In several parts over the next few days, I’m going to be publishing here a revised version of a report I wrote several years ago. This is a polished field report of an investigation in which I was involved -- I wrote it thinking maybe I’d write a book. But I’ve always been stopped by a nagging doubt. Something was going on there, as some of the facts I will detail will show, but along with whatever really was going on, there was a lot to make one suspicious about the activities there too. But among the things that were troublesome, probably the most troublesome among the researchers was the claim that the family of the witnesses had been feeding the creatures for years. This is called habituation, and it is very controversial. Was there a habituation in the Ohio River Valley case? Were there ever really any bigfoot at the location? I’m not sure I have firm answers for these questions, but judge for yourself.
*****
In June of 2005, Robert Jenkins (not his real name), says he saw something near the new fish pond he had built at the back of his property. It looked like an animal that shouldn’t have been there. It had gotten the attention of the two pit bulls he kept chained behind the old trailer home that sat at the crest of the hill. The dogs were whining and crouching submissively. What Robert saw made him do a double take. “I thought maybe it was an ape, maybe escaped from a zoo or somebody’s pet that got out,” he said later. But he realized it was walking on two legs, and that it was bigger than any ape he’d ever seen. He watched it for a brief time, not willing to credit what he was seeing, and then walked the short distance next door to get his neighbor. Together they approached the pond and saw that the animal was still there. It was now clearly visible, only 50' away. It was standing upright, in front of a large oak tree. It had frozen in place when it saw the two men. The men stared at it, unbelieving, while the creature stared back at them. To make matters even more absurd, in the woods behind the creature they thought they could see a smaller one cavorting like a monkey. Robert had one shell in a shotgun he always kept near. He aimed high in the tree and fired. The animal did not move nor flinch.
“I wanted to scare him off. I didn’t think it was real at first. I thought it was a guy in a suit, but when I pulled the trigger and it didn’t move, I knew it couldn’t be a guy in a suit. I had just the one shell with me, and when I realized it had to be some kind of animal, I got to wanting a few more shells real bad.”
Robert turned and walked quickly back up toward the house. He looked back to see what the animal was doing, but it was gone. By this time his neighbor had withdrawn as well. Neither of them saw it leave, or where it went.
The gunshot had brought the rest of the two families out: Robert’s wife, Suzie (not her real name), and the neighbor’s wife, son and her son’s fiancee. Though they didn’t see the creature, they did hear something loud in the woods. These events were narrated by the neighbor’s soon-to-be daughter-in-law in an email submitted to the BFRO. The writer claimed that there had been evidence of something going on for some time, and then they “heard a gun shot, and then they came back up saying something is back there.” The creature was described as a bipedal creature with “long grey hair”, with a smaller one trailing behind it. The writer claimed that one of the witnesses went down to the woods shortly after the sighting and left a tape recorder. When he went to retrieve the recorder, “you could hear brush moving, then you hear grunting and growling.” The State Police were called, according to the writer, and a trooper arrived, though he said he thought that what they had heard was a hog.
The BFRO is an all-volunteer organization. They receive many reports and comments every week, and it takes a dedicated group of folks to weed through these to find the important and time sensitive information. When the email came in on June 23, an investigator saw it and immediately forwarded it to investigator Gary Potter (no, that’s not his real name either) who lived very near the sighting location. Gary lost no time in contacting the witness and he was able to be there at the sighting location the same night we got the email. Things don’t always work so fast, but this time everything went nearly perfectly.
That first night on the scene, Gary heard the growling for himself. He also caught a strong scent of something akin to raw sewage with hair mixed in. He observed how the dogs, two pit bulls tied behind the house plus a mastiff Robert had tied at the front of the trailer home, reacted during this time. It was a fear reaction such as he’d never seen before, cowering, groveling and howling long, plaintive howls. Also, during his initial walk-through of the area, he found “large biped foot prints around the property owner's pond” and “partial remains of catfish.” Gary knew that he either had a sophisticated hoax going on, or there was something very interesting happening. He leaned toward the latter interpretation of events. The reactions of the dogs seemed something that would be difficult, if not impossible, to hoax. And the witnesses seemed very credible. They were frightened. They had even called the sherif.
It was when Gary returned the next night that he got the real bombshell. Robert had taken a video of the creature, and he showed it to Gary. Gary was blown away by what he saw. At first he thought it was too good to be true. It was a clear close up shot of the creature crossing from right to left. The bigfoot filled the screen, without any artifacts from zooming-in (by comparison, the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film fills only a fraction of the screen at full resolution). It was on the screen for at least twelve seconds. The video showed details of the legs, arms, hands, the left side of the face, it’s posture and gait – in short, this video, if authentic, was the most important video evidence ever gathered in the thirty-odd years since the Patterson-Gimlin film.
Gary was understandably excited.
But much of the rest of the BFRO was not. Many of the old hands there, not being on the scene themselves, found it too incredible for belief. This had simply never happened before, and all indications in the past were that it probably wouldn’t. How could one man in the Ohio River Valley, with no prior interest in bigfoot, do something that none of the “experts” had been able to do? Thus began a division in the ranks that persisted throughout the investigation. Unfortunately, the difficulties became personal and nasty, eventually leading to Gary’s resignation from the BFRO.
As it would turn out, there were good reasons that Robert was able to get that video – that is, if he didn’t hoax it. For one thing, he shot the video from inside the old trailer home. This had stood on the same spot as a storage shed for years. By now all the local fauna were well familiar with it and would have no reason to take any special notice of it. There had been no one living in it for a very long time. From within the trailer home, Robert was able to film down the hill, past the pond and into the woods, where there was a short space along a course clear of trees, between the path the creature took and the trailer. It was on this section of path that Robert filmed the bigfoot. And there were other reasons Robert was able to film the creature so easily, too, but we’ll get to these later.
Going back to that second day, when Gary saw the video for the first time, he knew he had something important. Robert and Suzie were very reluctant to let anyone else on the property because they didn’t want to lose their privacy to a media circus, but Gary negotiated with them to allow him to bring in two more BFRO investigators to view and “authenticate” the film, as much as anyone could. Basically, he wanted others to see and judge the film. He didn’t want to go forward on his own assessment alone. When Robert and Suzie finally assented, Gary chose to bring in Stewart Cosby (yeah, that's not his name either) and myself. Of course both of us agreed without hesitation, and it was arranged that we’d arrive at Gary’s house in the Ohio River Valley the following Tuesday.
There was a round of discussions about how we’d approach the opportunity to check out the sighting location. We thought we needed to be prepared to take pictures and look for physical evidence. We also planned to film our own re-creation so that we could see them side by side at some point and get a better sense of the size and proportions. But most of these plans were dashed when we actually met with the Robert. While he didn’t mind any of our plans, he had explicit instructions from Suzie that we weren’t to do anything involving film, video or audio tape. We could go down to the pond and look around, but that was it. But first we were going to look at the video.
I had built up my expectations on the flight out, and through all the talk about it the night before, certainly. There was no way any real video was going to measure up to all the things I could imagine based on what I’d heard. So perhaps it is no surprise that when I saw the video I was underwhelmed. The figure, clearly visible and clearly walking on two legs, was much more prosaic than I would have thought it would be. It was walking slowly, with exaggerated arm swings, without any apparent awareness that it was under observation. It appeared to be clean, meticulously so, as if it had been groomed. There were no patches of hair loss visible as you might expect in a wild animal, and like you can see on the Patterson/Gimlin film. The hair looked to be black with silver highlights, but these were possibly due to reflection from the sun.
If this was odd, then also it’s general demeanor ran against all expectations. There was no sense of an animal in fear of detection. It was either oblivious or totally unconcerned. Could a creature that spent its life hiding from man really pass so close to a house, within seventy five yards, with such ease of mind in broad daylight?
There were also some things that bothered me about the video. It was only 6 ½ seconds long, for one thing. For another, the creature did not have any kind of buttocks. It also didn’t move it’s head so that it appeared in profile the entire time, and the head was enormous in comparison to the rest of the body. The arms also did not look as long as I expected them to. I was nearly convinced I was looking at a man in a poorly designed suit. It didn’t help that we had to watch on Robert’s grainy old television with a bad connection from the video camera. I would not have been able to “authenticate” that video on the basis of what I saw on it. I leaned toward hoax, possibly without Robert’s knowledge since he did seem very convincing. Yet the video came in a context, and the supporting evidence was strong, as you will see.
Gary was immediately concerned by what he saw that afternoon, though he didn’t say anything while we were there with Robert. He told us later that when he saw the video he knew something was wrong. There was a lot of it missing, and the missing part contained all the most exciting information, including a view of more of the face, the left hand, and the left foot (never visible in what we saw). He thought he’d initially seen about twice as much footage as we were seeing now. He was worried we’d think he was crazy for calling us out to see what was left of the film.
And we might have, if we didn’t see so much else while we were there. We also had a chance to hear a very good audio tape with the aid of Gary’s Sony headphones. Both Stewart and I, with our experience in recording, were very impressed by the quality of the tape. We were each also visibly taken aback by the resonance of the sound, which indicated to us an animal of large size. We all agreed that we did not believe even the local bears, which we had been told were very rare, could have produced the sounds as we heard them. We thought perhaps a grizzly bear could have made the sounds. Obviously, there are no grizzlies in the Ohio River Valley, but this does not rule out the possibility of hoax. It might be simply a recording of real gorillas, for instance. But it had to be something with a very large chest cavity; the sound made that much plain. But here too there were problems. The fidelity of the recording was superb, and it wasn’t something you could have gotten with an old boombox. Those have microphones designed to reject the noise the machine makes itself, and the loss of those frequencies has an impact on the sound you get out of it. The sound we heard on the tape had a deep and full bass response, such as you’d expect from a quality microphone, and there was no noise from the machine audible. Yet Robert insisted that the tape had been made with a standard tape recorder, the brand-name of which he could not recall. I asked to see this recorder, but he declined to get it out. “It’s put away,” he would say. In truth, he was besieged by requests during this time, and he didn’t seem to think the audio tape was as important as the video and our opinion on it. No matter how many times I tried to get him to show me the recorder, and I must’ve tried at least three separate times, he always declined to get it out. Perhaps he didn’t want to leave us unattended in his house while he searched for the recorder. Or perhaps he hadn’t told the whole story insofar as the tape is concerned.
After we viewed the video and heard the audio, we took a walk down to the pond. We were allowed to go to see the area, but couldn’t take a camera or any recording gear with us. Robert had dug out the pond himself with a backhoe. It was not very big around, but deep. To account for the drop off of the land (the backyard was part of a valley down to a creek and has a fairly steep grade) Robert had built up the back side of the pond, creating a kind of crater-lip on that side, made of red mud. It was a very good surface for holding tracks.
We were excited to be checking out the location of the sighting. The first thing we looked at was the print, still visible at the edge of the water. Gary told Stewart and I that it had been under water when he first saw it, but now it was mostly dry. At first glance, it seemed less than impressive. The heel was missing, except for a very light scraping of the mud where you could make a guess about where it extended. But the toes were there and well defined. The mud had pressed up and made little caverns for each of the toes, which I though was pretty interesting. I crouched down to look inside. I could clearly see dermal ridges pressed into the mud around the toes. This was castable! I urged Robert to let us take a cast of the print, and since his wife had not expressly forbidden it, he thought that it would be alright, but he preferred that we do it and stow it away before she got home.
None of us had ever taken a cast before, but Stewart has had a long term interest in footprints and casts, so we elected him the official print-caster of our group. After only a little bit of protest, he got to work mixing the compound and pouring it in. While that was going on, Gary showed me some of the other things he’d seen earlier. There were still some fish remains at the pond, and Gary told me that he had seen a fish, uneaten, but covered with rocks, set aside near the top of the lip of the pond. I asked Robert to show me how high up on the tree he thought the head of the creature he shot at had come, and he indicated a point about five and a half feet up. I could see the mark on the tree from his shotgun blast.
All of these were bits of evidence that tended to confirm the story. But the case was not open and shut by any means. It could still be a well-planned hoax. I hoped that the footprint cast could give us some independent confirmation when it was examined by an expert. Surely the fact that the ball and toes were well defined, and that there were dermal ridges there clear to see, would be enough for someone with the requisite experience to say whether it was consistent with other suspected bigfoot casts.
During this time, the neighboring property owner came over to talk about the sighting from the previous week. I asked him, out of earshot of Robert, how tall he thought the animal had been when he saw it beneath the tree by the pond. He said about 5' tall. This was pretty close to what Robert said. Since there was now some tension between Robert and the neighbors (having to do with Robert’s suspicion that the neighbor’s wife had been telling people about the sighting), I thought it was reasonable to assume they had not collaborated on their estimations. Both Robert and the neighbor did appear to pause and think, as if mentally measuring where the creature’s head had been against the tree, before they answered.
When Stewart had finished pouring the dental stone, he joined us at the edge of the woods. Our investigation in the woods behind the pond yielded a few good clues but nothing major. We found that down the hill a few yards there were multiple bones of various ages, some looking to be decades old. Most of them looked to be the shoulder or femur of a pig, or ham hocks. We were very surprised to find them there in a pile like that, but we knew this could not have been procured by the bigfoot and had to have been introduced by humans. We could not think why so many (we did not count them but there were easily two dozen or more there in one area) would be there.
When we mentioned it to Robert, he did not explain the bones until later. We also found a nearly complete skeleton of a deer in the same general area, but Robert told us this was probably a deer he had discarded the previous fall when it had begun rotting while he hung it. We also found where something apparently large had sat and eaten several fish. Adjacent to this was a small area that was dug up for no apparent reason. It almost looked as if something had been aimlessly digging and stirring around the dirt. There were also broken branches in the same area, but none of them very large. Altogether one couldn’t say that this was not the work of a bear, though we found no bear prints and no obvious scratch marks nor any other bear sign.
We had gone back behind the pond partly to look for bear sign in particular, but also any other sign that might indicate that the witnesses had been mistaken about what was taking their fish. While we saw sign of deer, coyote, raccoon, crayfish, and many insects, we did not find sign of any large predators known to take fish and leave them aside for a few days, as Gary had seen and Robert told us had happened on several other occasions. Bears are known to do this, but bears are not overly cautious about leaving signs of their passage. There ought to have been multiple footprints in the soft, wet, dirt around the pond, but instead there were only large human-like prints there, one of which was so good we had been able to cast it.
We returned from our foray into the woods with little to show for our intrepidity. We checked on the condition of the cast, which was still setting up. Robert then thought to invite us to come with him in his van to survey some nearby places he thought something large could be hiding and no one would necessarily see it. We agreed, and covered the print with loose clay to protect it, doing our best to hide it from prying eyes.
Part 2.
Part 3.
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