Speaker 1: I grew up really poor. I never knew my father,
and my mother was abusive. I think life turned her
that way and she took her frustration out on me.
Because of the way things were, I tried to spend
as much time as I could away from home. Things
were clearly different in the seventies for kids like me.
The bullying and the obvious signs of abuse were often
overlooked or ignored by teachers and grown ups. My school
had what they called Eco Week, where they would take
us up to cabins in the mountains. Well I loved
Echo Week. Not knowing my father meant that I never
went on fishing trips or camping trips, and unlike other boys,
I had no one to show me how to bait
a hook. I never had the chance to relive the
hunting stories that fathers passed down to their sons. We
all piled into the school buses. The popular kids sat
anywhere they wanted. I scrambled to find a seat. Getting
to the camp area the first time was completely overwhelming.
I had never been to anything like this. We were
assigned to a cabin, each with four bunk beds. The
windows were small, which allowed light to stream into the cabin,
but high enough to keep anyone from spying on you
from the outside. We each chose a bed and we
laid out our sleeping bags. My bunk mate was a
heavy set boy with glasses named Eric. He was quiet
and he was shy, and he became an immediate target
for the older bullies in our group. I was big
for my age, and I had learned a long time
ago how to put up a front thanks to the
frequent beatings from my mother. The bullies were fooled by
my tough demeanor and generally left me alone. After a
night sitting around the campfire roasting sh'mores, the counselors ordered
us back to our rooms for the night. I helped
put the supplies away and douse the fire, and in
lieu of not having a healthy role model in my life,
I craved the attention of the adult counselors, who probably
had no idea how important their encouragement was to a
lonely kid like me. I was starved for affection and
severely lacking when it came to my own self esteem.
I was the last one back to the cabin. The
lights were off, but I heard whispers and I saw
a glare of flashlights through the windows. I quietly opened
the door to my disgust. Our roommates had Eric surrounded.
His pajamas were around his ankles, and he was clutching
the waistban of his tattered shorts. Whatever they had been
planning for my poor, humiliated bunk mate, my arrival had
preempted it. I hit the lights of the cabin and
stared down Eric's abusers. Alerted by the commotions, several counselors intervened.
They took note of the situation and promptly moved Eric's
tormentors to different cabins For the remainder of our stay.
Eric and I were the sole occupants of our own cabin.
We laid in our bunks one night and Eric opened
up to me about his own horrible childhood. We had
both been believed and victimized, but what had happened to
him was unspeakable, and whether out of pity or empathy,
we became buddies. They'll pay for that, said Eric to
me one night. My friends will take care of them, who,
I muttered, You haven't seen my friends. They look into
the windows each night, they're watching over us. Well. I
drifted off to sleep. Certain Eric's remarks were the revenge
fantasies of a picked on kid. Well, during the last
night of our stay, something drew us all from our cabins.
Our ex roommates had been discovered sitting in the dirt
near the camp restrooms. They were babbling incoherently, oblivious to
the gawkers staring and pointing at them. The counselors led
them away. Eric and I returned to our room and
tried to get some sleep before the journey home. In
a few hours, we sat together on the school bus,
but Eric and I hardly said a word to each other.
Maybe it was like a sleep. We were halfway home
before I noticed our former roommates weren't on the bus
with us. Well. I heard later that their parents had
been summoned to the camp in the middle of the
night to take them home. One day, Eric took a
walk out into the woods, and he never came back.
There were rumors he had died, or that he had
run away from his abusive household. I like to think
that somewhere out there he simply found a nicer set
of friends. The account you read of the UFO account
in Oklahoma from rusty is one hundred percent true. I
was a police officer at the time. I'd rather not
say what department that night I was on duty, but
I was planning on using a few hours of comp time.
As I was headed in, a traffic officer called the
police department advising that it appeared that a jet was
in trouble and to please contact the base. We had
previously served as support after one of the training jets
had crashed, so this was not an unusual request. Everyone
was immediately on full alert waiting for confirmation, and a
few minutes passed and I headed toward another area for
better observation, and meanwhile, the public had lit up the
phone lines to report the light that they were seeing.
We watched this ball of light as it descended diagonally
toward our city, and suddenly he had appeared to stop
in midfall, and dispatch advised east side officers to go
to a different radio channel for further instructions. After switching
to a different channel, we were advised to stand by
and we watched the light stop and remain stationary before
dispatch ordered me to the station to help with the
phone traffic. A few minutes later, when I arrived at
the police station. I was informed by my sergeant that
we were on a full alert from the base, and
a minute later, the infamous red telephone rang. Now this
phone had never rung before. Everyone always said that it
was a hotline to Washington, DC, and that night we
found out that that was true. My sergeant had a
deer in the headlights look on his face as he
stared at that phone. The other sergeant answered it and
immediately jumped out of his chair instead of attention. I know
that's weird and it's almost comical. But after several yes, sirs,
he hung up and looked at us and he said
it's him. He said that until we know the situation,
the base is in charge. He also said that we
were not to speak about this incident. It was then
that the base contacted the police station, advising us that
they had fully armed jets in the air and we
were advised that they were in pursuit of this object.
And for the next hour, that craft was between Kansas
City and Houston airspace and it was going back and forth.
No aircraft on Earth could have covered the distance between
Kansas City and Houston in six minutes flat. It was
like a game or something. It would stop until the
jets got closed, and then it would take off again.
Radar documented every bit of this. The lights of the
jets looked like ping pong balls compared to the beach
ball sized light of this object. After the incident was called,
everyone was told to stand down. The military in some
odd ball suits showed up for depbriefing. Well. I played
it off as if I didn't see anything. Being a
female back then was reason enough for the suits to
ignore me. I was told later that the military instructions
were don't acknowledge anything and keep it out of the press.
From what I saw, it appeared that over half of
that craft was in shadow. I honestly couldn't begin to
estimate the size. The last time I saw it, it
went straight up and it disappeared in the blink of
an eye. Whatever it was, it wasn't from our world.
My name is Wayne, and this is about an encounter
with a bigfoot. My father and I were on a
hunting trip in the foothills of North Carolina. We had
set out corn debate deer in the area the week before.
We decided to camp out in the area and go hunting.
The following morning. At four o'clock in the morning, I
was awoken by the sound of some rustling around of
some leaves and the snapping of twigs on the ground,
and as if the tent just enough to look outside
to see what it was. Fifty feet away I saw
something that at first looked like a bear eating a deer.
The deer was still moving or twitching, as if it
had just been killed. Within a second, a horrible odor
hit me, smelling like something in decay or rotting. It
was terrible. It must have heard me move because it
quickly stood up on two feet. It wasn't a bear,
and I realized what I was seeing. I fell back
into the tent lifted my rifle in the direction of
the beast. Then I heard heavy footfalls of this thing
charging the tent, and within a second we were both
lifted into the air like we were in a sack.
The big foot I had picked the tent up and
was dragging us along the ground. I worked the rifle
around and got off a few shots. This made the
creature release its grip on the tent and we fell
to the ground through the holes. I shot through the
tent fabric. I saw a blinding white light for just
a second, and then everything went deathly quiet. My father
breathing was all I could hear. My father asked in
a panic state, what was going on, but it took
me a while to compose myself to telling what had happened.
We both got out of the tent with our firearms,
but the creature was gone. The only thing that remained
was the mutilated deer. We packed our gear and we
left it daylight, and on our way out, thinking the
event was over, we saw a line of black SUVs
parked along the road. A couple of men stepped out
and waved us down and we stopped. They came to
the window and asked several questions about why we were there,
and then they asked if we had seen anything unusual
while camping. Well, I've heard and read about these things,
and I kept my mouth shut. I told the man
we hadn't seen anything. Apparently he believed my life and
we drove home. I've never shared this story with the public,
but I think it's now as the right time, seeing
more and more people are coming forward and deciding to
share their experiences. Well, that's a short compact, scary, terrifying, story.
Holy crap. I mean, he sees a bigfoot. It comes over,
picks the tent up, dragon, where's it taking you? Where
was it dragging you to in the tent? And then
you got off a couple of shots. Thank god you
had a firearm. It lets you go. And then there's
this white light which brings in what I don't know.
I don't know what that means, but it leads me
to believe like this thing was I don't know, interdimensional. Whoop,
this bright light happened and it disappears. Man, what a
scary story. I really appreciate you sending it. Wayne. That's
a good one. That's a real good one. Thank you. Man.
I was born in nineteen sixty seven, the year that
Roger Patterson shot the famous Bigfoot film. I was a
suburban ten year old living in a medium sized Midwestern
town with no knowledge of the film when my family
moved to the country. The years spent on our land
in the adjacent two thousand acre wildlife refuge gave me
a great appreciation for nature. I know that if you
sit quiet enough for long enough and listen closely to
the natural world, it will always amaze you. The years
following my childhood were spent outdoors as much as possible.
I've hiked and swam, and climbed and kayaked bikes, be
lunked and backcountry camped on five continents. The world's deserts
and rainforests and too many out and range is to
mention have been my playground. It taught me two things.
Don't look at the sky full of stars and tell
yourself there is no other life in the universe. And
don't look at a planet full of unexplored places and
say that things like Bigfoot can't exist. Although I would
never have denied their existence, it didn't mean that I
expected to see one. The topic has always interested me.
Movies and books and articles and web sites and the
like have always drawn me in, But to see one
never thought about that. My girlfriend Carrie didn't have the
advantage of a lifetime in the wild. Hers was a
much more conventional story. She graduated early from high school
and zoomed through college and got married and had three
kids and explored nothing. Three years ago when we met,
I opened those doors for her and discovered that she
had a natural inclination for the wilderness. It paved the
way for a lot of wonderful adventures together. Even while
we were climbing mountains in the dark to see the
sunrise or swimming in the lagoons of extinct volcanoes, Carrie
never looked at the sky and thought the same things
that I did. She only giggled at the prospect of Bigfoot,
and once she even suggested that I exercise a little
caution about that topic when speaking in certain circles, saying
we wouldn't want others to think you're as crazy as
I know you are. The irony of that statement would
come back to haunt her. The Pacific Northwest may not
house the largest forests on Earth, but it certainly does
not fail to impress. It's been a favorite place of
mind for a long time. The Redwoods are unparalleled, so
it was inevitable that Carrie and I would eventually hike there.
We took six days off from our responsibilit put backpacks
on our shoulders, and got on a plane. The first
day was spent gathering a couple of items that aren't
allowed on airplanes. I learned a long time ago to
pack light and never check a bag. There's nothing worse
than arriving at base camp five days before your climbing
gear does. On bigger trips, we may ship supplies ahead,
but on a little adventures it is easier to buy
a folding knife and one fuel sell for your camp
burner after arrival. In addition to this, we grabbed some
fruit and smoked meat and fish, and a few other
items to keep us going over the next few days.
After a good night's sleep, we ventured out for the
first day. The unseasonably warm weather carried hints of smoke
from the fires burning to the north. The smell was constant,
but it wasn't overbearing. The sky was a surreal shade
of orange draped over intermittent fogs and a constant smoky
haze that left us feeling like we had stepped onto
a movie set. It was unlike anything we had ever seen.
We hiked in northern California for four days, a total
of forty two miles, with only rare encounters with other hikers.
Most visitors to our national parks and wild places rarely
go beyond half a mile into the woods. Safer for
them and better for me, was my opinion. On our
fifth and final day out, we decided to take the
trail that I had been on twice before. It's eight
miles of not too difficult trail that ends in a
nice mile stretch along the Pacific coast. We started early
in conditions that hadn't changed in days. It was smoky
and warm, and it was orange. Having done well with
our rations, we nibbled periodically on whatever was left, knowing
that our next meal would likely be in an airport restaurant.
Several miles in, at what was roughly the half way point,
we came across two bull elk. That's not uncommon to
see Roosevelt elk on many of these trails, and as
long as you stay aware and give them adequate space,
it usually works out. These elk had decided to bed
down twenty yards from each other, directly in the middle
of the footpath. We held up behind a ten foot
diameter redwood that was about the same distance from the elk.
Milling around for a bit, we talked, and we made
enough noise that the boys definitely knew we were there.
They didn't pay us any attention, though, they were more
interested in soaking up any light that made it through
the hazy canopy above. Because there didn't seem to be
any immediate danger we waited and watched them a bit,
and we contemplated an alternate route around them. Four years earlier,
I had come across some females and yearlings while on
this trail, and that ended with me and my hiking
partner sitting ten feet up in a tree and holding
on for dear life while a bull smacked the trunk
below us for an hour. He was definitely making a
statement that I didn't care to have these two bulls repeat.
Changing course in the redwoods isn't as easy as one
might think. Often if you leave the trail is to
go straight up or straight down, and you simply don't
step over down redwoods unless you're Paul Bunyon. And worse,
sometimes it's fifteen feet up and then fifteen feet back
down through a heavy voliage that includes ferns as big
as cars. And I've walked to within ten feet avelt
more than on one occasion. Before they reveal themselves. Everything
is that big out there. I decided to try and
make the bulls uncomfortable by getting down on one knee
and moving closer. I had moved in several yards and
they were now looking right at me. But discomfort wasn't
the expression on their faces. It wasn't working, so I
began to shuffle back a few feet. When they simultaneously
turned ninety degrees and abruptly stood up. I no longer
had their attention. Carrie stepped forward and put her hand
on my shoulder, and as the elk leaped off the
path and disappeared into the forest, crashing and breaking branches
as they ran, I turned and looked at her, and
at that moment, a strong smell wafted it in and
overpowered the smell of smoke. It was curiously familiar, but
everything was happening so quickly that I didn't process it.
Carrie's grip on my shoulder got suddenly tighter as her
hand began to tremble. When I looked at her again,
what I saw scared me. Her eyes were wide and
her face had gone nearly white. She could see something
that I couldn't. I didn't stand up, but I turned
back and looked to where the elk once lay. And
then it happened, with a sort of grunting sound and
a tremendous leap, A huge hair covered things sprang from
the ferns below the footpath and landed not thirty yards
in front of us. It was absurdly large, way bigger
than either of the bull elk that had stood there
moments before. I knew exactly what I was looking at.
There was no doubt in my mind I was staring
at the same thing Patterson filmed all those years ago,
massive and very dark brown, standing on two legs, attached
to these giant feet, and it was staring at us. First,
it looked at Carrie, and then at me, and then
back at Carrie again, and over and over for what
seemed like an eternity. I was frozen in fear. I
wanted to run, I wanted to scream, or to cry,
or at least close my eyes, but I couldn't do
any of those things. Carries grew up, tightened to the
point that she was causing me pain, and then she
let go. She didn't step away, she remained directly behind me.
And then my girlfriend did something I would never have imagined.
I felt her open the top compartment of my pack
and remove one of the two apples we save for
the coast trail portion of our height. The apple sailed
over my head toward the beast that was staring at us,
and it fell short and rolled off the trail and
out of sight. Well this seemed to anger it, because
it huffed once and then a second time, even harder.
I whispered again, and Carrie replied, what, throw the other apple,
and throw it hard, I said. She reached for the apple,
and I saw the beast squint its eyes. The look
we were getting was far more intimidating than when it
first landed on the trail. Carrie chucked the second apple hard,
and time crawled as I watched the apple sail toward
the creature in slow motion, heading straight for its head.
It was definitely going to hit it. For a second,
I wondered how angry being hit by an apple would
make it. And then, with little effort and amazing speed,
it reached up and caught the apple about a foot
from its neck and pushed it into its mouth, all
in one fluid motion. I was so taken aback that
I fell from my knees and was now sitting sideways
on the ground, and Carrie dropped to her knees next
to me as we watched in amazement while this bigfoot
chewed the apple, huffed again in our direction, turned in
the same direction that the elk had gone, and with
two big steps, disappeared silently into the forest. It took
several minutes before either of us caught our breath and
snapped out of it, but neither said a word. We
communicated by watching each other's breathing and nodding, and after
a bit I gave her a gentle smile and she
answered with one of her own, and we clasped hands
very quickly walked the last three and a half miles
to the trailhead. We didn't speak much on our journey
home or for the next week. Eventually we discussed it.
I had to know what made her think to throw
the apples. She smiled and said, the Dixie cryptied guy.
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, don't blame anything
on the Dixie cryptied guy. Okay, all right, let me
give back. The Dixie cryptied guy told a story about
a grandpa who gave a bigfoot his grandson's squirrels, and
it seemed to work for them. We still occasionally talk
about what happened that day. We've even shared the story
with a few friends and family. Neither one of us
expected for that to happen. We both hope it never does. Again,
it's so far from our normal reality that it's hard
to process. I never tell anyone exactly where it happened.
I don't want people to go out there looking for
these things. The woods are dangerous enough without running around
trying to find something four or five times your size.
And my advice is to enjoy the stories and watch
the movies, but hope that you never make contact. Whatever
man touches, he destroys. Maybe the Bigfoot have figured that out,
and that's why they're so elusive.