Monday, May 16, 2016

Bigfoot Casebook (an excerpt): Into the New Millenium...


After a quiet end to the 20th century, the 21st got underway with a busy year for Bigfoot sightings, and a brief encounter late in January 2000 confirmed that Bigfoot had successfully entered the new century: he showed up in Starbuck, Washington State, at 3:00 a.m. on the morning of 27 January. The witness was an unnamed man living on the outskirts of town who went outside to fetch some wood.

You can read more by purchasing the book "Bigfoot Casebook UPDATED: Sightings and Encounters from 1818 to 2004" here on Amazon.

When he saw a 7-foot-tall, muscular figure with "grayish-brown hair" standing between the woodpile and a fir tree, he dashed back indoors and locked the door — a natural reaction in the circumstances. Brief sightings are all-too-often the norm, as witnesses, taken by surprise, do whatever is necessary to remove themselves from the location as speedily as possible. Another startled witness whose first impulse was to flee was James Hughes, driving his newspaper delivery route at 5:15 a.m. on 28 March along County Highway H 1 1 /2 miles from Granton in Wisconsin. What he saw, standing in the ditch beside the road, appeared to be an 8-foot "man"

with shaggy dark-gray hair which was "in clumps and knotted," and had some lighter honey-colored patches among it. He couldn't see any facial features other than two spots where its eyes should be; the creature turned slowly as he passed, as if looking at him, and it appeared to be holding something in its left hand - a goat, Hughes thought, though later he was not sure. He reported his sighting to the local sheriffs office next day and a search was made, but no footprints were found, even in the soil of a ploughed field between the highway and the nearest wood. Another fleeting sighting was claimed by a woman driving on Route 30 between Jeannette and Greensburg in Pennsylvania early in the morning of 9 June. The 6-7-foot creature, covered with long black hair, was standing "hunched" on a back road close to the highway. She saw it turn its head towards the highway, then stride away into the woods.

The summer of 2000 brought a rash of sightings, as well as many footprint finds, especially in the Pacific Northwest. A motorcyclist claimed a Bigfoot sighting off Highway 101 at Grants Pass, Oregon, on 18 May; on 29 June a forestry manager saw one in a forest on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State; and two days later a psychologist, hiking with his family in the Oregon Caves National Monument, also claimed a sighting. The creature seen by David Mills, forestry manager with the Suquamish tribe, was 9 feet tall, with shiny black fur, and it ducked behind a tree when it realized it was being watched. Mills walked closer, whereupon the creature made screeching noises and also appeared to be pounding a tree with a rock. Mills then realized that there was a bear cub only 20 feet away from him, but surprisingly its mother ignored him and appeared to be more concerned with the Bigfoot - at which point Mills sensibly retreated. The Johnson family's sighting in the forests of Oregon Caves National Monument on 1 July was preceded by a strong pungent smell and a guttural noise, before Dr. Johnson saw a "half-human and half-ape" step out from behind a tree about 60 feet away. He was sure it was not a bear, having seen both grizzlies and black bears in Alaska. Julie Davis was also sure that what she had seen, on 5 August ma remote part of the San Juan National Forest of Colorado, was not a bear.

She had been a volunteer with the Great Bear Foundation in Montana for several years, and felt justified in saying, "I've had a lot of time to get to know what bears look like up close. This animal was bigger than any bear." Ms. Davis was camping in the forest, being on a 10-day trip down the Colorado Trail with four goats and two border collies. One goat had become ill and so she had left the trail to set up camp in a remote meadow while it recovered. As the day passed, she noticed that the animals seemed nervous — until eventually she realized there was something outside the tent that was really worrying them.


She expected it might be a grizzly bear and rushed from the tent with a pepper spray in her hand. The creature she saw from only 12 feet away was about 8 feet tall, with very broad shoulders, and as they stared at each other, she noted that "Its face was almost completely covered in fur but human-like, on the human side of halfway between a human and gorilla." It had "medium-chestnut fur... like an Irish setter's" covering its body. The creature made a low rumbling noise, whereupon a second animal, smaller in size and lighter in color, peered at her from behind the big one. Then they both turned, and ran into the forest. She concluded, "I know from looking at the expression on its face and from the graceful way it ran off that there was no way it could have been hoaxed. It was absolutely a beautiful lope. You could see muscles moving under the fur... I don't care if anybody believes me or not. I know what it was, and it was real. There's nothing more persuasive than staring something straight in the face."

Far away in Louisiana, a fisherman wading in a lake in the Cotton Island area in mid-August claimed that a black-haired Bigfoot, 7 feet tall, hunched over, and strong smelling, walked up to him. It was carrying a Pig under its arm and darted off into the woods after stopping to stare at the startled man. Later in the month, more sightings were reported from the same area, the witnesses including logger Earl Whitstine who with a companion saw the creature in cypress swamps called Boggy Bayou. Twenty-five years earlier his father had been involved in faking giant Bigfoot tracks in the woods with plywood feet, so there was a natural suspicion  about the 2000 sightings...

You can read more by purchasing the book "Bigfoot Casebook UPDATED: Sightings and Encounters from 1818 to 2004" here on Amazon.

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