Speaker 1: I hear something outside my rig and it was loud
enough that it woke me up. I could tell it
sounded like it was bipedal walking on two legs because
of the steps that it was taking. And so I
hear it walking around the outside of my rig, and
I'm setting up listening very intently.
Speaker 2: And at this point I'm right up where the opening
of the tent is, laying on my stomach, kind of
looking forward, trying to see out because there's windows, and
I'm trying to see out, but it's so dark.
Speaker 1: And I hear it walk up to the annex and
it kind of gets the fabric in both hands and
stretches it, and I think I gasped, but I was
sitting there hyperventilating, terrifying. I was afraid it was fixing
to come in the tent and get me.
Speaker 3: This is Bigfoot Crossroads. My name is Matt, and I'd
like to welcome Jimmy to the show. Jimmy just got
back from an epic adventure. We were just talking about
it before I pressed record, and yeah, Jimmy, welcome to
the show. Man.
Speaker 1: Thanks Matt, glad to be here Ludrew's show.
Speaker 3: Thanks Man. Yeah, I'm glad we are finally able to
hook up like this and man on the hills of
a bigfoot outing of a lifetime. Man, tell everybody where
you just went this weekend.
Speaker 1: So I just got back Sunday. I left on Wednesday.
I went down to Walla Walla, Washington and camped overnight,
and then early Thursday got up and headed into the
Umatilla National Forest and the Blue Mountains and went in
camp near the Paul Freeman site and that iconic video
from nineteen ninety four where he's following a trackway at
the side of a hill. Camera kind of pans up
and you see a bigfoot walk from right to left
kind behind a tree, and it turns and looks at him,
and he goes, oh, there he goes that film right there.
I got to stand in the spot where Paul Freeman stood,
kind of explore that area. Now, went out there with
a whole group of folks, did some video recording and everything,
and then we camped nearby up and some of them
camped down in the forest and me and my group
camped up in a meadow. We had some futtertinge sounds.
Found a possible prince just inside the tree line. Maybe
about twenty feet and it was interesting. It wasn't exactly fresh,
I don't think, but it was kind of just to
the right of a big dead cedar tree, a red seedar,
and it was kind of in a position. I was
standing there and looking. It had a perfect view of
camp where me and some other folks were camp and
it could like look around from behind that tree and
very easily steep where we were. So we found that
one print. We had some kind of crazy before I
got there. Now, one of the folks I was with
was playing a flute in camp and it attracted a wolf.
It was doing a circle around camp, and it was
some pretty crazy audio. Oh wow, And I'm sure that
was I'm sure that was pretty freaky with a wolf
circling near camp there at that point, there were only
about two of them there. It was before the main
group arrived. But we went up and spent some time
on in a meadow on a ridge line doing a
thermal viewing along the ridge line where if anybody saw
the video Cliff Frockman did last year on the ridge line,
we were looking at that exact ridge line that he
was at. Epic describes it. It was an amazing experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was crazy. You sent me that short clip
that you recorded there at the site. Man, I was
really surprised about just how squatchy it looks. Man, there's
so much cover and habitat there. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, it's grown up a little bit, Matt. Since
it was filmed in ninety four. Just to the left
of the tree that the big footsteps up from behind
was a tree that called the Christmas Tree. It was
about twelve feet tall then and it's quite hit bigger now.
What really gotten me though, Matt was kind of walking
at that hill. It's it's like maybe fifty feet from
the spring. It's just off a dirt road. It's not
very far at all. It's a little bit steeper than
it looks. And from where he was standing, the video
doesn't really it doesn't really come through in the video
that he took how close he was. When you get
there and you stand in that spot and you can
see the whole video running through your head and you
see it step out and you hear him in your
mind go, oh, there he goes. We're talking like maybe
twenty years thirty feet away.
Speaker 3: Wow, And it stops.
Speaker 1: It stops and kind of turns his head and peeks
around a tree and looks at him, and then it
continues walking off into the brush. So Doug Hicheck, who
was famous for doing monster Quests the series before Paul
Freeman passed away, Doug Highcheck cleaned that video up, and
Paul Freeman continues walking up the trail a little bit
and turns a corner and you can see in the
video that high Check cleaned up there's a female sas
squatch there And I think a lot of people aren't
aware of this, but you can see it pick up
an rod like a juvenile. You can see the legs
come up in the video. So it wasn't just the
one big foot that he fel there. There were two others. Yeah,
female and a little one. And just knowing you're like
standing there was such an iconic thing happened. I got
goose bots, so it was pretty incredible.
Speaker 3: Iconic is probably the best word I can think of
to describe Paul Freeman and his legacy. Man, you know,
I still to this day kind of controversially, you know,
the crowd is kind of divided whenever it comes to
his evidence and films and everything. But man, I you know,
I've always been a fan like you. I've seen that
other footage, you know, and it looks like a female
picking up a baby to me, And you know, how
do you explain that one? Did he have a whole
family of people wearing costumes out there in the woods
that day? What was going on.
Speaker 1: Exactly? And it's pretty deep out there too. I drove
up that trail for probably a half hour where I
hit around five thousand feet and went over a little
past and that is quite a way's feather ebb. So
it's not like people are just hanging out there. And definitely,
like back in that time, you wouldn't want to be
running around in a suit out there. There's people hutting
bear and game and stuff, and you might get shot
doing something like that. And then having a whole family
dressed up. Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either.
Speaker 3: And apparently we can confirm that there's wolves out there
at least now, So there is that What got you
started in this whole thing? How'd you get interested in Bigfoot?
Speaker 1: So? I was always kind of interested in it growing up.
I was a free range kid in the seventies, and
I remember we went to see the Legend of Boggy
Creek at the drive in. In the back of the truck.
We sat there and watched it. I was kind of
hooked since then. Left monsters and stuff when I was
a kid, But at some point I kind of grew
out of it. About so growing up it was in
central Texas and the little town up front. It used
to be a little round rock. Remember when it was
less than a thousand people, and now it's probably a
couple hundred thousand.
Speaker 3: Yeah it's not little now, yeah, not anymore.
Speaker 1: But I remember hearing stories about the hairy Man. There's
a hairy Man road there. Yeah. My parents would say, like,
you know, I guess I was a free range kid.
I'd go out in the morning, come home, but I
knew I needed to be home by dark because they
and my grandparents would tell me, like, you know, will
Jimmy be home before dark? The wooly booger will get
you so like Boggie Creek. But then back then I
didn't equate Harrymanner Wooly Bookers were bigfoot, right. I thought
that was only something out west. I hear that time
and time again. I thought maybe it was something else.
But then I kind of lost track of all that
and grew up and went and did a bunch of stuff.
And then I moved to the Pacific Northwest about twenty
five years ago after a really bad divorce. I came
out here to kind of get my life together and
fish in Alaska, and I did that for about three years,
and then I met my wife and settled down here
and started working for drawingline retailer about ten years ago,
so around the time of COVID. COVID hit me really
hard because I'm a Type two diabetic and where the
whole thing started here in the US is about a
mile and a half from my house and right down
the street from where my watch works. That nursing home
where all those people died. The fire station is literally
behind where I live. The fireman and first responders had
to be quarantined, so I stayed home and indoors for
about eight months. Now. I was already kind of, you know,
on the heavy side, but during that period of time,
I blew up to about three hundred and fifty pounds
and I could barely walk down the hallway. And my
wife was like, Jimmy, you got to do something that
you're going to die. So I started this weight loss
program that dealt with the psychology of eating. And one
of the things I learned really early on was something
called habit by, where you want to pair something that
you enjoy doing with something that you don't. I'd always
been interested in photography, and so I decided to pair
that with hiking because I wanted to do landscape photography.
So I started hiking. My health kind of my feet
and knees and stuff got worse. I ended up having
to lay out the hiking, but I still wanted to
get out there, so I bought a twenty one four
Hunner TRD off road and I started overlanding and off roading,
and that's where I had my first experience. I was
out off roading with a group of friends near Mount
Baker and we'd been off roading all day long, and
we'd planned on camping together. So there's a in the
Baker River Area recreational area. There's a kind of an
overflow parking lot for when it's too snowy to get
up to where they skied. So we decided we were
going to park in that camping or in that parking
lot because it was kind of wide open. It was
big enough to accommodate all of us, so we set
up kind of in a circle around it. Everybody was
pretty spread out having a good time. I had just
gotten a rooftop tents and it was a big one
has like a had a king size plus bed in it.
It had an anex that attached to the bottom of it,
and then the ladder to go up into the tent
was inside the ANX. So everything is going cool. I'm excited,
I said it up. I'm excited to sleep in it.
And we all go to bed about ten thirty or so,
because we're all kind of older. And twelve thirty I
hear something outside my rig and it was loud enough
that it woke me up. So I'm setting up inside
my brig AA. And keep in mind it has a
kind of light blocker built into it, so it's extremely
dark in there, so dark I can't see my hand.
But I hear something that if you've ever been parked
on gravel in a vehicle and you turn the tires
and it makes it sound, that's what I heard. But
there was nobody driving around and I heard this thing
that I could tell. It sounded like it was on
It was by pedal walking on two legs because of
the steps that it was taking. And so I hear
it walking around the outside of my rig and I'm
setting up listening very intently, and it makes its way
around to the passenger side where the annex is. And
I really think, Matt, that the reason that picked me
for this was because I believe they're curious, and I
believe maybe this one had never seen a rooftop tentement
annex before. Everybody else was this cant in tents or
sleeping in their rigs. But I could hear it. It's
like went up to and at this point, I'm right
up where the opening of the tent is, laying on
my stomach, kind of looking forward, trying to see out
because there's windows in the annex. It's just like a
big tent and I'm trying to see out, but it's
so dark. And I hear it walk up to the
annex and it kind of gets the fabric in both
hands and stretches it.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, and I.
Speaker 1: Think I gassed. And when I gassed, I heard it
walk away, but I was sitting there, hyperventilating, terrifying. I
was afraid it was fixing to come in the tent
and get me. So the next morning at some point
I go I finally get to sleep, and the next
morning I get up and I'm as soon as it's light,
I'm looking around my rig trying to see, you know,
is there anything I can see footprints? Unfortunately, it was
on I couldn't find any footprints. I look in the
area I was kind of above setting on a hill
where I was, and I kind of looked down in
the dart and the grass and the brush, and I
couldn't see anything there. So I'm not sure exactly how
it came into camp. But one of the things I
noticed is on the driver's side of my brig, I
had an eight by eight awning that was up about
eight feet taut, and on the end of that awning
I had a camp organizer where you could put, you know,
things for camp, flashlights, toilet paper, whatever, and then the
bottom of it, I had tent steaks so it would
weigh it down so it's it ever got windy, it
wouldn't blow it around. But I don't remember any wind
that night, you know, other than just a slight breeze.
We're talking. This was in June twenty twenty three, So
it was just around this time of year. No rain
that day. It was a beautiful day, sunshine. If you want,
folks can go. But I can look at the weather
for that date. Arou on my baker and seat. So
but that camp organizer I don't see it. And so
in my mind I start rationalizing and thinking, okay, there
was a camp robber. That's when I heard they came
in and they stole that camp organizer. And so I'm
like walking around. I talk to everybody in camp asking
where you're around my ridge last night around twelve thirty,
and everybody said no, and I was either in my
tent or I wasn't in that area at all. I
think everybody was still asleep. So I just kind of
wrote it off for a little bit. Later that morning,
I walk over to where the fire pit is where
everybody's going to cook breakfast and everything, and I'm standing
there talking and I happened to look back over to
my rig and this is a little bit of a
more elevated area than where I was parked. I look
over to my rig and I can see the organizer
isn't gone. It's laying on top of the auning. So
remember this is eight feet up in the air and
it is stretched completely out, laying flat, and so I'm
like scratching my head trying to figure out what the
heck happened here. So I go over to my rig
and I get my steps tool. Because I'm not tall enough,
I'm like five six. I'm not calm enough to reach
up and get that camp organizer off the awning. So
I step up there and able to pull it down.
And then I'm standing there like an idiot with the
end of the organizer in my hands, trying to throw
it up to recreate it, to see can I make
it lay fat by blowing lay flat by like if
the wind was blowing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I tried for a while, and it would only go
like a foot maybe two feet in and then it
would fall because of the weight of the stakes. So
I wasn't ever able to recreate it. I don't have
any explanation for what happened to me other than I
really believed that it was a big but that did that.
Speaker 3: And before anybody starts rolling their eyes, you sent me
a photo of the organizer hanging down and everything, and
there's no there's no way the wind did that. There's
no way the wind did that. There's no way a
person did it. I mean it's like a huge heavy
flap that had stuff in it, so like something had
to be tall enough to not only lift it over
the top of an eight foot tall awning, but then
also stretch it out on top of the awning, which
would probably be what would you say, another two three feet.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. I mean you could maybe do it from
the side. You would have to be tall to be
able to do it, though, And I think I sent
your pictures of my rig as well. Yeah, with the
awning deploys you could see, like so the top of
my forerunner where the on in is mounted is probably
a good eight feet, so it would be is it impossible?
Probably not difficult, Probably very But I don't think somebody
else was kind of poking fun at me or trying
to trying to get me. My friends wouldn't do that.
In fact, I called and talked to the folks that
were parked the closest to me that I'd kind of
lost touch with for a while and asked him, like,
you know, did you hear anything that night? Did you
see anything? And I hadn't told him yet. You know
kind of what I was thinking of what was going on.
And one of them, Jack, he was like, does somebody
do something to you, Jimmy, because I guess he could
hear like my voice. He said, does somebody do something
to you? Or does somebody steal something? And I was like, no, Jack,
I think it was a bigfoot in camp. And I
told me what happened. It was like wow, he said,
you know, I didn't hear anything at all, so and
he was very sincere. I don't think it was them
messing with me. I do think it was a bigfoot.
Havn't have been a fun with me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And plus whatever did it? Did it either I
guess before you woke up, or did it while you
were a wig listening intently and you didn't even hear
it happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I believe it was probably I don't know.
You know, I hadn't even really thought about that. Matt.
I wonder if it came back at some point. Got
me wondering, now did it come back again? Because I
don't recall it stopping. So Also at that time, on
the dash, I had a I can't say what brand
it was or anything, but I had a dash count
that didn't have night vision, but it had motion detection,
and at the exact time, right around I think it
was like twelve thirty two, that dash can triggered, but
my cowboy hat was blocking part of it, and then
it was so dark you couldn't see whatever it was,
but it did go off at that time.
Speaker 3: Huh. So it definitely detected a change in heat source,
a heat source entering the area or something around that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or something something triggered that dash camp.
Speaker 3: So did you know pretty uh instantly that it was
bigfoot in your mind or was that what you were
always thinking.
Speaker 1: It's what I was always thinking, just because of the sound,
Like I've been around so many people walking on gravel.
I mean, look, I'm an Overlander, so we spend a
lot of time in gravel parking lots, talking a step
and I'm used to hearing riggs pull in what they said.
I'm used to hearing what people sound like walking around
on gravel. My dad worked in a limestone quarry for
pretty much his whole life and retired from there, and
I used to go out and see him. It's like,
I'll gravel out there. That's what they sold, is gravel
so I'm used to what gravel sounds like, and this
didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard before. And I
could tell it was like really big. And I think
that's what kind of immediately intimidated me was it didn't
sound like a bear shuffling around. This sounded very purposeful,
very meticulous, like it knew exactly what it was about.
And I think not being able to see because I
had the windows zipped up, couldn't see because it was
so dark outside of the annex, I think that made
it a hundred times worse. I think maybe if I
saw it, I would have been like, oh, hell, that's bigfoot.
But not being able to see intensified it quite a bit,
and it took me quite a while before I could
get a good night's sleep. I want to say it
rose to the level of PTSD, but it definitely impacted me.
I didn't sleep well for a while.
Speaker 3: So did you just get the bug at that point?
Why did you start going out looking for these things?
Speaker 1: I needed an explanation, but at that time I wasn't
really too serious about it. I started watching bigfoot shows,
videos things like that. It wasn't until November tenth of
last year that I became completely obsessed and what happened.
Being an overlander and stuff, I do a lot of
remote camping and had gone on a solo trip by
myself over to Crescent Bar, Washington, on the eastern side
of the Cascades, and spent a couple of nights out
there by myself. I was in a campground, so it
wasn't like that time wasn't too remote. But I was
coming back, and I was coming back over the Cascades
through Snowpalmy Pass and came down the pass. There was
a lot of traffic, like there always is on Sunday,
got just like this last weekend coming back over the pass,
and that trip it should have taken me less than
four hours to get home. That took seven because it
was like two hours of traffic on the pass from
kle Elum all the way up to the top. So
there's always really bad traffic, and I didn't feel like
fighting the fast lane. People were driving like idiots, so
I just kind of hung out in the right lane
and I was going about seventy miles an hour or so,
lightly raining. It's about one fifteen in the afternoon on
a Sunday going down iminy headed west. I'm just outside
North Bend, Washington, and coming into North Bend, there's some
different sections in the snow Kwamie River that you pass,
and the first one is the south south fork of
the snow Kwamie and it's right at the exit for
the Washington Fire Training Center and Homestead Road if people
are from the area, so they'll know where I'm talking about.
That bridge, you kind of come around a corner and
I'm always kind of I love rivers, and I always
look to see, like how high is the river? Can
you see river bed rock? A river rock? You know,
is it raging? What's going on? So, like I said,
I was going about seventy miles an hour, and I
come around that bend and I look over to the
rights to see what the river looks like, and standing
there is a cinnamon colored bigfoot that's about it had
to have been over eight feet tall, and I think
it was about eight and a half and I could
see it from head to the hill. From behind. It
was facing kind of to the northeast away from me,
but I could see, you know, very clearly. It was
cinnamon colored. It didn't have the super conical head. It
had a huge head, the shoulders were And I'm kind
of going back and thinking about all of this afterwards,
because as soon as I saw it, Matt, I was like,
holy cow, that shouldn't be there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm like, I.
Speaker 1: Can't believe broad daylight. Although it's like missing light rain,
there's a freaking bigfoot standing seventy five yards off the highway.
And I've been, you know, watching on TV and stuff,
and I hear there's roadside sightings all the time, but
I never expected to see that. And when I did it,
my mind kind of just froze for a second, and
I'm like, did I just really see that? And like,
I looked at it two times because I had looked
over saw it and I was like, holy crap, And
I look right back and kind of taken more of
what I'm seeing. But my sighting this time was maybe
two three seconds at the most. But it's kind of
amazing what you can observe within a couple seconds. Yeah,
it seemed like a lot longer to me. So kind
of getting back to the description had a really big head,
the shoulders were like, immediately, what kind of the size
of the shoulders were shocking? We're talking about like four
and a half feat wide. I could see the arms
were hanging down in its side. It was kind of
looking away, like I said, to the northeast. It was
looking it looked like across the river. So across the
river it's just real thick brush. There's a boundary forest
there between the river and homestead. And I went back
and drove that last week and on the way up
there to see like is their way down in there?
And I couldn't really figure out what it was looking at,
but the arms were hanging by its side. The hands
went down to maybe just below the knee, right at
the knee, and I could see the hair on its
forearms was hanging off about a good four to six
inches long. The hair looked that I did. It wasn't
shaggy like I thought it would be. It looked like
it was fairly well kept, like maybe it had been
swimming in the river. I really think that they used
that the souft fork of snow Qualm is maybe a
pointed ingress into the area and egress and I'll tell.
Speaker 3: You why in a moment.
Speaker 1: But so, the arms were huge, The shoulders were like
shockingly big. The waist was it super tapered. The bike
was you know, everything was covered in this cinnamon colored hair,
so it's like a dark brown with hints of brand
in it. And I could see all the way down
to its feet. Its legs were huge. And since that moment,
unlike I've been my wife says, I'm completely obsessed, but like,
I have to figure out what this is. I think
there's two kinds of people. They're the kind of people
that see something like this are having experience, and they
write it off and they never want to think about
it or talk about it again. And me, I'm just
the opposite, Like I want to get out there and
find out what it is. I want to do everything
I can to figure it out to the point to where,
you know, like maybe one day we can sit down
and have a conversation with them. So a couple of
things happen. One is I started going to conferences, and
last year me and my buddy went to the Sasquatch
Summit in Ocean Shores, Washington. I met a bunch of
people there, including a bunch of folks from the Olympic Projects.
I really enjoyed that conference. So the next one that
was coming that was in November. The next one was
in January, and that was in Kelsa squatch Fest. So
I went down there by myself and hung out for
a couple of days. I got to meet a couple
of people. One of those was Craig Yownie, who was
the host of squatch Fest, and he leads a group
called Pacific Northwest Sasquatch Research Group. And we really hit
it off talking. He's a professional cameraman, I'm a photographer
on the side, and we're talking with cameras and stuff.
We exchanged contact information. We figured out like we live
really close to each other, but twenty minutes away from
one another, and through talking and everything, he said, you know, hey,
why don't you come out to the research area. And
so we set up a time and started going out
north of Darrington to his research area that he calls
this i Squatch Valley and started going out there with him,
and then I started making a log trips out there
by myself as well and camping out there alone. About
a month and a half ago, I believe it was.
I was camped out there with my buddy and we
didn't hear it at the time, but we went to
bed like once again. It was around ten thirty and
I had an audio recorder running for the whole night,
and about thirty five minutes after we went to sleep,
started hearing tree knocks on the recording, an Adobe audition.
The closest place to camp from there is like camp grounds.
There's one to the east and it's about two miles away,
and there's one to the west. It's also about two
miles away, and I'm in the middle. It's a national force,
so you're not supposed to be shooting out there unless
you're hunting, not hunting season. But going back to the
audio that I got, you hear a tree knock in
the distance, and then maybe ten seconds later, you hear
another one, and it's a little bit closer, and then
you hear a series of tree knocks that progressively get
closer to where we're sleeping until it culminates in a
very loud bang that to me kind of almost sounds metallic,
and that woke me up. But I kind of sat
there listened. Didn't feel like there was any threat, so
I went back to sleep, and we had no idea
until the So I got home the next day and
started listening to it. I believe you know Jonathan and
Sarah Brown sure good friends guys from Salas Sasquatch. So
I was talking to him recently and we were talking
about that area and they mentioned that they'd been at
something where Washington Fish and Wildlife was there, and they
asked them, you know, hey, where do you get the
most reports from? And the place they get the most
reports from is in our research area. That campground is
two miles away from where I recorded those audios. Craig
has found some footprints and has some his own interesting audio,
possibly filmed something walking along the river. We're not sure
what you know exactly get what that might have been.
So I get really involved in the research end of it,
and then decided to try to tie bigfoock research into
overlanding and off roading. So I decided to start a
podcast called off Road x Files and find people who
had had experiences like myself, not limited in it to
just like Sasquatch or Bigfoot, anything that they might have
encountered all on the dirt road for service shrod, just
first camping, any kind of strange experience that they've had.
Because I'll tell you, Matt, every time I talk about this,
I feel better Yeah, it's almost like it's soothing. It helps.
It helps me kind to grips with what happened and
to kind of rationalize it in my own mind. And
I have heard other people say that it's really helpful
to talk about it, and so I want to try
to offer that support as well.
Speaker 3: It's amazing how much of a difference it makes just
to talk to somebody and something click in your brain
that makes you realize you share this experience, you have
something in common with that person where you don't feel
isolated in questioning yourself so much anymore. That's actually happened
right now, Actually your experience with something coming up around
your tent while you're camping, that whole thing about footsteps
and the gravel man. The most impactful encounter that I
had whenever I was doing build investigations was a situation
where a group of us from various states, we're meeting
up at our main research area. I was part of
the locals that were already there. We arrived a day
or two before everybody else, of course, and we had
set up camp and kind of made a half circle
around this campsite. It was the same campsite we always
use and everything, and we use that one because the
bigfoot are kind of known to travel through that park
and walk through the park at night and everything. So
it wasn't by accident, but we also chose that time
of year because the park's empty. Nobody camps during that
time of the season, and there was three of us.
I had this super huge tent set up because once
I started big footing, I realized that my tent was
way too small. I needed something with much more room
where nothing could touch me through the walls. And so
there was my tent and then another tent right next
to it, and then we had like a storage tent
set up, and then the rest of the spot was
for everybody that was going to show up. And we
probably stayed up until I don't know, eleven thirty or so,
and then we all got in the tents and went
to sleep, and we left three lanterns on There was
a couple of places. There was a tree right in
front of my tent, and then there was a lantern
post on the opposite side of the camp, and then
on another tree we hung another lantern. And these were
you know Coleman lanterns, the kind that you actually pour
the fuel into They were not propane.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I remember those.
Speaker 3: We had left them on because we didn't know whenever
everybody else was getting get there. They'd get there at
some point in the middle of the night, so they
needed to see where we were at in the campgrounds
and they would be able to see and set their
tent up and everything, and so we left them on
and filled them all up before we went to bed.
At some point I woke up out of a dead sleep,
and it was one of those times whenever something wakes
you up and you're just wide awake and you're listening
because you're trying to figure out, Okay, what just woke
me up?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Is it a threat?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And just like you're talking about, I heard extremely slow,
methodical steps in the gravel walking right next to my
tent on the side that I was sleeping on, and
my vehicle, I was driving a Ford Explorer at the time,
it was parked at that end of the tent, probably
three to four feet away. There is like some large
boulders set up there next to the camp road, so
you couldn't drive your vehicle into the campsite, and so
whatever this was was walking in a space or probably
about three feet between my tent and my vehicle and
the boulders and all that. And then I heard the
same type footsteps in the gravel in front of the tent.
And these two sets of footsteps are intersecting at the
front corner of my tent, next to the tree where
the lantern was hanging. And I'm laying there listening, and
I mean, these steps are so slow and like it
sounds like two very heavy people. And then I hear
whispering at the front of the tent and I'm thinking,
oh my god, somebody's out there. Is that, you know,
the of our group. That's what I'm thinking. It's got
to be the rest of our group. And they're just
trying to be quiet and not wake us up or whatever.
And that's whenever it kind of dawned on me. Everything
like this all happens pretty quickly, you know what I'm saying.
So like, at that point, I notice the lanterns are off,
there's no light outside the tent. I'm not seeing any
shadows on the tent wall or anything. And then I
hear something. There's distinct sound. I'll never forget it, that
sound of when you lift up a car door handle
and let go of it and it snaps back down.
That's the sound at my ford right there. Oh my god,
something's trying that. Yeah. So at this point, I'm honestly
thinking camp prowlers. We got burglars, you know, they're coming
in and stealing our stuff. And so I'm laying there
and I've got a pistol with me, and so like
I kind of like sit up inside my feet in
my boots and get my pistol, and I look over
at my buddy, who's asleep on the other side of
the tenant's like, like I said, a big two room tent.
He's sound asleep. He doesn't hear anything. And so I'm thinking,
what do I do? Because as soon as I hit
this zipper, whoever's out there is going to hear me coming.
And am I gonna just go out there and start blasting?
Am I gonna hold somebody at gunpoint? You know? All
these thoughts racing through my hip. What do I do?
So I see the spotlight laying on the floor next
to me. So I'm thinking, okay, I'm I'm going to
pick up the spotlight and I'm just gonna flash it.
I'm not going to turn it. I'm just gonna flash
it real quick, light up the tent real bright, so
whoever's out there will know that somebody's awake. And so
I do that and there's just nothing, just dead quiet,
and I'm like okay, So I start saying my buddy's name,
trying to wake him up. Well at the time, Uh
so there's the other guy that's asleep in a tent.
One tent over in a small tent, and these two
guys both have the same name. And the buddy of
mine that was in the tent with me is sleeping
with on his side. He's deaf in one ear and
I snore, so he's got his deaf ear up in
the air and he's got his good ear covered up.
And so I end up waking up the other guy
in the other tent. So I'm like telling him, like, hey,
meet me out in front of the tent right now,
and he's like okay. So we both come out of
the tent. I've got the spotlight and I'm doing like
the whole cop thing with my pistol in one hand
and spotlight crossed over, pointing, and I'm just being around
and like I'm you know, giving calms to him, you
know everything that just happened, and man, there's just nothing.
It's just dead quiet. I go over to my explorer.
I'm looking in the windows and everything, everything's there. Nothing's taken,
like my wallet and like a CBE radio and like
a flashlight. They're all like laying in the front seat.
Nothing's gone. And I'm just like, what is going on?
And I'm shining the spotlight around. There's just nothing, no movement. Nothing.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: About that time, the guy that woke up with me,
I've explained everything to him. He thinks it's prowlers too,
because that's what I'm saying. I'm like, look, they've turned
off the lannerns because we went up and checked the
lanterns and they were turned to the off position and
still had fuel in them, all three of them.
Speaker 1: All.
Speaker 3: So he's calling the park ranger and you know, reporting, hey,
we've got prowlers in camp blah blah. Block is. Like
I said, we're the only ones in the park. There's
only one road coming into this area and one road out.
So the ranger's coming. And by this time, my other
buddy has woken up and he's kind of like sitting
on the side of his cot and he's looking out
the tent door at me, and I'm looking at him
and I've just, you know, I've really got a crazy
look in my eye. You know, I'm pretty rattled at
this point. And uh, he just says, did you look
for tracks? Well, well, no, why would I look for tracks?
You know, it's people. So I shine the spotlight down
and I walk over there by the side of the
tent where I first heard the steps, and you can
see large what looks like barefoot impressions in the pea
gravel next to the tent. They're not clear. You certainly couldn't,
you know, pour a plaster cast of them or anything,
but it's like the out line and everything. And so
I'm shining around. Well, the pea gravel is thicker in
the main part of camp, so I shine over there
in front of my tent and there's just these other
set of tracks coming and I follow the tracks, and
something took a step between our two tints that were
side by side. There's probably about an eight inch wide
gap between them, and then you've got you know, the
support lines coming off the front and the back and everything.
Something took one step in between the tents and its
second step hit behind my tent. My tent was twelve
by eight fi. Yeah, so that's an eight foot stride.
And like I said, never heard anything, nothing, And that
freaked me out so bad because I heard whispering. I
heard it try a door handle, and all the lanterns
were turned off. There's just nothing out there except these
tracks around camp right where I heard something walking. Eventually,
the ranger gets there and he had actually parked his
vehicle at the entrance and walked in through the woods
trying to catch anybody that was sneaking around out there.
And he just matter of fact he told us, he
was like, you guys are the only people here. There's
no other vehicles. If there was somebody snooping around your camp,
they just hiked seven miles through the woods with no flashlight.
That doesn't make sense, doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: It's not reasonable. No, it's not reasonable. You mentioned to
the whispering. So are we're in the evening when we
recorded the audio earlier that evening, My buddy and I
are sitting around camp campfire. We had a couple of beers.
I kept looking over to my right and you kept going,
what's going on over there? I'm like, sounds like somebody talking,
but it's just outside the edge of understanding. But I
kind of chalk it up to you. We were close
to the river, and so maybe there's that whole thing
kind of like paradoia where if you're close to a
babbling work or something that can sound like voices. So
I just kind of wrote it off as that, but
maybe it was. Maybe it was something out there talking
just kind of outside the edge of hearing. So one
thing I wanted to mention is on maybe a couple
of months ago, I was on a different podcast and
somebody sent me an email two weeks after I was
on there, and there was a hunter who said that
they were pretty sure that a similar siding on the
way home from hunting on I ninety coming back to
the West Side just before North Bend, and he sent
me a screenshot of Google maps and Matt his sighting
was in the exact same place. Wow, three weeks before mine.
Three weeks before mine, he saw one in that same spot.
I've been trying to hook up with him to have
a conversation, to get more details about his siding, to
see like, you know, what car was it, et cetera.
Sees maybe it was the same one, but having had
two sidings within three weeks, I really think maybe they're
using that river to come and go, and so I
want to find a way down onto that river bed
to try to do some more investigating and see what
we can figure out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the one that you saw, I wanted to ask you.
I mean, it's broad daylight, so you're going across a bridge,
it's over a river. Is this thing on the bank
of the river, is it in water?
Speaker 1: Where is it?
Speaker 3: Exactly?
Speaker 1: So at that time, the river was pretty low because
to remember, it's November, so all of the high River
and everything is around this kind of year and earlier,
so April May June, the rivers are a lot higher
stage because of all the glacial melt and the snow melting,
and then around November the river's pretty low. So from
what I could see of the river, the river was
maybe only about ten twenty feet wide at that point,
and where it was sand and was on river rock
very big boulders, not necessarily boulders, but like basketball sized
rocks and smaller sticking out like a sore thumb. Yeah, exactly,
sore thumb. And it's like, what why. And I think
it's maybe one of the hardest things I've had to
come to terms with with that is like the why
of it? Why is it standing there in broad daylight
where it could very easily be seen by hundreds of
people driving through traffic is stremely heavy during that period
of time. Why didn't make care that it could be seen?
And I have no idea?
Speaker 3: Okay, So that's one of the great mysteries, right, That's
a question that plagues me at night whenever I'm trying
to fall asleep. Why is it? I mean, I've spent
years talking to people. I spent years going out looking
for these things, talking to people who had sightings. The
general consensus is these things are masters of their domain,
masters of the environment, and they go so far out
of their way to keep from being seen, discovered, whatever
you want to call it. But then you have this
sighting like you had. You have these sightings where they
just walk out cross in front of cars instead of
waiting for the car to drive past them. What what
is going on? It's like sometimes they just don't even care. Yes,
all of those fs are gone. Yeah, I don't know, man,
it's mind boggling. Well, I was hoping you could have
the answer. You've kind of you've kind of let me
wish I did so at this point in it, where's
your head at? What? What are Is this just some
undiscovered primate? Is it a human of some kind? What?
What do you think these things are?
Speaker 1: Good question? So I definitely think they're physical. I believe
they're physical beings, probably more along the lines if somewhere
in between Chromagne or Neanderthal and Homo homo sapien or
Homo sapien sapient whatever. I think it's Homo sapient sapient
somewhere kind of in between, because and I also think
there's a large variety, just like there's a large variety
of humans. Yeah, humans who are taller, shorter, all the
way down to you know, little we people look different,
have different color hair, different skin complexions. I think it's
pretty much the same thing. But I think with Bigfoot,
they never left the woods man, so they're still grounded.
We left the woods and we've lost probably all the
kind of superabilities or extra abilities that we used to have.
And so since they're out there twenty four to seven
year grounded, I don't they haven't lost those abilities they've
continued to evolve and grow, So I think it's a
physical being that has it kind of what I refer
to as adoptions, so that ability to disappear very quickly.
We don't understand that. Maybe it's something to do with
hair follicles. Maybe it's they're like and I've heard time
and time again, how fast are there are some humans
that are pretty fast, but apparently they can move and
you know that in speeds that even exceed that. Maybe
they can go from standing vertically to being horizontal in
a second just by dropping with their weights. And more
recently I started hearing stories about crawlers, the bigfoots that
are spider crawling. Is that a newer adaption? I don't
know yet how far that goes back at something I'm
really interested in, But I think they have all these
abilities that we've lost, that they've continued to evolve that
we just don't understand, and so we can, you know,
see one and be able to study it. And I'm
definitely not in the kill camp. I think that it
should be something that would happen naturally, but also think
that you know, maybe they bury each other so that
may never happen.
Speaker 3: Man do you think we'll ever get to the point
of where it's publicly accepted that these things exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do. I think we're getting closer and closer,
just from you know, the time where I was a kid,
it was the bigfoot craze right in the sixties seventies,
especially the seventies, and then it died out for a
long time. Then now it's become so common. You know,
it's readily accepted on TV. Sure people still roll their
eyes and go, oh, this is just acting, and probably
some of it is, but it's becoming more socially acceptable
to talk about the subject not only a bigfoot, but
you know other cryptids, mothman, dog man, et cetera. In
this area, we have something called the click aitat eight
cat that I just went down to Benjin, Washington recently
and interviewed James Shubski at Marge's Outdoor Store, where they've
had like one hundred and forty reports in the last
three years of this they called the click atat ape cat.
It's a cryptid that it's like a large, very large
black panther that maybe had some human or primate type features,
intelligent eyes, et cetera. Does it exist? I don't know,
but I think it's really interesting and something else that
I'm looking into. But it's all of that is becoming
more socially acceptable, right along with UFOs or UAPs, and
I think that's had kind of a considerable impact on
the field, with people talking about subjects that used to
be a taboo that maybe just aren't his taboo anymore.
Speaker 3: Have you had any encounters or sightings of anything else
besides bigfoot?
Speaker 1: Not cryptidwise. Back when I was a kid, I used
to spend some summers with my grandpa in East Texas
in the big piney woods if you know where Newton
is kind of been the vicinity of Orange, Texas, right
along the Texas Louisiana border. Visco spent summers within at
his place he called Buckhorn Valley, and it was out
in the big thicket. I never and I used to
spend all day long out there with a BB gun
or twenty two hunting. Never really saw anything weird except
for over a period of years, and we're talking like
from the time I was eleven or twelve until I
was in my twenties. Back behind his house, there was
a kind of a meadow was maybe one hundred to
two hundred yards wide, probably closer to like one fifty
wasn't super big, but it was big enough you could
ride a horse around out in there. And it's surrounded
by pine trees. And I said, over a period of
years from when I was eleven or twelve, and so
I was in my early twenties when he passed away,
right about dust time, we'd see an orb that would
float from and it was always from my right to
left across this meadow. It was about six or seven
feet in the air. It didn't bob or move or
anything like if it was somebody with a headlamp or
a lantern. It was very steady, kind of very methodical moving.
It would take like maybe ten seconds to cross the
whole meadow, so about that speed. And at the distance
that I was at like one hundred and fifty yards,
it was about the size of like a cantelope, about
the size of a candlope metal melon, So it had
to be significantly bigger than that at one hundred and
fifty yards. Yeah, over a period of years I saw this,
So it's empirical signs replicatable. It happened again and again,
I don't know what it was but there's like a
lot of weird things that happened there. But I did
see that or probably twelve to fourteen times over my wifetime.
What color was it? It was white, but it wasn't
like strobing like plasma. It was kind of a solid white,
not super duper bright. But it definitely got your attention
as soon as it started coming out of the woods.
Like I said, it would always come out on the
right side of the woods and move towards the left.
Speaker 3: Did your grandfather say anything about it?
Speaker 1: No, they didn't talk about it. Yeah, he didn't talk
about anything like that. And I would love to be
able to go back now and see, like pick his
brain about things that maybe happened. And also my great grandfather,
Big Pop, he was a well known trapper in East Texas,
trapping wolves and mi ink and stuff like that. And
I just wonder now, like what did he possibly see
Because he lived a long life. He was around one
hundred years old when he passed away, and I knew
him when he was in his eighties and he'd be
out woodland wood. He had a wooden lathe that he
would carve axe handles and tag hammer handles and stuff
like that out in the yard, and I'd come out
in the morning. He'd asked me if I wanted to
bicket a biscuit, and he'd take me into He lived
in a little trailer behind my grandpa. But that man
could make some tremendous biscuits. But I'd get anything to
talk to him and find out. Did you ever see
anything weird?
Speaker 3: Oh? Man?
Speaker 1: I was just talking with my dad on the way
home the other day on Sunday. I was calling when
I'm coming back from a trip because it's a not
only it lonely, but it gets really boring, and I
enjoy talking to him. And I'm going down to Texas
in a couple of weeks for my cousin that passed
away for his funeral. And so I'm talking to Dad
and he mentions that he had an experience in a
deer camp. And so while I'm down there, I'm going
to see, as I can say he kime on video
or audio and have him tell me that story. Why
he still can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I was actually raised by my great grandparents,
and I never got a chance to talk to my
great grandfather about any of this. I probably honestly got
into it because of his passing, just trying to find
something to distract me. It was right after he passed
away that I really got into this. And my great
grandmother was alive for quite a while after I started
going out and researching and everything, and she knew a
lot of the people that I went out and investigated
with and everything, and she would always give me such
a hard time about it though, you know, we relatives
would come over or something, and you know, she'd be
sitting there talking and she do you know what, Matthew does?
You know he goes out there looking for big fuck?
Can you believe it? And then eventually, you know, whenever
I had my first sighting, you know, I came home
and like had been processing it that whole weekend, you know,
and then get back home and everything, and I went in,
like sat down on the foot of her bed, you know,
and she sat down next to me, and I like
told her everything, and she kind of laid off making
fun of me at that point a little bit. But
then one day she overheard me use the word booger
and like how you were saying, you know, wooly bogers
and everything. And she had been raised in the mountains
of Arkansas, and whenever she heard me use the word booger,
she said, wait, I thought you went out looking for
bigfoot And I said, yeah, they're called boogers. Well I
know what boogers are. Those are those old Harry wild
men that live up in the mountains. I heard about
those all the time, and it was just the connection
was never made. But after that, you know, she never
questioned or anything, never made fun of me after that.
And then at one point, we were having Thanksgiving dinner
here at the house and one of my uncles made
his way into the room I was in and it
was just the two of us, and he said, so
I hear you go out looking for bigfoot. I was like, yeah,
he goes you ever find one? Well, as a matter
of fact, yeah, And he says, well, you know your
great great grandmother saw one. And I'm just like, what
are you talking about? And he proceeds to tell you
this story about how my great grandmother's mother had seen
one a long time ago. They heard, and I guess
it would have been my great great grandfather heard something outside.
All the chickens and everything are going crazy, and they
go out there with a lantern and a shotgun, and
there's this bigfoot at their hogpen, and it had reached
over with one arm, they said, and scooped up a
pig underneath its arm and just walked off into the
woods with it. They never fired a shot or anything.
They weren't about to. And my uncle said, yeah, I
used to to go out looking for Bigfoot two, and
I used to do it whenever you were real little,
whenever I was in the Navy. He was actually stationed
out in Washington and got into it for a while
and I never knew it. So I guess it kind
of runs in the family. But yeah, man, those stories
from the previous generations are so far and few between
at this point, and we lose the opportunity to talk
to him. So I hope your father goes on the
record or whatever and you're able to record some of
those stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I hope so too. We're quickly losing that generation
and we need to talk to them and get all
those stories and get them documented while we can.
Speaker 3: Well, like you said, it's so therapeutic and it helps
so much, not just talking about it, but others hearing
them and everything. So, yeah, man, is your podcast already out?
Are you working on it.
Speaker 1: I'm working on it. I'm hoping I'm a couple of
weeks away of having a couple episodes down and then
getting it released out there. It'll be on a Spotify
to start. And if somebody wants to get in contact
with you, how can they go about doing that? Well,
thanks for asking, Matt. They can reach me Jimmy Tungate
at off Road Altogether, off road dot x dot files
at gmail dot com. Happy to talk to anybody that
you've had a strange experience, eerie, unexplained chilling encounters. If
you're a campra off over overland er anywhere on the globe,
happy to talk to you about it.
Speaker 3: And if youre some support, well, Jimmy, thanks for joining
me and sharing some of your stories and I look
forward to talking to you in the future.
Speaker 1: My friend, Yeah, same thing, Matt. It's been great. I
appreciate you having me on and sharing your stories as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, can't help it, man, can't help it. And if
you've had an encounter with something you can't explain, such
as bigfoot, UFOs, orbs or ghosts or anything at all,
email me at Bigfoot Crossroads at gmail dot com. Check
out the website Bigfootcrossroads dot com. You can find links
to social media, past episodes, merchandise, everything you need, all
in one place, and until next time, remember there's something
in the woods.