"The Man Who Shot a Bigfoot" (an excerpt from Dr. Sykes book: Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal)

In the Bigfoot world no recent case has aroused more controversy than the 'Sierra Kill. Not only is the account gripping in itself, it has also stoked the embers of a long-running argument surrounding the deliberate killing of a Bigfoot. As soon as I heard about the 'Sierra Kill' I knew this was a most important case to put through the rigours of genetic analysis...

The book "Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal: A Geneticist's Search for Modern Apemen" by Dr. Bryan Sykes can be purchased here.

The story begins when Justin Smeja, an unassuming and like-able young hunter from Sacramento, an electrician by trade, was driving to his favourite hunting ground high up in the Sierra Nevada in northern California. I met Justin in San Francisco where he recounted his story, clearly not for the first time. He told me he had grown up hunting in the forests almost every weekend since he was a kid. Mostly he hunted deer, wild pigs, turkeys and bears. But not 'lions, by which he meant mountain lions, or cougars. It was illegal to kill a 'lion.

In October 20l0, he and his hunting buddy were in the Sierras of northern California at about 7,200 feet. They were on the lookout for bear and deer. They had seen a few deer, though none they liked the look of. With the exception of bear, Justin kills to eat, and these deer were too young. They headed for a familiar grassy clearing surrounded by pine forest, a perfect place for a clear shot at any deer coming out into the open to graze. As soon as they reached the edge of the clearing, Justin and his buddy saw the Bigfoot.

`So we drive in and look into this open meadow, and we see this creature that's on two legs. And at first glance I thought it was a bear, and me and my buddy saw it at the same time. I slammed on the brakes. And we're sitting there looking at this, and maybe for the first second or two I did think it was a bear, it was furry and was the right colour. I saw it was on two legs and that it looked kinda like a person in a bear suit or Wookie suit or something like that. (Wookie was the huge, hairy, Bigfoot-like character from Star Wars. During filming in Washington State he needed an armed guard to protect him against Bigfoot hunters.) It must have been seven or eight feet tall and at least 600 pounds. It was huge. I'm sitting there looking at it, watching it. A couple of seconds go by and I decide I'm gonna kill it.

`My buddy is yelling at me, saying stop, don't shoot, don't shoot, it's a person in a bear suit, stuff like that. I have a lot more hunting experience than he does so I decided it was my call, so I started squeezing the trigger. It started to turn to run away. It turned sideways and I shot it right here, on the top of its rib. It was a direct hit. It fell to the ground then started trying to get up and staggering around just like anything does when you shoot them. It started to try and get its balance and run away and that's when I could have had the kill shot. It was mostly staggering away on all fours, but just like if you shoot a person they don't usually run away on two legs, they crawl away fast.'

I hoped that this last remark was not taken from Justin's personal experience.

He was lining up for the second, fatal shot when his buddy yelled out that there were more of them. Justin took his eye away from the rifle scope and saw two smaller ones, maybe three feet tall and thirty or forty pounds. They looked like ju-veniles. Walking on two legs most of the time, sometimes on all fours, they melted into the wood. Justin and his friend got out of their vehicle and ran after them. They found them almost at once and, like the two hunters, the youngsters were looking for the fallen adult.

`We kept seeing them and they were obviously looking for their parent. It was just like when you shoot a sow pig: when you shoot a pig then you find out it has babies they always take you to the parent, so we were kind of following them, they were kind of following us and we were maybe fifteen feet away from them at times.

`Eventually I decided to shoot one. I was gonna shoot one from the beginning as soon as we saw one. I pulled up the rifle and my buddy is saying the same thing, no this isn't a good idea, we already have one on the ground, let's find that one and get out of here. So that was the plan, to find the big one and leave. Eventually I gave up trying to find it and said, "Let's just shoot one of the little ones, throw it in the truck and that way we'll have some proof that we can show people:' So I shot the little one square in the neck, walked up to it, grabbed it. It was still alive, it was bleeding all over me.'

Justin immediately regretted what he had done, and for two reasons. When he held the dying juvenile close to his face, its almost human appearance panicked him. He thought he might have shot a human child, albeit a very strange one. The other reason was that they knew they had to pass a Park Ranger station on the way out. Realising the ranger would have heard the fusillade of rifle shots and was probably on his way to investigate, they decide to bury the body.

`We got a bunch of rocks and sticks and buried it, got in the truck, drove two and a half hours home without saying a word. Plan was to return the next day and get the body. That night there was a snow storm. It snowed 4ft and we were not able to get back up there.'

In fact the weather prevented them from returning for over a month. They eventually returned to the site in mid-November. The brought with them two trained cadaver dogs and Justin's bloodhound to help them locate the body. The dogs soon found the spot, but there was very little there. After eight hours of digging all they found was a piece of skin with hairs attached, which soon came to be known, rather fancifully given its diminutive proportions, as 'The Steak. Though it was no T-Bone, there was plenty for a DNA analysis and a small portion was soon off to Dr Melba Ketchum's Sasquatch Genome Project in Texas. Four days later the results came back identifying it as a Bigfoot. Only later did Justin become suspicious that pretty well every sample tested by Dr Ketchum's lab had been identified as a Bigfoot, which is when he got in touch with me.

Justin has been back to the meadow and the surrounding woods over a hundred times since, but has never seen another Bigfoot. When I asked him whether he now regretted shooting the youngster, he replied quite calmly that his only regret was not to have put the body in the trunk of his car and driven it home. Then he would really have had something to show people. I got the impression talking to him that on the fateful day he did not realise quite how precious a Bigfoot body would have been. He had certainly heard lots of Bigfoot stories, but until the `Sierra Kill' incident he was not particularly interested in them. Though he had spent most of his life hunting in the woods, until the day he shot one he had never seen any signs of Bigfoot and didn't really believe they existed. Like many eyewitnesses I talked to, Justin is now driven, almost to the point of obsession, to convince others that what he saw was real. I had the impression that his desire to be believed was even more important to him than the immensity of the discovery had he been able to produce the genuine body.

As Justin finished telling me his story, he produced a small envelope. In it was a sliver of skin about an inch long by a quarter wide, bone dry now, but still with plenty of short almost blond hairs attached to it. This was all that remained of 'The Steak' and he handed it over to my care. Justin told me he had stored 'The Steak' in salt to preserve it, hoping this would not have harmed the DNA. On the contrary, I was able to reassure him, it would have helped. Salt preservation is one of the reasons why DNA from Egyptian mummies survives so well. I immediately put 'The Steak' and the envelope into an evidence bag. He also produced his hunting boot, the one that had been spattered in blood when he held the dying juvenile. At first I was reluctant to accept the boot for DNA testing as unlike hair, which I knew I could clean up before the analysis, the blood on the boot was bound to be highly contaminated. But I also realised that the connection between the blood on the boot and the dying Bigfoot was much more solid than it was with 'The Steak, which had been recovered weeks later and may have had nothing to do with the creature that Justin killed. Luckily I carried a scalpel in my sampling bag, and with Justin's help to identify the exact spot where the blood had landed on the boot, I cut a sliver from the surface and placed it in another evidence bag.

I must say I was slightly surprised that Justin had the time to notice precisely where the blood had landed while the juvenile Bigfoot was choking to death in his hands. Not long after taking `The Steak' and the blood sample from Justin's boot we knew a great deal more about their identity, as we shall see.

The book "Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal: A Geneticist's Search for Modern Apemen" by Dr. Bryan Sykes can be purchased here.