Speaker 1: In the late nineties, I found myself working as an
electrical contractor at a nearby chemical plant. The men I
worked with there were older and not filled with as
much nonsense as me, and this led to a lot
of fun filled debate in the break room. For example,
one of our biggest debates was about who was the
greatest athlete of modern times. Partly tongue in cheek, I
asserted that it was Evil Knievel, based on the fact
that he put all of it on the line to score,
and that if he missed his goal, there was no
steak or hot tub waiting, but rather a visit to
the hospital or even to the morgue. After a lot
of debate and ribbing, the subject turned to Bigfoot. One
of the older men said, yeah, I guess you believe
in Bigfoot too, don't you, to which I replied, yes,
I believe there's a possibility that Bigfoot does exist. I
wouldn't rule them out. Again, these men, being hardened in
level headed hunters and fishermen, they laughed and made some
more smart remarks. It was all in good fun, and
none of us really took it seriously. Our silly break
room banter was just our way of blowing off steam
and forgetting for a few minutes the hard labor and
the intensely dangerous work conditions that we faced every day.
That day, my work partner Remo asked me, do you
really think Bigfoot could be real? And I replied, to
be honest, I hope it is. One thing is for sure.
When I get to Heaven, I'll find out. Remo then said,
if I tell you something, will you not mention it
to the other guys. I said, of course, knowing he
was about to tell me something that he trusted me with,
and so Remo began to tell me his story. Three
years ago, I went deer hunting. I have a regular
spot that I go to where I have a tree
stand set up up and there are plenty of natural
attractors for deer. I kill a deer almost every time
I go there. I had been there the weekend before
to make sure my stand was there and in good
shape so there would be no surprises. When I came
back to hunt, I was pulling into my parking location
well before sunrise. I got out and started loading up
my gear, and I saw an empty truck that had
obviously arrived before me. I knew this because there was
frost on the windshield, the rifle rack was empty, and
an empty bottle of apple scent was laying on the
ground next to the truck. I figured it was another
hunter who just liked the same area that I did.
The evidence of another hunter would normally discourage most but
it was a vast national forest area in northeast Tennessee,
in the Rhone Mountain area, and there was plenty of
room for more than one hunter. Also, for the most part,
this is an area where people are still neighbors and
consider it to one another. I began to hear a
ruckus coming from some distance away, deep in the woods.
This was gonna scare off the deer if these guys
keep it up. I put on my hat and vest,
and I started down the trail towards the location of
my deer stand. As I walked, I could hear limbs
breaking and someone yelling for help. Someone was in trouble,
so I picked up the pace. As I topped a
small rise and started down the opposite side, I caught
sight of a man running as hard as he could,
and he was in a panic. It had to be
this other hunter, as the man approached. I could see
the look of sheer terror in his eyes, and he screamed, run, run,
follow me, Let's run, and he never slowed his paste
as he ran past me. I followed him back down
the trail towards the trucks, and I noticed that he
did not have a rifle. This was really odd. Who
goes deer huh without a rifle. We reached the trucks
about the same time and he collapsed from exhaustion. Remo
questioned the man and asked what happened, fully expecting to
hear that he had stumbled onto a moonshine still or
a marijuana grow. These can be dangerous to stumble upon
because these groves are closely guarded. Monster was all he said,
over and over, Monster Monster. Even though his eyes darted
around wildly, checking in all directions, he took just enough
time before tearing down the gravel road at breakneck speed
to say that a ten foot tall, apelike black monster
had attacked him after he took a shot at it.
He claimed the shot only infuriated the creature, and it
charged his tree stand. In what seemed like a single movement.
The creature charged him, ripped the gun from his hands,
pulled the tree stand down to the ground with him
in it, and crouched down facing the man as it
burst forth with a deafening roar right in his face.
The hunter scrambled to his feet and tore through the
woods in terror. Remo was stunned. He wondered if this
was a trick to run him out of the forest
and his favorite hunting spot. After a self motivational pep talk,
Remo decided that it would take more than a crazy
fairy tale to keep him from getting a deer that day.
He proceeded back to the trail and made the hike
to his tree stand. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary
when he got there. Surely the other hunter had a
nightmare while sleeping in his stand, or maybe he had
mental problems, or it could have been under the influence
of drugs. Whatever it was, it didn't matter. Now. Remo
had settled into his stand and was ready for a
good hunt. He heard the crunch of dry leaves in
the distance, but he couldn't see the animal to the
faint light of the early morning. Maybe a deer was
heading his way. The animal was coming straight to him,
and he was perfectly positioned for the kill. The light
of the rising sun had revealed all the details of
the landscape for many yards in every direction, so he
scanned the woods, looking and waiting. He focused in on
something that was unusual and didn't belong in the woods.
The shapes were wrong. Not far away was the twisted
and mangled remains of a tree stand. The wind shifted
and a horrible smell overtook him as he looked around him,
searching for the animal and now what was producing that
nasty odor? And just beyond his stand on the ground
was the broken stock of a deer rifle. Something was
way off about this whole situation. The rustling leaves was
coming closer, but it was not the familiar sound of
a big buck. It was the heavy thud of two
feet walking. Becoming a bit unnerved, he decided to quietly
make his way down the tree and quickly jogged back
to his truck. He did not wait around to see
what this thing was. He got in his truck and
he left. I could see that he was embarrassed to
admit this, but I also seemed to be relieved to
have finally shared it with someone. His nervousness quickly left
as I assured him that I would not share his
story with the other men. Remo never said if he
ever went back to that spot, but I knew him
for years and he never mentioned hunting, just fishing. I
wonder sometimes if Bigfoot won a victory over the rights
to his territory that day. I cannot claim to know
the truth about this story, but I can vouch for
the man who shared it with me. He was an honest,
hard working, no nonsense man. He told me his story
at great risk of intense ridicule from others. I grew
up in the middle of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, so I
don't have stories of life on the farm other than
the two hundred acre form my grandfather had. That's where
my dad taught me to hunt. That being said, my
life was never normal. It was filled with unusual events,
like lightning streaking through my house during the summer thunderstorms.
To a small boy, the bluish streaks flashing through the
house were the greatest thing in the world. We had
a tall TV in tent of wired to a massive
sycamore tree for support, and I believe it acted like
a lightning conductor. It never hurt us or damaged the house,
but it made Mom jump and scream every time it flashed.
That's probably why I love lightning storms, not because a
mom jumping and screaming, but knowing it probably wouldn't hurt me.
I chased life with a camera for about four years,
and I got some amazing photos. I grew up in
the Deep South with all the legends of monsters in
the woods, ghosts everywhere, and things that go bump in
the night. It's taken seventy one years of living to
prove that most of them are real. I've hunted and
fished the woods and waters of Louisiana all my life,
beginning with trips to fishing spots that were just a
little wider than the fourteen foot boat my dad and
I were in. Well that's where the fish are. We
went to exotic places like Cockadri. I think that's how
you pronounce that cocodre, Cockadrie, Grassy Lake, False River, and
Bayou Pigeon. These waters were filled with alligators, an alligator
gar that could easily eat you, an alligator snapping, turtles
that could take a hand off in one bite. I
guess it's best to avoid anything with alligator in its name.
These waters were mostly surrounded by deep woods, dark places
that would inspire your mind to wander and wonder what
was out there, even though you didn't really want to know.
I took comfort knowing that our eighteen horsepower Evan rooted
outboard and motor could outrun anything that could swim up
to our boat. The time spent with my dad was
and is the best memories of growing up. He was
the guy that knew everything about everything, or so I thought.
Hunting trips were pretty much the same. We'd get up
three hours before sunrise and drive sixty miles to the
middle of nowhere to be in the woods before the
sun came up. That man walking in the dark to
our hunting spots, and if I had known what was
out there, I'd probably have never started hunting. But I
was reassured by my father that the guns we had
were all we needed to protect ourselves. His was a
twelve gage L. C. Smith double barrel shotgun and mine
was a four to ten bolt action, both loaded with
number six squirrel shot. And again, if I had only known,
my journey into the unseen realm started when I was young.
I had ongoing repetitive nightmares of going to an old
two story house that was haunted. Each level in the
house was more frightening and dangerous than the last, and
in my dream, if I ever had made it to
the attic, I knew I would die. I never did
get to the attic in my dream. Luckily I always
woke up first. Forty years later, I visited that house
the Myrtles near Saint Francisville, Louisiana. The ghosts were real
and the dreams stopped. I suppose I had met face
to face with my fears. Dealing with earth bound souls
or ghosts became a way of life for me in
the nineteen seventies. Most of them are lost and confused,
and they just need a little help finding a direction.
But some are evil and demonic, and although I didn't
like it, I had to deal with some of those too.
Knowing about UFOs was commonplace among all my friends. It
was a huge topic of conversation. In the nineteen sixties.
The US was engaged in the space race, and everyone
was interested in all the things about space. UFOs like Bigfoot,
were mostly whispered about for fear of ridicule. In two
thousand and six, while living on a farm in Tylertown, Mississippi,
I was photographing a thunderstorm and I managed to get
two clear photographs of a UFO. There. Again proved for
what I believed, and I sent the photos to Moufon
and never heard back from them. As for Bigfoot, that
story started when I was sixteen. The Roger Patterson Bigfoot
film from California had just come out, and I knew
it was real. I wanted to go there, but I
knew it was impossible. Not too much later, the movie
The Legend of Boggy Creek came out, and I thought
it was just another B grade scary movie and I
didn't pay any attention. Shortly after that, my first exposure
to Bigfoot came at a hunting camp in Morganza, Louisiana.
It was a twenty three thousand acre lease with two
hundred and fifty members in the hunting club. The club
had three camps. Days at the camp included getting up
two hours before dawn to be on an assigned stand
as the sun came up, and the drivers would turn
the dogs loose to get the deer up and moving well.
That lasted until noon after which we returned to camp
after the to clean whatever deer were killed. We hung
out around the camp for the afternoon, drinking beer and
waiting for supper to be cooked. Later. After supper, there
was more beer in the nightly card game. Well, myself
and another sixteen year old nicknamed Poncho had other plans.
Because it was a moonlit night, we walked down a
five mile gravel road at night to another camp with
no flashlights, no guns, nothing but my hunting knife for protection.
Because there had never been a sighting of a bear
or cougar, the worst thing that we could meet was
a deer, apossum, an armadillo, or a skunk. Right about
a mile into the walk, we could hear something walking
beside us in the bushes just off the road. It
sounded light enough to be a person, and it seemed
to walk on two feet. If we stopped, it stopped,
and if we walked, it walk. This went on for
a quarter of a mile, with both of us trying
to figure out what it was. We ran through all
the animals that we could think of. No way it
was anything that we'd heard or seen before. So what
was it? Was it a person? If it was one
of the men from our camp. They would have jumped
out to scare us. A lost hunting dog maybe would
have come to us. Deer don't follow people. I stopped
and cut a tall sapling to make a spear, and
Poncho asked why I did that. I told him, if
anything comes out of those bushes, I'm gonna stab it.
It finally faded off in the distance and we never
knew what it was. Two weeks later I heard on
the radio that on a recent night, a towboat pilot
had shined his searchlight on a large, upright walking animal
on the banks of the Mississippi River near where our
camp was. He said it was a bigfoot. By the
time I was twin and had a job that could
have paid my way to California, I was in love
and getting married so much for Bigfoot. I kept up
with the stories of Bigfoot as best as I could,
and now that I'm single again and retired. In October
of twenty eighteen, I finally made it to California. While
walking a boy scout tree trail in Jedediah smith Redwood
State Park, I found a sixteen inch bigfoot track. I
hoped I would find the bigfoot there. I did find
a big footprint, but not the bigfoot. I was like
a kid in a candy store. I was all but
dancing as I look for what made the print, but
I never saw it. I could feel eyes on me,
though something was watching me, and I'd call out to it,
come see me. I'm not afraid of you, and I
won't hurt you, and I won't run away. Come in
and see me. Nothing appeared or called back, but I
knew they were there. But what I didn't know was
that this trail is only twenty miles from where Roger
Patterson shot his film of Paddy. Had I known, I
might still be there today. Obligations brought me back to Louisiana,
and now I have embarked on a quest for bigfoot
near where I grew up. I headed for the area
with the most reported sightings of bigfoot in Louisiana. It's
the Kesachee National Forest. It is six hundred thousand acres
of commercial pine, timberland and hardwood bottoms, and there's lots
of room for bigfoot to roam. I made it here
in April of twenty nineteen, and I've been in this
area off and on. Since I camp here two to
three weeks out of every month, as close as a
half a mile from where I've found their tracks. I
have found numerous tracks and tree structures supposedly built by Bigfoot,
and had the extreme pleasure of actually getting a three
second full body view of one only one hundred yards away.
On September fifth of twenty nineteen, I was walking one
of the logging roads here, a stretch that I hadn't
walked before. It was eight thirty am, and I had
stopped to look for tracks around a small pond. I
had my Sony digital camera out. I zoomed out to
twelve hundred millimeters, looking around the edges of the pond,
not seeing any tracks of deer, codies, or Bigfoot or raccoons.
I turned the camera off and let it hang on
a strap connected to my backpack. Well. As I did,
I saw something move from the corner of my right eye,
and when I turned to see what it was, I
saw about three seconds of the seven foot tall creature
walk across the road one hundred yards away from me.
It takes five seconds for that camera to come to
life and be ready to take a photo, so I
didn't get photo. I think it had been paralleling me
as I walked, and when I stopped, it saw a
chance to get ahead of me, and it crossed the road.
It was covered in six inch long black hair and
was slender built. Unlike the reports of the massive hawk
like creatures. It had an easy gait, apparently in no
particular hurry. Its head was down a little and I
couldn't see a neck. The back of its head was
conical in shape, with a point straight above its head
as it looked down. Its hands reached almost to its knees,
and its palms faced towards the rear. It never looked
my way, either because it didn't see me standing there,
or it didn't want me to see it in the
first place, or maybe it did. I've wondered if it
wanted me to see it briefly, because I had been
looking for it and talking to them out loud as
I walked, calling for them to come out to visit me,
the same way I did in California. I do that
a lot here, and I've heard mumbled replies, and I've
even been whistled at by one while walking. Whatever the case,
I went to try to find it, but I couldn't
find any tracks because the ground was dry and hardest concrete.
Most of the accounts for my witnesses say that they
just wanted to get as far away as possible. I,
on the other hand, I wanted to get closer. Remember
I'm the guy that chased lightning. I've heard the tree
knocks people talk about in vocalizations, and answer to calls
one of my fellow researchers made. My goal currently is
to get another sighting and hopefully some photos. I've waited
fifty five years to get to this point. I guess
a couple more years won't matter.