Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: If you've been with me for the first two parts
Speaker 1: of this series, you know what we're doing here. And
Speaker 1: if you haven't, go back and listen to those first,
Speaker 1: because this one's going to land different. If you've heard
Speaker 1: what came before it, here's the quick version for context.
Speaker 1: Part one was Herschel, retired mill worker from Dalton, Georgia,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight. He and three buddies leased a hunting
Speaker 1: parcel in the Kahudah Wilderness, and over the course of
Speaker 1: five nights, something came into their camp and messed with them,
Speaker 1: not attacked, messed with, moved their coolers without damaging them,
Speaker 1: took a dressed dough off the hanging pole and laid
Speaker 1: it in the fire ring like a centerpiece. There was
Speaker 1: knocking from two directions the valley, answering the ridge back
Speaker 1: and forth, coordinated like something talking to something else. Bipedal
Speaker 1: footsteps heavy enough that one of the guys felt the
Speaker 1: impact through the ground. And on the last night herschel
Speaker 1: put his flashlight into the hemlocks and got reddish eyes
Speaker 1: shine back at about eight feet something just standing there
Speaker 1: looking at him. Part two was Karen sixteen years later,
Speaker 1: twelve miles north same ridge line. She was a seasonal
Speaker 1: worker for the Forest Service doing road maintenance on a
Speaker 1: decommissioned fire road. Over three weeks, she documented tree breaks
Speaker 1: at six to nine feet, a smell that showed up
Speaker 1: at the same GPS coordinates every afternoon on a schedule,
Speaker 1: nineteen inch tracks and creaked mud with no claw marks,
Speaker 1: and handprints on a clay bank with fingers longer than hers. Then,
Speaker 1: on her last week, she got a flat tire on
Speaker 1: the road. After dark, something walked toward her on the gravel,
Speaker 1: stopped about forty feet away, paced back and forth across
Speaker 1: the road for ten minutes, and then stepped off into
Speaker 1: the timber and exhaled one long breath from above her
Speaker 1: head height, close enough to hear the rasp of it.
Speaker 1: Two people who've never met, same ridge, same behavioral patterns,
Speaker 1: the slow escalation, the deliberate review, the silence that drops
Speaker 1: over the woods when the thing gets close. Tonight, we
Speaker 1: jump nine years past Karen and a few more miles
Speaker 1: up the corridor. It's two thousand and three, late September,
Speaker 1: and a man named Marcus is sitting alone on a
Speaker 1: ridge saddle in the Cherokee National Forest with a spotting
Speaker 1: scope and a notebook, doing what he does every fall,
Speaker 1: scouting terrain, reading sign getting ready for bo season. He's
Speaker 1: not looking for anything weird. He's looking for deer, and
Speaker 1: his optics are about to show him something that'll take
Speaker 1: up space in his head for the next twenty years. Now,
Speaker 1: what makes this story different from the first two, and
Speaker 1: I realized this pretty early in my conversations with Marcus,
Speaker 1: is the nature of the evidence. Herschel's story was experiential.
Speaker 1: He felt things, heard things, saw eyeshine in the dark.
Speaker 1: Karen's was more methodical. She documented physical evidence over weeks, prints, smell,
Speaker 1: tree breaks. But both of their stories depend ultimately on
Speaker 1: their testimony. You believe them or you don't. There's nothing
Speaker 1: they can hand you. Marcus has something he can hand you.
Speaker 1: He has trail camera images. He has field notes taken
Speaker 1: during the observation with time stamps. He has data. And
Speaker 1: for a story like this, data changes the conversation. It
Speaker 1: doesn't prove anything. I want to be careful about that.
Speaker 1: Trail camera images from three aren't exactly forensic quality, but
Speaker 1: they exist. They're on an SD card in a fireproof safe,
Speaker 1: and they show something that a wildlife biologist couldn't identify.
Speaker 1: That matters in a field where most of the evidence
Speaker 1: is anecdotal, Any physical record matters. Marcus sent me an
Speaker 1: email about two thousand words, single spaced, no preamble. No,
Speaker 1: you're probably not going to believe this. He just opened
Speaker 1: with the date, the location, the weather conditions, and what
Speaker 1: he observed. He used the word observe four times on
Speaker 1: the first page, not saw, not spotted, observed, like he
Speaker 1: was writing up a field report for someone who was
Speaker 1: going to grade it. That told me a lot about
Speaker 1: who I was dealing with before I ever heard his voice.
Speaker 1: When I called, he answered with his full name, first
Speaker 1: and last, like a business line. His voice is steady,
Speaker 1: a little clipped. He talks the way people talk when
Speaker 1: they've spent years in professional settings. We're saying the wrong
Speaker 1: word costs you something. He doesn't ramble, he doesn't backtrack.
Speaker 1: If he starts a sentence, he finishes it, and when
Speaker 1: he's done with the thought, he stops. No trailing off,
Speaker 1: no filler, no you know what I mean, just clean delivery.
Speaker 1: It's almost unsettling how precise he is. Marcus is fifty one,
Speaker 1: lives outside Knoxville with his wife and their teenage son.
Speaker 1: He sells industrial equipment, compressors, generators, that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: the kind of sales were you've got to know your
Speaker 1: product cold and answer technical questions on the fly. He's
Speaker 1: been doing it for over fifteen years. Before that, he
Speaker 1: was in the Army for six years, including a deployment
Speaker 1: to Kosovo in ninety nine. He doesn't talk about the
Speaker 1: military much, mentioned it once briefly and moved on. He's
Speaker 1: been bow hunting since he was fourteen when his dad
Speaker 1: set him up with a recurve in the backyard, shooting
Speaker 1: at a bag target propped against the fence. And here's
Speaker 1: where I need you to pay attention, because the bow
Speaker 1: hunting thing isn't a side detail. It's the lens. Everything
Speaker 1: else gets filtered through. Marcus competes in three D archery.
Speaker 1: That's where you walk a course through the woods and
Speaker 1: shoot at foam animal targets set at distances. Nobody tells you.
Speaker 1: You have to estimate the range yourself from the terrain,
Speaker 1: from the size of the target, from experience. Then you
Speaker 1: adjust for angle and wind and put the arrow in
Speaker 1: a kill zone about the size of a paper plate.
Speaker 1: He's been doing this for over twenty years. He's placed
Speaker 1: at state level competitions. He practices almost every day, even
Speaker 1: in the off season, and he keeps a log draw weight,
Speaker 1: arrow speed, group size at different distances. He tracks it
Speaker 1: the way some people track their mile times. He brings
Speaker 1: that same discipline to his hunting. When Marcus scouts a
Speaker 1: new area, he doesn't just walk through and look around.
Speaker 1: He sits, He watches. He writes things down in a
Speaker 1: field journal, date time, temperature, wind, speed, and direction, barometric pressure,
Speaker 1: cloud cover, what he sees and where he sees it.
Speaker 1: He photographs terrain features. He treats scouting like data collection,
Speaker 1: because to him, that's what it is. More data, better decisions,
Speaker 1: better decisions, more filled tags. That's how his mind works.
Speaker 1: Everything is a system. I'm telling you all of this
Speaker 1: because what happens next only means what it means if
Speaker 1: you understand who it's happening to. This isn't somebody who
Speaker 1: gets startled by a shadow and calls it a monster.
Speaker 1: This is a man who measures things, who trusts what
Speaker 1: he can see through good glass and what he can
Speaker 1: write down in a notebook. And what he saw that
Speaker 1: morning in the Cherokee broke his system. He'd been looking
Speaker 1: at this particular area on a topo map for a
Speaker 1: couple of seasons. A series of ridge saddles connecting higher
Speaker 1: ground to a creek bottom with a clear cut on
Speaker 1: the east side that was about five years old. Young
Speaker 1: clearcuts grow back thick BlackBerry, sumac, young tulip, poplar, deer food,
Speaker 1: and the edge where the clearcut meets standing timber is
Speaker 1: where deer move between feeding and bedding. On paper, it
Speaker 1: looked like exactly the kind of spot a mature buck
Speaker 1: would set up in the fall. Late September three, he
Speaker 1: drove out before dawn, parked at a trailhead about two
Speaker 1: miles from the area he wanted to look at, and
Speaker 1: hiked in on an old logging road scope, tripod, journal, water,
Speaker 1: a couple energy bar, just a scouting trip. The walk
Speaker 1: took about forty five minutes. He was moving quiet, the
Speaker 1: way he always does when he's approaching an area he
Speaker 1: wants to glass. You don't go crashing through the woods
Speaker 1: when you're trying to see what's there before it sees you.
Speaker 1: He got to a saddle on the ridge at about
Speaker 1: seven point fifteen good vantage point. The clear cut spread
Speaker 1: out below him to the east, maybe three hundred yards across,
Speaker 1: five or six hundred yards long, sloping gently down to
Speaker 1: a creek standing timber on the far side. Climbing the
Speaker 1: opposite ridge, he could see the whole thing from up there.
Speaker 1: He set up his scope behind a downed log. Swarovsky
Speaker 1: ats eighty and if you're not into optics, all you
Speaker 1: need to know is that it's serious glass twenty to
Speaker 1: sixty power magnification. At four hundred yards you can count
Speaker 1: the times on a rack. The image is sharp enough
Speaker 1: that you trust what you're seeing. Marcus has been looking
Speaker 1: through scopes like this for over twenty years. He knows
Speaker 1: how to read an image distance. Clear morning, low fifties, light,
Speaker 1: wind from the northwest. He wrote all of it down
Speaker 1: before he started looking. That's just what he does. For
Speaker 1: the first hour and a half, he watched deer feeding
Speaker 1: at the south end, a young six pointer along the
Speaker 1: timber edge, couple of turkeys scratching around in the open.
Speaker 1: Good activity. He was feeling positive about the area, and
Speaker 1: then around eight forty five, every dough in the clear
Speaker 1: cut stopped feeding at the same time. Deer don't do
Speaker 1: that for no reason. When a group of dos all
Speaker 1: stop eating simultaneously and point the same direction, something is there.
Speaker 1: Marcus has seen it a thousand times. A coyote moving
Speaker 1: through brush, another deer approaching a person on a trail.
Speaker 1: The dos are the early warning system. They see it first.
Speaker 1: But what he was seeing wasn't casual alertness. These deer
Speaker 1: were frozen, ears locked forward, bodies stiff, every one of
Speaker 1: them staring north. He watched them for about fifteen seconds.
Speaker 1: The little buck did the same thing. Turkeys went heads up.
Speaker 1: Every animal in that clearing was looking at the same
Speaker 1: spot at the north end of the clear cut. Every
Speaker 1: prey animal in a three hundred yard field just stopped
Speaker 1: what it was doing and locked onto one point. Whatever
Speaker 1: they were looking at. It wasn't a squirrel. Marcus swung
Speaker 1: the scope north. There was a stump up there, big one,
Speaker 1: about four feet tall three feet across, left over from
Speaker 1: the timber harvest. He'd noticed it earlier when he scanned
Speaker 1: the clearing. Unremarkable. Now there was something standing on it,
Speaker 1: something that hadn't been there an hour ago. First thought
Speaker 1: was bear. Black bear standing on the stump to get
Speaker 1: a look around. They do that sometimes, get up on
Speaker 1: an elevated surface to see over the brush. He's seen
Speaker 1: it before. Not common, but not weird. He centered the scope,
Speaker 1: brought the magnification up to about forty power and looked
Speaker 1: dark black or very dark brown, wide across the shoulders
Speaker 1: and chest, standing upright on the stump, facing south, roughly
Speaker 1: toward the doze. The head was turned slightly away from him,
Speaker 1: so he couldn't make out the face. No obvious neck.
Speaker 1: The head looked like it sat right on the shoulders,
Speaker 1: thick torso all around. He wrote bear on stump north
Speaker 1: end in his journal and kept watching. Figured it would
Speaker 1: drop to all fours in a few seconds, confirmed the
Speaker 1: id and he'd move on. It didn't drop. It stepped
Speaker 1: off the stump, not jumped, not slid, stepped one leg forward,
Speaker 1: extended to the ground, weight transferred, smooth, controlled the way
Speaker 1: you or I would step off a curb. And it
Speaker 1: kept going on two legs. Marcus told me his brain
Speaker 1: needed a few seconds to process what his eyes were
Speaker 1: showing him. He was waiting for the drop. That's the
Speaker 1: thing with bears. When they stand up, it's temporary. A
Speaker 1: few seconds, a couple of wobbly steps, and back down
Speaker 1: to four legs. That's how they're built. He had his
Speaker 1: mental model loaded and ready, stump stand step, drop, walk
Speaker 1: away on all fours, but the drop didn't come. Five seconds,
Speaker 1: ten fifteen. It was still upright, still walking, still moving
Speaker 1: south through the brush on two legs. He told me
Speaker 1: there was a specific moment, he remembers it clearly, when
Speaker 1: his brain switched categories, when it stopped being bear doing
Speaker 1: something unusual and became I don't know what I'm looking at.
Speaker 1: He said. It was like a gear slipping one second
Speaker 1: he had a name for this thing, and the next
Speaker 1: second the name fell off, and there was just this
Speaker 1: shape in his scope that didn't match anything. And here's
Speaker 1: what's interesting about Marcus. He didn't panic, he didn't pull
Speaker 1: away from the scope. He did what Marcus does. He
Speaker 1: kept watching and he started recording details. His training kicked
Speaker 1: in the same way it kicks in when he's ranging
Speaker 1: a target at a tournament. Assess, measure record, whatever this was,
Speaker 1: he was going to observe it properly. It walked upright
Speaker 1: into the clear cut south through waist high brush, steady,
Speaker 1: even strides its arms and he used the word arms,
Speaker 1: not legs, not four legs, hung at its sides and
Speaker 1: swung with each step, left arm forward when the right
Speaker 1: leg stepped, right arm forward when the left natural bipedal
Speaker 1: arm swing. Except the arms were too long. They hung
Speaker 1: down past the waist, past where your hands would fall
Speaker 1: if you were walking. They ended somewhere around mid thigh.
Speaker 1: I asked him to go through it piece by piece.
Speaker 1: What else could he see at forty power? He got
Speaker 1: quiet for a second. That's his tail when he's making
Speaker 1: sure he's going to say exactly what he means and
Speaker 1: nothing more. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. The color was consistent all over,
Speaker 1: dark brown, not black. He was firm about that, like
Speaker 1: wet bark, he said, or dark chocolate. Same tone head
Speaker 1: to toe, no lighter patches on the chest or face.
Speaker 1: The surface had texture, not smooth, more like a rough
Speaker 1: coat of some kind, and it absorbed light instead of
Speaker 1: reflecting it, which made it hard to pick out anatomical
Speaker 1: detail even through the scope. The head was wide, whiter
Speaker 1: than a person's. He thought he saw a slight crest
Speaker 1: or peak at the top, but he was careful about it.
Speaker 1: I don't want to add something I'm not sure of,
Speaker 1: he said, might have been the angle. The shoulders were big, wide,
Speaker 1: and sloped, with a thickness to the upper body that
Speaker 1: made a human build look narrow by comparison. Chest was
Speaker 1: deep front to back, much thicker than anything human shape
Speaker 1: should be. He said. It looked like a barrel. No
Speaker 1: taper at the waist, more like a cylinder. He couldn't see.
Speaker 1: The face angle was wrong for most of the observation.
Speaker 1: He thought he caught a partial profile at one point,
Speaker 1: flat face, heavy brow, but he wouldn't commit to it.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to describe something I didn't clearly see.
Speaker 1: He said, that's Marcus. He'd rather leave a gap in
Speaker 1: the account than fill it with a guess, and that,
Speaker 1: to me is what makes him credible. People who are
Speaker 1: making things up fill in every gap. People who are
Speaker 1: telling the truth leave the parts they're not sure about empty.
Speaker 1: He estimated height by the brush. He knew what was
Speaker 1: growing in that clear cut BlackBerry Siu mac young poplar
Speaker 1: three to three and a half feet in the open areas.
Speaker 1: The brush hit this thing at about the waist. That
Speaker 1: puts it somewhere around seven to seven and a half
Speaker 1: feet tall. He estimated stride by watching it pass fixed points, stumps, rocks,
Speaker 1: individual bushes. He could identify four and a half to
Speaker 1: five feet between steps, consistent same pace the whole way across.
Speaker 1: That's a long stride, longer than a tall person's, and
Speaker 1: it covered ground about two hundred yards of open clearcut
Speaker 1: walking upright the entire time, no stumbling, no wobbling, no
Speaker 1: dropping to all fours. It moved through that brush the
Speaker 1: way you'd walk down your driveway, like it wasn't thinking
Speaker 1: about the act of walking because it didn't need to
Speaker 1: like That was just the way it got around. After
Speaker 1: about a minute, he started his watch time or function
Speaker 1: on his Casio. Three minutes and forty seven seconds that's
Speaker 1: how long he watched it after he thought to hit
Speaker 1: the button. Total observation was closer to four and a
Speaker 1: half minutes. I want you to sit with that number.
Speaker 1: Four and a half minutes through a Swarovsky's spoting scope
Speaker 1: in clear morning light. That's not a glimpse. That's not
Speaker 1: a flash in the headlights. That's sitting there, eyed a
Speaker 1: glass watching something walk across a field for longer than
Speaker 1: it takes to boil an egg. At the south end,
Speaker 1: it reached the timber and walked straight in. Didn't pause,
Speaker 1: didn't slow down, didn't look back one second. It was there,
Speaker 1: and then it was gone. The doughs were gone too,
Speaker 1: He hadn't noticed them leave. He'd been locked on the
Speaker 1: scope the whole time. He sat behind that log for
Speaker 1: at least ten minutes afterward, didn't move, kept the scope
Speaker 1: pointed at the spot where it went into the trees,
Speaker 1: hoping it would come back, hoping he'd get another look
Speaker 1: that might make the whole thing make sense. Nothing the
Speaker 1: clear cut was empty. The turkeys were gone, the doughs
Speaker 1: were gone. Everything that had been out there fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: ago had cleared out, and the field just sat there,
Speaker 1: still and vacant. He pulled his eye off the scope
Speaker 1: and looked down at his hands on the tripod. They
Speaker 1: were shaking, not a lot, but enough to notice. He
Speaker 1: sat there and watched his own hands tremble and had
Speaker 1: a thought that came through as clearly as if someone
Speaker 1: had spoken it out loud. Either something is wrong with
Speaker 1: the world or something is wrong with me, and I
Speaker 1: need to figure out which one it is. I want
Speaker 1: to stop here for a second, because I think that
Speaker 1: line tells you everything about Marcus. He didn't think what
Speaker 1: the hell was that. He didn't think I need to
Speaker 1: get out of here. He thought, I need to figure
Speaker 1: this out. That's who he is. Even in the middle
Speaker 1: of something that shook him to his core, his instinct
Speaker 1: was to frame it as a problem that needed solving,
Speaker 1: not to run from it. To understand it. Most people
Speaker 1: aren't like that. Most people, when they see something they
Speaker 1: can't explain, they either panic or they start talking themselves
Speaker 1: out of it before they've even finished processing it. Marcus
Speaker 1: did neither. He just sat there with the question and
Speaker 1: started working on it. Here's where the story shifts, and honestly,
Speaker 1: this is the part I find most compelling about Marcus's
Speaker 1: whole account, because the sighting itself is remarkable. Four and
Speaker 1: a half minutes through a Swarowski in clear light at
Speaker 1: a distance where the optics give you real detail. That's
Speaker 1: an extraordinary observation. But what makes Marcus' story different from
Speaker 1: most encounters I hear about isn't the sighting. It's what
Speaker 1: happened in his head afterward. It's the twenty year aftermath
Speaker 1: of a man whose entire worldview is built on evidence
Speaker 1: and logic, trying to reconcile what his evidence is telling
Speaker 1: him with what his logic says shouldn't be possible. With
Speaker 1: most encounter stories, the sighting is the whole thing. Somebody
Speaker 1: sees something, they describe it, end of story. With Marcus,
Speaker 1: the sighting is the first act. The second act is
Speaker 1: a man slowly coming apart at the seams because the
Speaker 1: world stopped making sense and he can't force it back together.
Speaker 1: He sat on that saddle for two more hours after
Speaker 1: the thing disappeared. Didn't Scout, didn't Glass for deer. He
Speaker 1: sat there with his journal open on his knee and
Speaker 1: wrote time of initial observation. Estimated distance four hundred yards
Speaker 1: based on the known dimensions of the clear cut. Height
Speaker 1: estimate one to seven and a half feet derived from
Speaker 1: brush height comparison, Stride estimate four and a half to
Speaker 1: five feet measured against fixed reference points, color proportions. He
Speaker 1: went through these methodically, the way you describe something in
Speaker 1: a biology lab. Head to shoulder ratio, arm length relative
Speaker 1: to torso length, depth of the chest front to back.
Speaker 1: He described the gait in specific terms, sustained bipedal locomotion,
Speaker 1: consistent stride length and cadence, coordinated armswing, no evidence of
Speaker 1: instability or compensatory movement. Duration three minutes forty seven seconds
Speaker 1: on the timer. Estimated total observation four to four and
Speaker 1: a half minutes. He sketched the clear cut from memory
Speaker 1: and drew the thing's path with the dotted line. He
Speaker 1: noted wind direction, temperature, cloud cover. He noted that the
Speaker 1: deer had reacted to the thing before he ever saw it,
Speaker 1: and that every animal in the clearing had vacated during
Speaker 1: or shortly after the observation. And then he sat there
Speaker 1: and read what he'd written, read it back to himself twice,
Speaker 1: and each time the same question. What was it? So
Speaker 1: he started running through the options one by one, the
Speaker 1: way an engineer works through a troubleshooting list. You don't
Speaker 1: skip ahead to the weird answer. You start with the
Speaker 1: obvious ones and eliminate them. Bear was first. That's the
Speaker 1: one he was pulling for a black bear walking on
Speaker 1: its hind legs. He knows bears, He's watched dozens of
Speaker 1: them in these mountains. And here's what he knows about
Speaker 1: bears on two legs. It looks wrong. The hips aren't
Speaker 1: designed for it. The center of gravity tips forward, they shuffle,
Speaker 1: they wobble, and they drop back to all fours within
Speaker 1: a few steps, because sustained upright walking isn't what their
Speaker 1: skeleton is built to do. He's watched videos, he's read
Speaker 1: about the biomechanics. He's seen it in person. He knows
Speaker 1: what it looks like. What he watched through that scope.
Speaker 1: Nothing like that. The thing moved like being upright was
Speaker 1: its factory setting. No forward lean, no shuffle, no effort.
Speaker 1: It walked the way you and I walk, except it
Speaker 1: was seven and a half feet tall with arms that
Speaker 1: hung to its thighs and a torso built like a
Speaker 1: fifty five gallon drum. He spent about an hour trying
Speaker 1: to make bear work. Couldn't person was next, big person
Speaker 1: in dark clothing, maybe a gilly suit, maybe heavy coveralls
Speaker 1: that hid the clothing lines he worked through it. Could
Speaker 1: a person be seven and a half feet tall? Technically possible,
Speaker 1: though you're talking about one in several million. Could a
Speaker 1: person walk through waist high brush at that speed without stumbling,
Speaker 1: maybe if they knew the ground. Could a person have
Speaker 1: arms that hang down to mid thigh. No, that's the
Speaker 1: one that killed it for him. That's not a clothing issue.
Speaker 1: That skeletal proportion. Human arms end at about fingertip to
Speaker 1: mid thigh at the very longest, and that's on a
Speaker 1: person with unusually long arms. What he saw through the
Speaker 1: scope had arms that were proportionally longer than any human
Speaker 1: variation he'd ever seen or read about. He couldn't make
Speaker 1: person work either, and that left him on a ridge
Speaker 1: in the Cherokee with a journal full of careful observations
Speaker 1: and absolutely nowhere to file them, no category, no label,
Speaker 1: no explanation that survived contact with the data. Here's what
Speaker 1: gets me about this part of Marcus's story. Most people,
Speaker 1: when they hit this wall, when the normal explanations run out,
Speaker 1: they picked the least bad one anyway. They grab onto
Speaker 1: bear or person or trick of the light, even if
Speaker 1: it doesn't really hold up, because having a shaky answer
Speaker 1: feels better than having no answer at all. Marcus couldn't
Speaker 1: do that. His brain won't let him accept an explanation
Speaker 1: that doesn't survive scrutiny. It's the same thing that makes
Speaker 1: him a good competitive archer. He doesn't fudge his yard adjustamates.
Speaker 1: He doesn't round off his grouping data. If the number
Speaker 1: is what it is, that's the number. You don't change
Speaker 1: it to make yourself feel better. So instead of picking
Speaker 1: the least bad option, he just sat there with the
Speaker 1: question open, unanswered for twenty years and counting. On the
Speaker 1: drive home, he pulled over twice, not because he was
Speaker 1: having some kind of emotional episode, because his brain was
Speaker 1: grinding on the problem so hard that he stopped watching
Speaker 1: the road. He realized he'd been driving for ten minutes
Speaker 1: without any awareness of speed or traffic or turns, and
Speaker 1: that scared him enough to pull into a gravel lot
Speaker 1: near a trailhead and sit there for fifteen minutes with
Speaker 1: the truck running, just sitting, eyes on the windshield but
Speaker 1: not seeing anything, running the observation through his head frame
Speaker 1: by frame. He pulled over a second time, about twenty
Speaker 1: minutes later. This time he grabbed his journal and wrote
Speaker 1: down things he'd remembered since the first round of notes,
Speaker 1: details that had surfaced. The way the brush bent forward
Speaker 1: as the things left legs pushed through it, and then
Speaker 1: sprang back upright after it passed, the fact that it
Speaker 1: never turned its head, not once during the entire crossing.
Speaker 1: It just faced forward and walked, the consistency of the stride,
Speaker 1: not speeding up, not slowing down, not adjusting for obstacles,
Speaker 1: same pace, same length, every step like a machine, except
Speaker 1: machines don't have muscles, and machines don't scare deer. He
Speaker 1: went home, made dinner for himself and his son. His
Speaker 1: wife was working late that night, helped the kid with homework,
Speaker 1: sat on the couch and stared at the TV without
Speaker 1: absorbing any of it. Went through all the motions of
Speaker 1: a normal evening while his brain was one hundred miles
Speaker 1: away on a ridge saddle looking through a scope at
Speaker 1: something that shouldn't exist. He went to bed around ten,
Speaker 1: lay there for three hours. Every time he'd start to
Speaker 1: drift towards sleep, his brain would serve up another frame
Speaker 1: from the observation, and he'd be fully awake again. The
Speaker 1: step down from the stump, the arm swing, the brush parting,
Speaker 1: the timber, swallowing it over and over. He considered hallucination,
Speaker 1: and I want to be clear, he didn't just wave
Speaker 1: this off. He sat with it. He gave it honest,
Speaker 1: serious consideration. Because Marcus is the kind of person who'd
Speaker 1: rather discover he had a medical episode than except that
Speaker 1: he saw something impossible. A hallucination would be easier. A
Speaker 1: hallucination has an explanation. You go to a doctor, you
Speaker 1: get checked out, you find the cause, you address it.
Speaker 1: That's a solvable problem. What he saw through that scope,
Speaker 1: if it was real, is not a solvable problem, Not
Speaker 1: for him, not for anyone. So he went through the checklist.
Speaker 1: Had he been drinking the night before, No, was he
Speaker 1: on any medication, No, had he ever experienced a visual
Speaker 1: hallucination before under any circumstances. No, did anyone in his
Speaker 1: family have a hissy tree of psychosis, schizophrenia, anything that
Speaker 1: might produce visual hallucinations. No, was he sleep deprived, Not really,
Speaker 1: He'd slept fine the night before, about six hours dehydrated possible,
Speaker 1: but he'd been drinking water on the hike in low
Speaker 1: blood sugar maybe, but he'd eaten a granola bar before
Speaker 1: he started glassing. Was there any environmental factor, gas seeping
Speaker 1: from the ground, something in the air, a carbon monoxide
Speaker 1: issue with his truck that might have lingered, anything at
Speaker 1: all that could explain a sustained, coherent visual hallucination lasting
Speaker 1: four and a half minutes. He couldn't find one. And
Speaker 1: here's the thing that really kills the hallucination theory. And
Speaker 1: I want you to hear this because it's the part
Speaker 1: people tend to overlook. Hallucinations are incoherent. They're fragmentary. They
Speaker 1: shift and morph and don't hold together under sustained observation.
Speaker 1: What Marcus saw maintained consistent proportions, consists gait, consistent speed
Speaker 1: across two hundred yards for nearly five minutes. The brush
Speaker 1: physically bent around it as it walked. He watched it
Speaker 1: happen through the scope, individual stalks of vegetation bending forward
Speaker 1: as the legs pushed through and springing back up after.
Speaker 1: That's not in his head. That's physics. And the deer,
Speaker 1: the dos reacted to the thing before Marcus ever saw it.
Speaker 1: They stopped feeding, turned north, and froze. That reaction happened
Speaker 1: in the real world. Those deer were responding to a
Speaker 1: stimulus that was in the clear cut, not in Marcus's brain.
Speaker 1: If he hallucinated the thing on the stump, then the
Speaker 1: deer just happened to independently react to the same spot
Speaker 1: at the same moment for no reason. That's not a
Speaker 1: coincidence he could accept. He told me the hallucination theory
Speaker 1: lasted about half an hour before it fell apart, the
Speaker 1: same way everything else had no angle survived contact with
Speaker 1: the data. He didn't sleep that night or the next,
Speaker 1: and those two nights were bad. Not because he was scared.
Speaker 1: That's not really the right word for what Marcus was
Speaker 1: going through. It was more like his operating system had
Speaker 1: crashed and he couldn't reboot it. He'd lie there in
Speaker 1: the dark and his brain would cycle through the observation,
Speaker 1: try to match it to a known category, fail and
Speaker 1: start over. Stump step, walk, arms, brush, timber, what was
Speaker 1: it on a loop? Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. For hours, his wife
Speaker 1: could tell something was wrong. She's been married to the
Speaker 1: man for over twenty years. She knows what his silence
Speaker 1: sounds like when he's focused on a work problem, and
Speaker 1: what it sounds like when something's actually bothering him. Second night,
Speaker 1: she asked. He told her he'd seen something in the
Speaker 1: woods that was eating at him. She asked what. He said,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure yet, which was true in the sense
Speaker 1: that he knew exactly what he'd observed but hadn't decided
Speaker 1: yet what he was willing to call it. She didn't push,
Speaker 1: and I think that restraint matters. She gave him space
Speaker 1: to work through it at his own pace. She could
Speaker 1: have pressed him, could have gotten worried, could have suggested
Speaker 1: he see someone. She just let him sit with it.
Speaker 1: That's trust. Third morning, kitchen table, coffee journal, quiet house,
Speaker 1: wife still asleep, kids still asleep, and Marcus sat there
Speaker 1: and made a decision. He was done running the loop.
Speaker 1: Replaying the observation in his head wasn't solving anything. It
Speaker 1: was just wearing a groove. He needed to do something different.
Speaker 1: He needed to do what he knows how to do
Speaker 1: collect more data. He had a few Moultarie trail cameras
Speaker 1: standard gear for the early two thousands, motion sensor infrared
Speaker 1: flash for nighttime images saved to an SD card. He
Speaker 1: used them every season to pattern deer. You strap one
Speaker 1: to a tree, pointed at a trail or a food source.
Speaker 1: Come back in a week see what walked by. Simple.
Speaker 1: Three days after the siding, he loaded a camera in
Speaker 1: his pack and drove back to the Cherokee, and the
Speaker 1: walk in felt different this time. He told me that
Speaker 1: was the first thing he noticed. The first trip. He'd
Speaker 1: been relaxed scouting. This time, he was wound tight before
Speaker 1: he even left the truck. He was paying attention to everything,
Speaker 1: not just the stuff he'd normally notice, but everything. A
Speaker 1: branch cracking somewhere off the trail, a shadow that shifted
Speaker 1: in his peripheral vision, the way birds went quiet in
Speaker 1: one section of timber and then started up again after
Speaker 1: he passed through. He caught himself stopping to check his
Speaker 1: back trail, which is something he never does. He had
Speaker 1: a Glock twenty on his hip, ten milimeter, a serious handgun.
Speaker 1: He'd never felt the need to carry a sidearm while scouting. Before,
Speaker 1: he'd been in these woods hundreds of times without one
Speaker 1: and never thought twice. The fact that he strapped it
Speaker 1: on that morning without even debating it told him something
Speaker 1: about where his head was, and he didn't love what
Speaker 1: it told him. I hear this from witnesses more than
Speaker 1: you'd think. Not the gun specifically. It's the behavior change
Speaker 1: that comes after people who spent their entire lives comfortable
Speaker 1: in the woods suddenly aren't. Something breaks in the relationship.
Speaker 1: You've been in a room your whole life and felt
Speaker 1: safe there, and then one day you find out there
Speaker 1: was something in the room with you the whole time
Speaker 1: that you never knew about. The room doesn't change, you change,
Speaker 1: and you can't change back because you can't unknow what
Speaker 1: you know. Something had shifted between Marcus and the woods.
Speaker 1: Some trust he'd carried his whole life was gone, and
Speaker 1: he hadn't agreed to give it up. He got to
Speaker 1: the saddle, glassed the clear cut for about thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: Force of habit. Nothing unusual does feeding at the south end. Turkeys,
Speaker 1: a hawk on the far ridge, no dark shapes on stumps.
Speaker 1: He walked down to the edge of the clear cut
Speaker 1: and picked a tree for the camera, big oak, about
Speaker 1: halfway between the saddle and the north end where the
Speaker 1: stump was. He wanted the widest coverage possible, so he
Speaker 1: mounted the camera about five feet up, angled slightly down,
Speaker 1: pointed east across the opening, turned it on, checked the battery,
Speaker 1: made sure the card was seated, stepped back and photographed
Speaker 1: the camera's position with his own camera so he could
Speaker 1: find the exact tree when he came back, wrote down
Speaker 1: the GPS coordinates. Then he left. Didn't stayed a scout,
Speaker 1: didn't sit on the saddle. He wanted his scent out
Speaker 1: of there. If something was using this clear cut, his
Speaker 1: presence would alter the pattern. He gave it seven days,
Speaker 1: and those seven days were rough. I asked him about
Speaker 1: this specifically because I think the waiting period is an
Speaker 1: underappreciated part of these stories. People hear about the siding
Speaker 1: and the trail camera, and they focus on those moments.
Speaker 1: But the end between, the part where you're just living
Speaker 1: your life while this thing is sitting in the back
Speaker 1: of your skull, that's where the real weight is. He
Speaker 1: went to work, made sales calls, sat in meetings, smiled
Speaker 1: at customers, drove to his son's soccer games and stood
Speaker 1: on the sideline, clapping at the right moments. Normal life,
Speaker 1: normal routine. But underneath all of it, the clear cut
Speaker 1: was running like a program he couldn't close. He'd be
Speaker 1: mid sentence on a phone call giving a quote on
Speaker 1: a compressor system, and suddenly he was back on that saddle,
Speaker 1: watching the arms swing. He'd be standing in line at
Speaker 1: the grocery store and he'd realize he'd been staring at
Speaker 1: the cereal aisle for two minutes without seeing it because
Speaker 1: his brain was replaying the moment the thing stepped off
Speaker 1: the stump. He'd be in the shower, driving, mowing the yard.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter. It was always there. His wife noticed
Speaker 1: he was off, he could tell she noticed, but she
Speaker 1: didn't bring it up again after that first conversation, and
Speaker 1: he didn't volunteer anything. He told me. He lay in
Speaker 1: bed every one of those seven nights, running the same calculation.
Speaker 1: If the camera catches something, then the observation was real.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a hallucination, it wasn't a mistake. It wasn't
Speaker 1: his brain glitching in the early morning light. It was there.
Speaker 1: And if it was there once and the camera catches
Speaker 1: it again, then it's still there, which means it lives there,
Speaker 1: which means every time he's ever walked through woods like that,
Speaker 1: it might have been there too, and he just didn't
Speaker 1: know it. That thought kept him up that one, specifically,
Speaker 1: on day seven he drove back. He told me he
Speaker 1: woke up early that morning, not from an alarm, just
Speaker 1: from his brain kicking on at about four point thirty
Speaker 1: and refusing to go back to sleep. He lay there
Speaker 1: for a few minutes thinking about what might be on
Speaker 1: that card. Two possibilities really. Either it caught something and
Speaker 1: his life was about to get more complicated in ways
Speaker 1: he couldn't predict. Or it caught nothing and he was
Speaker 1: back to being a man with a very detailed journal
Speaker 1: entry about something nobody else witnessed and no evidence to support.
Speaker 1: He wasn't sure which one he was hoping for. He
Speaker 1: thought about that on the drive out and couldn't decide.
Speaker 1: The morning was overcast, mid forties, with mist hanging in
Speaker 1: the drainages. The Cherokee looked different in October than it
Speaker 1: had in late September, more color in the canopy, colder air,
Speaker 1: the feel of the year turning over. He hiked in
Speaker 1: on the same trail, moving a little faster than usual,
Speaker 1: not because he was eager, because he wanted this part
Speaker 1: to be done. He wanted to see the images and
Speaker 1: deal with whatever they showed and stop wondering. He got
Speaker 1: to the saddle, checked the clear cut from habit empty,
Speaker 1: nothing moving, and walked down to the camera tree. Everything
Speaker 1: looked normal, cameras still in place, still pointed right, no damage,
Speaker 1: no signs that an animal had messed with it, battery
Speaker 1: at about sixty percent, green light blinking. He stood in
Speaker 1: front of it for a second before he opened the housing.
Speaker 1: And I think this is one of the most human
Speaker 1: moments in this whole story, that pause, that half second
Speaker 1: where your hand is on the latch but you haven't
Speaker 1: opened it yet, because you know that whatever's inside is
Speaker 1: going to change something, and you can't unsee it once
Speaker 1: you look. It's the same feeling as opening an envelope
Speaker 1: with test results in it. You're standing at a boundary
Speaker 1: and you know you're about to cross it. He opened it,
Speaker 1: popped the card, put a fresh one in, sat down
Speaker 1: at the base of the oak with his back against
Speaker 1: the trunk, pulled out his laptop, little Tshiba he carried
Speaker 1: for work and slid the card. In two hundred and
Speaker 1: nineteen images. He started going through them the same way
Speaker 1: he always does with trail camera pulls, one at a time,
Speaker 1: time stamp, species, direction of travel, deer doze at different
Speaker 1: times of day, a four point buck, a decent eight
Speaker 1: with a nice spread, raccoons at night, a possum, a
Speaker 1: coyote trotting through early morning, a tom turkey in full strut.
Speaker 1: Normal stuff. Under any other circumstances, he would have been
Speaker 1: excited about that eight pointer, would have started planning a
Speaker 1: stand location. These were not normal circumstances. About one hundred
Speaker 1: and forty images in the rhythm broke timestamp said three
Speaker 1: seventeen am night four infrared shot that washed out gray
Speaker 1: green you get from night mode trail cameras. Brush in
Speaker 1: the clear cut tree line behind it, and in the
Speaker 1: middle of the frame, maybe thirty feet out, a shape
Speaker 1: standing up tall. His first reaction was that someone walked
Speaker 1: past the camera. A person standing facing roughly toward the lens,
Speaker 1: but the proportions were wrong. Same issue as the scope
Speaker 1: observation shoulders too wide for the head, arms too long,
Speaker 1: no visible clothing, no collar, no cuffs, no belt line,
Speaker 1: just one continuous form, same tone top to bottom, and
Speaker 1: then the eyes. The infrared had caught them bright spots
Speaker 1: high in the frame, spaced wider than a person's pointed
Speaker 1: at the camera. He stared at that image for five
Speaker 1: full minutes without moving, laptop on his knees back against
Speaker 1: the oak bark. His hands were shaking, not from the cold.
Speaker 1: I want to tell you what he told me went
Speaker 1: through his head in that moment, because I think it
Speaker 1: says everything about who Marcus is. He said. It wasn't triumph,
Speaker 1: wasn't excitement, wasn't fear. It was something closer to resignation,
Speaker 1: because part of him had been hoping the card would
Speaker 1: come back clean. Two hundred images of deer and nothing else.
Speaker 1: That would have meant the sighting was a one time event, weird, unexplainable,
Speaker 1: but isolated. He could have lived with that, could have
Speaker 1: filed it under strange thing that happened once and eventually
Speaker 1: stopped losing sleep. But the card wasn't clean. Something was
Speaker 1: on it, something that matched what he'd seen through the scope,
Speaker 1: which meant it was still out there. It hadn't wandered off,
Speaker 1: it hadn't been passing through. It was using this area.
Speaker 1: He went to the next image, same timestamp. One second later.
Speaker 1: The camera was set to do a quick double shot
Speaker 1: when it triggered. In the second frame, the shape had
Speaker 1: shifted farther left, body turned more toward the timber edge,
Speaker 1: but the head was turned back like it started to
Speaker 1: move away and then looked over its shoulder at the camera,
Speaker 1: and that detail got under his skin. He kept coming
Speaker 1: back to it when we talked. The thing knew the
Speaker 1: camera was there. It had to. First frame, it's facing
Speaker 1: the lens. Second frame, it's turning away but checking back.
Speaker 1: That's not an animal wandering past a sensor. That's something
Speaker 1: that noticed the device. Two frames, one second apart, something
Speaker 1: upright in the clear cut at three in the morning.
Speaker 1: Looking at his camera. He kept scrolling three more triggered
Speaker 1: sequences over the remaining nights, all at night. Two of
Speaker 1: them showed nothing useful. The camera fire, but whatever tripped
Speaker 1: it was out of frame or too far to register,
Speaker 1: just empty brush. But the last sequence was different. Two
Speaker 1: eight am night six two frames. In the first the
Speaker 1: shape was at the far edge of the censor range,
Speaker 1: small in the image, but clearly upright, standing near the
Speaker 1: stump at the north end the same stump in the
Speaker 1: second frame. One second later it was significantly closer. Marcus
Speaker 1: estimated it had covered twenty to twenty five feet between frames.
Speaker 1: That's not walking speed. At twenty five feet per second,
Speaker 1: you're looking at a sprint. Something had been standing at
Speaker 1: the far end of the clear cut and closed that
Speaker 1: distance in the time between two shutter clicks. He went
Speaker 1: through all two hundred and nineteen images twice, went through
Speaker 1: the flagged sequences three more times, adjusted the screen brightness,
Speaker 1: zoomed in as far as the resolution allowed. The images
Speaker 1: were rough three trail camera technology wasn't exactly high, and
Speaker 1: the infrared killed most of the fine detail, but the
Speaker 1: basics were there. Something upright, something tall, something with eyes
Speaker 1: that reflected infrared. Visiting that clear cut at night on
Speaker 1: multiple nights, he saved everything to the laptop, put the
Speaker 1: original SD card in a plastic bag and sealed it.
Speaker 1: Took the camera down, packed his bag, and he sat
Speaker 1: there for a minute, looking out at the clear cut.
Speaker 1: Sun was starting to break through the clouds, lighting up
Speaker 1: patches of brush. It was a good spot, good habitat
Speaker 1: the kind of place he'd normally come back to for years.
Speaker 1: He didn't come back He made a decision that week,
Speaker 1: and he's kept it for twenty years. He wasn't going
Speaker 1: to chase this. He wasn't going to set up camera grids,
Speaker 1: or build a blind or show up at night with
Speaker 1: thermal gear. He thought about it. He still thinks about it,
Speaker 1: but he decided that whatever was out there, he wasn't
Speaker 1: going to let it turn him into somebody he's not.
Speaker 1: I'm a bowhunter, he said, That's what I do. I
Speaker 1: went out there looking for deer and found something else.
Speaker 1: I documented it the way I know how and brought
Speaker 1: the data home. That's my skill set. I don't know
Speaker 1: what to do past that, and I've made my peace
Speaker 1: with it. He kept the SD card in a fireproof safe,
Speaker 1: same safe where he keeps important documents and his wife's jewelry.
Speaker 1: Didn't show it to anyone for over a decade. And
Speaker 1: here's the part that I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: listening to this are going to recognize because I've heard
Speaker 1: versions of it from so many witnesses over the years.
Speaker 1: The sighting itself is something that happens to you. What
Speaker 1: comes after that's something you have to live with, and
Speaker 1: the living with it is often harder than the thing itself.
Speaker 1: Marcus went back to hunting different area of the Cherokee
Speaker 1: miles from the clear cut filled his tag. That year,
Speaker 1: life kept going from the outside. Nothing changed. From the inside,
Speaker 1: everything did. He told me. He thinks about it at
Speaker 1: least once a week, even now, not obsessively, just this
Speaker 1: question that got lodged somewhere in the back of his
Speaker 1: brain and never came loose. He'll be driving to a
Speaker 1: meeting in his mind will slip back to the saddle.
Speaker 1: He'll be eating lunch and realize he's replaying the arm swing.
Speaker 1: He'll be on the edge of sleep, and those two
Speaker 1: infrared dots will show up the trail camera image, the
Speaker 1: eyes looking at the lens, and he's awake again. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. It changed how he hunts, though he'd never
Speaker 1: say that to anyone he competes against. He notices things
Speaker 1: now that he used to walk right past. How a
Speaker 1: ridge goes quiet sometimes for no reason. He can identify
Speaker 1: how deer react to something. He can't see, every head
Speaker 1: turning the same direction at the same time, the way
Speaker 1: the deer did right before the sighting tree breaks along
Speaker 1: ridge lines that don't match, wind damage or ice sounds
Speaker 1: at dawn and dusk he can't a name to. And
Speaker 1: here's the thing about that, you can't unsee it. Once
Speaker 1: you know there's something in the woods that isn't supposed
Speaker 1: to be there. The woods are never the same again.
Speaker 1: Every shadow has an extra dimension to it. Every silence
Speaker 1: could mean something. He used to walk into the forest
Speaker 1: and see a simple picture, terrain, wind, sign, shot, opportunity.
Speaker 1: Now he sees something with layers, something with depth he
Speaker 1: didn't know about before three. He told me, it's like
Speaker 1: someone pulled back a curtain and showed him a room
Speaker 1: he didn't know was there. And now every time he's
Speaker 1: in the woods he can feel that room behind the wall.
Speaker 1: He's never had another sighting twenty years, hundreds of days
Speaker 1: in the field, not a glimpse, he told me. Part
Speaker 1: of him is always watching for it. Though every time
Speaker 1: he puts his eye to a scope, there's a corner
Speaker 1: of his brain that's not looking at deer. It's scanning
Speaker 1: for something else. I've thought about which would be worse,
Speaker 1: he said, seeing it again and having to go through
Speaker 1: all of this as say, second time, or never seeing
Speaker 1: it and spending the rest of my life not knowing
Speaker 1: for certain whether what happened was real. I don't have
Speaker 1: an answer for that. I go back and forth. The
Speaker 1: research happened slowly. He didn't dive in right away. He
Speaker 1: was too shaken for that, and he wasn't ready to
Speaker 1: admit to himself what he was researching. But over the
Speaker 1: months and years that followed, he started reading quietly. He'd
Speaker 1: go to the public library in Knoxville and check books
Speaker 1: out instead of buying them because he didn't want titles
Speaker 1: like that showing up on his Amazon account or his
Speaker 1: credit card statement. He browsed the internet in private mode.
Speaker 1: He read in his truck during lunch at work, angled
Speaker 1: away from the window so nobody walking by would see
Speaker 1: the cover. I want to pause on that for a second,
Speaker 1: because I think it says something important about how this
Speaker 1: subject gets treated in our culture. Here's a man, army veteran,
Speaker 1: successful professional competitive athlete, father, husband, sneaking around like he's
Speaker 1: doing something shameful because he's trying to understand what he
Speaker 1: saw in the woods. That's what the stigma does. It
Speaker 1: turns legitimate inquiry into something people feel like they have
Speaker 1: to hide. Marcus wasn't embarrassed about the sighting. He was
Speaker 1: embarrassed about looking into it. And there's a difference, and
Speaker 1: it matters. He started with the skeptical material because that's
Speaker 1: what he wanted to work. He needed somebody with credentials
Speaker 1: to hand him a clean, rational explanation that would close
Speaker 1: the book. Misidentification, hoax, perceptual error. He was pulling for
Speaker 1: one of those to be the answer, the way you
Speaker 1: pull for your team in a playoff game. He needed it.
Speaker 1: None of it held up. The misidentification argument fell apart
Speaker 1: against his observation data. He didn't glimpse something from a
Speaker 1: car window. He watched it through a swarowsky for four
Speaker 1: minutes in clear light. The hoax argument couldn't explain why
Speaker 1: somebody would be in a suit in the middle of
Speaker 1: the Cherokee at eight forty five in the morning with
Speaker 1: no audience, and then returned to the same spot at
Speaker 1: three am, four nights later to walk past a trail
Speaker 1: camera they couldn't have known was there. And perceptual error
Speaker 1: doesn't account for the fact that the deer reacted to
Speaker 1: the thing before he ever saw it. He exhausted every
Speaker 1: debunking angle he could find and came up empty. And
Speaker 1: let me tell you, for a man like Marcus, coming
Speaker 1: up empty on the debunking was worse than the sighting itself,
Speaker 1: because the sighting at least was over. It happened, and
Speaker 1: it was done. But the failure of every rational explanation
Speaker 1: to hold up against the evidence that was ongoing, that
Speaker 1: was something he woke up with every morning. He told
Speaker 1: his wife about five years in, sat her down one
Speaker 1: evening after the kid was asleep, opened the laptop, pulled
Speaker 1: up the trail camera images, and walked her through the
Speaker 1: whole thing start to finish. He did it the way
Speaker 1: he does everything, organized step by step. Data first, interpretation. Second,
Speaker 1: he showed her the images, the field notes, the sketches.
Speaker 1: She looked at the photos for a while, then she said,
Speaker 1: I believe you saw something, which is a kind thing
Speaker 1: to say to your husband. And Marcus knew it was kind.
Speaker 1: He also knew what it meant. I believe you saw
Speaker 1: something is not the same as I believe what you
Speaker 1: saw is what you think it is. It's the response
Speaker 1: of someone who loves you and doesn't want to call
Speaker 1: you delusional, but isn't quite ready to follow you down
Speaker 1: this particular path. He understood the distinction. He appreciated her kindness,
Speaker 1: he didn't push it. He showed his brother around twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: This was the one he'd been building up to for years.
Speaker 1: His brother is a wildlife biologist for the state of Tennessee.
Speaker 1: If there's anyone in Marcus's life who should be able
Speaker 1: to look at a trail camera image and give him
Speaker 1: a definitive answer, it's a guy whose literal job is
Speaker 1: identifying wildlife. His brother took his time with it. He
Speaker 1: asked detailed questions camera model, detection range, infrared wavelength and
Speaker 1: temperature because temperature affects infrared sensor performance. Estimated distance of
Speaker 1: the subject angle, all the right questions. Professional great inquiry
Speaker 1: from a trained scientist. Then he sat back and said,
Speaker 1: I can't tell you what that is. Not it's a bear.
Speaker 1: Not your camera malfunctioned. Not somebody was out there in
Speaker 1: a suit. He said he could not identify what was
Speaker 1: in the images, and then he changed the subject didn't
Speaker 1: bring it up again. A state wildlife biologist looking at
Speaker 1: a trail camera image taken in the woods of eastern Tennessee, saying,
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is. That's not a civilian shrugging.
Speaker 1: That's a professional admitting the limits of his field. Marcus
Speaker 1: told me that might have been the single most frustrating
Speaker 1: conversation of his life. Validating in one sense his own brother,
Speaker 1: a trained expert, wasn't dismissing him, but devastating in another sense,
Speaker 1: because it meant nobody was going to solve this. Nobody
Speaker 1: was going to hand him the clean answer that let
Speaker 1: him close the file and move on. He found our
Speaker 1: show about a year and a half ago his son,
Speaker 1: which is ironic if you think about it. Send him
Speaker 1: a link to an episode. He listened, and then he
Speaker 1: listened to more. He told me the ones that got
Speaker 1: to him were the long duration sightings, encounters where the
Speaker 1: witness had real time on the thing, where they could
Speaker 1: describe proportions, gate behavior in specific detail, rather than just
Speaker 1: I saw something big run across the road. He recognized
Speaker 1: what those people were describing, same proportions, same gate, same unhurried,
Speaker 1: confident movement, people in different states, different years, completely different circumstances,
Speaker 1: talking about what sounded like the same thing he'd watched
Speaker 1: cross a clear cut in three That's what pushed him
Speaker 1: to write. He spent a week on the email, two
Speaker 1: thousand words organized like a field report, date, location, conditions, observation, evidence,
Speaker 1: no emotional language, not a word of speculation, just data.
Speaker 1: When I called him back, the first thing he said
Speaker 1: after giving me his name was, I want you to
Speaker 1: know I'm not looking for attention. I don't want to
Speaker 1: be on social media. I don't want my name attached
Speaker 1: to this publicly. I'm telling you because I think the
Speaker 1: observation has scientific value and the data should be somewhere
Speaker 1: besides a fireproof safe in my closet. That's the most
Speaker 1: Marcus sentence Marcus has ever said, and it's the reason
Speaker 1: I trust him. Here's what stays with me about this one.
Speaker 1: Every story in this series has a different detail that
Speaker 1: hooks in and doesn't let go with Herschel. It's the deliberateness,
Speaker 1: the camp rearranged like a message, the rocks pointing north,
Speaker 1: the sense that something was running a test on four
Speaker 1: men from Dalton, Georgia to see what they tolerate with Karen.
Speaker 1: It's the breath that single exhale in the dark after
Speaker 1: three weeks of documenting evidence at arm's length, The prints,
Speaker 1: the smell, the tree breaks, Everything collapse down to one
Speaker 1: moment something close enough to hear the air come out
Speaker 1: of it. With Marcus, it's time three minutes and forty
Speaker 1: seven seconds on the timer, nearly four and a half
Speaker 1: minutes total through a Swarovsky spotting scope in clear morning light.
Speaker 1: Most sightings last seconds. A shape in the headlights, something
Speaker 1: crossing a road, a figure at the tree line that's
Speaker 1: there and gone before you can get your phone out.
Speaker 1: Those sightings are real, I believe the people who report them.
Speaker 1: But there's only so much you can pull from three
Speaker 1: or four seconds of startled observation. Marcus didn't have three seconds.
Speaker 1: He had close to five minutes, seated stable eye to
Speaker 1: a scope on a tripod. He watched it step off
Speaker 1: a stump walk two hundred yards and disappear into timber.
Speaker 1: He saw the arm swing, He estimated hight against known vegetation,
Speaker 1: he estimated against fixed objects, He timed it, He wrote
Speaker 1: it all down, and when he got home he tried
Speaker 1: to break his own observation. He spent twenty years trying.
Speaker 1: That's not a glimpse. That's a record made by a
Speaker 1: man who knows how to make records. And then the
Speaker 1: trail camera backed it up. Whatever he saw during the
Speaker 1: day came back at night, not once, multiple times over
Speaker 1: the course of a week. It was using that area.
Speaker 1: It was there, which is the thread running through this
Speaker 1: whole series. The thing I keep coming back to. This
Speaker 1: corridor isn't the site of random one off encounters. It's territory.
Speaker 1: Something lives in it. Something that was there when Herschel's
Speaker 1: camp got rearranged in seventy eight, something that was still
Speaker 1: there when Karen smelled it and found its tracks in
Speaker 1: ninety four, Something that was still there when Marcus watched
Speaker 1: it walk across a clear cut and then caught it
Speaker 1: on camera at three in the morning in O three,
Speaker 1: twenty five years. Same ridge system, the same valley, same corridor,
Speaker 1: and the same behavioral traits showing up over and over
Speaker 1: from people who've never spoken to each other. Patience, deliberation, control,
Speaker 1: whatever this is, it doesn't panic around people, It doesn't run.
Speaker 1: It manages the encounter. It decides when to show, how
Speaker 1: much to reveal, and when to leave. Every time I
Speaker 1: didn't tell Marcus about Herschel or Karen before he gave
Speaker 1: me a story, I wanted it clean, no contamination. When
Speaker 1: I eventually told him. When I said Marcus, two other
Speaker 1: people have described encounters along the same ridge line in
Speaker 1: different decades, and some of the details line up with yours.
Speaker 1: He went quiet for a long time, long enough that
Speaker 1: I checked my phone to see if the call dropped.
Speaker 1: Then he said that's either very good or very bad.
Speaker 1: I asked what he meant good, because it means I'm
Speaker 1: not the only one. If other people saw similar things
Speaker 1: in the same area, that's corroboration. That's a data point
Speaker 1: in favor of my observation being accurate. Bad because if
Speaker 1: it's real, if something's been using that corridor for twenty
Speaker 1: five years or more, then it's been there this whole time,
Speaker 1: right there in the same mountains people hike and camp
Speaker 1: and hunt in every day, and almost nobody knows it.
Speaker 1: Three stories in now, seventy eight ninety four, three three people,
Speaker 1: three decades, one ridge, and the same details keep showing
Speaker 1: up from people who've never exchanged a single word. Tree
Speaker 1: breaks at the same height, biological silence when this thing
Speaker 1: gets close, the watched feeling that precedes every encounter, bipedal
Speaker 1: locomotion that doesn't match bear, doesn't match human, doesn't match
Speaker 1: anything in any field guide, and the behavior that's the
Speaker 1: thread patient deliberate, controlled, never rushing, never panicking, always on
Speaker 1: its own terms. Three data points along a forty mile
Speaker 1: corridor spanning a quarter century. I've got two left and
Speaker 1: next time. The whole feel of this series changes. We
Speaker 1: go from single witnesses alone in the back country to
Speaker 1: a fifteen passenger church van full of teenagers on a
Speaker 1: two lane highway twenty eleven. A youth pastor named David
Speaker 1: driving the kids home from a summer retreat, late dark road.
Speaker 1: The highway cuts through the valley, the same valley that
Speaker 1: runs between the ridges, same gap, same corridor, and something
Speaker 1: walks out of the tree line and into the road.
Speaker 1: Not a deer, not a bear, something tall enough that
Speaker 1: the van's headlights hit it at the chest. Van headlights
Speaker 1: sit about two and a half feet off the ground.
Speaker 1: If the beam's catching something at chest height, you're looking
Speaker 1: at something well north of seven feet. It doesn't jump
Speaker 1: out of the way. The van hits it, or it
Speaker 1: hits the van. David still isn't sure which hard enough
Speaker 1: to spin them off the road and into the ditch.
Speaker 1: Airbags go off, kids screaming. David gets out to check
Speaker 1: the damage, looks up at the tree line. It's there
Speaker 1: standing at the edge of the pavement looking at him,
Speaker 1: not running, not limping, not hurt, just standing there the
Speaker 1: way something stands when it's deciding what happens next. That
Speaker 1: story breaks the pattern because there's no slow build, no
Speaker 1: three week documentation, no campfire escalation. It happens in about
Speaker 1: three seconds and then it's over except for the aftermath.
Speaker 1: But the aftermath is where it gets interesting because for
Speaker 1: the first time in this series, there are multiple witnesses. David,
Speaker 1: two of the teenagers who are adults now and agreed
Speaker 1: to talk to me, and a tow truck driver who
Speaker 1: comes out to pull the van and mentions, almost as
Speaker 1: a side comment, that he's towed three other vehicles out
Speaker 1: of that same quarter mile of highway in the past year,
Speaker 1: three other impacts, same stretch. And after that we wrap
Speaker 1: this whole thing up. Part five. A retired land surveyor
Speaker 1: who surveyed the property boundary that runs right through the
Speaker 1: heart of this corridor. He's got field notes, plat maps,
Speaker 1: and a cassette tape he recorded one night in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven while he was out there working. He thought
Speaker 1: it was a coyote at the time. He doesn't think
Speaker 1: that anymore, but i'll save that for the end. I'll
Speaker 1: see you next time, Sa