DATE:           06/01/86

TIME:          Daybreak, possibly 6:45 AM

LOCATION:   Redwoods National Forest, Northern California,
                 Humboldt County
 

TERRAIN:     National Forest
 
 

OBSERVED:      My father and I were camping out.  It was my 27th birthday, June first of that year, 1986.  I can exactly pinpoint the date due to the birthday, and the fact that it was the last trip I ever took with my dad.

We had arrived the evening before to camp a bit off the picnic area in the woods.  It was the Richardson Grove area of the Redwoods National Forest in Northern California.  Being originally from Nebraska and also an Eagle Scout when I was young, this was a routine activity for both of us.

It was early morning and I was awakened just as the sun was coming up.  It wasn't the noise so much as it was the smell that got me.  Musky and musty both, and I remember it was a smell like a wet dog, all at the same time.

The sound was a little strange to me.  Not a growling or 'ook-ook' sound like one might imagine.  Just heavy breathing, and a bit of a wheeze.  When I say heavy, the proper word might be voluminous.  Like an oil drum inhaling.  The wheeze was a light sort of a "hmmm...hmmm" sound.  It occured with every breath.

It didn't initially come right over to our tent but I could see through the semi-transparent nylon material that it had squared on the tent looking right at us.  For the first time in my life I noticed that my dad wasn't snoring.  He was asleep though, and I was glad for the quiet.  No telling what this creature would do.

It lumbered around the back of the tent, very quietly and surpisingly agile in its motions.  It went about twenty meters back into the woods, clearly visible, and defecated at the base of a small tree.  I looked out the back flap of the tent, just opening it barely enough to look out.  I will never forget what I saw.

The thing was very, very large, maybe 7-1/2 to 8 feet tall, although I guess in hindsight it could have been less.  I remember that it was quite broad in the shoulders and of course, covered with hair.  The hair was halfway between dark brown and light brown.  I guess medium brown.  Initially I did not see its face.

The animal seemed to have a domed head and shoulders, no visible neck.  He might have been hunched over a bit, though, so I didn't get a good look at that.  The fur on the head came together at the coronal arch, making a slightly (and I do mean SLIGHTLY) humorous little peak.

I imagined he weighed at least 600 pounds.  His feet were long, like skateboards, literally.  I remember thinking how amazingly well groomed all the hair on his body looked, except for a little dark patch of matted hair on the right shoulder, on the back.  I imagine that is the way he sleeps.  His elbows seemed to be covered with a thick padding, as were the bottom of his feet, which were clearly visible as he crouched down.

His method of defecation was just what I would expect.  He opened his legs a bit more than shoulder width and crouched to the ground, noisily doing his duty.  He was not holding on to the tree, just crouching beside it.  I never did see his hands (paws?). Upon standing, he did a bit of a shuffling the way a dog would do just after such a function.  That surprised me greatly.  I closed the little flap and reached over to rouse dad.  He was awake, staring straight up.

I whispered to him as lightly as I could that there was a HUGE bear out there and he had just fertilized the forest 60 feet from the tent.  Dad was ready to fertilize the tent at that point, I think, but said nothing.

I reopened the flap just a little crack again, same as before, and came face to face with the bear, and I mean two inches.  It wasn't a bear at all.  I actually didn't know how to describe what I was looking at but I'm sure I wasn't breathing just then either.  He did have gorilla-like features in the face, to some extent, particularly the nose which was flat and the nostrils seemed to have been drilled into the front of his face.  His eyebrow ridges looked like the pictures you see of a Neanderthal and were completely covered with hair.

I noticed the eyes too.  Not like animal eyes, but not like human eyes either.  I do recall they were soft, not fierce, dilated and brown.  I saw a little white of the eye, the right eye, and it was a bit bloodshot.  What little bit of skin there was on the face was dark brown, almost like a bronze tan.  The skin was very crinkly and wrinkled, like it had been weathered over decades of life.  I saw that his lips were cracked and peeling a bit and he had a honeysuckle smell to his breath, which was pouring in through the porous nylon of the tent.  It was a sickening sweet smell.

At that moment, I don't know why, I gave him a name in my mind.  I remember naming him "Toklat".  It just seemed appropriate, since I had thought he was a bear at first, and Toklat was a famous bear.

Then it hit me that I was looking right into the face of a bigfoot.  I also think I am the only one who has ever seen one from 2 inches away.  Once I realized what I was looking at my blood ran cold.  Have you ever been so scared that you could feel your heart beating IN YOUR TOES???  Well, that's what I felt at first.  I mean, who knew what one of these could do to a man, especially a stupid man?  But then after a while I began to feel very, very calm.

We actually stared at each other maybe a minute and a half or two minutes through the little mesh of the tent, neither of us moving a bit.  I think he was fascinated by my eye color, not much different than his, but I wear glasses so he must have gotten a distorted view of my eyes.  Once again, in hindsight, I think he didn't know what he was looking at but it intrigued him just for a moment.

Then he frowned, it seems, and when he did it was like his entire face shifted; at which time he snorted a bit, and I got a very hot puff of air through those horizontal nostrils which sent me back a second.  When I regained my focus all I could see was brown hairs sticking though the mesh, like he was just standing there.  Then he was gone.  Silently and very quickly, without making a sound.

Dad was fully aware of what was going on and was silent to a fault.  I saw that he had his .357 magnum in his hand (a necessity on any camping trip my dad ever went on) but to his credit he never used it.  Once we were sure the big guy was gone, I mean literally an hour later, we unzipped the front and looked out.  The sasquatch had done the darndest thing.  He had put a quail, about half eaten, feathers still intact, at the back of the tent near the flap.  I'm sure he hadn't dropped it.  I think he PUT it there.  My father agreed with that point up until his death in 1996.  The joke my dad always made is that I must have had hungry eyes and old Toklat was trying to feed me.

Why was it such a surreal and quiet experience?  I can't say, except that I was certainly the first person this big guy had ever seen up close too, and he was probably just as curious and as frightened as I was, yet he was as calm as I was.

I'll tell you my opinion, after looking this one right in his eyes: they are not dumb animals.  They aren't human and I'm sure their intelligence level is no where near a human's, but they are far above the rest of the animals of the forest in terms of brain power.  I'm sure they can be very vicious, but on the other hand I think they (or at least this one) are able to excercise discretion.  I was frightened at the concept of looking a bigfoot in the choppers, but not this particular one.

For example, have you ever heard of a saying like, "I got that Sasquatch in the headlights look"?  No, they are smarter than deers and probably every other animal who lives in the forest.  That is probably the main reason why their sightings are as rare as blue diamonds.  The other main thing I remember was telling my dad later (after we had HASTILY packed up) that I felt a little peaceful looking into  those big, intelligent eyes.  I think he felt a bit peaceful looking into my specs too.  As we were driving away I had the feeling he was watching us and it made my skin crawl.

 A couple of other observations I can make on the subject.  For one thing, he was cold.  The weather gets to them a bit I think, and he was wheezing.  The skin on his face was so wrinkled it looked like deep cuts made in a chocolate frosted cake.  I think that's what his skin looked like.  An incised, chocolate frosted cake.

Also, I never heard him make a throat noise, not at any time.  He breathed heavily and through his mouth, but he never uttered a sound orally.

I have just one more observation to make.  I am an amateur anthropological hobbyist.  This creature, if you ask me, is neither man nor ape.  I think he's a third option, a species that got separated somewhere along the evolutionary ladder and never really thrived or advanced.  Just a few survive in comparison to man, and I think that has been the key to their success.

They are the original down low animal.
 

ACTIVITIES OF WITNESS(ES):   We were asleep, in a tent, in the forest.

DESCRIPTION OF CREATURE:   (Please refer to above description in main text as it is an excellent observation and no need to repeat this here)  One thing I am positive of: this was NOT a man in a monkey suit.  I got a very close up look at the way the hair grew out of the face from around the eyes and cheeks, I saw the massive wrinkles and the leathery looking skin.  Close up.  I felt his breath from the nostril burst and I smelled his fur, his breath, and his defecation as well, since we were unfortunately downwind from the Sasquatch men's room.

This was real.

OTHER NOTES:

Follow up:     Did you see his teeth or determine if it was male or female?  Just extra questions I wanted to ask.  I have experienced that smell from them of a sickening sweet honeysuckle smell (from the female bigfoot) and no better way to describe it.  Mary Green

Dear Mary,

You know I actually thought to look for genitalia, but
never really got a good look.  When it squatted it did
look like it had a little extra business going on down
below, so I will speculate it as a male and I call it
a 'him', but I can't swear to it.

The teeth seemed to be very well obscured by his lips
and the odd angle I was looking at him through the
tent flap.  But his eyes will always be in my mind.

Please let me know if you need anything alse.
 

OTHER SIGHTINGS IN THIS AREA?:
I haven't heard of any, but I believe it is the same area where those two men filmed the guy in the monkey suit in the 70s - the Zapruder of bigfoot films.  Again, this one we encountered acted nothing like the one in the famous film.

I tried for two years to report this incident to legitimate authorities and media, and was laughed outta Dodge, so I gave up until I found this website.  One more note is that as I have been writing this my wife has found the illustration I made on the day of the incident.  Neither dad nor I had brought a camera with us.