The three boys were in Willie’s pickup truck with Willie driving. Richie and Brian were riding in the truck’s bed. As they drove past the campground late at night a huge creature suddenly bolted from the campground and followed the men in their pickup. After running (seemingly) after the truck for about 50 feet, the dark-colored creature suddenly veered off the road and plunged into a swamp. The whole episode lasted for about 20 seconds.76
As it veered, according to the witnesses, its head brushed an overhanging tree branch that was nearly 10 feet off the ground. The height of the cardboard cutout in their famous photograph was based on the tree branch. The Creature of Sycamore Flat was later dubbed “Big Ben” by locals and it made continual appearances in the area. It had a habit of standing straight-backed, arms akimbo, on high ridges at night as if surveying the action down below.
One of the better photographs of a sasquatch was released in 1996. According to an article in Fortean Times51 (No. 93, Dec. 1996), a forest patrol officer from Tacoma, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job, had an encounter with a giant ape-like creature and was able to take a series of 35mm photos. The ranger then called Cliff Crook at the sasquatch-monitoring group named Bigfoot Central.
Bigfoot Central is located in Cliff Crook’s living room in Bothell, Washington. Crook held a news conference on December 9, 1995 to satisfy the mounting interest over the photos. Crook told the conference that the ranger had taken 14 photographs of the sasquatch but eight of them were dark because fleeting clouds blocked the sun on his 50mm telephoto lens. The ranger said that he heard a splashing noise to his left while hiking along a ridge in Washington state’s Snoqualmie National Forest. He went to investigate the noise. Then, from a high bank, he observed the eight foot creature just 30 yards away in a swampy lagoon. He use up what remained of his roll of film.
The photos are sensational, clearly depicting a hairy bigfoot creature with its head low on a pair of massive shoulders. Not the sort of creature one wants to tangle with in a back alley or backwoods swamp. The photos have a certain Frank Frazetta look to them that makes their authenticity seem doubtful. One photography analyst declared that he had found tiny diamond shapes in the image indicating that it was a digitally created image. Cliff Crook countered that the analyst was examining a laser-copied print and not an original.
Skeptics believe that the photo was digitally created, probably in Photoshop, while some think that it is genuine. Genuine bigfoot photos would be welcome by all cryptozoologists, but fakes occur from time to time.
Another encounter of note also occurred in the summer of 1995 when several ex-Forest Service employees claimed that they had had an encounter with a bigoot in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. An Associated Press story released from Walla Walla, Washington on Aug. 10, 1995 carried the headline “3 Men Claim Bigfoot Sighting.” The story went on to say:
A man who has frequently claimed to have encounters with a legendary creature dubbed Bigfoot says this time he’s got witnesses.
Paul Freeman, a former U.S. Forest Service employee, said he and two other men saw a tall, hairy creature on Saturday in the Blue Mountains, about 25 miles east of Walla Walla in the Mill Creek watershed.
Freeman, who claims to have spotted a similar creature four other times, brought back part of a tree he says Bigfoot twisted, some hair samples and two plaster footprint molds.
Freeman went on the expedition with Walla Walla resident Wes Sumerlin and former state game department employee Bill Laughery. The trio said they first saw signs of the creature’s presence: a strong odor, small, twisted trees with clumps of long, black hair, and large footprints, 15 inches and 7 inches wide.
Then on Saturday, through the dense timber, they saw bigfoot, nearly 8 feet tall and a hairy tan-brown, Laughery said.
Stories of encounters with bigfoot in Canada and the USA continue to this day. Bigfoot encounters even occur in Arizona and southern California. In the next chapter we will examine some of the most recent encounters that have made the news.
Above and Opposite: Two of several photos allegedly taken of a sasquatch in Washington state on December 9, 1995. Courtesy of Cliff Crook.
CHAPTER 9
MODERN SASQUATCH REPORTS
Clearly the sasquatch does not constitute a new
order of mammals like the elephant. Almost
certainly it is not even a distinct family like the
giraffe. Its physical distinctions from known
primates would most likely rate a new genus,
nothing higher. And that genus is quite possibly one
that is already known in the fossil record; it might
even be a known fossil species.
—Grover S. Krantz
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.
—Albert Einstein
Yetis, bigfoot, hairy giants and skunk apes will continue to crop up in the news for decades to come. There is no sign, as yet, that these creatures are extinct. Perhaps they need protection, but they seem to be able to take care of themselves. Indeed, rather than the reports of sasquatch becoming fewer, they are becoming more common and widespread. Recent reports from Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado indicate that bigfoot is still tromping around a wide swath of the United States.
Sasquatch in Arizona
The Arizona sasquatch, sometimes called the Mogollon Monster, made the news on September 2, 2006, when newspapers in Arizona reported on bigfoot activity at the White Mountain Apache Nation which comprises a large part of east-central Arizona. This area of the state is heavily forested and lies along what is known as the Mogollon Rim, which stretches from Flagstaff, Arizona, through small towns to the south like Pine and Strawberry, into Payson, Show Low and the White Mountain Apache Nation and then to the Mogollon Mountains in New Mexico. This area contains the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world and is the sort of habitat the sasquatch is said to prefer: dense forest with plentiful rivers and streams, and a near complete lack of human towns and cities. Indeed, this vast area, larger than many eastern states, could contain many hundreds of sasquatch. Areas around Flagstaff, Stoneman Lake, and the tiny towns of Pine and Strawberry have had bigfoot reports for many years, and I personally know several people who have told me that they have briefly encountered bigfoot in this area.
The White Mountain Apache Nation reports were particularly interesting because a number of Apache Nation police officers were involved and reports were made to the police department that tended to show the seriousness of the encounters. Local television news crews were dispatched to interview witnesses and this story appeared on Tucson’s Channel 3 website, azstarnet.com, under the headline, “Apaches go public with Bigfoot Sightings”:
Footprints in the mud. Tufts of hair on a fence. Ear-piercing screeches in the night. These are only fragments of the stories now coming from the White Mountains in Eastern Arizona.
For years the White Mountain Apache Nation has kept the secret within tribal boundaries. “We’re not prone to easily talk to outsiders,” said spokeswoman Collette Altaha. “But there have been more sightings than ever before. It cannot be ignored any longer.”
It is a creature the world knows as “Bigfootd”.
“No one’s had a negative encounter with it,” said Marjorie Grimes, who lives in Whitewater, the primary town on the reservation. Grimes is one of many who claim to have seen the creature over the last 25 years. Her first sighting was in 1982. Her most recent was in the summer of 2004, driving home from the town of Cibecue. She becomes more animated as the memory comes forth. “It was all black and it was tall! The way it walked; it was taking big strides. I put on the brakes and raced back and looked between the two trees where it was, and it was gone!”
Grimes’ son Francis has a story. Their neighbor Cecil Hendricks has a story. Even police officers have had strange encounters. Officer Katherine Montoya has seen it twice. On a recent Monday night dozens of people called into the tribe’s radio station, KNNB,
to talk about what they’d seen. Others came in person.
... Tribal police lieutenant Ray Burnette puts it in terms of public safety. “A couple of times they’ve seen this creature looking through the windows. They’re scared when they call.”
As in all alleged sightings of a bigfoot creature, tangible evidence is scarce. The “Patterson film” from 1967 is the most-often-seen video. It shows a tall hairy figure striding through the woods of the Pacific Northwest. For nearly 40 years this film’s authenticity has been debated; it has never been discredited.
In the White Mountains last year, investigators found footprints, several tufts of hair and other material at the scene of a sighting. Tribal police made plaster casts from the prints and sent hair and plant samples to the Department of Public Safety for analysis in its state-of-the-art crime lab. Test results showed the hair was not human, but animal in origin. Further testing to determine what kind of animal was not done.
...Back on the reservation, Lieutenant Burnette wants outsiders to realize that the department takes these calls seriously, and so should you. “The calls we’re getting from people—they weren’t hallucinating, they weren’t drunks, they weren’t people that we know can make hoax calls. They’re from real citizens of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation.”
Another report came from the same area on November 6, 2006, published by The Arizona Republic with the headline “Ft. Apache reports spur Bigfoot hunt.” In the article it was mentioned that a police report had been made by White Mountain tribal Officer Katherine Montoya, who responded to a call at 2:30 a.m. on August 14 when Barry and Tammy Lupe of Whiteriver called 911 to report an un-humanly large prowler peering through their window. Officer Montoya reported what she witnessed when she arrived at the Lupe residence:
It stood approximately 6’7” tall. It appeared to be about 220 pounds or more. It had exceptionally long arms; it did not appear to be wearing any clothes, and just appeared black. When it turned towards me, the most obvious feature was its eyes. The skin around his eyes was a lighter color than the rest of the face. It appeared almost white while the rest of the suspect was black. I could smell a distinct odor, like a stinkbug. You know, when you squish a stinkbug it smells. It never made any sounds until it crashed through the fence [while running away].
Apparently, Officer Montoya had never heard of skunk apes or the Fouke Monster from Arkansas. Her suspect was, by her own admission, a large, hairy, stinky apeman. She had just met the Mogollon Monster.
In the same area, with the nearest town being Strawberry, Arizona, a man named John Johnson reported on July 10, 1999 to Oregonbigfoot.com that he had camped with a friend a few days earlier, and they had a sasquatch visit their camp. Johnson claimed that they heard strange screaming noises like a banshee’s one night. On the next night he and his friend heard what sounded like pounding on a hollow log. This occurred off and on through the night and the next morning they discovered an old tree that had been torn into pieces by some powerful being. Said Johnson, “You would have to be Hercules to do this to a tree.” (Oregonbigfoot.com file #00503)
A doctor posted a story on the Unexplained Mysteries forum (UnexplainedMysteries.com) about an encounter in the same area in 2006:
I’m a doctor in Northern Arizona. On a trip from Show Low to Concho on the afternoon of Thursday, October 26th, 2006, I saw a sasquatch about 1/2 a mile in front of my car. It entered the road from the right, ran across the road, down the shoulder on the other side and into the brush. My first thought/comment was “What the hell was that!” thinking that it certainly did look like a sasquatch, but I didn’t believe that they might be in Arizona of all places. Perhaps in the Pacific Northwest or even in the mountains of the eastern US, but Arizona? That certainly would have never crossed my mind! .. .until my wife looked up this site on the net which contained several references to sasquatch by the local White Mountain Apaches.
...The interesting thing is that no matter how much a person doubts the existence of something, no matter how much other people try to explain it away as your eyes playing tricks on you, no matter how much people try to rationalize somebody else’s experiences, once you’ve seen something crystal clearly on a bright, clear day yourself, you know. You realize that the comments of others is simply their ignorance and need for denial. It no longer matters to me what anybody says about sasquatch, there will never again be a single doubt in my mind. Once you see one, it takes it out the realm of possibility and firmly into the realm of knowing. I don’t consider myself a “believer.” It’s not a matter of believing. I now know.
Many more stories of the Mogollon Monster have surfaced over the past decade and there is even a website devoted to the creature. In a feature article in The Arizona Republic on April 3, 2009, reporter Clay Thompson told of hearing stories of the Mogollon Monster as a Boy Scout at a camp near Pine, Arizona in the 1960s. He also reported that a friend of his, Don Davis, who died in 2002, claimed that he encountered the monster at a Boy Scout camp near Payson in the 1940s. Davis had reported:
The creature was huge. Its eyes were deep set and hard to see, but they seemed expressionless. His face seemed pretty much devoid of hair, but there seemed to be hair along the sides of his face. His chest, shoulders and arms were massive, especially the upper arms; easily upwards of 6 inches in diameter, perhaps much, much more. I could see he was pretty hairy, but didn’t observe really how thick the body hair was. The face/head was very square; square sides and squared-up chin, like a box.
The Mogollonmonster.com site also records a sighting near Springerville, Arizona by a woman named Donna who reported her encounter on December 25, 2008:
We spotted it on the old Bigelow homestead. It was walking down the treeline along the Little Colorado River on the south side of the creek. It was huge—about 8 feet tall. It didn’t seem too worried about us either. We were on the road a good 100 yards from the creature, and we were in our truck. We had just dropped down off the plain on the South Fork access road. We wanted to look at the old abandoned house. Then we spotted it. It was large, looked black. There was no clothing, so it was not a man. We watched it until it moved back into the tree line. A good 4 minutes, but we had no cameras with us. It was about daybreak.
Another report, this one submitted to BFRO (bfro. net), was about an incident that occurred in 2005 at the Lo Lo Mai Springs Campground by Page Springs, which is near the New Age Mecca of Sedona, and also very near the northern Arizona home of John and Cindy McCain. Said the report:
I was in Page Springs Arizona on Oak Creek in July 2005 with my kids, camping, and my daughter and I saw something. I saw it twice. Also, a friend of mine and myself had some bad feelings in a particular area there. He was camping further down the creek. What I saw was odd. It was grey, 4’-5’ tall, slender, fast moving, able to hide, and made a screeching noise twice, once when I think it hit something while moving and again, far away when tons of dogs were barking. Could hear stones clicking, walking and breathing nearby after I went into my tent for the night. Our peaceful camping trip turned into us being frightened.
It is interesting to note how close this incident was to the home of Senator McCain. One might think that the Secret Service would be especially vigilant in protecting him if they suspected that a bigfoot was somehow on the property!
The 2003 Colorado Sasquatch Sighting
Bigfoot was big news in Colorado in early 2003 when The Denver Post featured an interesting story about sasquatch in its Sunday, January 5th edition. A former instructor at the University of Colorado Law School named Julie Davis claimed she met bigfoot one morning while camping.
The article was headlined: “Camper Says She was 12 Feet from Curious Giant.” The article then says: “When Julie Davis burst from her tent in a remote part of the San Juan National Forest late on the afternoon of Aug. 5, 2000, the 54-year-old musician expected a confrontation with a hungry bear. What she got was the surprise of her life.”
Julie goes on to say, “It was gigantic—it m
ust have been 8 feet tall. My first thought was, ‘I’m looking at something I’ve never seen before,’” she said. “I didn’t even think about bigfoot. The notion that these animals were out there in Colorado never crossed my mind.”
Davis said she was too afraid to move, and simply stared at the bigfoot standing 12 feet away. Says Davis in the article, “It had very, very broad shoulders— huge shoulders. Its face was almost completely covered in fur but human-like, on the human side of halfway between a human and gorilla.”
Davis, according to the article, was an experienced backcountry camper from rural Boulder County and a former volunteer with the Great Bear Foundation; apparently she knew a bear when she saw one. This was not a bear. There was medium-chestnut fur “like an Irish setter’s” covering the giant, which stared back at her in apparent curiosity with big brown eyes.
“I’ve had a lot of time to get to know what bears look like up close,” she says in the article. “This animal was bigger than any bear.” It uttered a low rumble, and immediately a second animal—slightly smaller and lighter in color—peered at her from behind the big one. Suddenly, the two turned, ran back into the forest, and disappeared. Davis did not leave her remote campground near Jarosa Mesa until the next day.
For two years, Davis kept quiet about her encounter, sharing it with only a handful of friends and the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO).
The article goes on to say that Davis’ account is one of 54 sasquatch sightings, tracks or vocalizations reported in Colorado during the past 40 years that are listed on the BFRO website.
Yukon Sasquatch Sighting in 2004
On June 10 of 2004 the Associated Press reported out of Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon that two men traveling down the Alaska Highway had witnessed a large sasquatch along the road.
The AP story quoted a Conservation Officer named Dave Bakica who said he was convinced that whatever the two men saw early on June 6, a Sunday morning, “shook them up.” Bakica said that Marion Sheldon and Gus Jules were traveling out of town along the Alaska Highway on an all-terrain vehicle between 1 and 2 a.m. when they passed what resembled a person standing on the side of the highway. Said the story:
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