four more of the same shapes now standing
in the open field. They all had a pig in
their grip. I heard a loud moan over the sound
of the truck engine rumbling in that cold air. I
saw the one who did it. He tilted his head
back and he stuck his chest out, and then howled
like a wolf, but with a much deeper tone. And
they all walked back into the woods and disappeared. We
got the heck out of there and went home to
a warm and safe house. Two weeks later, I was
driving past my homesteader neighbor's house. He and his wife, who,
by the way, never spoke to my wife or I.
She was religious or something and thought it was sinful
to talk to people not in her religion were loading
their truck with furniture. I stopped and asked what was
going on with a weird, ghostly look on his face.
The man told me that they were going back to
their other house in Dallas, something about a family member
needed care, and they probably wouldn't be back. He offered
to sell his place to me right there on the spot,
which surprised me. Of course, I declined I didn't need
that old swampy land they had bought. Not too long
after that, I ran into the sheriff and he asked
me about those people, where the heck they were, etc.
I told him that they had moved. He laughed and
told me about a call his office had gotten from
them the night that we saw the creatures in the field.
Apparently they had been terrorized that night by a pack
of monsters. He made a big joke out of the thing,
and I laughed with him, all the while knowing that
the story was true. I went on my way and
felt a little bad about my homestead er friend who
were run off their land by a pack of bigfoots.
But honestly, I don't think I'm gonna miss them too much.
So yes, we have bigfoot in our area. I had
heard about them a few times, but had never run
into them until that night. We just don't talk about
it in general conversation with anyone. I mean, really, who
would believe us?