On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Legend - Full Movie (Bigfoot Evidence and Encounters Documentary)

yeah on the on the average I would say what I came across was between six and a half to eight foot tall the brown or the black in the East the Minerva monster Momo the Sister Lakes creature a lot of those creatures have hair all over their face and it's almost as if the Eastern Bigfoot is a little farther away is a little more invisible to the eyewitnesses than the Western [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] the last time I talked to someone that claimed to have us like be having activity down here it was 2007. uh and it's a a doctor that owns property along St Peter's Church which is going to run we're gonna cut over to in a minute but she they were having sightings regularly they they lived um on a fairly large horse rant they owned horses and had a ranch and their the activity was so frequent that she told us that they would wake up in the morning for breakfast and these things would be in their backyard my name is Seth brebov in 2005 I became interested in the Unexplained when I began investigating a series of bizarre animal mutilation is taking place near the small town in which I'd grown up [Music] what happened is I talked to that doctor who claimed to have seen something back here and I started kind of trying to figure out what the history of the area was and the first thing I thought was if there's someone having a sighting back here there's got to be other people having sightings so I started driving these roads just because I didn't I was just getting into it I never interviewed anyone I didn't know how that stuff worked I didn't have contacts so like I would just drive the roads and this one time I was driving down here and there was like an elderly couple that was walking along here and I asked them I saw them I pulled over and I asked them like if they'd ever encountered anything and they started telling me about all these dead animals they had been finding on their property like deer ripped in half stuffed up in trees the highs the hides like ripped out and what was really as a documentary filmmaker my primary task is to remain objective to remove myself from the stories I'm telling and what the subjects themselves carry the film but there's a part of me that is always curiously seeking the answer to the Mysteries at the heart of my films do upright walking Giants exist despite covering a multitude of topics in the films I made this is the question to which I always return so I've decided to set out on a journey for myself one that isn't solely based around documenting fascinating local Legends but also in getting to the bottom of the reality behind those Legends Bigfoot into the whole phenomenon took place right here you can see why it would be like you said it's rugged The Ravines are really deep it's not what you think of when you say northeast Ohio that's for sure Mark matsky is one of the most knowledgeable people I've ever met on the Bigfoot topic Mark is a Lutheran Minister who has a skeptical level-headed approach to the subject and an encyclopedic knowledge of events and figures that form the foundation of the phenomenon okay the history of Bigfoot reports in newspapers going back to the 1800s has has morphed over time at first they were described largely in terms of the wild man but that started to change over time part of that I think had to do with the introduction of the discovery of the gorilla much of the time the language of like a gorilla or like an ape started to replace the language of the wild man maybe there's no better person to explain the centuries of history related to undiscovered creatures than Lauren Coleman Lauren runs a museum dedicated to the subject of cryptozoology in Portland Maine cryptozoology is of course the study of unknown animals of which there are said to be many but Lauren himself was once just an answer Seeker his investigations into the Unexplained led him to write numerous books on the Paranormal and his vast array of knowledge on these subjects opens a door into just how long people have been seeing shadowy beings in the forests behind their homes before the Bigfoot word was used newspaper reporters eyewitnesses everybody involved with this phenomena including native peoples had to use other words those words included things like wild man a lot of newspaper reports from the 1920s back to the 1860s talk about wild men some of the 1924 newspaper reports talk about Forest Giants or Forest Devils so everybody used different words to try to capture something that today we know entirely as Bigfoot Bigfoot is a word that's used in Canada Russia China everywhere and it's became become the global word to deal with hairy hominets while Lauren Coleman has made cryptozoology his career David Floyd has observed the subject as a hobby while maintaining a distinguished academic career as a professor with a specialty in English literature at Charleston Southern University for David the pursuit is less about proof of the existence of an unknown animal and more about the quest to further understand humankind's own obsession with Things That Go Bump in the night so the interesting thing to me about the whole Bigfoot Legend is that typically in you know you've got mythology that explains nature and human nature and their story is to sort of explain why things work the way they do or you've got folklore that's more of like cautionary tales to tell kids not to wander out into the forest and all Bigfoot doesn't seem to really serve a purpose culturally you know our culture doesn't really need it I don't think psychologically we necessarily need the idea of an ape figure walking in the in the Woods as a former newspaper reporter myself when I first became interested in the Bigfoot subject it was the very early newspaper articles that talked of Harry Wildman living in forests around the country that piqued my interest the figures being described in terms of just long-haired humans in some cases even wearing clothing living off almost in a hermit-like fashion the the ones that I think researchers are more interested in are ones that where there's actually less of a sensational nature where the figure is just searching for food the figures is coming close to shelters and homes either for opportunistic finding of food or just trying to find some easy shelter for the night Gallup police Ohio is excited over a wild man who's reported to haunt the woods near that City he goes naked is covered with hair is gigantic in height and his eyes start from the sockets he attacked a carriage containing a man and his daughter a few days ago he is said to have bounded at the father catching him in a grip like that of a vice and hurling him upon the Earth falling upon him and endeavoring to bite and scratching him like a wild animal just as he was about to become exhausted from exertion the daughter taking courage of the imminent danger of her parent snatched up a rock and hurling at the head of her father's would-be murderer was fortunate enough to put an end of the struggle by striking him somewhere about the ear following it other reports spring up around the state of Ohio as well as other newspapers across the United States so I guess if we think about the Wild Man reports of the 1800s maybe in the newspapers those probably didn't hurt in selling newspapers and that was probably something that people looked forward to reading as well as maybe addressed a fear that Pioneers might have had going out into this unknown Wilderness I think one of the the things that you have to take into account when you're talking about these early reports is the fact that like today newspapers were in the business of selling papers and so they would find themselves on a low news day having to at the very least embellish some reports that may have come in about a strange sighting of a weird figure in the woods even in terms of English language newspapers that's where you have the wild man reports 1869 in Kansas you had a groups of wild man reports you had in wailing River New York you have accounts in the 1930s of ape-like creatures in the woods there in Illinois and Indiana and Ohio you have very early reports of some of these creatures especially around the Ohio river and then down into the South the consistency of reports is one alarming aspect of the Bigfoot phenomena that needs to be examined closely it isn't just that there are common physical characteristics of what is being seen but also behavioral characteristics as well while this doesn't immediately lead one to the conclusion that an Undiscovered animal exists it does make one at least question the possibilities but what is being seen while there are height and weight descriptions that tend to deviate for the most part people are seeing a bipedal ape-like being with an attitude that can shift from elusive to playful to curious at a moment's notice but more on that later as with any subject Bigfoot history has its fair share of key moments reports that are repeated over and over again as cornerstones of the phenomena another of those key moments is a tale that began in the 1920s in the state of Washington and its biographer is Mark mercel we are in Southwest Washington we are approximately I'm going to guess about 60 or 70 miles an of the Columbia River and we're Inland from the Pacific coast um well over probably 100 miles or so and we're on Mount St Helens the one that blew up in 1980 on the southwest corner of Washington so in the 1920s you've got John W Burns working with the tohalis Indians and finding out about these hairy man Legends and of course that's where we get the term Sasquatch from in 1924 you've got the ape Canyon incident with the I think they called him devil apes or ape devils the ape Canyon story is one that if you're at all interested in the Bigfoot field you have to come across at some point in 1918 a group of miners headed by a guy named Marion Smith along with mostly family members started prospecting for gold up along the Lewis River here on the south side of the mountain and in 1922 had made their way up off the Lewis River and up to a location of what's now called ape Canyon they were up here not very long they started hearing strange noises from Ridge Top to Ridge Top they would hear high-pitched whistling screeching noises from a Ridge Top in the middle of the night Mark has filled in details of the ape Canyon incident that a perplexed investigators for decades he's even managed to uncover the actual location of the original cabin itself in addition to the physical remains of the cabin he's also pieced together a series of events leading up to the ape Canyon attack that weren't widely publicized while I was aware of the ape Cannon attack what I had never learned before was that there were multiple incidents involving fredbeck Marion Smith and Leroy Smith that involved not just encounters and sightings of the Apes but at least three incidents in which the miners took shots at them including an incident that occurred the same day as the famed attack again at dusk Leroy is outside the creature comes out from the bushes Leroy takes one shot but all the rest of the miners are inside the cabin and they start boiling out of there fully armed start shooting at this creature Marion estimated that there were about 16 to 17 rounds that went into this creature within 50 to 75 feet that seemingly didn't affect it one bit on the last shot the creature is very standing very close to the precipice which drops down 200 feet down into the bottom of Vape Canyon and the last shot apparently Fred took it the creature either crouches down and climbs down or Falls over into the canyon that was shortly before dusk they're just bedding down and something ends up hitting the cabin really dang hard like a truck could come barreling down the mountain whatever hit the cabin these guys look out and it was a full moon they reported plenty of light and they can see five or six or seven of these creatures dancing around in the Moonlight and they start throwing Boulders on top of the cabin rocks we start pounding they're trying to pound their way in they start trying to bust down the door the guys start ripping apart their beds and using the fur balls to blockade the door something is trying to pound their way in something is actually digging underneath the cabin to try to dig their way through underneath to get inside the roof wasn't very formidable so they start shooting through the roof and screaming and yelling please leave us alone we're gonna leave go away this happens all night long for say about four or five hours perhaps 4 30 5 o'clock in the morning and all's quiet they tear apart all their blockade open the door nothing's out there but all around there are these very very large seemingly huge huge human Footprints rocks scattered everywhere they had a loose pile of of roofing shakes piled up and and someone had used that as a step stool to get up on top of the roof and those are scattered everywhere right grab the tobacco grab their guns and hit the trail we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to be very close to the site of the ape Canyon incident uh just this this past year with Mark mirzell and there's something really about having set foot on that site that gives you new insight into the possibility of creatures living out in that area what most people don't seem to realize is that the Bigfoot story wasn't born in the 1950s it's been a part of our culture since the first settlers began making their way into the Undiscovered recesses of our nation the terminology for what people have been seeing has changed but many of the basics of the phenomena remain the same when discussing these Basics one of the most reliable sources for them comes in the form of Native American Cultural history and legends Kathy strain works for the forest Service as a tribal relations manager and historian in the Stanislaus National Forest in California and has spent decades collecting historical accounts of Bigfoot type creatures that date back centuries one of the main reasons I believe that Bigfoot is real outside the fact that I'm a witness is just like every other animal in nature coyote Condor Eagle rabbit they are all within traditional stories of Native American tribes Bigfoot should be represented in those stories and he is that each tribe has a different name like Harry man or you know Stone Giant or all these different names and they always describe this giant he doesn't wear clothes he's got big feet so as far as the Native American hairy man stuff they seem to fall into two categories one is sort of this nurturing guardian of the forest that kind of oversees the different tribes and now you've got the Dakota tribe they had the shiitanka which means like elder brother but then others are these sort of violent cannibals that come down and kidnap children and and women and the Bella coola tribe has the the bach or the Skookum that means uh evil GD and the Iroquois has the stone man that's evidently was human at one time but was cursed to be this sort of forest dweller what are some of your favorite sort of historical accounts of Bigfoot country well a lot of those are Native American type stories that I think are my some of my most favorite but more of the more recent kind of historical accounts the Osmond account is I found very intriguing and at first it's it's so outlandish because it's a man who was out trapping in the remote areas of British Columbia in Canada he had noticed something sniffing around his camp and and he decided one night that he was going to stuff some food some tobacco in his his gun into his pack with him and some time along that night he gets picked up by something thrown over its shoulder like a sack of potatoes and he rode for hours in this very uncomfortable position with his knees up he was dumped out on the ground and he noticed that he was in a canyon but he also started noticing that the individual that had carried him was an old male hairy Forest client he also started looking around and saw that there was a old female off in the bushes he noticed there was a young female and also a young male what are these things what are they doing they're they're chit chatting to each other and the language he doesn't understand but it was very very clear that anytime he tried to make a move to leave the area he was being stopped either by the male figure he considered the father or the female that he considered the mother so for three days he stayed in the canyon and he started interacting with the old male and it's an opening for him to escape so he grabs his gun what is left of the rations that he had brought with him he makes a Mad Dash for it he didn't tell the story to anybody for many years he kept it to himself because he figured everybody would think he was crazy until finally John Green got him to tell him the story and had him sign an affidavit that everything that he had said was true accounts like the Austin encounter or Abe Canyon are important because like so many early Tales details cited by Witnesses from Years Gone by are recounted often in modern day sightings as well the rock throwing bizarre vocalizations and general physical descriptions have been noted by dozens of other eyewitnesses of Bigfoot even up to today thank you [Music] while discovering the body of an ape at the actual location of the ape Canyon incident is unlikely simply learning if there was a cabin in that location would help corroborate some details and submit the story's place in history I brought my file with me it's about three inches thick of interviews with these miners that were done at the time and at the time directly after the attack all the miners did say I don't care how much gold is up there I'm never going back one thing about mining law at the time is that in order to continue proofing your claim you had to file what was known as a proof of Labor and file it with the county and they filed one in Skamania County and it was done in September about two months after the incident in that proof of Labor they said that all work was completed on July the 10th 1924. July the 10th 1924 was the night of the attack and they never went back in addition to mountains of paperwork in recent Years Mark has managed to discover the actual location of where the ape Cannon cabin itself once stood but what else can we learn from these historical reports just how widespread were they and how can we possibly corroborate the veracity of the events in question with the entire subject of cryptozoology being looked at as little more than a simple diversion or worse a laughing stock what good does it do to ask questions of the past while seeking answers in the present the real takeaway from looking into these historical reports seems to be that the people who claimed an encounter that has since become just another Legend went to their grave without ever seeing the mystery solved I like the subject of Yeti and Bigfoot studies because it's a mystery it's about animals and it's just that we haven't discovered these primates and the other big thing to me is that it's a way in which something that's almost human but not human is just barely beyond our Consciousness the documents are still there waiting in the file in courthouses and libraries and historical societies and these stories need to be researched again out here nobody seems to know what it is how do we study that and and make it a reality but it was also the folklore part of it of of every part of this country has a different story and a different name Native Americans had traditional beliefs it wasn't something that just popped up in the 1950s when when Jerry crew found those first Footprints it was something that's always been out there the appeal to me of the Bigfoot topic is the consistency of accounts of it throughout Legends and folklore and literature and and that type of thing even previous to any photographic evidence of it just that idea of a consistent theme throughout um is is interesting to me foreign if you went down and talked to Farmers on that road today they're probably similar to what people are reporting in that area today like you've got the the consistency of like this animal that wants to stay hidden that people see you trying to stay hidden that occasionally will commit some sort of terrifying you know like the gallop police sighting from the 1800s where it attacked someone and then you've got the rock throwing and things like that that we see popping up in reports like the Minerva case from the 70s there's a lot of similarities in these reports and and those consistencies or something I've always found interesting yeah and that makes you wonder how many of these reports are going on in places where there's a historical sort of a pattern of these these sightings taking place how many of them go unreported and and therefore never reach any kind of mains not mainstream but like any kind of recognition people just don't want the attention yeah in their own backyard yep [Music] Northern America is full of folk tales lore and legends few of these resonate with us still today in the way that Bigfoot does sightings still occur in the vast Wilderness in the nation's forests in wooded areas behind suburban homes and in Farmers fields fittingly for a subject that has only grown in stature over the centuries these modern day encounters bear startling similarities to those from years past perhaps the reason is simply a cultural manifestation of our own memories of Stories We heard as children or maybe lurking in the darkness there does exist something real something unseen that wishes to remain that way the last great mystery [Music] the real research happens on the back side of that camera up in the mountains and in these areas and one of the key things through this research I found is staying in one area for a lengthening period of time because too many people too many people you know back you know when this the research kind of started it was and Derek could tell you better than I can but it was okay here's an encounter let's go there here's the encounter let's go there here's an encounter here's the story not only people really appreciate you know uh how hard this research is and how difficult it is and when you get out there you're looking for something or at least researching something that's obviously highly intelligent a master Roots environment and probably really doesn't want to be found I think they can stay fairly isolated without any human contact especially in areas like this I mean out here between Northern California and in BC there's what 56 missing planes which are stationary people can't find them imagine a moving needle in a haystack good luck growing up when I heard the word Bigfoot I thought of the Pacific Northwest it wasn't until my late teens that I heard about sightings taking place on the east coast and I distinctly remember finding the entire idea of vaguely ridiculous it wasn't that the idea of the creature existing was itself ridiculous I just couldn't comprehend how something said to be as large as a Sasquatch could remain undetected in the forests of States like Ohio or New York but the pnw well that made sense pinned in by mountains and sea the Pacific Northwest is a corridor extending through the states of Northern California Idaho Washington and Oregon eventually coming to an unofficial border somewhere in British Columbia it's an area brimming with Wildlife water sources dense vegetation and seemingly endless Acres of unexplored forests oh and few people making it all the more appealing to an animal said to be fiercely anti-social in 2018 I made my way out to the Pacific coast I spent three days traveling the states of Washington and Oregon seeing everything I could from the Cascades to the Olympics what struck me most was that at first blush it was just like forested mountainous areas I visited on the other side of the country only bigger so much bigger in the Olympic National Forest I met up with Shane courson and Derek Randalls of the Olympic project [Music] starting with you uh just tell me your names and what you do and a little bit about the organization my name is Derek randles I'm the co-founder of the Olympic project the Olympic project was started about 10 years ago and it started as a like a pretty comprehensive camera trap program and what we did is we would take predatory travel routes ridgelines elk calving areas things of that nature and we would camera trap them my name is Shane courson um one of the core members of the Olympic project and uh basically like as Derek said here you know we're just trying to gather as much data as we can this phenomenon this big phenomenon I think requires that that uh that approach and we got a really good group uh of biologists scientists laymen trackers Hunters uh and uh we all get it along great and it's a you know it's a blast doing this type of research on the other side it's like you know Misty it's creepy and it's just literally you can step over into it people misconstrue what we're trying to do we're not trying to prove Bigfoot's real everybody in the Olympic project pretty much has had an experience or a sighting and we're kind of in The Knowing Camp we're trying to do as much documentation as we can of evidence and what we're trying to do is develop patterns and it's a long shot but if we can get enough patterns developed over time then we might start being able to work towards predictability which is like you know Jane Goodall and nian fosse got his has had as much success as they had one of my goals is to make this less taboo and get more signs involved by doing that is is you know we got tons of stories anecdotal stories out there um you've got a document you got to present stuff designs that they'll accept and right now that's what we've been working on for years and we got a great body of data and evidence so uh I would like to make it less taboo and get to get science to look at this a little more serious as a whole where we focus our research is the northern the northern part of the Olympics one of the reasons I think that this makes such perfect big good habitat is you can step 10 feet off the highway and you're gone you're not going to be seen if you don't want to be seen so the geography here just plays into being able to house a creature like this very easily there's an abundance of whether you want to fish or hunt or eat uh many berries uh um there's just a ton of food out here and so it'd be easy for us to to survive out here and something such as a Sasquatch could Thrive out here and never be seen year round investigators such as Derek and Shane aren't simply picking a random spot on a map to conduct their research they're doing it directly in Bigfoot's own backyard a place as Inseparable from the lore as the tracks the creature is said to leave behind speaking of those tracks it's perhaps due to the popularity of another large hairy creature making footprints that the Bigfoot subject would grow to such prominence in the 1950s small band of men on a perilous search for the man Beast of Tibet the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas heard of him haven't you [Music] foreign [Music] abominable snowman came about in 1921 in Nepal through a Indian newspaper reporter who mistranslated a word from that area of the Himalayas where these reports were coming out of here you have the merging of the old reports of wild men and Sasquatch and different things like that occurring in America where some people would start using the word a bondable snowman of America while the yeti was leaving footprints in the snow across the Himalayas road crews in Northern California began discovering tracks of their own accompanying these print finds were stories from skittish loggers and construction workers of encounters with huge hairy beings in the uninhabited sectors currently being cleared as part of a logging boom in 1957 a man named Jerry crew would unwittingly create a media frenzy around the unknown trackmaker that would soon be dubbed Bigfoot the story of Jerry crew is in almost every way the story of the birth of Bigfoot as we know it because of how his story hit the news sort of the images that were associated with the search ever since the six Rivers National force was one of the last of those forests to open itself up to logging Jerry crew was working on a contract to build some of those logging roads into the forest to begin that process he would work and then leave his equipment and the next day he kept finding these large footprints around his equipment so finally he decides he's going to cast one of the most beautiful Footprints there are and it gets into the national press and the term Bigfoot gets coined with the term Bigfoot slowly overtaking the yeti in the pop cultural lexicon reports of encounters with men like apes in the forested regions of the Pacific Northwest began to increase while sightings of these creatures have been taking place for decades they had never been treated with any degree of legitimacy and certainly no one had ever bothered to put any effort into actually attempting to scientifically approach the search today groups like the Olympic project can find private donors or raise funding through its growing beasts of researchers but at a time when there was no acceptance for even the possibility of Bigfoot's existence in the public eye funds were non-existent until Tom Slick one of the things that was missing from some of the early searches for the yeti was good funding Along Comes Texas oil and beef millionaire Tom Slick saw that we would be a lot easier if he could conduct these research and these Expeditions in the Americas so he transferred the whole operation over to California and British Columbia in the beginning of the 60s the early days of Sasquatch research were dominated by four men individuals who over time became inextricably linked to the subject and did more to further it and help us understand it than nearly anyone John Green Grover Krantz Renee de hinden and Peter Byrne in 1999 filmmaker Peter Von puttcomer set out to make a film documenting the search for Bigfoot and in so doing he created a valuable look at the Four Horsemen and how they interacted with and viewed one another so Renee to hinden obviously they all had great personality he's really interesting Renita Hendon was kind of the gadfly of the group he was the one who came out and he was critical but he always he always took him with a grain of salt and he had a great sense of humor and he was quick with the wisecracks and basically people really loved him he was the irascible guy in the Bigfoot circuit Renee de hinden had one goal in mind and that was to find the answer to find the creature itself and if he had to befriend these other researchers in order to do that that was fine but not necessary John Green was very much a he was a newspaper man and he wanted just the fact he was one of the first people that ever published anything and most people the introduction to Bigfoot is John Green's initial books from Washington Oregon British Columbia you know Peter Byrne of course and Peter was an amazing wreck on tour and true adventure and an actual hunting guide and true tracker Hunter he was a big game hunter from Nepal and had a quite the Stellar reputation I think his importance stems from the fact that he was out there leading the charge you know he very much had that Persona of the Wilderness Hunter and Dr Grover Kranz is the only academic to really throw his hat in at the ring at the time what Krantz was able to do is utilize the resources that were at his disposal and some of the connections that he had in order to take a anthropological and biological look at things that he could get his hands on he always fought you know the the academics you know who just thought it was ludicrous that he was studying this at all during the 60s and 70s The Four Horsemen would offer more to the burgeoning field of unknown primates in North America than nearly anyone taking part in massive and smaller scale Expeditions and investigations across the Pacific Northwest Krantz green to hinden and burn would cast tracks take citing reports and stalk their unseen prey in hopes of solving the Bigfoot riddle once and for all ironically none of them would ever claim a sighting of the creature they spent their lives in pursuit of and over time their relationships with one another would fall apart John Green said that how could all of these egos fit in one room and they all had to have enormous egos to keep on the hunt to really have all those distractors and Skeptics you know at Bay all the time the relationship between all of them was tenuous tenu it's the best that's part of what intrigued me about the story is if you had four men that had spent a lifetime looking for a monster in the woods and yet most of their time was spent arguing with each other so John Green and Renee de Hendon were very close for a long time and then Renee who became a very crusty sort of individual kind of pushed John away Peter Byrne and John Green never liked each other and then Grover Kratz got angry at all of them Renee de Hendon very famously criticized Grover Krantz for being you know sick in the mud and and all of this Renee thought most of the scientific stuff was blown out of proportion and you know he hadn't done the the field work that Renee had done he hadn't lived in tents out in the forest and it was all academic and in his mind now it's 2018. three of them are dead and Peter Byrne is outliving everyone and those that outlive all of the Emperors get to write the history and it's kind of intriguing to watch what's going on the early days of Investigation into the subject aren't all that different from today for the most part the few researchers that did actively take part in the search for answers merely responded to sightings by arriving at the location where they'd taken place and trying to collect any evidence that might remain occasionally spending a few days in the field hoping for a sighting of Their Own in the decade following the Jerry crew track find only the Patterson gimlet film would in any meaningful way help Propel the hunt forward yet even the PDF would offer a little more than a fascinating document of a purported creature shot in 1967 the Patterson gimlin film is as debated today as it was when it was first shown from the Jerry crew Discovery until the early 1970s Bigfoot remains solely a product of the West Coast with numerous discoveries Expeditions and sightings occurring in the pnw Bigfoot are mainly seen from Northern California to Southern Alaska that's the concentration the Pacific Northwest the Pacific Northwest would seem to be the perfect place for an Undiscovered large primate to hide there's a variety of reasons for that beginning with the terrain itself you have mountain ranges some of them extremely rugged occupying hundreds upon hundreds of square miles [Music] folks early researchers like John Green and Roger Patterson and Renee de hinden chasing down all of these reports a lot of them came from the Pacific Northwest there were quite a few where regular campers to a report I have up on the Olympic Peninsula of a deputy sheriff running across one foreign is a retired firefighter paramedic who teaches an EMT class he lives with his wife Kathy in Northern California and has spent more time outdoors in the mountainous terrains that Bigfoot is said to call home than nearly anyone I've come across can you tell me about that sure well um the first experience that I had with what we call Bigfoot it was in 1975 I just graduated high school and I went on a elk hunting trip with my dad and we had been hunting for a couple of days and I was up on a ridge my Dad was supposed to be coming up an opposing Ridge and we were going to try to kick up some game to each other and I saw something Black come out into the open it's probably three 400 yard distance that I'm looking at but it was unobstructed view first I thought it was a bear and it came across the Hillside and was hiding behind some trees and some rocks I had a clear shot and I had you know a deer rifle and I was watching it through my scope and it was on all fours like I said got up to this flat area and it's I was just about to take the shot it was in my crosshairs and it stood up on two leg and it kind of freaked me out a little bit well it confused me as to exactly what it was I was looking at and I walked off on two legs the hunched over uh cross-country skier type walking motion and I watched it walk away so the entire sighting in two or three minutes and then I'm looking through my binoculars my dad had finally come out from the forest where this thing had emerged from but I see him looking for me and he got on his walkie-talkie who's over there with you there's some big huge guy with you and says son there's nobody over here but me and I said well there is some big dude all dressed in black right above you August 2011. I was remote backpack in Mount Hood Wilderness with two friends of mine work buddies and we had made camp at this remote Lake around 1 32 in the morning I I'm awoken I wake up to what sounds like two rocks being smashed together and it's from a distance and it's getting closer and closer my buddy Mitch who was next to me asked me hey do you hear that and I said yeah I hear that so what is this I don't know and we hear something moving up on this little bit of a hillside it did sounded by pedal but I I couldn't tell and to be honest I didn't really want to look and all of a sudden whack whack five times these they're so hard to explain the most powerful knocks I've ever heard or felt in my life because you could film in your tent they literally shook the ground so whatever it was was close and it got silent and then through the trees we hear something coming through high above us through the trees you hear it hitting branches my buddy Mitch's tan and he goes you know what that was right I said that was a rock and zip the tent I'm looking around now the quarter of my eye see something swing from behind a tree and it looks like it's looking directly at our camp and it's just swing it's got and I can see a hand on the front of this large pine and it's just doing this back and forth back and forth and I can make out the arm and the shoulder and the head and I could tell it was massive but it eventually took off and we peeled out as soon as with daylight we packed up and got out of there and we were going to do four days and we ended up doing two I was an investigator with the BFRO for several years as well and I talked to a lot of different people and I have friends that are you know who you would call very credible people Law Enforcement Officers you know being from California I've talked to several California Highway Patrol who have had visual sightings and they identified it specifically is that's the only thing it could be is a Bigfoot a really typical part is hey I was driving to work four o'clock in the morning between Port Angeles and forks and this eight foot tall creature on two legs ran in front of the car that's super typical well the majority of reports are roadside Crossing small at any given moment there's more people driving in around camping hiking in and you're observant when you're driving when you're out camping and stuff you're usually into yourself into you know what you're doing I think Sasquatch could be around you you would never know because you're very predictable and they just want to skirt around you and void you over 60 years have passed since Jerry crew came across a strangely huge footprint in the dirt in Northern California during that time the field of Sasquatch study has seen its fair share of new faces and additional evidence has come in by the truckload much of it from findings in the Pacific Northwest and while the world has changed dramatically the farthest reaches of the West Coast remain essentially the same as they were in the 1960s and while Grover crayons John Green and Renee de hinden didn't have a sighting of their own the creature they searched for continues to be seen and investigators like Derek and chain follow in their footsteps occasionally walking the same ground that the pioneers of the subject once walked themselves though for different reasons than the cantankerous Four Horsemen is because it's it keeps me in the woods it's it's the ultimate hunt and I'm a Hunter and even though we're not hunting with rifles we're hunting for answers and these answers are answers that everybody's looking for and it's not that we want to be first with the answers just want the answers I love it because I just love to be in the woods I mean I mean I I know Sasquatch exists it's not even a it's a non-issue for me I'm you know some people come out here to find themselves some people come out here to lose themselves I come out here for answers and to be in nature you know um and I can escape this guy because the Mountain's right there and I'm a little bit faster than him so I can go you know bye-bye no [Music] I didn't make the Trek to Washington with the expectation that it would find proof of the existence of undiscovered ape men and in that regard my Approach was the right one but I did leave with a greater understanding of the area that we now consider the birthplace of Bigfoot and expands so large in scale that it's difficult to describe through words I came away from the Pacific Northwest with a sense of just how much the quest to find the creature has impacted the lives of those who take part in the search and now months after I last set foot somewhere within the murky boundaries of America's Last Frontier I find myself wondering if maybe the search for Sasquatch is motivated as much by a desire to explore the Wilds as it is to find the answers to his centuries-old question [Music] thank you [Music] don't go out in the woods after dark if the Minerva monster will get you I heard it a thousand times as a kid but never understood what it meant Minerva was a small town that was a 20-minute drive from my own small town my dad and mom used to take us there for dinner when I was little why on Earth did such a normal Place have such a weird mascot years would pass before I learned the story behind the Minerva Monster Legend how it centered around one small family living just off the Lincoln Highway outside of town who were stalked by a mysterious creature in the forest behind their home during the summer of 1978. it was another handful of years before I would set out to document that story from my first film Minerva monster the person I contacted when I began researching the Minerva monster case was Barbara Callaway Barbara was a beat reporter who was tasked with covering the monster story when it was first reported when you were when you first got tasked with covering the Minerva monster story what were you told about the story going into it oh it was uh simply a correspondent had picked up this uh police report at the sheriff's department and uh I needed to go check it out because it was quite bizarre and it sounded to them like they had seen this new creature that's what I was curious about it's like was was Bigfoot even in it wasn't even a word yeah were there Bigfoot reports taking place here or was this kind of like in your opinion was this one of the the first ones to kind of catapult it into the one of these first yeah in the east coast definitely um all we knew about Bigfoot is that there was this video from the west from Washington State or somewhere yeah and um the name Bigfoot had just gotten started wasn't even a thing yet I did it as a legitimate story and you know and you didn't you didn't refer to it as Bigfoot no and they never did yeah they never did and they reverted to it as the hairy creature or the large creature or something like that there's a real evolution in the media interest in the 1950s it was all about flying saucers and strange phenomena to do with UFOs and then you see in the late 60s after the Patterson gimlin film and around the time of the boggy creek movie that the thrill of monsters came to the newspaper headlines and a lot of newspaper editors wanted to sell papers wanted people to pick up their newspapers so it was Monster this monster that after the Jerry crew stories hit the papers there was a growing sense that various locations had their own histories of Sasquatch and Bigfoot reports where all of a sudden stories were coming out of the general Midwest coming out of the South and even the east coast and the extreme Northeast part of the United States if Patterson gimlin film is in 19 67. you know you're you're at the end of a very tumultuous decade where there's lots of sort of cultural upheaval and all that and you go into the 70s that is kind of trying to reconcile all of that chaos that came before it and I think the popularity of something like Bigfoot seems to play into this cultural interest in people's darker nature Minerva was a microcosm for the United States as a whole suddenly a phenomenon that was supposed to be taking place solely in the Pacific Northwest had made a home in our own backyards literally stories about the Minerva monster and the Big Muddy monster were grabbing attention not just because of the headlines associated with them but also because various elements of them seem ripped from the pages of a dime store horror novel Tales of marauding creatures annihilating household pets and terrifying teenagers and parked cars were now all the rage the falc monster the Missouri monster Monroe monster big head the Enfield horror and more began appearing in local papers across the U.S in many ways mirroring Tales of encounters with wild men and apes seen in some of the very same Publications a century earlier with the spread of Bigfoot reports the number of people interested in finding the creature began to grow as well in New York investigators like Bill brand began looking into the subject with great interest while in Ohio Don Keating started taking reports from locals of what he began to call the bigfoot was Bigfoot even a thing or was that kind of like when it was just first starting becoming the Republican Bigfoot in Ohio was like a roller coaster ride sometimes you would hear a lot about it and other times you'd go for months or years without hearing anything at all and so you had Minerva and MacArthur taking place in the late 70s but nothing had taken place up until the mid 80s when I happened to come across this in some information [Music] I was always aware of as one of the first Ohio Bigfoot investigators he'd had a hand in looking into Infamous cases like the Rome Ohio flap and of course the Minerva monster case though the Minerva monster sightings took place prior to his time as an investigator his research into it pointed towards some of the commonalities that ran across many Bigfoot Encounters in the Northeast part of the U.S yeah on the on the average I would say what I came across was between six and a half to eight foot tall the brown or the black in the East the Minerva monster Momo the Sister Lakes creature a lot of those creatures have hair all over their face and it's almost as if the Eastern Bigfoot is a little farther away is a little more invisible to the eyewitnesses than the Western a geographical differences in what the creature was actually being reported as did seem to have sort of a regional cast to them it seemed like a lot of the Midwest reports seemed to be seven to eight feet tall and very very hairy to the degree that often the face would be obscured by the hair that was growing over it I had one report that stuck out stood out from Guernsey County Ohio not too far from kimbolton of some fellas who were back in the woods that were clear-cutting an area they happened to run across one of these things it was dark brown or black in color but the entire stomach and chest area was white that wasn't unusual enough they just seen it and they said that's it we're out of here you know because they ran across something that they didn't think existed and scared them frankly well what's interesting about a country as big as the United States is you seem to have these different species or variants of what Bigfoot is you know in the in the Northwest seems to be this kind of docile creature just just kind of wanders about whereas in Florida you've got the skunk ape that seems particularly aggressive their accounts I think in the northeast of white haired Bigfoot in September of 85 outside of Newcomerstown just south of the Tuscarawas guernsa County Line on County Road 33 as you head toward a tiny little dot on the map called Guernsey we had been out there investigating repeated sightings screams and the glowing eye incidents there were four of us out there we had been playing recorded sounds of what a allegedly a Sasquatch sounds like the guy who was over by the old barn didn't tell of course they didn't we didn't know this until later but he had heard noises coming off the hillside like heavy walking heavy footfalls and a short time later as we found out is when I seen something walking towards a chicken pin it stopped for a split second and then walked away straight away from me twice as fast as it had come down toward the chicken pin and what I could tell with what ambient light that I had was that it was a light colored individual easily twice as tall as what the Golden Rod was because it appeared as if the waste was above the Golden Rod weeds Pacific Northwest you have a lot of people that compare Bigfoot to the Mount gorilla and that very much is in contrast to the Eastern Bigfoot really starting from the 60s where there was violent interactions and it seems like a lot of these Northeast reports had sort of an aggressive nature to them that the the sightings or the the things that were being reported were not something that you would want to see uh coming close to you often there's a sense of uh you know a war or a violation of space that was taking place but the major difference that a lot of people always can see is that the Eastern Bigfoot tend to attack dogs and dogs become the victims of Bigfoot and a lot of these stories not in the west but certainly in the East we interviewed a family that they'd had six dogs taken from their some of them were pit bulls taken rip to the chains or ripped I mean it's not I've done films with cougar attacks and coyote attacks and wild dogs in general will just tear an animal apart but we're talking about something that is torn a heavy chain with the dog they've also been decapitations you try and put a human in the yard you're not going to get close to that dog so what's doing it it's not indicative of any animal and they're disappearing at you know a regular rate as far as differentials and behavior the one down in the bulgy Creek area falc Arkansas seemed to be more aggressive there have been maybe a handful of reports in Pennsylvania that indicate it could be a little more aggressive over in that part of the state Eric Altman and Stan Gordon would have a lot more info on that Ohio was just what I know it's just a mainly passive non-aggressive creature uh rubbing the woods the aggressiveness of the Minerva monster was downplayed by The catons Who despite the suspected killing of their dog believed it to be a passive creature something echoed by many Ohio investigators when it came to Bigfoot Behavior as reported by the majority of witnesses maybe it was simply the more dramatic encounters that tended to make the news which painted the creatures into a violent Corner regardless the direction the phenomenon would take next would make the destruction of pets and livestock by creatures across the Midwest and Northeast look relatively normal by comparison the Rome Ohio incidents in 1981. that was a a totally bizarre set of circumstances apparent three-toed tracks all over the place and Advanced UFO Bigfoot connections which oh my own opinion is you have to show it to me to convince me that it actually is connected but they allegedly were having an awful lot of reports up there of UFOs and Bigfoot connected and that was in 1981 just a few years before I got into it it was Pennsylvania researcher Stan Gordon who first brought to the Public's attention the correlation between UFOs and Bigfoot in the state I documented a very small part of Stan's work in the Bigfoot and UFO fields in my 2017 film Invasion on Chestnut Ridge which was also when I first became aware of just how many cases he's investigated in this 60 plus years of paranormal research while Stan was primarily a UFO investigator at the start over time he would become intricately tied to the Bigfoot subject and to furthering the idea of a nationwide phenomena that stretched far beyond the Pacific Northwest what were people reporting seeing or encountering Bigfoot is really nothing new to Pennsylvania I mean there have been reports that apparently are associated with the Native Americans going back many many years and there are numerous newspaper accounts from across the state of Pennsylvania that talk about sightings of Bigfoot and strange Footprints were found throughout the state back in 1973 and 74 form all through this area we experienced the first the biggest UFO outbreak and then the biggest Bigfoot outbreak in history that began the summer of 1973 continued in early 1974. with multitudes of Bigfoot sightings daylight as well as at night that's when I had my race my first research teams mainly scientists and engineers and research people and we are on the scene many times within minutes to hours after the incidents occurred there was a time in the 70s where UFOs and Bigfoot reports merged they merged in Pennsylvania and Ohio in some of these locations you would get a lot of eyewitnesses saying that UFOs were involved in some of the craft sightings and that then all of a sudden a Bigfoot would appear so we were there when we could see the reaction to Witnesses see their emotion see the animal reaction in some cases see the physical evidence at the scene we made cancer some of the footprints and it was just an amazing time to live through it was a case that occurred up in Fayette County along the ridge up near Ohio Pile in February 6 of 1974 that was a case that convinced me that there's a lot more of the Bigfoot phenomena than any of us realized this woman was sitting in a little cabin home deep up in the mountains she began here this commotion on her front porch she loads her shotgun she makes her way over to the wall turns on the switch to turn on the porch light she makes her way to the front door opens up the front door steps outside and to her surprise there's no dogs but only a few feet in front of her she describes his huge hairy covered creature with his own straight up over his head just standing there right in front of her what does she do she fires her shotgun right at the creature right into it she said there's this bright flash of light like the flash from a camera and it physically disappears right in front of her that's not the end of the story though because her in-laws lived only about 100 feet away and they heard the gunshot and they called and asked what are you shooting at and she tried to describe it to him her son-in-law at that point grabs his pistol and starts walking up that dark road towards her cabin [Music] he saw a figure running up the road but as he gets closer he said he's surrounded by four or five hairy people with eyes like holes of Fire and he runs into the cabin home and it was around that time period that they see this large object they sound like a big Christmas order with luminous different lights on it that was hovering over the trees at the same time they they were very frightened that's when they called the state police by the time the state police summons National Guardsmen found the property way up in the mountain whatever was there was gone within the Bigfoot field and the UFO field it's kind of a norm to talk about 80 percent of the cases are misidentifications mistakes one percent are hoaxes now if you take those two bodies of reports and you look at the Circle that overlaps you have an even smaller percentage that include UFO reports and Bigfoot reports while Pennsylvania would eventually become inextricably linked to high strangeness cases connected with Bigfoot the predominant number of reports were still of seemingly Flesh and Blood creatures moving through the densely forested sections of the state or occasionally glimpsing crossing a back road late at night despite the muddying of the waters brought on by the occasional paranormal Bigfoot case the mundane sightings and encounters continue to occur weekly with reports coming to Gordon's UFO hotline with greater frequency a lot of these creatures generally range from six about nine feet tall even though some smaller ones been reported uh generally very sometimes very broad-shouldered very long arms sometimes extending down beyond the knees almost to the ground in some cases and men get a Bigfoot reports are light it seems that some people are of the opinion that Bigfoot isn't a nocturnal animal and it's only seen at night but actually many of the better sightings here in Pennsylvania are occurring here in daylight and many have been at very very close range from the hills of Ohio to The Ridges of Pennsylvania to the Adirondacks of New York Bigfoot was sweeping the nation Coast to Coast local Legends had begun making some sense when viewed within the phenomena as a whole perfectly exemplified in Tales of a creature said to lurk in the depths of Southern swamps the southern Sasquatch gained further notoriety in the early 70s when it was brought to the Silver Screen in The Legend of Boggy Creek a docudrama which focused on an outbreak of Bigfoot sightings in the bogs of Arkansas unlike most films connected to the subject Boggy Creek was based on true events and did more to cement the idea of a living undiscovered creature wandering the forest than nearly anything in pop culture up to that time one of the major films for those people that grew up in the 1960s was Legend of Boggy Creek which came out in 1972 and it really burst on the scene in such a big way in drive-in theaters was so accessible to people and then had a whole TV career too that a lot of individuals that are researchers today really point to that one film Robert Robinson is an author and adventurer he currently researches Bigfoot and skunk Apes along with other local Legends near his home in Florida the skunk Cape which I always tell everybody is the cousin the Bigfoot my research has shown this is basically seems to be the same animal this animal attends about eight foot tall the light brown inherent I would say uh it does seem to have you know have no fear of going in the water generally speaking those creatures were cited in and around swamps or Inland Lakes so even the the nomenclature there of skunk ape suggests a very ape-like appearance and almost a great ape or a gorilla shape and size to what was being seen down in the swamps reports in South Carolina are not as prevalent as as some other places but there is a consistency to them in that they tend to be the sort of orangish color they tend to have really long arms and really the descriptions are consistently like an orangutan the term scum cake got used in 1971 when a MJR archaeologist h.c Osborne saw it out in the Big Cypress swamp down in the Everglades seems like right after that every uh newspaper article right after that referred to it as a Florida Skunk cake I'm one of those individuals that tend to think there's a different kind of hairy creature in the South that's more chimpanzees like uh in the Florida it's called the skunk ape the Honey Island Swamp monster boogers all kinds of different names in the South those are not traditional Bigfoot one of the oldest sightings of the florist gun Cape took place in 1941 it was by a five-year-old little boy and he came in and he told his mom that there was a big hairy monster out there watching it and he said that that thing was just watching him and then when he got up and ran inside it took off walking and this took place in the big in the green swamp located out north of Lakeland Florida it is the skunk gate but there are equal number of sightings in Louisiana in Mississippi in Oklahoma Texas Southeast Texas you know there's places called Monster Central along the border of Louisiana and East Texas where there's constant sightings they do seem to be a little aggressive here whether it's screaming at the person that that saw them or maybe throwing something but just like in Florida the skunk tends to be somewhat aggressive and and sort of nasty it seems like the ones in in South Carolina seem to be too we had a siding with a a hunter a 2012 Thanksgiving he uh it was in a tree stand when he saw the animal as I call it come walking out into a big huge Palmetto field and uh he took out a cell phone and started filming the thing looked up at him and he said he felt a chill go down his spine when he realized it wasn't like a guy in a suit or a a hunter in a Ghillie suit that it was an animal he's kind of just didn't know what to do because the thing was looking at him he was looking at it and then he you know didn't know if he you know should go for his gun or just keep filming and anything the thing just quickly just took off running said he couldn't believe how fast it was running hey medially gone on the phone his cell phone and called his uh dad and his son to come over and he was too scared to get out of the uh out of the tree stand he would in fact they said they had to coax him to come out of it he was so scared between the 70s and the present day sightings have continued across the country there might be more reports coming in now than at any point in history from the deepest Southern bogs to The Rolling corn fields of the Midwest to the farthest reaches of the East Coast hair covered giant creatures are spotted by average people in ordinary places while the creature's popularity continues to ascend as films television shows books and podcasts propagate the subject the being at the center of it remains ever elusive thank you I think the prevalence of these things in practically every state is compelling as opposed to them being isolated to one particular area but because they're they seem to be everywhere you know and stories not just in the United States but all over the world that there's some form of this thing practically everywhere if you look at the global picture of hairy creatures there's all kinds of different things Bigfoot Sasquatch are the same thing but in the Southern United States they're more hunched over they're not as tall they're more aggressive different things like that behaviorally that show us there's something else going on down in the South than there is in the Pacific Northwest and some of the more forested areas of the United States I mean obviously we both feel the same I know this for a fact we both feel the same way about this story as local history it should be preserved it's very important too Minerva it's important to start counting Carroll County do you think there's an importance though I mean don't you feel in a way like this is the story that kind of put Bigfoot on the east coast map I I do I really do uh in retrospect yeah and as I said it wasn't even a thing then but uh it certainly became a thing later on and uh yeah this was probably the biggest East Coast or Midwest episode at the time yeah definitely if I had my own misgivings on the subject they might actually relate to Bigfoot's ability to exist in every state in the Union after all there aren't many creatures on this Earth said to reside nearly everywhere how does a 7 to 10 foot tall 300 to 600 pound animal managed to stay as hidden in the cornfields of Illinois as it does in the darkened forests of Washington I've been across the country on my journey to find the truth about the creature's existence and I'm left with the simple fact that the only chance I might have of finding out if Bigfoot exists is to seek it out in the place it's most likely to live [Music]

Channel: Small Town Monsters

Views: 524,908

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Id: On2i1ZtHjJw

Length: 73min 54sec (4434 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023