Speaker 1: In the mid nineteen sixties, friends offered our family use
of their cabin in the Great Basin near Baca, Nevada,
only a few hours drive from our home in Eli.
That part of the country is mostly barren, with a
few pockets of beauty and mystery. It's where most of
Nevada's rivers and streams go to did disappearing into the
dry basin, only to tragically flow into the Great Salt Lake.
We were financially challenged, not homeless or starving, but we
definitely struggled and had some very lean times. It felt
really good to tell people that we were going to
the cabin. However, it wasn't the quaint, rustic lakeside log
cabin or alpine chalet that one might have envisioned. After
what seemed like a really long drive of some over
rutted dirt roads up through a small canyon, we reached
a tiny, ramshackle framed house. This pitiful thing looked a
very out of place, and there wasn't another structure anywhere
that we could see. I was momentarily disenchanted. The cabin
consisted of only one room. At one side, there was
a big iron stove, possibly a few cabinets. It had
no running water or electricity. It had at least one
window on each side and two doors front and back.
The ladder opened onto a short path that led to
a small creek surrounded by shade trees. Because of the
property slope, they had leveled the cabin using pallets and
shims on the downhill side. This made the front left
side stand off the ground a couple of feet, making
the windows on the sides fairly high up to anyone
walking along. There wasn't much in the way of furnishings.
A couple of old metal bed frames that someone had
placed sheets of plywood on, and those served as couches
and beds. Using sawhorses and wood slats, we made a
tiny table by removing the plywood sheet, setting a sawhorse
in the middle, and adding a one by six slant
to each end for seating, and replacing the plywood crossways
on the sawhorse for a table. Out there. We never
encountered people. We never even saw another car. A badger
would always pop up out of its burrow by the
road to race our car as we neared the cabin,
and as soon as he gave up the chase, he
would duck back down in another hole. Our friend the badger,
was one of the highlights of our visit. Mom watched
out for him and would call out to us when
she spotted him so we didn't miss out. She would
slow down for a bit for him to keep up
for as long as he could. Inside the cabin at night,
mice would skid her back and forth over the floor,
and in the daylight you could see their tiny prints
in the dust. It was a little unnerving to hear
them scurrying about at night. We really didn't mind the
isolation so much, though. My three sisters and I love
being out in the wilderness and roughing it. As far
as my parents were concerned, the more remote the better.
They hated sharing the great outdoors, and with few exceptions,
camping and hiking were pretty much the only kind of
vacation our family ever took. One day, we realized that
we could dam up the creek with rocks to create
a little pool for us to sit in, kind of
like a hot tub, only filled with the icy mountain
runoff on a hot day. It was divine. Overspill allowed
the creek to still float within hiking distance. There was
an abandoned garnet mine that reportedly had belonged to Alfred Hitchcock.
We climbed huge dunes of garnets, where we had hoped
to see shiny rids. We found heaps of dusky maroon pebbles,
smaller than BB's in rough in texture, and if you
tried to polish one, I think there might not be
anything left. Possibly the larger stones had been extracted, leaving
these which were likely industrial grade, if of any value.
We had many happy stays at the cabin through the years,
even when some of us were entering our teens, we
still look forward to going. In the spring or summer
of nineteen seventy one, after the four of us had
been staying with our grandparents, we were excited and waiting
for our mom to pick us up because she had
promised we'd go straight to the cabin. When mom arrived,
we virtually pounced on her, our excitement running over. She
seemed oddly reticent. I got the impression that she was
hoping we'd forgotten. Before leaving, we had lunch where the
subject of bigfoot came up. Our grandmother had started buying
the National Inquirer. We had never seen a more Outrageous magazine,
and the issue that we were most fascinated with was
the one about the notorious Bigfoot creature. There were stills
from the Patterson Gimlin film, artist depictions and eyewitness accounts,
and photos of tracks that had been cast in maps
that showed the locations of sightings. Our mother seemed a
little bothered by the topic, and she kept trying to
steer the conversation away from Bigfoot. Most of the drive
to the cabin was unremarkable, but because I was kind
of a pest and I realized the topic of Bigfoot
made Mom uneasy, I continued to talk about it. My
sisters picked up on my cues and joined in on
the ruse. In our minds, we were just having some
harmless fun and Mom listened, tight lipped, but finally retorted, Oh,
that's just out there in California. It's not here. Oh no, oh, Mom,
I said, they say they're seeing them all over now,
even in Nevada. Of course I hadn't read or heard
any such thing, but she went quiet again, so we
decided to stop torturing her, and we soon forgot about
it all For the rest of the drive. We took
it in turns arguing and singing annoying road trip songs,
or napping. We all perked up. However, when our faithful
friend the Badger popped out of his burrow beside the
road for a race he had never disappointed us. Everything
seemed right for the moment. Our spirits dampened. However, when
we saw the sorry state of our favorite getaway. The
back door had been completely torn off and tossed down
the hill, and the hinges were bent and twisted from
the violent removal. There was no way we could set
it back in, even if we had the tools, which
we did not. The interior was full of leaves and
dirt that had blown in. Sweeping the floor, we could
see dried mud that had been tracked in. Mom was
dismissive and said that she heard that hunters had been
using the cabin. I wonder why they tore the back
door off, because it was never locked. Even if it
had been, they could have just broken the lock. Also,
deer season was pretty cold, you'd think hunters would appreciate
a door. Anyway, We shrugged it off and cleaned it
up and went out to our pool for a dip.
Our dam had been broken up in the preceding year
during reconstruction, we silently cussed out those rude hunters. It
wasn't the first time my favorite outdoor area had been
spoiled by hunters, so we didn't think much more about it.
It got dark and Mom's anxiety returned and intensified as
the night wore on. We attacked a large sheet of
heavy plastic she had found to cover the doorway. We
hung it like a curtain. After dinner, we went to bed,
everyone except Mom. She stayed up all night stoking the
fire and the old iron coal and wood stove. I
was a light sleeper and kept waking up because I
heard her pacing now and then she'd rush over and
she'd ask, are you okay? Are you girls okay? It
was a little annoying, but I'd assure her that we
were finding the plywood mattress was comfortable, and surprisingly it was.
It was at that point I began to feel guilty
for filling her head with the Bigfoot stories. But I
never thought she'd taken us seriously. Besides, she was the
bravest person I had ever known. Now I wish I
had stayed awake with her or asked her to lie
down with us, after all, she had driven nearly all day,
but kids can be pretty self centered. During the night,
it began to snow, with an average elevation of sixty
eight hundred feet. It was the time of year that
it could snow anytime, so it could have been as
early as April or spring break, or between June through August.
Not sure when exactly we were there, though I thought
the gentle snow flurries were beautiful and peaceful until a sudden,
loud wind gust blew the plastic sheeting that hung over
the door and sent it flapping up into the room.
It's possible that Mom's anxiousness was getting to me, because
at the moment the wind blasted that plastic sheet, I
sat uprightfully, expecting to see bigfoot standing in the doorway
and roaring at us. But there was nothing but blackness
that stared back at me, and only the wind howled.
It was a frightening moment. Nonetheless, Mom scrambled to secure
the plastic around the doorframe the edges, and we settled
into an uneasy wait for daylight. We left the next day,
never to return. For the most part, I thought it
was just all a funny scare over nothing. Really. I
don't recall any of us kids ever asking to go
back in. Our parents never again suggested we go to
the cabin again for a trip. Sorry, little Badger friend,
we sure miss you now. In twenty twenty, my mother
was eighty four and I was sixty one. She was
bedridden and she had dementia. The television kept her occupied.
One show she liked was Unsolved Mysteries, which usually covered
crimes or disappearances. But one time, while I was taking
care of her, an episode about Bigfoot came on. A
little ways into it. Mom said, Oh, that's just silly.
You don't think that's real, do you. I told her,
I thought it was possible that they were real, that
there were a lot of personal accounts, and I found
many people who reported encounters quite credible. Mom's demeanor changed notably,
so I paused the program. She told me something that
had happened to her and dad at the cabin. It
was the time they'd send us girl to stay at
Grandma's that took advantage of being temporarily childless and went
to the cabin. I find it odd neither of them
until now had ever mentioned that they'd gone there alone,
not that it would have mattered to us kids, but
it's odd that they never said anything about it. Mom
said she woke up in the middle of the night
when something jiggled a doorknob. What or whoever it was
was very large and heavy, and it went around the cabin,
trying each door and windows, circling around and around. She
said that she was afraid to even look at the
windows for fear of what she might see. And she
said that she felt kind of a terror that she'd
never felt before. I could see how it still scared
her to talk about it well. She woke my dad
to tell him what was going on. They laid there listening,
whispering only as necessary. They assumed it was a person,
and Dad was concerned the person might be armed. He
didn't want to force a confrontation in the dark with
some one who obviously had an advantage on them, especially
since he himself was not armed. They decided to pack
up quickly at first like and made a mad dash
to the car to leave. I asked my mom if
she saw anything of what was outside the cabin that night.
She said that we really couldn't see anything. It was
just a shadowy outline, but it was very tall. In
the early morning light, they saw it run off, zigzagging
through the trees very fast. If it had been a person,
there would have been no accommodations out there to run to,
no nearby roads if they had come by a car.
It was remote and mostly barren wilderness. After Mom and
Dad's strange night, the next time she saw the cabin
was alone with her daughters. She found it with the
door ripped off in the mud tracked floors, and that
must have been terrifying sight for her, especially knowing that
we had no gun or any way to call for help.
She probably should have left thin. I asked her why
we didn't leave, and why she chose to stay. She
admitted that she didn't want to disappoint us or let
fear get the better of her. I think she hadn't
shared with anyone until she told me last year. When
I said it was odd that none of us ever
asked to go back, she said, it wouldn't have done
you any good anyway. I wasn't taking you back. We
never really feared creatures of the wilderness, even though there
are cougars and some black bears in the mountains and
the high deserts of Nevada in Utah, where we spent
a lot of time. On one camping trip up Wheeler Peak
before there were any roads up there, when we were
all pretty young, a mountain lion screamed at us all
night long. Before we had set up camp. Dad had
buried a deer carcass. He said, look like a mountain
lion had been feeding on it. But he thought that
the big cat was finished. The big cat disagreed loudly. Still,
I don't remember being very scared even then, even though
we had just slept out on the ground, no tent ever.
We just slept under the stars, but til the cabin.
That's how we camped under the stars. I never said so,
but I hated it. Mom told me that she and
Dad many years later, did make one last trip up
to the cabin just to see it. They found it
in even worse shape, and not just run down. The
front door had also been ripped off like the back,
and that heavy wrought iron stove had been ripped out.
They found it busting up, lying in a ditch quite
away from the house. I really can't imagine people doing that,
even if they could have can you. It was a
cold and moonlit night and my church group was meeting
at Rocky Springs for a bonfire. After it got dark,
the group came up with the idea to visit the
old church. I was a little nervous, but I went
along with the crowd. We went into the church and
hit a few keys on the old organ that had
been there for years, and then the girls decided to
stroll through the dark cemetery. It was a loud crowd,
and I told them not to be noisy so as
not to disturb the dead. After a few hours, everybody
left me there by myself. I eased down the church
driveway by myself and took out a small fluorescent light
I kept in my shirt pocket. I turned my light
on in the darkness of night, feeling a little uneasy
and nervous. It was at the foot of a drive
by a cedar tree that was on my left side,
which is still there today. All of a sudden, a
piece of brick came flying from the cemetery. It hit
the cedar tree branches and it nearly hit me. I
looked around, but I couldn't see what through it. I
jumped out and ran like a scared rabbit. Running as
fast as I could, I got up in my truck
and turned it on and got out of there. I
don't know what threw that rock, but someone once told
me that bigfoot guard cemeteries at night. Well. I went
back there twenty years later, but this time I packed
a pistol, not taking any chances. All those years later,
I still felt uneasy around the old church. Had we
disturbed the dead? Or was it a sasquatch. Here's another
little fact. The whole town of Rocky Springs died from
a rare disease, so don't drink the water if you
go there to visit. I moved away from home as
soon as I turned eighteen, and I found a place
to rent thirty miles from where I worked. It was
an old double wide trailer set back in the woods
where I didn't have any neighbors to deal with, and
I could do pretty much anything an eighteen year old
farm kid could ever want. After living there for a week,
I started noticing strange stuff, small things. At first, lights
would be on that I knew were turned off. Stuff
would go missing, only to turn up in places that
didn't make any sense. Tools would disappear from whatever car
I happened to be attempting to restore. At the time,
I'd find them scattered around too far out to have
been thrown even in a fit of rage, as anyone
familiar with working on a car can relate to. Once,
I was in the middle of replacing a radiator hose
and I stopped to make a run to the convenience
store for cigarettes. Before I left, I put a wrench
that I was using on top of my toolbox, figured
I'd only be gone for an hour at the most.
When I got back, there was no sign of the wrench.
Eventually I found it in the corner of an old
lean to that later became my furs shd. After a
few months, things got more weird. Doors would slam in
the middle of the night, Dishes would break. Another time,
I came home and all my silverware had been dumped
out on the floor. A bottle of Scots that was
given to me by a coworker exploded in the cupboard.
And then things got worse, and eventually I started making
plans to get out of there. But about that time
I started hearing something walking around the house and yelling
my name and telling me to come outside. Two weeks
of that, I finally left and moved to Lebanon, Missouri.
A lot way back to that house a few times,
but it sat empty since I left. No one wants
to live out there. It's too far from everything and
there's no jobs close by. Now, let me tell you
a story about my girlfriend at the time. The house
she lived in was close to the site of a
Union camp that was attacked by Confederate soldiers during the
Civil War. Or one night she was out closing the
chicken coop. While she was inside, she heard two men
whispering what sounded like battle plans, something to the effect of,
we'll bring the cavalry in from the west. They won't
be able to head south because of the river. The
artillery will hit them from the north, and they'll be
dead before sunrise. And then I have one more story
that took place two miles from my girlfriend's house. We
were walking around in abandoned property, and by the look
of things, the owner had gotten up in the middle
of dinner, loaded everything into their sixties rambler and crashed
it into a tree. There were still boxes and trunks
containing clothes and other belongings on the way out, we
started to feel like we were being followed. We noticed
a strong odor, like rotting fish in a full outhouse
in the heat of July. Close to the end of
the driveway, I saw a pile of small animal bones,
probably a cat a raccoon from the size. When we
got back to the house, we talked it over and
decided to go back and check it out some more.
This time I had the sense to go more prepared,
so I grabbed a handgun and an extra mag and
I grabbed a machette and a headlamp and a shovel
and a hatchet. When we returned, the smell was even stronger.
We searched the old shop and the storm shelter, and
after a while we decided to take a closer look
at those bones. I noticed a cut on the inside
of the animal spine. It looked like the throat had
been cut. A little further away, my girlfriend found another
pile and another one further along. Over the next few
days we found three hundred and sixty five complete skeletons
belonging to cats and small dogs, and they were placed
in a circle around the house and the surrounding buildings.
The whole time we were there, it felt like something
was standing right behind us. I don't know what was
going on or what was there with us, but I
know I'll never visit that house again. For the greater
part of my life, I never believed in things like sisquatch,
But when I overheard my dad listening to your channel,
I was converted. I live in western Washington State, and
I have for most of my life. My parents have
taken us fishing and hiking for years, and we're used
to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. We live way
down a dirt road that borders some old logging land,
where my family and I often walk back there. We
could hike out to the lakes and sometimes for a
birthday get to go shooting at the old quarry well.
One night a couple of years ago, a huge thunderstorm
rolled into our area. The clouds were so thick that
the sky had become a black abyss. There was thunder
and lightning and rain in hell, and it was one
hell of a tempest. That night, my family and I
were watching a movie when my sister exclaimed that she
had just seen lightning at once. My mom and dad
and three youngest siblings and our dog Boaz, jumped up
and went to the back door to watch the storm.
My brother and I stayed behind to finish what we
were doing, but within a few minutes, urged by the
many oohs and ahs of the rest of our family,
we ran to the back door to see what was
going on. Well. The storm was spectacular. Lightning streaked across
the dark backdrop of the clouds in a brilliant flash
of white and purple, and thunder boomed the seconds after,
as if celebrating the joys of lightning's intricate dance. Droplets
of rain as large as marbles plummeted down to the
earth and exploded into even or orbs of water as
they hit the ground. It was a joyous and standing
there watching the power and strength of nature as it
displayed its awesome might to us. But we stood there
watching the storm for a while until the lightning started
to die down. Everyone went back inside to enjoy the
rest of their evening except my brother and our dog
and me. We were hoping to catch a few more
glimpses of plasma in the sky from outside the back door.
We waited outside for the next bolt of lightning, when
bos started acting funny. It was walking around us and
acting skittish. My brother let him back inside in exchange
to confused. Look with me, that was weird, I said.
A boez is a big dog, about thirty inches wide
at the shoulder, and he's protective and he would usually
throw himself at anything he deemed as dangerous before he
let it get anywhere near us, so his behavior was
very unusual. A few minutes later, a scream came roaring
out of the edge of the woods. It was one
of the most terrifying things I have ever experienced. To
describe it, it would not be true to its nature.
It was like an owl screech, but louder, fiercer, and
fused with a wild man's howl, and it was coming
from the edge of our woods, only one hundred feet
from our back door. My brother and I locked eyes
wide with fear, knowing it was no ordinary creature. It
was something unknown and alien. We didn't wait to see
if it would make its horrible call again. We bolted inside,
scared to death of the unknown menace lurking in the
walls of our forest. Our family oblivious to the sheer
terror that we had just experienced was sitting down relaxing,
having a grand old time watching their movie, and my
dad asked us if we had seen any more lightning,
and we told him that a creature was screaming from
the woods. When we were done with our story. Our
dad thought for a bit and then said it was
probably just a cougar and that we had nothing to
worry about. I argued back with him, it wasn't a cougar.
I said, I'd heard what cougar screams sound like, and
it was completely different. My dad still blew it off
his children's over excited imaginations and he left it at that.
We never talked about it since, but my brother and
I will never forget that night. I had a good
friend who drove a log truck until he passed away
in two thousand and seven. Like a lot of old
truck drivers, Jeffrey had his share of tall tales. There
is a place about thirty miles from where I live
in Georgia called Raytown. Jeffrey was born in there. Raytown
is a very remote place. It's a hunter's paradise and
also an area full of big timber. Over the years,
we have done some logging in that area quite a bit.
Jeffrey always claimed that Bigfoot roam the woods there, but
I never really believed him until late one night in
January of twenty and ten. My crew and I were
working far back down along dirt road. At the time.
I was driving the truck, but on this particular track
we were hauling pulp wood, but we also had chippers
set up to grind the smaller debris and hauled chips
to bio mass plants about one hundred miles away. My
sister had called me earlier in the day and asked
if we could meet up and let my young nephew
ride with me in the big truck. We met at
a local restaurant around six pm, and my little buddy
Cody hopped in with me, and we took off and
headed for Raytown time a year. It was already dark
when I picked up my nephew, and as we drove along,
I told him that we were headed to a dark,
spooky place. Well, Cody didn't mind. He was just happy
to be in the truck with me. I even had
to hit the jake brakes for him every few miles
because he loved the sound of it. As we neared
the dirt road. I told him not to worry, always
have a ruger with me. We were five miles in
on a dirt road when all of a sudden, something
hit the hood of the truck. It sounded like a baseball.
What the hell was that, I mumble to myself. On
a dirt road, gravel wool, ping the fuel tanks and
quarter fenders, and even ping against the headache rack. Those
are familiar sounds, but this was different. It was intentional.
Someone threw a big rock at the hood of my
Peter Bilt. I knew no person would be out in
those woods, fourteen miles from the nearest town on a
twenty five degree night throwing rocks. Cody was pondering what
could have thrown something at the truck, and I immediately
thought about Jeffrey's bigfoot tales. I've always heard they throw
rocks anyway. I couldn't speak for a few minutes, but
I wasn't scared one bit. I finally believed Jeffrey, and
it's a pity that he wasn't around for me to
tell him my story. Twelve years ago, I was having
a campfire at my house with my brother in law.
We had a couple of beers so that we could
unwind after a long day of coaching our travel soccer
team in a tournament. It was a nice, clear summer
night and I was looking up into the sky, watching
the smoke from our campfire drift into the atmosphere. You
can see the lights from some planes, and we were
enjoying the evening. I glanced over at my brother in law.
He was staring at the sky too, and he had
a puzzled look on his face. What are you looking at,
I asked him. I don't know what it is, he said.
I looked up and saw six or so different colored
flashing lights in a circular pattern. They didn't look like
any plane or anything else that I had ever seen
in the night sky before. It was motionless, high up
in the sky, with no discernible sound coming from it
that we could hear. We watched the lights for several minutes,
and then all of a sudden, they shot across the
sky and they disappeared at a speed that was way
too fast for any aircraft. I checked the news the
next day and even reached out to a local UFO
website to see if anyone had reported seeing it, but
there was nothing. Now I'd like to tell you a
story about once I went squatching. My extended family owns
one hundred and fifty acres of farmland in woods in
rural western Pennsylvania. My cousin owns a huge A frame
house on the property. Going away with this family and
had just gotten a new puppy. He asked if I
wanted to dog sit for the weekend and he would
pay me for my time. Well, I jumped at the
opportunity to hang out in this huge house all weekend
and not be cramped at my parents' house. I've been
interested in cryptozoology and aliens since I was a kid. Now.
I remember watching In Search of with Leonard Nimoy and
being interested in the mystery of it all at an
early age. One night at the A frame I decided
to go out with my flashlight and try to do
some whoops and howls and tree knocking and listen for
some kind of a response. The next thing I knew,
fear swept over me like a light switch, and my
thoughts turned panicked. What if I got a response, would
that be a good thing, I thought to myself. And
what if the creature was aggressive? I thought? Even Further,
I grew up camping, boating, hunting, fishing, and I'm no
stranger to the outdoors. I even wrote for a Pennsylvania
outdoor magazine for several years as a fishing columnist. I
don't scare easily in the woods, but that night was different.
Headed back to the house as quickly as I could,
and I locked the door behind me, and I grabbed
a handgun and I sat on the couch. If I
decided to go back out, I think I will find
a partner to go with me for my own peace
of mind. Okay, I hope you guys enjoyed those new stories.
I think that was five or six new stories. Now
I'm going to drop an archive story behind this, so
if you begin to listen, you've already heard it. Just
click away. But some people haven't heard all these, and
I thought I would include some in videos going forward,
but I'll always warn you. Thanks for joining me on
the podcast, and we'll see you guys on the next one.
Here comes an archive to podcast. Thanks. I can't remember
when I got this story. It's been not too terribly long,
but it's one of the craziest stories I've ever read,
and I've never I've never thought about this theory. What
you're going to learn about now. For the first five
minutes or so, she's going to give some background on
where she's from, what she does. Hang on because this
is a long story and it really gets good. I
mean it gets really creepy. Here's what Jenna writes. How
the past year has changed my life. I cannot begin
to express, but I will give it my best shot.
My name is Jenna and I'm a twenty nine year
old female geologist spieleeologist, and I was working for the
government within the Department of Geological Survey up until recently.
We were responsible to explore and map out old mind
chefs and cave systems in the Eastern United States. There
are several of these teams working throughout the country in
places like the Rockies, Texas, the Midwest, and in Washington State.
I've heard that there are also teams in Canada and
Mexico as well. I have been spilunking since I was
five years old with my father and older brothers, so
it became who I was and not just what I did.
My experience through the years made me useful to this project.
I was recruited in my last year of graduate school
at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire by Joseph who had
become my supervisor and mentor. My eight teammates were all
roughly the same age, and we had various degrees of
interest of study, including engineering, archaeology, biology, herpetology and volcanology,
as well as other fields. We were a mixture of
seven men and two women, and all have a love
for the world below the surface, resulting in our pale
skin in very thin frames. Because we spent most of
the days in the dark out of the sunlight, it
wasn't all that bad for me being a pale skinned
ginger and ten minutes in the sun I would turn
into a lobster. The meals that we take are mostly
small protein bars and water. It's easier to carry with us,
especially when we stayed in the cave system overnight. During
the expeditions there were sometimes ten miles deeper more. We
have done many of these over the past four years.
We have made some remarkable discoveries and we've mapped out
miles of cave systems in West Virginia and Kentucky using
a combination of GPR or ground penetration radar and light
ar from the surface, as well as some new technology
that will make for some amazing new discoveries in the future.
Our average expedition would start when we entered a cave
or a small hole in a mountainside and started to
evaluate if it was safe. Understand that we we have
left more caves than we explored due to what appeared
to be unsafe, or when our equipment detected gas. Once
we determine that it is safe, we begin to move
deeper into the cave and into the twilight zone. There
is no presence of light in the dark zone, and
we see nothing if we turn out the lights. Often
we find chambers and passages off to the sides, or
even drop offs in sinkholes. We can use special drones
with lights and cameras to fly over the drop offs
or down the sinkholes, or on top of shelves or
ledges above our reach to see if there are any
points of interest below or above us that we need
to explore. Using those drones have given us access to
new passages and chambers that no human has ever seen,
some of which have led to miles of passages and
enormous chambers, one of which was over one hundred feet
tall and three football feels long fifty yards wide, and
we nicknamed that one the ballroom. We have discovered entrances
to cave systems that were not noticeable from the top
side or outside the cave. Some of the entrances have
been behind waterfalls, crevices, and cliffs, and under roots of
large trees, and even behind some dead falls that appear
to have been pushed up against it to conceal the entrance.
We have mapped some systems that will travel miles into
another exit or entrance, with the longest one being twenty
seven miles in southeast Kentucky and it goes into Tennessee,
and that required us to stay in the cave for
over two weeks. We have scanner units mounted onto our
helmets that capture three D imagery of the cave as
we travel, and we also use GPS signals that rarely
are detected above the surface, but we still have them
and occasionally get closer enough to the surface to get
our data to the base camp to be collected. We
have other tools that we have used in the past.
One includes a buoy with a GPS unit. We dropped
one in a fast moving underground River near the West
Virginia Kentucky state line to see where or if it
would ever surface. To our amazement, it reappeared five weeks later,
almost three hundred miles away in the Clinch River near Kingston, Tennessee.
We were astonished it must have traveled under another river
system to arrive to the Clinch River. We are now
developing equipment that we can capture imagery of the underground
river system without our team having to dive into those
underground rivers, with the hopes of capturing the constant location
of the device and the depth under the sea level
as well that will be able to explain how these
rivers are crossing. Other findings are also worth mentioning. We've
found several species of animals or insects that were unknown
or thought to not inhabit this region, as well as
numerous cave drawings that date back over ten thousand years,
along with artifacts such as pottery from the early fourteen hundreds,
spears and arrowheads, muskets or black powder rifles, a couple
of swords. We found knives, shells, some gold and silver
coins from seventeen hundred Europe, along with bones and I
mean a lot of bones. These discoveries found miles underground,
far from known entry points. We report our findings before
moving further, and it slows down the exploration process because
we have to wait for another team to go in
and gather the artifacts. Without us, we would contaminate the scene.
The real question was how did someone get this far
into the cave system with torches, as they would have
to have burnt out well before they got that deep.
They would have had to carry extra torches with them,
and why would they have traveled this deep while the
other team was in our cave. We would go to
another cave for several weeks until we were given the
go ahead to continue our explanation of the original cave.
Rarely were we given any information on what the other
team's findings revealed, especially when it was about bones or
modern day items like a shiny new shotgun we had found,
or the backpack with a West Virginia Park map that
was printed in twenty eighteen and it was over seven
thousand feet into the cave system. We would write it
off to people going beyond their limits and getting lost
in the cave and losing their belongings as they roamed
about in the darkness. And as for the other team,
they were a dull bunch of people with no personality
yet trying to talk to them, they were tight, left
about their business. They were almost what we would think
of as a stiff government or maybe a CIA personality type.
There were occasions where we would pass them coming or
going and they wouldn't take the time to speak to anyone.
They wouldn't drop any clues or share any findings, absolutely nothing.
Using our newest technology that we had developed was the sphere,
which was a mobile GPR light hoar sphere that set
up on a tripod in the middle of chambers, which
we would leave overnight to scan. The results were beyond belief.
We have found new tunnels that are blocked by large
rocks or boulders. The stones are so heavy that several
men working together could not move them for us to
explore further. But we knew the boulders had been placed
there because the scars remained on the floors and walls
they had been rolled into position. We had a heavy
hydraulic jack design to lift rocks off of us should
we become trapped, and we found that this jack could
move the boulders enough to gain entrance into hidden chambers
or caverns. And now that I've given you a brief
description of what we do and how we do it,
I want to tell you of my account that began
on Friday, August the thirteenth of all days in twenty
twenty one. We had been mapping out a cave system
south of Grayson, Kentucky, and we were five miles deep
into the system when we dropped off of a shelf
about twenty feet using our climbing gear to discover a
new passage. It led back east to half a mile
to an oval shaped chamber, and at the far end
of the chamber was a large boulder blocking another passage
that we found by setting up our sphere overnight. The
following Monday was August the sixteenth, and we analyzed the
data and we determined it was worth exploring. After moving
the rock, we followed the passage for another half mile
and then we decided to back out and call it
a day. We returned on the seventeenth to the oval
chamber and we found the rock had rolled back to
block the entrance. We jacked it back open again and
placed smaller rocks under it to keep it from rolling
back while we were in there exploring. We then entered
the passage and began to map out the system where
we left off. Through the day, we discovered a labyrinth
of passages going in all directions. Some were dead ends,
and some were working their way back to the main cavern.
The areas that didn't reconnect, we would follow those for
five hundred feet and then turned back. There were so
many that we wanted to see, but this system could
be thoroughly explored. Later. We were getting our bearings and
taking notes, and we were excited about this discovery. We
started noticing different items, such as fresh leaves and small
twigs on the cave floor. They were green, they weren't dead,
but they shouldn't have been there in the first place.
In the largest passage, we found a shallow stream with
a mud and a swet bottom and bank, and in
that mud we found tracks of all sizes. They were
human looking tracks. Some were smaller than my feet and
others were twenty four inches long and ten inches wide. Laurie,
my female teammate, carefully examined the toes to see if
there were claw marks, because that would lead us to
believe that it was a bear. But she found none. Well.
The day was late and we pulled out again, marking
our route with illuminated paint of different colors, as we
always did when exploring new systems. The footprints gave us
all concern, but it also was exciting. The passage was
nine feet high and we could not imagine a giant
of a man walking around in there. But this raised
questions beyond belief, so we all decided to keep this
finding to ourselves for the time being. On Wednesday, the eighteenth,
we found that the rock had again been rolled back
over the entrance and we had to move it with Jacks. Rodney,
the archaeologist, said that he was going to bust it
into pieces if it happened again, and we proceeded to
the stream where we had left off the previous day
to find more tracks. We slowly moved along the stream,
following the direction of the footprints as it flowed down
the center of the cavern. A quarter of a mile
through the passage and into the chamber, we discovered some
of the most disturbing items we had ever found. There
were numerous shoes of different sizes, including boots and children's sneakers,
some clothing that appeared to be torn, and some looked
like it had dried blood on it, and they were
all in piles like someone had been sleeping on them.
There were backpacks and coats. There was a hatchet and
some knives, a couple of firearms, and children's toys such
as dolls and barbies and action figures. There were balls
and toy cars lying all about the chamber, and then
we found a pile of human bones of all sizes,
including children's, all piled up against the wall at the
far end of the chamber. Laurie screamed at the top
of her lungs and began crying uncontrollably, and as the
others tried to comfort her, out of the darkness of
a passage at the far end of the chamber near
the pile of bones, came a scream or a roar
of a monstrous volume that shook my insides. It lasted
long time and was immediately answered by another roar from
a different cavern, and then several more. The team instantly
began to run toward the exit, with me bringing up
the rear. I had a feeling that something was behind me,
and I quickly looked back over my shoulder with my
high intensity led light, and I illuminated the face of
a beast that was the size of a refrigerator, only
ten feet behind me. In that brief instant, I could
see the beast's lips were curled back, bearing large teeth
which were like ours except for the canines, which were
larger in proportion than a human. It had large, round,
black evil eyes and a flat nose, and everything around
the face was covered with hair. The animal covered its
eyes from the light with its hands and screamed in
pain as if the light heard it, and it shrank
away from me and my light. It curled up into
a ball onto the floor of the cave, wailing in pain.
I was now backing out of the chamber, trying to
keep the light on the beast, when I must have
passed the exit and tumbled into a sinkhole. I got
lucky it was only five feet below the chamber floor.
It could have been deeper and I would have never
gotten out of there. I am only five foot four
to start with, and I weigh less than one hundred
and ten pounds fully clothed, and I knew if I
couldn't do something quick, I would end up in that
bone pile. In front of me, I saw a small
crevice that looked to me about my size, so I
dove into it headfirst, and I began to crawl on
my belly back into the darkness. I was ten feet
into the crevice when I heard the monster scream into
the mouth of the crevice behind me, and I could
feel it reaching into the hole as it started to
claw at the walls. The creature was so cloth I
could smell its foul breath, and this gave me a
surge of strength to move ahead faster. I crawled ahead
without thinking. I was in survival mode and I wanted
to get as far from this thing as possible. The
roars began to fade the further into the passage I went,
and after an hour, I dropped into a room. Stalactites
hung from the low ceiling and I had to walk
hunched over, but at least I could stand. I tried
to reach my team on the radio, but I got
nothing in response. If I was going to get out
of there, I had to move upward while avoiding these creatures.
I had to get to the surface. That's all I
could think of. I turned down the intensity of my
light to get more life from my batteries, and I
continued walking and crawling. I wandered the uncharted passages and
caverns alone for hours, not knowing where I was or
if I was moving to freedom. I lost all sense
of time, and I didn't know if it was day
or night. And to make matters worse, not long after that,
I was down to my last spare battery pack. The
only light I would have after those batteries died was
my cell phone. I had turned it off long ago
to save it as a last resort for light. And
the exhaustion set in, and I clicked off my light
and I sat in the blackness, and I fell asleep.
I woke to the distant sounds of clicking and some
sort of gibberish that I didn't understand. The sounds weren't close,
thank goodness, but they were looking for me. Once. It
sounded so human that I thought it might be in
my team members calling for me, and I almost shouted
to them, but I waited to make sure, and I'm
glad I did, because minutes later another roar came from
the same direction. I drank the last of my water
and I ate the final protein bar. I then turned
my light off and I curled into a fetal position,
hoping the sounds would stop so I could move again. Strangely,
I felt an evil presence near me, and I knew
the creatures were near, but still I waited. Hours later,
the noises stopped, and I assumed they had given up
their search for me. So I got moving, always trying
to move upward. Freedom was above me, and I had
to get there. Two maybe three days later, I felt
hope slipping away. I had lost all sense of time,
and I was weakened now from hydration, and I was
starving to death. I only used my headlamp briefly. I
would click it on, look ahead as far as I
could see, and then turn it off, and then I
would feel my way to something until I needed light again.
While alone in a place this silent, your sense of
hearing heightens. There or no other noises to interfere with
what you were hearing. While taking a break, and without
the noise of my movements, I heard the hum of traffic.
I moved toward the sound until I saw a faint
rays of light penetrating the passage wall. I was overjoyed,
and I was filled with a surge of energy. There
was a small crevice that would be tight even for
my small body to escape through, but I pushed through
it anyway into the sunlight. I was standing at the
base of a cliff that I would later find out
was next to Kentucky State Route seven. Cars were speeding
pass below me. I had made it out alive. My
phone still had a charge, and I called my supervisor. Well.
She was ecstatic to hear from me. She said, they
picked up my GPS tracker twenty minutes ago. My tracker
must have started broadcasting when I got near the crevice,
and state troopers were on their way, she said. The
police took me back to my hotel room, and I
felt like I drank a gallon of water while we drove. Now,
I wanted to get a shower in something to eat,
but as I got out of the car, four men
approached and ushered me into a small hotel conference room.
I assumed they knew I was exhausted in Hungary and
that this meeting would not take long, But I was wrong.
Two of the men were from the Department of the Interior,
one was a federal Game and Fish official, and the
last was with the US Geological Survey. The date was
August twenty second, and they wanted me to recount the
last ninety six hours my scanner was still operating. From
that data, we found that I had traveled eleven miles
underground from the point at which I fell into the sinkhole.
They began asking me about the bear we had encountered. Well,
I was a biology major, but I knew damn well
that the creature was not a bear, and I said so.
I described the creature in great detail, but still they
continued calling it a bear. They questioned me for three hours.
At some point I told them I had answered every
question and that I was done, and after walking out,
I headed to my room and I took a long shower.
Some food was brought to me, so I ate like
I had never tasted food, and then I went to sleep.
I was still a bit confused when I woke, but
I felt rested and ready to find my teammates. I
went to all their rooms, and the only one who
remained there was Tony. He told me that Laurie was
so upset after the event that she had to be
sedated and was taken to a local hospital. She had
been released and sent home. The other members of the
team had been put on leaving sent home. They had
all been notified that I made it out, and Tony
said they allowed him to stay because he was the
only one who wasn't freaking out. I think that came
from his military training. I later learned that a task
force had come in and Tony guided them back into
the cave. There were way too many people there to
be looking for a bear, though their main mission, Tony
later decided, was to gather the human remains in clothing.
Tony searched the area with those men, and he found
no sign of a bear, and then they made castings
of several tracks in the mud before they destroyed all
the evidence they could find. They spent days in that
cave system searching for that bear, they said, but they
never found an animal. And then it occurred to me
that I may have been the only one who had
seen this creature, because Tony never mentioned it. He kept
saying they searched for a bear, and I think that
is what he thought we were dealing with, and I
had never told him about the creature. I had seen
only the men in the conference room. I was going
to leave the next day, but that evening we went
to the bar, and there we found two members of
the task force drinking. After several drinks, one of them
began to talk. This fellow told us that this team
was a unit of special forces that were used to
hunt down Bigfoot. I had yet to think of a bigfoot,
and I was stuck on an unknown monster until then,
and bigfoot was a myth, wasn't it. He continued to
tell us that this was only the second underground assignment
they had been on, and that his unit hated the
darkness of the cave systems, even though they were equipped
with special equipment that allowed them to see in the
dark zone, or the part of the cave where there
was a complete absence of light. He said, we were
some of the luckiest people he had ever met, and
my falling into that sinkhole gave all my friends an
opportunity to escape because it had captured the interest of
the bigfoot trying to catch me. He admitted that the
government has proof that these animals are traveling underground as
much as they are in the moonlight, and there is
also evidence of them kidnapping people and eating them. That
was obvious to me I had seen the chamber with
a pile of bones. He was about to continue with
more information. I mean, this guy was a real bliber mouth.
But one of the men who questioned me grabbed a
hold of him by the shoulder and said that that
was enough, soldier, and you should turn in. This fellow
then sat down and he asked us what we were told. Well,
at first we were hesitant to tell him, but we
did so anyway, to which he told us us that
the soldier was drunk and he was telling tall tales
to scare us, and we shouldn't put much faith in
what he was saying. The next day, we were informed
that our project had lost its funding and we were
all terminated and were given a year's wages a severance pay.
I've kept in touch with the others, and it seems
that I'm the only one who has been able to
find work in this field. Currently, I do geological and
soul analysis for a general contractor for building foundations. None
of our group have returned to the darkness of the
underworld and its secrets that we loved and cherished up
until that August week. I have been left with more
questions than I care to imagine, was that a Bigfoot
we encountered in that cave? Are they using the cave
systems to travel undetected? Do they really kidnap people in
eats them? What does the government know? What was the
real purpose of the government funding of our expeditions and
mapping out the cave systems in the first place. Why
won't the government inform people of these animals and the dangers?
And that's the end of her story. Have y'all ever
heard a story like that. I've never heard anything like that.
Now again, like I said in my last video, I
don't know if any of these stories that I read
are true, but this was a sure enough story email
to me. She has enough information on the job and
the you know, the spielunking equipment and all that stuff
that adds a little bit of credibility to the story.
But you know, who knows either way, It was a
real good story. And I tell you what, you couldn't
pay me to go into one of those caves. And
it's not because I think Bigfoot is in there. I
am not terribly clost her, but I've read articles and
I've seen videos where people get stuck in these caves.
They can send in twenty or thirty men and they
cannot get them unstuck, and the people just have to
lay there and die. What a horrible, horrible way to die.
And I just I can't. And I've seen other videos
with these guys. They squeak through these real tight rock formations,
or they'll be flat on their stomach and the rock
is just right down on them. I always think, man,
if that rock formation shifted just a fraction of an inch,
it would just squash you right there. I know everything
you know. I know that's probably not the way it works,
but it could anyway. I don't want to get stuck
in a dark cave somewhere and die in the dark.
That's just me. But anyway, Jenna, thank you for sending
this story. I really admire your profession. You're a pretty
brave girl. All Right, that's gonna wind this podcast up.
I hope you guys enjoyed it. We'll see you on
the next Thank you really