Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “Dear Wes, Attached is my scholarly personal narrative about my encounter with Sasquatch that I wrote for my college writing class. I referenced your podcast and name in my essay multiple times and I would love for you to read it!”

The Likely Existence of Bigfoot 

In June of 2017, I saw what many people consider to be Bigfoot, or most accurately, the North American Sasquatch. It started when my then future husband, Brian, and I decided to take an overnight backpack trip on the Dicky Creek Trail in Mount Hood National Forest. Hiking had been what helped us connect and relate to each other.

Usually, on trips like these Brian would set up a timid campfire that we would sit next to, setting the perfect and ominous atmosphere to listen to our favorite podcast, Sasquatch Chronicles. Brian had first introduced me to it, the podcast is centered around people coming on and sharing their personal Sasquatch experiences in an open-minded setting. It helped enlighten me to the possible existence of Bigfoot. I would like to bring forth that the existence of Sasquatch is more likely than some may assume.

This particular backpacking trip felt abnormal from the beginning. The roadblocks on the trail couldn’t help but feel eerily intentional every time we stumbled upon one. It was as if something or someone didn’t want us traveling further in. The amount of debris and logs we had to climb over to keep going felt absurd. I began to worry when Brian started having trouble, as he was an experienced hiker who I rarely saw having difficulty with trails. The other more common trails in the Mount Hood Forest area are popular – we did not encounter anyone other than ourselves while making our way to the campsite – and well-kept – quite the opposite of the trail we had been on.

Sometimes we had to go through steep areas covered in undergrowth that made it feel as though we were making our way down a mountain instead of tracking through a normal trail. It took several hours to arrive at the campsite. I found myself more surprised by how immaculate the scene looked than by the wrecked trail. I couldn’t reason with myself why the campsite would be so alluring yet the trail so hard to master. But I wasn’t one to complain about a beautiful place to sleep for the night. The ground looked like it had been swept, there was a bench that was built into the hillside with the fire ring directly in front it. This setup could have kept a person warm in the coldest of months. I also remember that there was piled firewood and a stream that ran alongside the campsite.

Our favorite way to spend our evenings when backpacking is by a fire while listening to “Sasquatch Chronicles”. That night we happened to listen to an episode that featured a guest that had recordings of what they thought were Sasquatch calls, named the Sierra Call or the Samurai chatter. However, some people believe that the creatures have a type of language. As stated by Ron Morehead, “There are a few things that Bigfoots are probably doing when they speak to each other that is beyond animal communication. First, they are recomposing words and syntax. If a bee tried to change the dance sequence to a pollen source it would send the entire hive to the wrong place. A Bigfoot could alert another Bigfoot to a food source through multiple ways because…language. Another difference is language is taught and learned. Humans that are not exposed to language during their youth have trouble acquiring language as adults. Animals communicate mostly genetically.” This means they have a way of communicating with each other and drawing other Sasquatch near them. R. Scott Nelson even created the Sasquatch Phonetic Alphabet (SPA) or more commonly, the Unclassified Hominid Phonetic Alphabet (UHPA). UHPA makes sense of the different howls and overall noises these cryptids make that have been documented. It is possible listening to a recording of those sounds could’ve enticed a Sasquatch toward our campsite if it had assumed we were one of them.

I fell asleep before Brian that night. His air mattress was deflated, and he was unable to get to sleep. Once he finally dozed off, he heard what he would describe as a “human imitating the sound of a chainsaw”. Then about an hour later, on a still silent night, he heard a single tree drop about two hundred or three hundred feet away. The night was very calm, there was no wind or storm. He went on to explain that he later heard about another encounter where the witness thought the Sasquatch might have been imitating chainsaw noises, on Sasquatch Chronicles podcast episode four hundred and eleven.

During this episode, the host, Wes Germer, asked the witness, Brenda Harris, if the sasquatch might have been imitating a chainsaw. She can be quoted around the fifty-seven-minute mark saying “Oh, yeah, that can be a good possibility because they can mimic different animal sounds”. She gave an example of her daughter hearing the creature imitate a duck. The host can also be heard around the fifty-five-minute mark saying he had heard a story about a woman hearing one imitate a chainsaw but he was interrupted. This implies that my husband is not the only person that had this experience. Afterward, when Brian was recounting his story he told me, “I knew it would freak you out, so I didn’t wake you up. I planned on telling you when we got back to the car.”

The next morning, I woke up having no idea what my husband had experienced the night before and started getting ready for our hike. As we were hiking out and rounding a bend I happened to look up and see what I now think was a Sasquatch on the hillside. The Sasquatch blended in with the sunlight and trees, but I could make out the creature enough to notice the size, hair color, and hair texture. It was different from any animal I had ever seen before. The hair was humanlike and orange-red.

Within a matter of seconds, it dove to its right. I was able to catch a glimpse of its torso and side body as it disappeared from my sight into the bushes. The torso was roughly two feet and seven inches long, which is around half of my total height of five feet and four inches. I would say the creature was at least seven-foot tall. The size of the creature I saw would coincide with the analysis of Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who is a professor of anatomy and anthropology. Meldrum can be quoted saying, “It’s 40 to 50 percent bigger than a normal human. The anatomy doesn’t jive with any known animal.”

Jeff Meldrum got those percentages from an impression found on the ground. In September 2000 a cast was made with the recognizable prints of a forearm, a thigh, buttocks, an Achilles tendon, and heel from a large animal that had been laying down on its side to retrieve some fruit next to a mud hole in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington State. One of Meldrum’s statements on it was, “Given the scientific evidence that I have examined, I’m convinced there’s a creature out there that is yet to be identified.” (https://rb.gy/h8yzmv)

As soon as I registered what I had seen, I turned to tell Brian, though he stayed calm and said to just keep walking. The rest of the hike out, I felt like I was being followed. Brian would later say he thought the Sasquatch was walking us out. We got back to the car and he finally told me about his encounter. Now that we both had something relating to Sasquatch, I was certain we had invaded the being’s territory. However, I didn’t feel threatened by the creature, it had only seemed curious and a little juvenile.

It took me a couple of years to process what I had seen and to rule other possibilities out — such as a bear, deer, or an elk. I would go on to read the book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” written by Rebecca Skloot. It gave me the shock of my life about how unethical scientists used to be. Not only did they have a total disregard for the humans they were experimenting on without their consent, but they were also taking their cells and creating hybrids of different species. The corruption and years it took for people to know the truth about the unethical behavior and the fact it is still not common knowledge to the public made me realize that medical researchers are capable of horrific things and hiding the truth from the public.

According to Skloot, “Soon after Harris’ HeLa-chicken study, a pair of researchers at New York University discovered that human-mouse hybrids lost their human chromosomes over time, leaving only the mouse chromosomes (pg.142).” Also, Skloot goes on to explain how, “Scientists in laboratories throughout North America and Europe began fusing cells and using them to map genetic traits to specific chromosomes, creating a precursor to the human genome map we have today. They used hybrids to create the first monoclonal antibodies, special proteins later used to create cancer therapies like Herceptin and to identify the blood groups that increased the safety of transfusions. (pg.142)” Experimenting with these hybrids “proved it was possible for DNA from two unrelated individuals, even of different species, to survive together inside cells without one rejecting the other (pg.142)”.

Of course, this made scientists excited about hybrids, which made the public panic, causing the media to publish headlines with titles such as “MAN-ANIMAL CELLS ARE BRED IN LAB… THE NEXT STEP COULD BE TREE MEN… SCIENTISTS CREATE MONSTERS (pg.142)”. The book goes on to use The Times of London and the Washington Post as examples for the media’s reaction, calling this research “horrendous”. The media was exposing these acts, yet were exaggerating them and hyping them up. The media used terms like “mad scientists (pg.142)”. The doctor who created the human-mouse hybrid, Dr. Harris, went on a BBC documentary and said, “the eggs of man and ape could now be joined to create a mape (pg.143)”. If our country’s researchers and media are corrupt enough to cover up their past unethical research, then I wouldn’t put it past them to hide the truth of these creatures from us either.

Based on other people’s experiences told in the podcast Sasquatch Chronicles, the research of Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a beautifully written book by Rebecca Skloot, and my husband and I’s a personal story, I have more reasons to believe these fascinating creatures are out there more than not. I am forever lucky and forever changed after my experience, and I am grateful I have been given a platform to share my story. I hope we can get clear answers about Sasquatch and it’s confusing existence. Going forward, if more people see things and more people can talk about it, we can erase the stigma around these encounters. Instead of assuming these people are mentally ill, we can listen to them and look behind the scenes despite what we are told by the mainstream. I believe they are harmless unless given a reason not to be, we shouldn’t be scared of the unknown, rather respect the fact we don’t know the full story about something. It’s just the beginning of their narrative.