Speaker 1: I can't remember when I got this story. It's been
not too terribly long, but it's one of the craziest
stories I've ever read. And I've never thought about this theory.
What you're going to learn about now For the first
five minutes or so, she's going to give some background
on where she's from, what she does. Hang on because
this is a long story and it really gets good.
I mean, it gets really creepy. Here's what Jenna writes.
How the past year has changed my life. I cannot
begin to express, but I will give it my best shot.
My name is Jenna, and I'm a twenty nine year
old female geologist spileeologist, and I was working for the
government within the Department of Geological Survey up until recently.
We were responsible to explore and map out old mind
chefs and k systems in the eastern United States. There
are several of these teams working throughout the country in
places like the Rockies, Texas, the Midwest, and in Washington State.
I've heard that there are also teams in Canada and
Mexico as well. I have been spilunking since I was
five years old with my father and older brothers, so
it became who I was and not just what I did.
My experience through the years made me useful to this project.
I was recruited in my last year of graduate school
at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire by Joseph, who had
become my supervisor and mentor. My eight teammates were all
roughly the same age, and we had various degrees of
interest of study, including engineering, archaeology, biology, herpetology and volcanology,
as well as other fields. We were a mixture of
seven men and two women, and all have a love
for the world below the surface, resulting in our pale
skin in very thin frames. Because we spent most of
the days in the dark out of the sunlight, it
wasn't all that bad for me being a pale skinned
ginger and ten minutes in the sun I would turn
into a lobster. The meals that we take are mostly
small protein bars and water. It's easier to carry with us,
especially when we stayed in the cave system overnight. During
the expeditions there were sometimes ten miles deeper more. We
have done many of these over the past four years.
We have made some remarkable discoveries and we've mapped out
miles of cave systems in West Virginia and Kentucky using
a combination of GPR oor, ground penetration radar and light
are from the surface, as well as some new technology
that will make for some amazing new discoveries in the future.
Our average expedition would start when we entered a cave
or a small hole in a mountainside and started to
evaluate if it was safe. Understand that we have left
more caves than we explored due to what appeared to
be unsafe, or when our equipment detected gas. Once we
determine that it is safe, we begin to move deeper
into the cave and into the twilight zone. There is
no presence of light in the dark zone, and we
see nothing if we turn out the lights. Often we
find chambers and passages off to the sides, or even
drop offs in sinkholes. We can use special drones with
lights and cameras to fly over the drop offs or
down the sinkholes, or on top of shelves or ledges
above our reach to see if there are any points
of interest below or above us that we need to explore.
Using those drones have given us access to new passages
and chambers that no human has ever seen, some of
which have led to miles of passages and enormous chambers,
one of which was over one hundred feet tall and
three football feels long fifty yards wide, and we nicknamed
that one the Ballroom. We have discovered entrances to cave
systems that were not noticeable from the top side or
outside the cave. Some of the entrances have been behind waterfalls, crevices,
and cliffs, and under roots of large trees, and even
behind some dead falls that appear to have been pushed
up against it to conceal the entrance. We have mapped
some systems that will travel miles into another exit or entrance,
with the longest one being twenty seven miles in southeast
Kentucky and it goes into Tennessee and that required us
to stay in the cave for over two weeks. We
have scanner units mounted onto our helmet. It's that capture
three D imagery of the cave as we travel, and
we also use GPS signals that rarely are detected above
the surface, but we still have them and occasionally get
close enough to the surface to get our data to
the base camp to be collected. We have other tools
that we have used in the past. One includes a
buoy with a GPS unit. We dropped one in a
fast moving underground river near the West Virginia Kentucky state
line to see where or if it would ever surface.
To our amazement, it reappeared five weeks later, almost three
hundred miles away in the Clinch River near Kingston, Tennessee.
We were astonished it must have traveled under another river
system to arrive to the Clinch River. We are now
developing equipment that we can capture imagery of the underground
river system without our team having to dive into those
underground rivers, with the hopes of capturing the constant location
of the device and the depth under the sea level
as well that will be able to explain how these
rivers are crossing. Other findings are also worth mentioning. We've
found several species of animals or insects that were unknown
or thought to not inhabit this region, as well as
numerous cave drawings that date back over ten thousand years,
along with artifacts such as pottery from the early fourteen hundreds,
spears and arrow heads, muskets or black powder rifles. A
couple of swords. We found knives, shells, some gold and
silver coins from seventeen hundred Europe, along with bones and
I mean a lot of bones. These discoveries found miles underground,
far from known entry points. We report our findings before
moving further, and it slows down the exploration process because
we have to wait for another team to go in
and gather the artifacts. Without us, we would contaminate the scene.
The real question was how did someone get this far
into the cave system with torches, as they would have
to have burnt out well before they got that deep.
They would have had to carry extra torches with them,
and why would they have traveled this deep while the
other team was in our cave. We would go to
another cave for several weeks until we were given the
go ahead to continue our explanation of the original cave.
Rarely were we given any information on what the other
team's findings revealed, especially when it was about bones or
modern day items like a shiny new shotgun we had found,
or the backpack with a West Virginia Park map that
was printed in twenty eighteen and it was over seven
thousand feet into the cave system. We would write it
off to people going beyond their limits and getting lost
in the cave and losing their belongings as they roamed
about in the darkness. And as for the other team,
they were a dull bunch of people with no personality.
Forget trying to talk to them. They were tight left
about their business. They were almost what we would think
of as a stiff government or maybe a CIA personality type.
There were occasions where we would pass them coming or
going and they wouldn't take the time to speak to anyone.
They wouldn't drop any clues or share any findings, absolutely nothing.
Using our newest technology that we had developed was the sphere,
which was a mobile GPR light hoar sphere that set
up on a tripod in the middle of chambers, which
we would leave overnight to scan. The results were beyond belief.
We have found new tunnels that are blocked by large
rocks or boulders. The stones are so heavy that several
men working together could not move them for us to
explore further. But we knew the boulders had been placed
there because the scars remained on the floors and walls.
They had been rolled into position. We had a heavy
hydraulic jack designed to lift rocks off of us should
we become trapped, and we found that this jack could
move the boulders enough to gain entrance into hidden chambers
or caverns. And now that I've given you a brief
description of what we do and how we do it,
I want to tell you of my account that began
on Friday, August the thirteenth of all days in twenty
twenty one. We had been mapping out a cave system
south of Grayson, Kentucky, and we were five miles deep
into the system when we dropped off of a shelf
about twenty feet using our climbing gear to discover a
new passage. It led back east to half a mile
to an oval shaped chamber and and at the far
end of the chamber was a large boulder blocking another
passage that we found by setting up our sphere overnight.
The following Monday was August the sixteenth, and we analyzed
the data and we determined it was worth exploring. After
moving the rock, we followed the passage for another half
mile and then we decided to back out and call
it a day. We returned on the seventeenth to the
oval chamber, and we found the rock had rolled back
to block the entrance. We jacked it back open again
and placed smaller rocks under it to keep it from
rolling back while we were in there exploring. We then
entered the passage and began to map out the system
where we left off. Through the day, we discovered a
labyrinth of passages going in all directions. Some were dead
ends and some were working their way back to the
main cavern. The areas that didn't reconnect, we would follow
those for five hundred feet and then turned back. There
were so many that we wanted to see, but this
system could be thoroughly explored. Later. We were getting our
bearings and taking notes, and we were excited about this discovery.
We started noticing different items, such as fresh leaves and
small twigs on the cave floor. They were green, they
weren't dead, but they shouldn't have been there in the
first place. In the largest passage, we found a shallow
stream with a mud and a swet bottom and bank,
and in that mud we found tracks of all sizes.
They were human looking tracks. Some were smaller than my
feet and others were twenty four inches long and ten
inches wide. Laurie, my female teammate, carefully examined the toes
to see if there were claw marks, because that would
lead us to believe that it was a bear, but
she found none. Well, the day was late and we
pulled out again, marking our route with illuminated paint of
different colors, as we always did when exploring new systems.
The footprints gave us all concern, but it also was exciting.
The passage was nine feet high and we could not
imagine a giant of a man walking around in there.
But this raised questions beyond belief, so we all decided
to keep this finding to our selves for the time being.
On Wednesday, the eighteenth, we found that the rock had
again been rolled back over the entrance and we had
to move it with Jacks. Rodney, the archaeologist, said that
he was going to bust it into pieces if it
happened again, and we proceeded to the stream where we
had left off the previous day to find more tracks.
We slowly moved along the stream, following the direction of
the footprints as it flowed down the center of the cavern,
a quarter of a mile through the passage and into
the chamber. We discovered some of the most disturbing items
we had ever found. There were numerous shoes of different sizes,
including boots and children's sneakers, some clothing that appeared to
be torn, and some looked like it had dried blood
on it, and they were all in piles like someone
had been sleeping on them. There were backpacks and coats.
There was a hatchet and some knives, a couple of firearms,
and children's toys such as dolls and barbies and action figures.
There were balls and toy cars lying all about the chamber,
and then we found a pile of human bones of
all sizes, including children's, all piled up against the wall
at the far end of the chamber. Laurie screamed at
the top of her lungs and began crying uncontrollably, And
as the others tried to comfort her, out of the
darkness of a passage at the far end of the chamber,
near the pile of bones, came a scream or a
roar of a monstrous volume that shook my insides. It
lasted a long time and was immediately answered by another
roar from a different cavern, and then several more The
team instantly began to run toward the exit, with me
bringing up the rear. I had a feeling that something
was behind me, and I quickly looked back over my
shoulder with my high intensity LED light, and I illuminated
the face of a beast that was the size of
a refrigerator, only ten feet behind me. In that brief instant,
I could see the beast's lips were curled back, bearing
large teeth which were like ours except for the canines,
which were larger in proportion than a human. It had
large round of black evil eyes and a flat nose,
and everything around the face was covered with hair. The
animal covered its eyes from the light with its hands
and screamed in pain as if the light heard it,
and it shrank away from me and my light. It
curled up into a ball onto the floor of the cave,
wailing in pain. I was now backing out of the chamber,
trying to keep the light on the beast when I
must have passed the exit and tumbled into a sinkhole.
I got lucky it was only five feet below the
chamber floor. It could have been deeper and I would
have never gotten out of there. I am only five
foot four to start with, and I weighed less than
one hundred and ten pounds fully clothed, and I knew
if I couldn't do something quick, I would end up
in that bone pile. In front of me. I saw
a small crevice that looked to me about my size,
so I dove into it headfirst, and I began to
crawl on my belly back into the darkness. I was
ten feet into the crevice when I heard the monster
scream into the mouth of the crevice behind me, and
I could feel it reaching into the hole as it
started to claw at the walls. The creature was so
close I could smell its foul breath, and this gave
me a surge of strength to move ahead faster. I
crawled ahead without thinking. I was in survival mode and
I wanted to get as far from this thing as possible.
The roars began to fade the further into the passage
I went, and after an hour, I dropped into a
room stalactites hung from the low ceiling and I had
to walk hunched over, but at least I could stand.
I tried to reach my team on the radio, but
I got nothing in response. If I was going to
get out of there. I had to move upward while
avoiding these creatures. I had to get to the surface.
That's all I could think of. I turned down the
intensity of my light to get more life from my batteries,
and I continued walking and crawling. I wandered the uncharted
passages and caverns alone for hours, not knowing where I
was or if I was moving to freedom. I lost
all sense of time, and I didn't know if it
was day or night. And to make matters worse, not
long after that, I was down to my last spare
battery pack. The only light I would have after those
batteries died was my cell phone. I had turned it
off long ago to save it as a last resort
for light. And the exhaustion set in, and I clicked
off my light and I sat in the blackness, and
I fell asleep. I woke to the distant sounds of
clicking and some sort of gibberish that I didn't understand.
The sounds weren't close, thank goodness, but they were looking
for me. Once it sounded so human that I thought
it might be in my team members calling for me,
and I almost shouted to them, but I waited to
make sure, and I'm glad I did, because minutes later
another roar came from the same direction. I drank the
last of my water and I ate the final protein bar.
I then turned my light off and I curled into
a fetal position, hoping the sounds would stop so I
could move again. Strangely, I felt an evil presence near me,
and I knew the creatures were near, but still I waited.
Hours later, the noises stopped, and I assumed they had
given up their search for me. So I got moving,
always trying to move upward. Freedom was above me, and
I had to get there. Two maybe three days later,
I felt hope slipping away. I had lost all sense
of time, and I was weakened now from hydration, and
I was starving to death. I only used my headlamp briefly.
I would click it on, look ahead as far as
I could see, and then turn it on, and then
I would feel my way to something until I needed
light again. While alone in a place this silent, your
sense of hearing heightens. There are no other noises to
interfere with what you were hearing. While taking a break,
and without the noise of my movements, I heard the
hum of traffic. I moved toward the sound until I
saw a faint rays of light penetrating the passage wall.
I was overjoyed, and I was filled with a surge
of energy. There was a small crevice that would be
tight even for my small body to escape through, but
I pushed through it anyway into the sunlight. I was
standing at the base of a cliff that I would
later find out was next to Kentucky State Route seven.
Cars were speeding past below me. I had made it
out alive. My phone still had a charge, and I
call my supervisor. Well. She was ecstatic to hear from me.
She said they picked up my GPS tracker twenty minutes ago.
My tracker must have started broadcasting when I got near
the crevice, and state troopers were on their way, she said.
The police took me back to my hotel room, and
I felt like I drank a gallon of water while
we drove. Now, I wanted to get a shower in
something to eat, but as I got out of the car,
four men approached and ushered me into a small hotel
conference room. I assumed they knew I was exhausted and
hungary and that this meeting would not take long, but
I was wrong. Two of the men were from the
Department of the Interior, one was a Federal Game and
Fish official, and the last was with the US Geological Survey.
The date was August twenty second, and they wanted me
to recount the last ninety six hours my scanner was
still operating. From that data, we found that I had
traveled eleven miles underground from the point at which I
fell into the sinkhole. They began asking me about the
bear we had encountered. Well, I was a biology major,
but I knew damn well that the creature was not
a bear, and I said so. I described the creature
in great detail, but still they continued calling it a bear.
They questioned me for three hours. At some point I
told them I had answered every question and that I
was done, and after walking out, I headed to my
room and I took a long shower. Some food was
brought to me, so I ate like I had never
tasted food, and then I went to sleep. I was
still a bit confused when I woke, but I felt
rested and ready to find my teammates. I went to
all their rooms and the only one who remained there
was Tony. He told me that Laurie was so upset
after the event that she had to be sedated and
was taken to a local hospital. She had been released
and sent home. The other members of the team had
been put on leaving sent home. They had all been
notified that I made it out, and Tony said they
allowed him to stay because he was the only one
who wasn't freaking out. I think that came from his
military training. I later learned that a task force had
come in and Tony guided them back into the cave.
There were way too many people there to be looking
for a bear, though their main mission, Tony later decided
was to gather the human remains in clothing. Tony searched
the area with those men, and he found no sign
of a bear, and then they made castings of several
tracks in the mud before they destroyed all the evidence
they could find. They spent days in that cave system
for that bear, they said, but they never found an animal.
And then it occurred to me that I may have
been the only one who had seen this creature, because
Tony never mentioned it. He kept saying they searched for
a bear, and I think that is what he thought
we were dealing with, and I had never told him
about the creature. I had seen only the men in
the conference room. I was going to leave the next day,
but that evening we went to the bar, and there
we found two members of the task force drinking. After
several drinks, one of them began to talk. This fellow
told us that this team was a unit of special
forces that were used to hunt down Bigfoot. I had
yet to think of a Bigfoot, and I was stuck
on an unknown monster until then, and bigfoot was a myth,
wasn't it. He continued to tell us that this was
only the second underground assignment they had been on, and
that his unit hated the darkness of the cave systems,
even though they were equipped with special equipment that allowed
them to see in the dark zone, or the part
of the cave where there was a complete absence of light.
He said, we were some of the luckiest people he
had ever met, and my falling into that sinkhole gave
all my friends an opportunity to escape because it had
captured the interest of the bigfoot trying to catch me.
He admitted that the government has proof that these animals
are traveling underground as much as they are in the moonlight,
and there is also evidence of them kidnapping people and
eating them. That was obvious to me. I had seen
the chamber with a pile of bones. He was about
to continue with more information. I mean, this guy was
a real bliber mouth. But one of the men who
questioned me grabbed a hold of him by the shoulder
and said that that was enough, soldier, and you should
try This fellow then sat down and he asked us
what we were told. Well, at first we were hesitant
to tell him, but we did so any way, to
which he told us that the soldier was drunk and
he was telling tall tales to scare us, and we
shouldn't put much faith in what he was saying. The
next day, we were informed that our project had lost
its funding and we were all terminated and were given
a year's wages a severance pay. I've kept in touch
with the others, and it seems that I'm the only
one who has been able to find work in this field. Currently,
I do geological and soul analysis for a general contractor
for building foundations. None of our group have returned to
the darkness of the underworld and its secrets that we
loved and cherished up until that August week. I have
been left with more questions than I care to imagine.
Was that a Bigfoot we encountered in that cave? Are
they using the cave systems to travel undetected? Do they
really kidnap people and eat them? What does the government know?
What was the real purpose of the government funding of
our expeditions and mapping out the cave systems in the
first place. Why won't the government inform people of these
animals and the dangers? And that's the end of her story.
Have y'all ever heard a story like that. I've never
heard anything like that. Now Again, like I said in
my last video, I don't know if any of these
stories that I read are true, but this was a
sure enough story email to me. She has enough information
on the job and the spielunking equipment and all that
stuff that adds a little bit of credibility to the story.
But you know who knows either way, It was a
real good story. And I tell you what, you couldn't
pay me to go into one of those caves. And
it's not because I think Bigfoot is in there. I
am not terribly claustrophobic, but I've read articles and I've
seen videos where people get stuck in these caves. They
can send in twenty or thirty men and they cannot
get them unstuck, and the people just have to lay
there and die. What a horrible, horrible way to die.
And I just I can't. And I've seen other videos
with these guys. They squeak through these real type rock formations,
or they'll be flat on their stomach and the rock
is just right down on them. I always think, man,
if that rock formation shifted just a fraction of an inch,
it would just squash you right there. I know everything
you know. I know that's probably not the way it works,
but it could anyway. I don't want to get stuck
in a dark cave somewhere and die in the dark.
That's just me anyway. Jenna, thank you for sending this story.
I really admire your profession. You're a pretty brave girl.
All right, that's gonna wind this podcast up. I hope
you guys enjoyed it, and we'll see you on the
next one. Thank you.