Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I’ve been listening to your pod casts for a few months now and I quite enjoy them.

Recent episodes have prompted me to finally send you an email describing my experiences and thoughts on the matter of Sasquatch. I, like 99.9% of ‘bigfoot enthusiasts’ had experiences that I couldn’t let go of and in some manner became all consuming.

I’ve had two experiences that were obviously interactions with a bipedal primate and several that are less substantial, but nonetheless intriguing. Most of my experiences happened when I was a child and I have since had a huge desire to see this primate again through adult eyes…possibly as final validation that my childhood memory can be trusted.

Before I go into detail about my experiences; I need to provide some context with a description of my background. I grew up in two locations; Pineville, La. which is on the Red River in central Louisiana, and Copenhagen, NY; moving there when I was ten years old. Copenhagen is a little town in upstate NY that’s situated at the base of the Tug Hill plateau at the edge of the Adirondack mountains.

As a child, I spent all of my time outdoors hunting, trapping, fishing and camping. I had free reign to do so as often as I wanted. I loved and still do love being outdoors, getting away to the Sierra Nevada mountains as often as I can. I spent many a night alone in the woods with nothing but a wool blanket and my dog. The point is that I’m an avid outdoorsman, and as such, have always had a great deal of interest in biology and other related sciences so I’m very familiar with animals of the forest, their behaviors, and their sounds.

As an adult, I’ve spent time serving in the military and have been working in high tech Government R&D for close to two decades. My forte has been in image acquisition and analysis. I consider myself to be very pragmatic and analytical when it comes to answering questions and solving problems. This is partly why I can’t let go of my previous encounters…they’ve left me with unanswered questions.
On to the encounters…

The very first WTF moment, circa fall 1981. I’m in the first grade and I’m dragged out of bed before dawn on an impromptu hunting trip with my dad and uncle. We drive from Pineville, La. north to somewhere near southern Oklahoma. We get to the designated location around dawn and we park the truck on a dirt road in a forest in the middle of nowhere. I’m cold and tired so I ask if I can stay in the truck while my dad and uncle hunt. My dad’s ok with that because I’m probably more of a liability at my age anyway.

I immediately fall asleep on the bench seat of the truck. As the sun came up, the cab of the truck warmed up and I slowly began to wake. As I sat up, I looked out in front of the truck down the road. As immediately as I did so, about what I can guestimate was 50 or so yards down the road, a huge, shaggy “man” with reddish hair covering his whole body took one step across the dirt road from my right to left. My first thoughts were, “Wow, he’s really tall” and “What’s wrong with him?”. My feelings or emotions were of sudden, extreme anxiety, however. It almost felt like a purely physical response as opposed to one more cognitively connected. I still find this fascinating today and have a theory as to why I, like so many others have such an overwhelming response to seeing one of these primates.

My dad and my uncle immediately came running back to the truck from the same general location on the right side of the road. They were terrified. They jumped in the truck, violently shoving me between them and slammed the truck into reverse, speeding back up the road. Assuming that they had obviously seen what I had, I asked my dad “What was that?”. His immediate and very angry response was “Shut the F* up and don’t worry about it!”. Apparently he had the same emotional response that I did. I never spoke of the encounter again. One thing I’d like to point out is that my dad is 6’9” and weighs about 350lbs. My uncle is 6’7” with a similar build. They’re very large, capable farm boys that aren’t easily scared.

The second WTF moment, circa summer 1982. I’m in Pineville, La. at a family friends house with my sister and parents. There are a bunch of us kids running around while the adults have a bbq / party. They live on a large spread not far from our house. There’s pine forest on three sides and not very many neighbors. Its evening; after dark, maybe as late as 9pm. There are pixie sticks on the counter in the kitchen so I ask for one. My dad lets me eat one as long as I stand outside on the back stoop and eat it so I don’t make a mess in the house. This sounds like a plan to me.

As I step out the back door, I turn on the flood light while I take a step down onto the stoop. The flood light illuminates a burn barrel at the edge of the property about 60 – 70 feet away. It’s right on the edge of the range of the light so it’s hard to make out. I don’t notice it at first because I’m tearing open my pixie stick. As I look up at the burn barrel, I notice a set of red eyes staring back at me from the darkness. They’re set wide apart and very easily discernable. They are at the height of the top of the barrel, maybe four feet of the ground (how tall is a 55 gallon drum?).

I’m nervous about the glowing eyes so I open the back door and yell into the house telling my dad about it. He off-handedly responds that it’s either a puma or bobcat and as long as I stay on the stoop, I’m fine. I close the door and focus on the eyes which are looking around somewhat, but still intent on watching me. I get that same extremely anxious feeling as I notice the pair of eyes “float” up well beyond the height of the barrel. I can’t say how high the eyes were, but they were much higher than my perception of how tall an average adult would be. I ran inside, scared to death. Recalling this memory, the “floating” of the eyes was actually the creature standing up.

Third WTF moment, early fall 1982. Evening temperatures are just beginning to drop. I believe I had just started the third grade when my next encounter happened. It was a Friday or Saturday night and I was up late watching a documentary on Hailey’s comet. I’d say it was closing in on 11pm. My father was asleep in his chair as I sat on the couch eating popcorn. When the show was over, I decided to go outside and get a bead on where Hailey’s comet was going to show up in a few years. I frequently went outside at night because free night crawlers are cheaper than the ones at the bait and tackle store.

I lived in a log style house on Donahue Ferry Road in Pineville, La. at the time and the large, acre + lot was surrounded by pine forest. There was a small pond and a marsh at the rear of the property line that I used to fish in and explore. As I was looking up at the sky, I gradually made my way down the slope in the back yard towards the edge of the forest near the pond. I got ¾ of the way to the pond and started to walk back up the lazy slope to the house when I heard this god-awful scream come from the wooded edge to my right as I started my walk. Initially, I thought screech owl, but the scream was so overwhelmingly load and volumous that it had to be coming from something huge.

I instantly panicked and started sprinting toward the house, watching the tree line on my right. I was sure I was going to see some sort of a monster come barreling out to grab me. As I got to about the half way point, I was even with the creature as it belted out another scream, I looked toward the noise and I could make out the silhouette of an arm, shoulder and head of something really tall standing by a tree and shaking a large branch. I bolted in through the back door and immediately went to take my dad who was stirring in his chair. I told him what happened and he kind of looked at me for a second and I knew he had heard the scream also. Nonetheless, he told me to quit screwing around and go to bed, that it was just my imagination. Scared and angry, I did so.

However, despite telling me to do so, I heard him load the rifle as he went outside and sat on the front porch near my window.”