“They’re apes,” he told me. “They’re like gorillas. They live in nests back in the dense forest along the river. No one goes back there.”
I looked around the dark hollow with its steep hillsides going up in into the forest where folks had often encountered the sasquatch. The forest was silent and still. I waited to be pelted from the forest. Nothing happened. Eventually, we got into our car and left.
The Du Pont Monster was only about 40 miles from my home in Kempton, Illinois. I had traveled across the world—to Nepal, Mongolia and Tibet—looking for yeti, and I was to have my closest encounter less than an hour away from my house.
It seems incredible, but the reality of the hairy giants—the apemen that live on the fringes of civilization, curious about our lifestyles, and ready to steal our women at any chance—seems hard to deny when faced with what seems an overwhelming amount of evidence. Could all of the stories that have come down to us for nearly 200 years in North America be cases of misidentification of bears, or the occasional escaped circus gorilla? Or hoaxes? That, to me, would be very difficult to swallow.
Indeed, if playing the skeptic, I would have to be skeptical that there can be so many stories, photos and footprints (even frozen bodies) for it all to be a fabrication of imaginative hunters, miners and policemen (and women). One thing that we have learned in this book is that people in general are cautious about their encounters with yeti and sasquatch, and in many cases do not want to report them because they think—they know—that their friends and the general public will ridicule them for the experience that they claim they had.
No, they did not get a photograph. No, they didn’t stop their car and chase after the animal that they spotted briefly in their headlights. No, they didn’t report their sighting to anyone, except a few close friends that they could trust. I personally know many people exactly like that who have had encounters with bigfoot in various places around the United States, but are reticent to talk about it or have their names published. They feel that “normal” folks will ridicule them, accuse them of lying, and even question their professional standing (as a doctor, lawyer or engineer) after hearing their story. They might lose their jobs, their friends—and even their sanity. How can they have seen something that doesn’t exist?
Fortunately, we have a few people who “know what they saw.” There are those folks, often residents of remote rural areas, who had an encounter with a giant hairy apeman and aren’t afraid to talk about it. I say, “hurray for them.”
So what is the reality of yetis, sasquatch and hairy giants? It is for you to decide. Whether a believer or skeptic, hopefully you are open-minded and willing to honestly look at the evidence, such as it is. Why not try what Kenny Mahoney in Kentucky did: buy a motion-sensitive camera and put it at a good spot near your house. Maybe, like lucky Kenny, you might find out that you have more and stranger late-night visitors than you have ever imagined!
This Page and Opposite: Official documents from the 2005 sasquatch encounters at the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona.
Above: A photo of a Texas bigfoot given to Donna Shelton at the Kountry Kubbard Restaurant in Lamar, Texas in the summer of 2009.
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An old photo of an Englishman and some circus giants in India.
The cover of the February, 1968 issue of Argosy with Patterson’s photos.
Yeti, Sasquatch & Hairy Giants Page 22