Original subtitles

- I'm trying to classify what this thing is,

but it's not real.

And I know what it is, but what it is is not real.

- I met this river guide

and he ended up telling me, "Not only is Bigfoot real,

but I've seen them several times."

- Then it stood up.

And when he stood up,

he took two great big steps and squatted back down

and started eating again.

That experience alone, I mean,

it'll never, it changed my life.

I'll never, never be the same.

- There could be a subset of people out there

who have see this,

but you would never know about it

because their defenses kicked in and protected them.

- So the thing walked up to about 200 yards away,

it stopped, looked at them, turned and walked away.

- I'm as convinced as I can be

short of having stood there on the sandbar

on that afternoon.

- It took less than a second for me to realize

what I was looking at were not people at all.

- Holy crap, that's a freaking Bigfoot.

And he's like, "Where?"

And I'm like, "Right there!"

- You don't know what to think.

I mean, it's just, you see something that doesn't exist.

- The hand prints were roughly eight feet.

- There's a language here

and that is not a human being.

- All of a sudden, my tent starts getting pushed in.

- You run into them and you get this flash of beauty

and they are gone.

- As a child growing up, I was told stories

by my great, great grandparents.

They would take us

up to the woods in the summer

and we would spend all summer up there.

We weren't allowed to come back down into civilization.

Antone, my great, great grandfather,

would give us a rifle.

And we were eight years old at the time.

And he said, "Go out and I want you guys to learn the area.

And I want guys to hunt."

It was a lesson that he taught us

to go out and learn ourselves.

And if we had done anything wrong, then we were corrected.

While there, he would also tell us stories

of the areas that we would visit.

We have many lakes,

a couple of rivers,

and we have Mt. Adams

and he would tell us stories of how they were created.

And then he would also tell us stories about Bigfoot.

Growing up, it was kinda hard to fathom

why is he telling us stories like this?

But as I grew up, I became a skeptic because I didn't know.

And then a few years later,

working for the Yakama Nation,

then that's when everything started happening.

- With regard to the subject at hand,

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch,

my wife grew up

in Ferndale, Washington,

right next to the Lummi Indian Reservation.

Where she grew up, there were so many Bigfoot sightings,

it was just common.

The thought that Bigfoot was a legend

or maybe did it exist or not never even came up.

She was 19 and in college before she met somebody

that doubted the existence of Bigfoot

and she was astonished

because there wasn't a question is Bigfoot real.

It was just another animal in the woods.

- In talking with indigenous people,

some of the people will say, you know, the DNA is there.

We are related. We are related to the Sasquatch.

For them this is really, it's family, it's a neighbor.

It's that connection.

It's not different for them.

- I read a story by Paul Kane,

an artist who wrote a book

called "Wanderings of an Artist

Among North American Indians".

And it was published about 1890.

This mountain has never been visited

by either whites or Indians.

The latter assert that it is inhabited by a race of beings

of a different species who are cannibals

and whom they hold in great dread.

These superstitions are taken from the statement of a man

who they say, went to the mountain with another

and escaped the fate of his companion,

who was eaten by the skookums or evil genii.

I'd offered a considerable bribe to any Indian,

but could not find one hearty enough to venture.

- And they would not guide him there no matter what.

- There are competing hypotheses about what Sasquatch is,

what its nature is, and I've approached this subject

from the perspective

of an anthropologist, an anatomist, biologist.

And so the evidence that impresses me

that suggests the existence of this creature

points to it being a large bipedal primate.

It's particularly interesting to me,

due to my interest in the evolution of human bipedalism,

and sharing that habit with another species of primate,

living alongside us is a unique and interesting opportunity

of comparison and contrast to that adaptation.

- We have a being that is in the biological record,

that is a 10-feet tall, upright walking ape.

We have thousands of track casts

that Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum collects.

We have numerous reports from all kinds of people

over many years in the United States,

as well as a complete cultural record

of all indigenous cultures.

- It's the footprint evidence that drew me in

and likewise, many of my scientific predecessors,

Dr. Grover Krantz, Dr. John Napier,

it was the composite data set of the footprints

that compelled them to take this matter seriously.

"Something," as Dr. Napier said,

"something is leaving footprints."

- The Salish BC call it Dzunukwa.

The Lakota call it Chiye-Tanka.

And they don't talk about this being

as being separate from us.

Matter of fact, a lot of them say,

our brother in the forest,

and a lot of them will actually explain

how there's the fox, the bear, and the Sasquatch.

It's not different for them.

How do you feel just sitting here

and looking over there again right now?

Yeah, it's nuts, man. It really is, dude.

I'll tell you, I mean,

it's almost breathtaking.

I just, I keep, I honestly keep wanting so badly

to be like, look guys,

and then everyone can see it, dude,

but it's never, like it's killing me right now to be here.

That experience alone,

I mean, it'll never, it changed my life.

I'll never, never be the same.

We came here to do a survival video

for our YouTube channel back in 2020, mid-October.

We set a camp up on this side of the mountain.

We had turned our cameras off,

our batteries were running low.

We came down here to fish for some dinner.

We spent a good half an hour down here on these rocks

just chit chatting with a line in the water and-

- Just trying to make ends meet for the night.

- Yeah, just trying to get something to eat,

trying to get warm, get some food.

Austin had noticed a couple animals over here on this log

that was in the water and he kinda punched me

and said, "Hey man, what are those?"

- It was kinda like, "Hey, you see that over there?"

- Yeah, we, we noticed it.

I didn't know what to think of it at first.

I was thinking maybe sow and a cub

and I kinda played it off for a few minutes

like it's nothing.

And the more I looked,

the more I seen that it wasn't like a bear.

It was more like a, you know,

- more like a man. - Human.

Yeah, so hard to explain.

I just can't put it in words.

- The size of it.

It was just remarkable. - Yeah.

- I mean, larger than any human I've ever seen.

As soon as you realize that it wasn't

some kind of animal that you would normally see out here,

it kinda just like took everything outta your body.

Just took your whole breath away

and everything just went silent.

You know, you didn't really hear anything

but what your thoughts were.

- I had a whole career as a wildlife conservationist

and ended up working for 27 years

for the tribes.

Over a very long time as I earned the trust of the tribes,

more and more stories would come my way,

more and more information,

more and more stories

about where Sasquatch were found

on the res.

And after I became sort of a trusted mascot of the tribe,

I got a lot of information just from them

about what they are and what they want

and where they live.

There's a lot of films and photos

that are taken that are never shared

outside of Indian Country.

Bigfoot stories are owned by the long house that has them

and they do not share with other members of their tribe

that are in another long house.

It's all Balkanized within the tribe

as far as Bigfoot stories go

because they're considered property that a long house owns.

It's like a copyright.

You can't use that story 'cause they own it

and they don't tell it to anybody else.

So an outsider like me in some cases

has more access to those stories

because I am not seen as a threat

and not seen as something that you have to compete with.

For example, Vancouver Island, the Kwakwaka<wakw,

who used to be called the Kwakiutl,

that tribe has a lot of Sasquatch contact.

They have a secret society called the Hamatsa,

which is a hereditary clan

where it's the Wild Man society in the tribe.

If you're a member of the Hamatsa,

you can put a Dzunukwa,

which is their word for Sasquatch,

at the bottom of your totem pole

because totem poles are read upside down.

The thing closest to the ground is the most important totem

in the totem pole.

- The story poles are influenced

by the Wild Man and the Wild Woman.

There's a relationship there

and it must be a really close relationship.

For them, this is really, it's family.

It's a neighbor.

I asked some of the tribal historians,

people that might be in tune or in touch

with this information.

And I said, "Who were you emulating with these head shapes?"

The answer was more than not,

usually the forest people, the Sasquatch.

When you are in touch and in tune

with our indigenous communities in the region,

you will observe

that most of the culture up and down the coast

is related to the Wild Man, the Wild Woman.

A lot of the family crests

are related to the Wild Man, the Wild Woman.

A lot of the ceremonies are related

to the Wild Man and the Wild Woman.

The mask artistically, the regalia,

is related to the Wild Man and the Wild Woman.

I'm not speaking for the Native communities.

I don't want to represent them in any way.

I really feel that if you wanna know more about this

through oral tradition or through the stories or culturally,

then you need to take the step to do that.

If we can really bridge the gap with peoples,

we could learn a lot about this topic.

- In 1840, there was a missionary

that was out in the Oregon Territory.

His name was Elkanah Walker.

The Native Americans out there were telling him

about the giants that would come down,

steal their salmon.

And he was writing back to his church

back on the east coast in New England I believe it was

telling what the Indians were sharing with him

and how these giants smell bad

and were very strong and had like 18-inch tracks.

Elkanah Walker

in April of 1840 wrote,

"I suppose you will bear with me if I trouble you

with a little of this superstition

which has recently come to my knowledge.

They believe in the existence of a race of giants

which inhabit a certain mountain off to the west of us.

This mountain is covered with perpetual snow.

They inhabit its top.

They hunt and do all of their work in the night

and they cannot see in the daytime.

They come to the people's lodges in the night

when the people are asleep and take them

and put them under their skins

and take them to their place of abode

without even waking.

When they wake in the morning,

they're wholly lost,

not knowing in what direction their home is.

The account that they give of these giants,

well, in some measure,

correspond with the Bible account of this race of beings.

They say their track is about a foot and a half long."

- I started in the Bigfoot field in 1956.

I was trekking in the Himalaya,

a small expedition, to look for the Yeti

and made contact

with this Texan called Tom Slick, this oil man.

He became a very good friend.

So to make a long story short,

I signed up with him and I spent three years

in the Himalaya looking for the Yeti.

When I came down from that,

he invited me to come to the States.

He said, "You spent enough time up there,

come to the States and look for Bigfoot."

Well, I have to say I laughed.

But I came over here and got into the search for Bigfoot.

In the whole history of Bigfoot,

there's been one piece of footage,

16mm footage, taken by two men,

Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin.

Patterson has died, passed away.

I met him, interviewed him half a dozen times

before he died.

He came across to me as thoroughly credible.

His associate Bob Gimlin

is a man of great integrity,

very much admired.

He lives in Washington still.

And I believe his story of what happened,

the whole thing.

- And Peter Byrne ran an organization

called the Bigfoot Research Project.

And I became part of his project

and we paid for a group of scientists

to analyze the Patterson film

and prove that it was a guy in a gorilla suit.

So we dropped about $500,000 and we couldn't do it.

We really tried to use pure science

and approach it with hard science.

- The Patterson-Gimlin film clearly stands

as the most compelling photographic evidence

that we have to date.

Even in this age of iPhones

and digital cameras and so forth,

it still has set the mark so high.

And not only do we have the film,

but we have a remarkable track record associated with it.

The cast that Roger Patterson executed himself

on the day of the filming,

but also some number of days later,

Bob Titmus, a researcher from Canada,

came to the scene and made a series

of 10 footprint casts that provided a remarkable record.

But having the image of the track maker,

combined with the tracks, as an anatomist,

as a functional morphologist,

I'm as convinced as I can be

short of having stood there on the sandbar on that afternoon

and witnessed the event myself.

The suggestion that you'd work around the challenge

of finding an oversized human male subject

by portraying a female falls to the wayside

when you scrutinize the specifics

of what would have to be a fur suit

and someone to fill that fur suit,

which is just virtually impossible,

especially given the technologies available in 1967.

This is a piece of evidence that stands up

under remarkable rigor

that couldn't have possibly anticipated the technologies

that we are applying to it today.

- We had a great copy.

We could see the muscles moving under the fur

with the resolution we had.

Everything that we did find in the film

suggested it was actual observations

of an uncataloged animal.

There's an occipital protuberance on the back of the skull.

And it has a point on the back of the skull

where all the back muscles attach.

It was designed for walking erect,

which is a hominid variation.

So it's not a primate, it's a hominid.

- Going back to the silly question people ask,

"Where would they hide?"

The Pacific Northwest is enormous.

Here we had the Mt. Hood National Forest,

a million acres,

acres that supply the essentials:

food, water, cover, and space.

Those four things which a wild animal requires.

When I lived over in the Hood River Valley

on my second project, a plane crashed two miles from me,

a small plane.

It took a year to find it.

We're dealing with an enormous area

which the pilots tell me they can't see into it.

They fly over it and it's a carpet of trees.

You can't see into it.

- I spent 20 years

in the military

looking and analyzing,

maintaining various high complex medical devices

and IT systems for the United States government.

It's been very easy for me to transition that

into the world of analytics for various topics.

It could be pretty much anything.

And I've taken kind of an affinity to the Bigfoot community

from that perspective.

And then doing the research and finding out

that less than 30% of North America

has been actually walked by man.

What is in those areas of uninhabitable

or untraversable environments,

that's to me all the more alluring to find out

what's in those areas.

I just had a feeling that there was something more out there

than what we are knowing.

Scholars of the earth thought the earth was flat

at one point in time

and we are only surpassed

by our utilization of technology

and our understanding of science to leapfrog each other

to be able to find things out that we don't know.

- There's now always a place to go

and see easily and interpret or digest data

without reading pages and pages of reports.

And a map puts those data points right in front of you.

Maps tell a story immediately when you see them.

I saw a parallel

where I could use my mapping abilities and background

to catalog and create a central repository

for data relating to Bigfoot sightings and encounters

and make it measurable and quantifiable

and create a standard database or a data set

where we can apply big data concepts and principles.

From Alaska all the way to Australia,

we have sightings that have been submitted.

Washington is the number one state.

866 sightings in Washington State alone.

And then when you start to go down the coast

to Washington, Oregon, California, Bigfoot thrives here.

- Bigfoot's intelligent.

That's what helps their being elusive.

They're not a herd of elk.

They're not a pod of whales.

They're hominids that are intelligent

and they don't wanna be seen,

they're not going to be seen.

Most instances are accidental when we have witness sightings

Patterns are the same, wherever you go

that I have found in the areas that I have researched.

So South, Southeast, and Northwest,

I have seen no difference and any kind of patterns.

They're all individuals just like we are.

You're gonna have grumpy ones, happy ones, sad ones,

fun ones, grouch, you know.

So I think it's more of a personality difference

between different individuals than regions.

They're all different shapes and sizes and color.

Just like we have different hair colors.

They're red, brown, black, white, gray.

- The fact that they have remained unrecognized

or unestablished as a species

simply rests on their rarity

and other aspects of their reported behavior.

They're nocturnal, they're solitary, they're far-ranging,

they're very generalized.

Those are characteristics

of any animal species

that render it very difficult to study

let alone trap or obtain a specimen in the wild.

- The first encounter I had that I know for sure of,

I was six years old.

I was at my grandmother's house.

I was outside playing in the dirt.

I had sticks and things gathered up

and I was just sitting there on the ground playing

when I heard somebody walk up.

I thought it was my grandmother

but when I looked up,

there was a young male juvenile standing there

And I looked at him for a little bit

and we stared at each other.

And you know, I go back and try to think

of what was really going through my mind.

Was I just looking at him and saying,

man, that's a really hairy kid

or what was this?

And pretty much I jumped up after he turned and walked away

and went in and asked my grandmother,

"What was that?"

And all she said to me was, "What do you think it was?"

And then later, we began to talk about it

and she began to tell me things about them,

things that she had known all her life.

I've been from coast to coast.

And I've had many encounters.

Some of 'em nothing more than them

just letting us know.

Some of 'em even more

where I actually interacted with them.

- In '98, I became a police officer

for Department of Defense in Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

That's where I kinda started my law enforcement career.

I was 21 years old.

And I worked there for a couple of years

and then I moved out to the west end,

out in Forks, and I became a cop in La Push.

And that's where I had my first Bigfoot encounter.

I was actually coming into work on swing shift that day

and I was driving down La Push Road.

Before you get to the reservation,

you come to to the Third Beach Trailhead.

And in fact, within couple hundred yards,

there was just tons of people on the beach

around the corner.

And I'm coming down the hill towards this.

And I'm probably like 70 yards

when I first see this thing.

And then it's just big figure just steps out of the brush.

And then it just kinda just glides across the road.

And it doesn't even look at me.

And it took about four steps and it hit the fence

and it disappeared into the salmonberries.

When I first saw it, I was a trained observer,

I'm a police officer.

I'm looking at this giant figure

that was like that thick from chest to back.

I mean, and huge eight feet tall,

non-human gait, but humanoid.

And I'm trying to classify what this thing is,

but it's not real.

And I know what it is, but what it is is not real.

- April 3rd, 1993,

I was participating in a military training exercise

and this is an exercise where we use a lot of explosives

in our training, utilizing rock quarries.

We had three explosions to do that day in the morning.

And it was shortly after we set the fuses

on that third and final blast of the day

that we would get in our vehicles,

we'd convoy down to a safety staging area,

wait for the explosion, and come back and check our work.

I was situated as a passenger behind a driver

of the second Humvee.

As we rounded this one corner,

I had a direct line of sight

to the second blast site.

We came around that corner,

I'm looking down there

and there's like these three very dark,

very large figures standing

three abreast of each other,

watching us come down the road across the ravine from them.

My first thought was,

what are those people doing down there?

There's not supposed to be civilians in the area.

It took less than a second

for me to realize

what I was looking at were not people at all.

The arms of these things went well below their knees,

unbelievably long arms, very broad shoulders,

barrel chest, tapered waist.

The legs were quite long as well.

The one in the middle was I would estimate

about nine feet in height.

And the two that flanked it left and right

were probably seven and a half to eight feet.

The one in the middle though,

he stood there like a rock, just like a statue.

He, it just did not flinch.

But the two on either side of this larger one

exhibited this behavior where they were shifting weight

from foot to foot

and in the process rocking left to right like this,

these long arms were swinging

in front of their knees.

And they did that the entire time I saw them.

After say 25 seconds had elapsed,

seemed like an eternity,

we rounded another corner and I lost sight of 'em.

And just at that, I just slumped back in my seat,

and I'm just trying to,

trying to comprehend what I just saw.

- July 1st, 2021.

I'm in Idaho with my buddy, Jim,

and what you'll see here's his rig.

Anyway, just a couple minutes ago,

I saw a huge giant Sasquatch standing right there.

Only saw it for a second or two

through the trees as we drove by

and then Jim backed up and he caught a glimpse of it

and then it was gone.

We packed up camp and we started heading

down the forest service road that follows the creek

and I said to Jim, I go,

"I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a Bigfoot family

standing right in the middle of the road."

And we kinda laughed.

And about a half a mile down the road,

I'm keeping an eye on the creek as we're driving real slow

about 15 miles an hour,

and I see this huge figure

and I could see these huge shoulders.

And I said to Jim,

"Stop, I see a huge moose. Back up."

And I said, "I mean, I see a huge Sasquatch. Back up."

And he goes, we backed up a little bit.

And he says, "Oh, I see it too."

It had stood up and you could just still just see

the massive shoulders

and the body came in a little bit

and it was just super big and super thick

all the way to the water.

I think it was standing in the creek.

One second it's there

and in the blink of an eye,

it's just not there anymore.

- Really like the outdoors.

I've always hunted, fished, camped,

done it with my family growing up,

being married and having kids and we do the same thing.

Been into archery, pretty hardcore

since I was about 14 years old.

I've seen cougars

in the woods.

I've seen bear deer, elk, moose,

lotta smaller game, fox and stuff like that.

There's not too many animals in Oregon that I haven't seen.

Labor Day weekend, 2019.

I'd been going over to this particular area

in Eastern Oregon for couple months

since about mid-May.

I sat down by this water trough.

As a hunter, you're always playing the wind.

You always hunt with the wind in your face.

So I was set up that night, wind in my face,

and I'm kind of sitting there and out of the,

off to my left, I just catch a little bit of movement.

So I kinda turned my eyes real slow

and my head real slow over to look.

And I see a head pop out and go right back.

And so in my head I thought,

oh, it's a hunter, another hunter.

But I thought to myself, that's kinda weird.

I never heard him come in

and I should've heard him come in.

So I just kinda kept staring at that same spot.

And then it stuck its head out.

And it was what, you know,

doesn't exist supposedly.

Bigfoot sticks its head out, stares at me

for probably 10 to 15 seconds

and then slowly pulls his head back.

I just sat there dumbfounded

like what in the hell did I just see?

These things don't exist.

I've been in the woods long enough.

I know of what I've seen.

I knew it was not a bear.

Absolutely 100% not a bear.

So I sat there for, like I said, probably five minutes

just kinda trying to gather my thoughts

and get my wits about me.

- I've had a physical experience.

I put a infrared alarm system up seven feet

and it will only go off at seven feet.

At midnight,

my alarm goes off.

I'm up, going through the ceiling.

The dog's sitting up.

And something's going around my tent.

And it's going.

And you could hear footfall as it's going around my tent.

The dog jumps in my face,

goes down into the bottom of my mummy bag.

I'm scratched up all to pieces.

I'm laying there.

And it stops behind me.

All of a sudden my tent starts getting pushed in.

And then contact on the back of my head.

Its palm was at the base of my neck.

Its thumb right here.

The top of the hand right here,

as it's gently manipulating my head,

pushing through my tent.

So I go, "What am I gonna do, what am I gonna do,

what am I gonna do?"

I grabbed my keys for my truck

and I burped the alarm system on it.

And it backed away.

- In June 2019, seven loggers were working

place called the Wilson River Drainage.

And they're in a closed area which is all gated.

The public does not get in at all.

They were working with two very loud pieces of machinery.

One was pulling logs up a hill.

The other was loading them into trucks.

Tremendous noise.

One of them stops and says,

"Who's that walking down the road towards us?"

And about 300 yards away,

they say a Sasquatch, a Bigfoot,

was walking down the road in midday.

These are working loggers. These are not tourists.

None of them had a camera.

So the thing walked up to about 200 yards away.

It stopped, looked at them, turned and walked away.

They said it was seven feet tall at least,

400, 450 pounds, enormous,

dark brown in color, swinging its arms, walking upright.

And when it stopped, stopped like this,

with its hands out, looked at them,

turned and walked away.

We believe these things are nocturnal.

So my theory there is the noise of the machinery

got it up and moving

and it didn't know where the noise is coming from,

which happens with wild animals very often.

They can't pinpoint sound.

And started moving, saw the loggers, and walked away.

They called it the Seven Man Sighting.

I got into the area with great difficulty,

got permission, went in there,

spent a whole day, found some footprints,

great big footprints in a shallow stream bed nearby.

This is seven down-to-earth loggers

with 20 or more years of experience.

They're not mistaking something.

They knew what they saw.

- The way it started for me

was my son actually ended up finding a single track

deep in the icy mud

outside of the town of Thurston, Oregon.

And I thought, well, maybe it's a hoax,

maybe it's legit,

but for us it was a bigger question of what if?

You know, I'd always loved a good mystery.

And I thought, well, I'll introduce Jude

to a really cool mystery.

And so, it just so happened that one of our neighbors

filmed a movie about Bigfoot back in the '70s,

loosely based on Patterson-Gimlin.

And he looked at the photo,

which we had had the mind to put a scale object next to

to show size.

And he said, "You know, it's interesting enough.

It could be a hoax, but I know somebody you can talk to."

And so I met this river guide

and he ended up telling me after our initial meeting

that "Not only is Bigfoot real,

but I've seen them several times.

In fact, they come to my house."

Which was a whole new phenomena.

I had no idea that you could be a witness multiple times

and then be an extended experiencer

or someone who quite literally has Bigfoot

in their own backyard.

That right there was really the trigger point for me

to meet my first extended experiencer,

which Darrell would end up becoming

the ultimate extended experiencer.

- When I first moved to the house down here below us,

I would hear things at night up in these hills right here.

It prompted me to look for someone

that knew what those sounds might be

'cause they were so strange.

- Darrell wanted to meet a local.

He had just moved to town

and he didn't really know any locals here

that were into such a strange subject or hobby.

And so that's when we met and we hit it off.

And so we set up a kind of a date

to meet up at his house.

And that's when things kinda took off.

- My first sighting was Christmas Day 1993.

Myself and two nephews went for a drive looking for deer

and had the usual 15-second roadside sighting.

The thing was balled up in a root mass,

stood up and looked at us, thoroughly annoyed.

I was only about 20 to 30 feet away

and stepped out of the blow down in two steps,

which was a feat in itself,

and walked into the forest.

I told the boys it was a big bear.

I didn't even wanna really think about it.

That was that.

The biggest thing is to stay awake at night.

Some nights the forest is alive.

It generally has to do with phases of the moon.

And then we found out that with proper enticements,

offerings, occasionally one of these things

would come into camp.

- Let me show you this map.

I'll give you a little bit

of background and provenance.

Can I just hold it up like this?

Yeah, this map was up somewhere around 12 years

in the BLM office, Bureau of Land Management office,

in North Bend, Oregon.

And I learned about it from federal and state officials

that were conversant in that office.

And so they would talk to me about it.

And I would say, "I'd sure like to see that map."

And I'd kinda got nowhere

but there was one federal official

and I would work sometimes on his plumbing.

And finally he sent me a screenshot of it and this is it.

And I think the following year they took it down

when they found out that it had been disseminated.

This is a collection of, among other things,

stories where I am confided in

by my plumbing customers in their homes,

where they have a Bigfoot story

that they would like to tell somebody

but they can't and everyone understands why.

There's a stigma about the whole thing in many circles

and so what I do very purposefully

is I let my customers know,

'cause they all know me, I'm their plumber.

They've known me for many years.

I let them know that I know that the Bigfoot are very real.

It's not controversial or it shouldn't be.

Even if in the beginning, they'll say,

"Well, no, I don't believe in that stuff."

It's the funniest thing.

Maybe like a half hour later as I'm doing their plumbing job

and we're conversing, they'll say,

"Well, here's what happened to me."

And they'll tell me their story.

And I have a whole collection of them in here.

Many stories from very, very credible people

in this area.

Probably I would say anecdotally

more of my customers have had

some kind of a Bigfoot encounter

than have had cougar encounters

'cause it's very rare to see a cougar.

There's a family of Bigfoot that has lived for years

at the county dump.

When the lights go out and the gate is locked

and there's no one there at the dump,

the Bigfoot come in every night

and there's a smorgasbord there

'cause they're the only animals that can get into the pit

and back out.

A local historian and cartographer with considerable effort,

gotten a few of the employees at the dump

to admit that the Bigfoot are there.

This right here is a photograph that was given to me

of a trail cam.

This is just maybe a half hour from here.

It's a family, a very, a reputable family

that owns land all over here

and they're hunters and so they set out trail cams.

And they took this photograph,

probably I think 10 years ago or so,

and they never showed it to anybody.

And then they decided to entrust it to their plumber.

That would be me.

There's a man and woman that I know here in town

and they're pretty well-known, great people.

They were camping with friends for four days

on the Elk River.

And he sent me a photograph that they got

while they were there.

He said, "We watched this for awhile,

but it was an obviously a juvenile ape.

It looked like an adult old chimpanzee

that was just hanging

out up in a dead old growth tree."

You can look at this and think,

okay, either it's some sort of a gnarly growth on that tree

that looks exactly like a chimpanzee.

And he said, "We watched it for awhile."

But he said the thing that was more remarkable

was the noises that the apes would make at night.

And he said they would make this loud gibberish

and howling and barks and whistles

and just all these noises they would make at night.

It was rather disconcerting.

- This all began for me in 1971

when I was invited into the camp where these guys

had been experiencing these horrific sounds around the camp.

It was a nightly thing

and I started going up there.

Eight miles in the wilderness,

a very imposing area

in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.

And nobody up there was looking for Bigfoot.

It just really wasn't that way.

Because we had repeated the visits up there,

we started taking cassette tape recorders

and recording the sounds.

There's two of 'em across the creek at the big rocks.

- I spent a career in the Navy

as a cryptolinguist,

a translator of Russian, Spanish, and Persian.

I played it and I immediately knew.

I could hear it.

And I was stunned.

There's a language here!

And that is not a human being.

The articulation of the phonemes

are virtually the same as humans.

They make the same sounds that we do,

ah, with about six or seven extra ones

that I've never heard a human make in any language.

It would be impossible

to fake something like this.

- And according to Dr. Lieberman in 1968 at Brown University

only humans have the apparatus for language

like we have.

That separates us from all the other animals

in the kingdom of this earth.

So that tells me something,

something pretty significant.

If they have the vocal mechanism for language,

maybe they got some human component to them.

- Skepticism is a useful tool,

but they'll say, "Well, why don't we have a skeleton?

Why don't we have something?"

And there are several reasons for that.

One is because the government isn't going to release

the skeletons because it would be a disaster.

As that same government official told me,

"We have to keep it as a legend."

If we ever tried to pull the trigger

on the Endangered Species Act,

we can't because you have to be able to count the population

and they are too intelligent and elusive to do so.

And then we would end up with a bunch of primates

out in the woods with guns, hunting larger primates,

and it would not go well.

And so the government is well served

by keeping it as a legend.

The chaotic effect of the invocation

of the Endangered Species Act over something like that

would be catastrophic.

It'd be terrible.

And so good governance and good management

is to keep it as a legend.

- There have been quite a few reports that I've gotten

over the years of Bigfoot.

I have gotten one, maybe two, in the last few years

that I thought were worth taking a closer look at.

I've heard of people thinking that,

or mistaking bears for Sasquatch.

I've never gotten any reports

of Bigfoot or Sasquatch

in my professional career

that I determined was actually a bear.

And that has happened in other cases

in other parts of the Pacific Northwest.

- I've heard questions from many people out there,

skeptics, about where are the bones?

Where are the bodies? Why haven't we found one?

My major's Forestry. I've got my degree in Forestry.

If anybody knows anything about decomp,

animals, ants, whatever,

things decompose so quickly.

Small animals they eat the bone for the calcium

in the marrow.

Okay, everything is consumed on an animal

when it dies in the woods.

Seven to 10 days every trace is gone.

Every trace is gone of any kind of an animal.

- So it just speaks to the unlikelihood

of finding remains of animals

out in nature.

Nature has a way of recycling those resources

in a very efficient and very prompt manner.

- Western culture wants a body.

Biologists want a body.

They want bones.

They want a hair sample,

all these sorts of physical hard evidences beyond tracks.

I think personally what it'll take is contact.

It'll take contact.

It'll take someone who is willing

to create a relationship with them

and ask them to come forward.

But I don't think that's going to happen.

They hide for a reason.

And not only do they hide for a reason,

I'm on the fence about the fact

that they only show themselves

to people that they want to show themselves to.

- Most of the time, if I get hair,

it is usually hog hair, horse hair, deer,

something of that nature.

I personally have never received actual hair

that could possibly be Bigfoot.

Lot of footprints, hand prints.

My favorite investigation was back in 2001

at the water reclamation plant

in the St. John's River Management Area.

They had a lot of activity going on there.

I went out there and investigations,

as far as sightings, vocalizations.

I had received a phone call saying,

"Hey, we've got these hand prints on the window

that happened when this thing

was looking in the window one night."

My pictures were the hand prints

and in some cases you could actually see the hair

where it pressed against the window.

The hand print isn't the full hand.

It was looking in the window.

So it was kinda like had bent fingers,

but I got good palm and thumbs

and the tips of the fingers in some cases.

It wasn't just the, I mean, it was like he moved his hands,

okay, or he leaned against the window

so you could see the hair impressions on the window.

This is my favorite.

This is obviously skin

with hair impressions on it.

The hand prints and the imprints I received

a lot of oil in them.

This is Debbie who was my witness.

She's pointing way up here where the hand prints were.

And the hand prints

were roughly eight feet

because it moved around and everything.

She worked graveyard.

She came in from the back warehouse

of the shop into the reception area

and there it was looking at the computer screen,

watching the Windows little logo thing,

going on it.

And then when she walked in and saw it

and it saw her movement,

then it kinda stood up and then took off.

- One of my principles that I work with

is a Hewkin-Sullivan principle

that you have to spend 200 hours feet on the ground

in a reasonably good area

to have an encounter of any kind or possibly a sighting.

Jim Hewkin was a State of Oregon biologist.

Jack Sullivan was a science teacher.

These guys knew their stuff

and they were very active from the late '60s

up through the early '90s.

One claimed 12 sightings,

the other one claimed 13.

But they all had the same characteristics of sightings.

They were very brief. They were very clear.

They knew exactly what they're seeing,

and they did not have time to raise their cameras up

or if they did get their camera up,

it was too dark to take a decent picture.

And they refused to engage in blobsquatch.

Blobsquatching is these goofy pictures

that people have of Bigfoot that are shadows

and branches waving and all kinds of stuff.

- We just got glimpses every once in a while

and people wanna know why we didn't get a picture.

That might be one of the questions that's gonna get asked.

And I get asked that all the time.

And we tried, we really tried to get picture,

but these things seemed outfox us.

We underestimated what they were,

underestimated them thoroughly.

They move inhumanly fast.

The one I saw was shooting down through the trees.

The two other ones that were making sounds out here,

we feel like it was an adolescent and a mother.

That's what we think, a family of three.

- This event that I'm gonna talk about now

has to do with a nest that I found

while I was at work with two other people.

And this looked just like a bird's nest.

It was on a hillside that was about 60 to 70%.

And what built this nest

had opposable thumbs.

But when animals make beds,

they slide everything out

to the bare soil.

So you've got this mound of debris around it,

but you have a clear down to mineral soil.

But what I found here

was tree branches

that were woven together.

These branches were broken off tree,

two, three trees, whatever, in the area

and they used that as their building material

and everything was intertwined all the way around.

So I knew what built this had thumbs.

Coulda been a hunter.

I found hairs that were anywhere from an inch

to about two inches long.

These hairs had multicoloration to 'em.

They were light at the bottom and then it got brown,

blonde, and then there were a few that were dark.

So it was multicolored.

And I showed 'em to my partners

and they were just flabbergasted.

They were just out, it was out of this world

what we were looking at.

- In the Mt. Hood National Forest,

there are billions,

literally billions of broken branches.

They're caused by all kinds of stuff.

So occasionally you may find

a trunk or something of that nature

that's been twisted and braided by a Bigfoot,

probably as a territorial sign.

- There, right back in there.

- Oh yeah.

Whoa.

- We got some.

- That is whoa.

- So these were brought here.

I mean, you can see how they're all placed.

This is incredible.

Here we go. Look at this.

It's due north.

- Yeah.

When people say they see tree structures,

they see symbols that mean something,

something that is made with hands and order.

It, I mean, it takes a lot more for me.

It takes this to say,

you know, there's nothing here that would cause

one, two, three, four, five, six logs

all going the same direction

and then this fencing pattern.

- Uh huh.

- What if it was not due north?

What if it was slightly away from due north

to northwest, to northeast,

but it's exactly due north on the zero.

- It comes to a point like it is pointing to something.

You know, these have been brought here.

- Right? No, it's very obvious they've been brought.

Like this isn't pushed over.

I don't think this is pushed over.

No.

It's not, see.

- There's no root system here. - Yeah.

This is not pushed over. It's been placed.

So who knows what exists around this area?

I mean, it just,

it takes time. - And this one is actually

intricately interwoven with this one.

You have to like, you have to take steps to get to this.

- You know, you just kinda feel like something-

- You can't help but feel like they could

- Thinks this is important.

- do this, yeah.

- Or they did think it was important to build this.

I don't think hunters built a blind here.

I don't think hunters would go through this.

Honestly, think

what we're dealing with

is a relic hominid of some sort.

We've had Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal,

slightly different subspecies, if you will, of hominid.

- Bigfoot is going to be part of our genus

and that's gonna, it's gonna scare some people,

it's gonna excite other people.

I'm gonna be excited.

And I don't think anybody can really predict

what's gonna happen.

It's gonna be a free-for-all.

It's gonna be...

a little unnerving probably.

- I didn't know what they were

when I first got into this.

I would read the books and they would say,

we all branched off from the same

and there's different branches

as the generations progress.

But to me, we're all the same.

And they're the purest human on this earth yet.

And what I mean by that

is that they're living the life

as they were given it.

They are living as they have from the very beginning

so they are the purest form of human left on this earth.

- Their survival depends on us not knowing about them.

We bring disease, we bring violence,

we bring lack of understanding,

we bring lack of compassion.

And then I'm on the fence about,

can we actually hurt them?

I don't think we can hurt them per se.

But I do think we can destroy their environment.

We're destroying our own environment, let alone theirs.

- Frankly, I feel their discovery is inevitable.

There's no question, as a living being,

they're also a dying being,

and whether they die by age

or disease or injury,

they're gonna die one time and another.

And I think it's inevitable, extremely rare,

but inevitable, we will find a body.

As difficult a is to find a living Bigfoot,

somewhere out there

there's a body.

- I know a lot of people think it comes down

to the spotted owl situation we had back in the '90s.

So if there's this undiscovered primate

living in the woods now

and okay, now they say, yeah, it's here.

Well, how much land do we have to set aside for him?

So does that affect logging?

Is that gonna affect recreational areas?

Is that gonna affect hunting grounds?

What's the grand scheme that it's gonna affect?

It very well could be a coverup. It very well could be.

- I think they know more than we do.

I don't think they wanna put money into it.

As far as they're concerned

it's something out there and it's not going to,

as long as they don't show it attention,

it's not gonna affect the economic portion

of government and states and cities

because that's their main concern,

not as much science.

It's how it's going to affect the economy

of their particular area.

- Let's say that Bigfoot was discovered in the state

and what was determined

is that there's an existing population of them here

and that the animal is an indigenous animal in Oregon.

In that case, jurisdiction for management of the animal

would fall with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The animal would be listed under the Protected Animals List

through the Oregon administrative rules.

It's possible that some other agency or some other entity,

or maybe an individual

could petition with the US Fish and Wildlife Service

for that animal to be included

in the Federal Endangered Species List,

in which case significant amount of protections

would be afforded the animal.

- If there's an undocumented humanoid

living in North America,

and obviously with the thousands of encounters

that's occurred since pre-history,

that's well established that there is,

I mean, it means that they would dedicate

and exhaust all available resources to find out

as much information

as possible about that undocumented humanoid.

It's by definition a threat to national security.

They would use all resources and exhaust all of them

to find out everything they possibly could about it.

I have no doubt whatsoever that they've done that.

I can tell you that no Bigfoot researcher

that I know of has been contacted by a government agent

that wanted to know the information that they had

or what they knew.

Which tells me that the information that they already have

is much greater than anything that we know.

I do know that the US government

has knowledge of the Sasquatch.

I ended up becoming an intelligence officer

in the United States Army

and I worked specifically with the 2nd Ranger.

I do know for fact that the 2nd Ranger

had on many occasions had to take out a few Sasquatch

just for public safety.

Sometimes people aren't paying attention

to what the forest is telling them.

I personally didn't go out in the field with them

but I saw the after action review reports

and I do know just from the ones that I saw

there were four taken,

and they were also taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

for the autopsy.

I don't think it's really a national security thing.

I think it's more of a financial thing.

I think they're worried about the financial impact

of these things could have to small communities

around the country.

- It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life

and most frightening thing

I've ever experienced in my life all in one bundle.

I can't seem to keep my eyes out of the trees when I'm here.

I just wanna see it again so bad I can't handle it.

Trying to tell the story and put it in perspective

for someone to understand is, it's really hard to do.

It's just something that I wish everyone

that wanted to see Bigfoot or was curious

could see it for themselves.

- That's why I think opening up our story

that we have had would be able to express that

what people may think that's not something that's real,

might be able to be like, okay,

I can actually ease my mind a little bit

and be like what I saw was real.

- The way it pulled its little one,

it's young behind it with its arm.

- In a protective fashion. - In a protective fashion,

was just, it was crazy.

I, my first thing I thought was like,

this thing's protecting something

and it's not, I mean, I can't even put in words,

it was so unreal.

- There's nothing out there

that I have experienced out in the wilderness

that can move and have

the parental effects

that they had towards its own.

- Protecting its young like a human,

like I would, like pull my daughter behind me

in a bad situation, you know.

It was like a dark cinnamon.

Yeah, it was definitely, it was not black.

It was not what I've heard people.

It was not what you hear every day from people,

like this thing was cinnamon colored.

It had every feature that you would see,

like if you went to a zoo and saw a gorilla.

- The arm length was basically double

of what our arm length was.

- Yeah, it was too its knees,

below its knees almost. - Easily, easily.

Once they seen us and once we kinda locked eyes

for that what seemed to be an eternity,

they moved off the logs and they kinda hid

along the tree line there.

- You could see through the trees,

you could see that thing moving

but once it got behind the trees,

there was nothing.

It was like it just disappeared in thin air.

- It almost was in the feeling that it,

they wanted us to see it.

- Yeah.

- Like if I think that if we did have the equipment,

the cameras, anything like that-

- We wouldn't have seen it.

- Not at all.

We wouldn't have- - I think if we would've had

our cameras rolling, we wouldn't have seen.

- They would've never, never allowed us to.

- Chad and Austin were gonna come out here

and film a survival YouTube video

and it was gonna be like a 24-hour overnight thing

and they didn't want me to come pick 'em up.

They wanted to do it all on their own.

And when they went to go call me at midnight,

first I was upset

and I said, "No, I'm not gonna come and pick you guys up."

And hung up, they called back.

And when I met them down at the bottom of the road,

I could just see it in Chad's eyes

and in the 12 years we've been together,

I've never seen him that scared.

I definitely am a strong believer in Bigfoot now.

And it's something that I know Chad and Austin

will never forget as well as myself.

- There are many aspects to what you would consider

quote, a Sasquatch experience.

One of them

is unbelievable fear.

When you talk to somebody who's had an experience,

most often they're gonna tell you they have this fear

that is just, they can't even describe it.

Another is out of context emotions.

We don't have a mental construct for these kinds of beings

'cause we're not taught this.

So we're not open to it.

We're only told what exists and what does not exist.

So our belief system is such a way

that if something comes in to our context and leaves,

then we don't a mental construct for it.

A lot of people cannot handle

that psychologically, mentally, or emotionally

because it challenges everything that they've been taught.

- Making eye contact with something that doesn't exist,

it's...

You just don't know what to think.

I mean, I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know who to go talk to

because, you know, I don't wanna be the crazy one.

I talk to grown men who will stand there and cry

over what they've seen.

They won't go back in the woods to hunt.

There was one gentleman who was a foreman

for a construction crew and he wouldn't go back to work

for a few days because of what he saw.

And his wife said he never missed a day of work

in his life before that.

He knows what black bears look like.

He knows what's in the forest.

And he says he saw a Bigfoot and he saw it up close.

- I start to feel like betrayal I guess I would say

because I start to think about the fact

that I'm a trained professional, a trained observer.

I just happened to see something

that's not supposed to be real

and my whole world is in disarray at this moment

because I'm driving away from this thing,

having to deal with a realization

on something that isn't supposed to be real

that I just happened to have an encounter with,

real as day.

Like how come I just had to see this thing

and I'm never told about it before?

Only as a fairy tale.

I never believed in him or anything like that.

- My name is Dr. Michael Adamse and I'm

a clinical psychologist.

I trained conservatively at the University of Miami,

Yale University School of Medicine.

I served in the Army Reserve in the Medical Corp,

and finally, primarily in my private practice,

and to this date, probably

over 90,000 direct clinical patient hours.

We all have psychological defenses.

They allow us to go through the world

and navigate our experiences.

So everybody has them.

Anybody who has normal interactions in the world

has to have psychological defenses.

They're not either good or bad, they just are.

So when we talk about rationalization,

that's where we take an event that's happened in our life

and we just rationalize it.

For example, we see something strange out in the woods

and we go, no, it can't be that, it must be this.

And they discard their original impression

and rationalize it.

No, I couldn't have seen what I just saw, right?

So there's rationalization.

And then there's suppression and repression.

Suppression is a conscious act

where I just saw something,

I experienced something, but it's disturbing to me

so I am not gonna talk to other people about it

and I'm not gonna even maybe admit it much to myself.

I don't wanna relive what I just experienced.

Repression, on the other hand,

is an unconscious process

where we push it so deeply down

where we're not aware of it,

we don't even think about it.

So you may have a subset of people out there

who experienced Bigfoot, Sasquatch if you will,

who really don't remember the experience in some cases,

or remember it and push it down.

So there could be a subset of people out there again

who have seen this

but you would never know about it

because their defenses kicked in and protected them.

- If someone's seen Bigfoot

and they want to recall more information,

absolutely hypnosis gives us that tool.

A lot of things happen when we have a traumatic experience

or we have an emotional experience.

Our mind is recording all of this stuff

and it happens rapidly.

So if we can

slow it down using hypnosis,

we can say, okay, what happened?

Stop that, freeze frame it, zoom in.

We can do all those things.

The unconscious mind can really do all those things.

So yes, we can get a lot more details.

And if it's traumatic or emotional,

there's a bunch of information.

We have different minds that have different functions.

There's the conscious mind.

It's what we call volatile.

It's the one that says, oh, I've got an appointment,

I need to be there.

Or is this something that I should be watching or doing?

It's that questioning part of us?

It's also the part that says let's go have fun.

95% of your perceptions and your behaviors

are controlled by your unconscious mind.

So everything that's going on,

every moment of day,

your unconscious mind is recording.

And it is literally filing it.

When we go to sleep,

the stuff that has value gets shuffled to long-term memory.

If it had an emotional component to it

or a traumatic component to it,

it gets shuffled deliberately

into long-term because we need to know

that it has value.

If that experience was traumatic, created fear,

we need to know about it

so that if it happens again, we're prepared.

Oh, there he goes.

- You see an event that is possibly even traumatic,

but we see a profound event,

what we're likely to do is take a still frame

and a moving shot of that experience

and we're going to archive that in our brains.

And it gets seared in the sense that it is permanent,

it's a permanent image because it's so profound for us

and it's so out of the box for us.

So we put it in our minds,

we park it there and we will keep that seared, if you will,

in our memories for the rest of our lives.

- I really obsessed on it for like 30 days,

30 or, few months almost

I was like looking for answers, you know what I mean?

And finally, I just with my kids,

I just got distracted in life and my wife and stuff,

it just kinda slipped away and I kinda just,

anytime we'd go out for or a trip in the mountains

or down fishing by the river, it would pop right back up

in my mind.

I would look down the river or something like this

and I'd just see a flashback

of almost picturing something standing down there.

It could really put somebody in a bad state of mind

if they were to experience what I experienced.

It can be very traumatizing.

- Like Chad said, me and him talk to each other

when we get into those moments, you know, like it-

- Yeah, 11, 12 o'clock at night.

- It don't matterwhat time is,

Just ring the phone, you know?

- 'Cause it almost made you feel

like you were gonna go insane.

It'll never leave you.

You will always have that with you.

You will always remember that moment.

- One of my biggest takeaways

from starting the Bigfoot Mapping Project

is how many people have had experiences

that because of places

where they couldn't access somewhere to report

or somebody to talk to,

or they didn't feel comfortable,

now they have it.

So the biggest takeaway would be

that it's a big anthropological movement.

It's just not just about Bigfoot.

It's about the impact it's had on the culture.

And you can take that away

from the stories people have to tell.

When I set out starting the project,

I did not expect to get such emotional

and impactful reports.

I expected people to be pretty dry.

- I will say that a good percentage of them,

there's a level of underlying fear

because they don't know what this is.

It's making noise, it's moving past them,

or they see it and it's moving away.

It's not something that our unconscious mind

or our conscious mind is really set to register.

So they can start out a bit fearful.

They can start out with a little bit of hesitation.

I have had people go from that to awe

that, oh my gosh, this is an incredible creature

that it's amazing.

I had one client talk about how muscular it was

and how broad its shoulders were

and how it's like just was in awe

of this incredibly majestic creature.

I had another client that I worked with

who actually began to cry.

And I said, "What's happening now?"

And his response was so beautiful.

He says, "I realize that I will never see these again."

That was powerful.

- I don't entertain a lot of motives

when it comes to the skeptic, 'cause they're impure.

I mean, if people really wanna know something

and they're skeptical because they doubt, that's natural.

I can deal with that.

But if people want to mock and they want

to have their punchline and to say,

"Oh, you didn't do your homework, you're lazy."

Well, they don't know what I know

and that's good enough for me.

I know what I know and it's made me a better person.

This isn't everybody's journey.

Not everybody's supposed to take the red pill.

And you have to let those people go.

You can't force this message down their throat.

And sometimes they're skeptics,

but sometimes they're A-holes.

- If you want to ignore the thousands of reports

that are out there, you can do that.

But does that mean everybody's lying,

everybody's screwed up?

What does that mean

about all these people that are saying this

all over the world, and all over the United States?

All of the Pacific Northwest now people are saying

they see these things.

Open up your minds because they're out there.

- As you start utilizing the data

and you start seeing the data tell the story,

the whole story unfolds right before your eyes.

And it just becomes evident. This is real.

They can't all be making it up.

The data elements like who did you tell?

How long did you go

before you actually shared that encounter?

Many people go many, many years. Why?

If they saw something and they felt like it had to be shared

and they were hoaxing, why would they wait 15 to 20 years

or not even tell their spouse?

But now you're able to pull that information out of 'em

and you see that direct correlation

between something that happened in Maine

all the way something that happened in Southeast Texas.

And that to me is why the data is gonna tell the truth

every single time.

- People like to control their world

or their perception of the world.

So something that's outside the range

of their perception or experience,

some people will reject and sometimes in a militant manner

and sometimes they'll degrade somebody or demean somebody

who's had that experience.

And I'll tell you what underlies the denial, fear.

Fear.

They're fearful of something they can't identify,

understand, or control.

A person who's too rigid,

too rigid in their worldview, is crazy

because they can only see the world through one finite lens.

We call those people sometimes psychotic

because they've lost touch with reality.

They only see world in one simple finite way.

Emotional wellbeing, mental health

is strongly associated with flexibility,

the ability to think outside the box,

to experience different people, different events,

different circumstances with not such a critical eye,

but an open eye.

Those are mentally healthy people

because they see things as possible.

- I'm not out to prove he's there.

I know he is there and that's good enough for me.

You're never gonna convince everybody in the world

until there's one laying there on a table

or, you know, one caught.

I'm definitely not gonna be the one

to put one on a table

and I'm definitely not gonna be the one

to try and catch one.

And to be honest,

even if I get a picture,

and I know there's pictures out there

'cause I've seen 'em of actual Bigfoot,

why share it?

'Cause somebody's gonna say, oh it's fake.

It's makeup. It's this, it's a mask.

Even if I had absolute proof, 100% proof,

I don't think I'd share it.

- Bigfoot is a great example of something, once again,

that people can't categorize.

So who are the people out there saying

let's investigate this?

Let's take a closer look at this.

Let's see if there's some science behind it,

some explanation behind it.

If you're in the mainstream in terms of science

or a professional, if you will,

you're taking a risk because you're willing to say

I'm going to pursue this

and I'm not gonna really pay attention to naysayers.

I'm not gonna be put down by them.

And those people are truly pioneers.

And that's been true throughout history

whether it's religion, politics,

medicine, science, whatever human endeavor,

people take risks and chances.

And one of the risks and chances they take

is that people may think they're foolish.

So people who are willing to say,

yes, I'm going to get ridiculed for this,

but I'm going for it anyway,

those are truly pioneers.

They're transformational people who are willing to say,

let's take a shot at this.

Let's see what's out there.

And that's the kind of person that we should celebrate.

- 10 years ago I was diagnosed with melanoma cancer.

Me and God, we're good buddies

and I asked for help

and he sent me people

to tell me what to do.

And so I went to have a melanoma cancer removed

off the top of my head

but they didn't get it all

and I was eventually diagnosed with terminal cancer

and that was a death sentence.

Now, fast forward.

I'm going to St. Mary's, Alaska,

with my wife to see my grandchildren

and my daughter, Rachel, and son-in-law,

possibly for the last time,

The day that I saw the Bigfoot,

we get into the boat and we're motoring

up the Andreafsky River, which flows into the Yukon.

We fished all morning, caught nothing.

So we found a sandbar and unloaded the kids.

And then I said, "Let's go after steelhead."

I had a steelhead on earlier that day

and so my son-in-law and I alone jumped in.

We went down river and he pointed up the hill

and he says, "What is that?"

He whispered, "What is that?"

And I said, "That's a big old brown bear."

"No, what is that?"

Then it stood up.

And when he stood up,

he took two great big steps and squatted back down

and started eating.

In my mind as a nonbeliever,

I'm thinking, a bear can't do that.

He finally passed me the binoculars

and when I looked,

I saw fingers this long with the thumb way back here.

And I thought, a bear?

That's a Bigfoot!

And I was just stunned.

And so I handed him the binoculars

and then I hear this.

"Oh."

Now we're both believers.

And the big guy, that big, beautiful creature,

stood up and turned

and looked straight at me.

I cannot tell you what that did to me.

I saw gorilla wrinkles right here.

I saw a nose twice as wide as mine.

I saw a bare face,

a bald forehead with a raised eyebrow ridge right here.

No eyebrows.

The hair started right on kinda right up here

on the, towards the top of his head

and went all the way to his ankles.

The hair started,

I think, at his knuckles

and went all the way down.

I couldn't see hair on the fingers.

His shoulders were about this wide

and his body was, oh, so muscular.

So incredible.

Not much of a neck.

We could see it from the front,

but from the side and the back, you couldn't see it at all.

His head was about twice as wide as mine.

The eyes were up a little higher

than normal human eyes

and they were either solid black or solid black and brown.

I'm not sure which.

And he just looked at us.

You know, our eyes just locked.

And I just, my jaw hit the bottom of the boat.

His stare was...

His stare, wow.

Well, after about 10 seconds,

he turned and knelt and laid down,

and then we're trading the binoculars back and forth

and I'm wanting to see him again so bad my teeth hurt.

If you look out here in the field, there's cows

and I was a cow milker and I sang to the cows.

I taught my kids to sing to the cows.

And so I started singing to this Bigfoot.

Got through the verse once

and he didn't stand up

so I thought maybe he can't hear me.

So I'm raising my voice slowly

as I go into the second verse.

And I finally got right to...

And he stood up! I was elated.

Eventually, after about 10 minutes,

we watched him walk up that tundra hillside.

Great big, giant steps.

He walked up that mountain faster than I could run down.

It was my son-in-law said, "Look at that!

No human can walk on the tundra like that."

And he went over the hill

and the last thing we saw was his,

the top of his head going down the other side of the hill.

We finally turned around

and went back to the boat.

Most solemn experience of my life,

going down that river.

Me and God were talking.

"Thank you, God.

I'm diagnosed to die,

thank you for letting me see such an incredible thing

and to experience this

in the last time of my life."

- Of course, that was

10 years ago.

I am God's miracle.

- I have to come back here to Vernal, Utah,

and so I knew that the only time

I would be able to talk to anybody about a Bigfoot

was at the airport.

I walk in, there's about 30, 35 people there.

"I've seen a Bigfoot. Have any of you?"

I wanted answers.

I wanted knowledge and I got five stories.

I'm diagnosed to die. I might as well let it go.

Tell people. It's true.

I became an interviewer

and I have hundreds of Bigfoot stories,

500 or 600.

When he was walking away,

I called out to him,

"You are the most beautiful creature in the world.

Please don't go."

He looked more human.

I was hoping he could understand me

but he never turned to look back, not once.

My purpose in sharing this story with you

is to bless those who have not been able

to share their story and have been mocked

and ridiculed and belittled.