Two young Marine reservists on an overnight camping and hunting trip last month claim they got the scare of a lifetime: a possible Bigfoot sighting.
Tyler Kroetsch, 20, and Wil Neill, 23, were in the southwest corner of the Waterloo State Recreation Area in Michigan in the early morning hours of Sept. 16 when they heard footsteps about 20 feet away from them. The seasoned outdoorsmen then froze to listen to what came next: two distinct, four-second-long screams that didn’t sound like anything they’ve previously heard in the woods.
“You could hear each step,” Neill told The Post on Wednesday. “It stopped almost directly in front of me, about 20 feet away, off to my right, and then it screamed two times. After that, we freaked out.”
Neill, of Livonia, Mich., said he was so spooked by the sighting that he and Kroetsch ended up sleeping in their car. They never reported the incident to officials at the state’s Department of Natural Resources, but Neill insists he’s a believer.
“I went from zero belief that night to 100 percent believing in Bigfoot,” Neill said. “It’s ridiculous to say, but, after that night, we don’t know how else to explain it or what to say.”
Neill said he and Kroetsch – who did not get a glimpse of what they heard – later compared what they heard that night in the woods to YouTube clips of purported Bigfoot calls or sounds made in the wild. They matched exactly, Neill said.
“The more and more we looked into it, it just really confirmed our belief that we were within 20 to 25 feet of this thing,” he said. “When we heard that same sound later, no kidding, the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I freaked out.”
Kroetsch, of Utica, Mich., characterizing what he heard as the most “loud, freakiest, inhuman yell/scream/roar” coming from a creature on two feet.
“The only remotely close animal I’ve heard make this sound are mountain lions and cougars,” Kroetsch wrote, adding that he thinks whatever he saw spotted the pair in the woods.
Kroetsch told The Post the sound resembled a “fully-grown man running through the woods” in knee-high foliage, with large trees and branches everywhere that would be incredibly difficult for a person to navigate in the early morning darkness.
“It’d be hard for a normal person to run through it without failing, pretty much,” he said. “But to this day, we both don’t know exactly what it was.”