On the trail of the New York bigfoot, Part 3

In the late morning of the next day, I crawled groggily out of my tent, found something to eat, and eased up to the morning fire. The day was sunny but very cool. I wore pretty much everything I’d slept in. Another team member and I made small talk about the night before, and then one of the young couples joined us at the campfire. They had been with Team 2.

“Well?” I said to the pair. “What happened?”

“There was definitely something on the thermal imager,” the guy said, a big, powerful fellow with a shaved head.

I looked to his girlfriend, the red-headed skeptic, and said, “Any ideas?”

She smiled and said, “It was really intense. We could hear it moving in the trees. I was shaking, and they’re going to have to edit all my cursing out of the video.”

“Cursing?”

“It was. . .well, it was intense. I usually don’t swear.” 

Word in camp was that a video was made of some of the thermal imaging, and this footage was stored on a recorder owned by one of the BFRO investigators who was with us. This fellow was staying at a hotel in a small town not far down the road. I thought I should meet with him. But in camp I did speak to someone who did see the footage:

“At one point [in the footage] you could see the profile of something standing up, as if up-right, and it seemed to turn,” said this man, another BFRO investigator, who wore an “I’m the NRA” ball cap.“It turned enough that if it was a bear, I think you would have seen a snout. The whole time, the thing was hiding behind two trees. It kept moving, but it was shifting back and forth behind the trees.”

If this had been a deer or bear, would it have run when the team threw small rocks in its direction? Probably. It surely would have taken off when one of the group members approached, and that seems to have been the case, regardless of what is was.

I don’t yet know if the BFRO will post any of this footage on its site, or archive it for future use. Thermal footage from 2008, labeled as being from the BFRO, is billed on YouTube as being the “first thermal imaging of a sasquatch.” You can in this footage see for about half a second a somewhat hominid-shaped figure move in the brush, and make of that what you wish. (Note that nearly all YT bigfoot footage is obvious hoaxing, much meant for laughs, and unfortunately the serious investigative stuff gets mixed in that line-up.) The real value of this footage is to show how tricky thermal imaging can be to try to pinpoint an object and guess its distance and size. Any living thing will be a fast-moving blob of white in a B&W view-finder:

 In the afternoon of the second day, I and another team member volunteered to hike down to the swamp to look for any signs around the area where we knew we had heard the rock splash. If anything, I looked forward to a nice hike in the forest in beautiful day-time weather.

However, when my teammate, Brad (not his real name; and pictured above, watching waterfowl on the swamp), and I got down along the water, we found two very odd pieces of wood. Things called “wood formations” are another behavior ascribed to sasquatch; assemblies of sticks or pulled-down and over-lapped limbs and saplings are often found in areas known for bigfoot sightings, and some of these can be seen in the footage below (kill the sound or you’ll be subjected to cheesy recorder-flute music):

If people make these, that is pretty strange, but, as I said, the strangest things I’ve seen were performed by people. Maybe these are all just half-assed lean-to’s. Indeed, some of these formations — those in the footage above and any ever seen —  might be an informed attempt at a minor hoax in some instances. 

Down by the water, Brad and I first found this:

That long, curved piece of wood, hanging head-high, was deciduous wood that had been on the forest floor – it was partly rotted and had moss on it. When we found it, it was tucked neatly into the thinnest branches of some small pines. There were no hard-wood trees around these pines that could have dropped this limb, and had it dropped, it would have fallen through to the ground, not somehow intertwined itself into the lower limbs. There was little question that it had been placed in that position.

Did campers do that? Maybe. But if they did it as something to which to tie a tent rope or some other line, it was useless for that. This was also a terrible place to try to camp. Did a hunter do that to mark the visible deer trail along the swamp? Maybe, but doubtful, as most hunters would use surveyor’s tape to temporarily mark a trail where you can do that legally, or just mark a tree trunk, not stick a 7-foot limb into some trees. (The expedition took place during the muzzle-loader season, and now and then an echoing blast of black powder could be heard from distant hill sides.)

That finger-like end on the piece of wood pointed directly at a bunch of trees half-felled by beavers, so for whatever other purpose this piece of wood served, it certainly did send us to a spot that confirmed the significant presence of this rodent. Brad and I followed the deer trail, skirting the edge of the swamp looking for anything notable – a divot left by a rock that been removed, or any kind of tracks in the muck.

We saw nothing further remarkable until we made our way back up the slope to the trail. Here, Brad noticed an odd thing: a thick limb about a yard long, held in place by a single sapling branch (the vertical branch coming down from the top) wrapped around one end, so it hung down like a baton hung by its strap:

That doesn’t happen naturally, obviously. But I couldn’t see how this might have been a part of some kind of snare or trap made by a human. There’s no purpose it would serve a camper, not even if, as I speculated, the other end of the limb was similarly lashed to an opposite sapling to form a kind of bar, although we found no sign of this.

 One thing is for certain: Something of human height with hands did this. Assuming a person did so, why not use some cord or fishing line, and why do it at all?

Brad and I moved back back along the trail. On the way we met a pair of brothers from the expedition. They were backpacking their way to the top of the mountain, a strenuous two-hour climb. They were going to camp up there for the night. We wished them luck, and moved on.

Reaching the road, Brad and I saw down another trail the other BFRO investigator who had made the videotape the night before. We called out to him that we wanted to see it, but we couldn’t hear his reply over the sound of logging trucks passing by. And then he turned and, with his wife, made off down the trail.

Brad and I shrugged and went back to camp. After a late lunch, I felt the need for a significant nap, given that the crew would again take to the woods for the 10-to-2 vigil. I fell asleep faster than I ever did at any company meeting.

 * * *

In the early evening, the expedition members decided that a jaunt into the nearest town for dinner at a local restaurant was in order for a good meal before a night of recon. I had, however, followed BFRO directions and brought enough food for myself for three days, all of it packable. I also so no point of spending any time in civilization given the reason I was there. 

So, with a big ration of excellent stew from Nick, the expedition leader, the low-budget journalist (me) and the starving graduate student, Ben, spent time in the gathering dusk collecting and cutting firewood. We also installed a digital trail-camera down by the creek below camp. Another one of our jobs was to wood knock now and then, as Ben obliged (note my extremely fabulous film-making skills):

We never heard a response as we sat around the fire to eat and tell our favorite anecdotes of sasquatchdom.

A staple of the bigfoot narrative is the tale of a coon-hound pack encountering something that drives the dogs into a panic and sends them fleeing for human protection; hounds that invariably are described as “unafraid of bears.” An expedition member had recounted a similar story, told to him by his grandfather. The subject of the accounts that originally led to the name “bigfoot” reportedly killed a pack of tracking hounds sent after it. Dogs have a bad history with sasquatches.

As our conversation meandered lazily to other matters – school, jobs — we both heard an extraordinary sound: Three loud, deep, single-note howls, coming from a significant distance away, sounding as if they came off the hill to the east.

We looked at each other. Ben said, “That sounded. . . .” His voice trailed off, but I knew what he meant: That sounded a lot like howl recordings I’ve heard before.

We agreed that what we heard sounded much like a strong woman’s voice yelling, “Awww,” at the top of her lungs. The fact that the sounds carried distinctly over the distance suggested a rather powerful set of lungs, too.

After about two minutes of silence, the howling came again – four notes this time, just as loud but just as far away.

“Wow,” Ben said, and grabbed a notebook. We noted the time and what we heard. About three minutes later, we again heard the howling, this time just two notes. We listened for a long time after that, hearing nothing more, and no other sounds – no owls, no coyotes – just the crackle of the campfire.

We discussed the details of this, and decided that we had heard nine notes in all, three, then four, then two, across roughly seven-minutes’ time, until two minutes after seven p.m.

“You know what’s interesting?” Ben said. “That happened just at full dark. Just as the sky truly became the night sky.”

“You mean, it was almost like a signal?” I said.

 “Right.”

I agreed that this was workable concept. Given the loudness and number of howls, their time of occurrence, and the duration of the sequence, the whole thing seemed almost like some sort of announcement. If you can assume that an animal made this sound, and you compare the timing of this call to the way and when other animals emit their notable vocalizations, then it seemed possible this sound came of some social intention – The night has started, I’m here, take note.

Of course, what made the sound? Could there have been another researcher, separate from our group, up on the hill, howling or playing some sort of recording? Maybe. I wondered about the two brothers who had climbed to the top of the small mountain. From what I knew of their position, they weren’t situated in the direction from which this call came, and to my knowledge, they didn’t have recordings of howls to play. If either of them could have made a sound like that, however, he clearly missed his chance at a part in the Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera.  

What Ben and I heard didn’t sound like a recording; it sounded like a natural sound with a living source. Bears can make some interesting sounds, but they’re not known for making as loud and repetitive a call as this. It also didn’t sound like a coyote – their loudest sounds are very high-pitched cries that are very distinct (click on selection #3 in particular). This sound had some real guts to it. 

So if there was someone up there on the hill, practicing, he, or she, had it down perfectly. He/she also had to be quite a large person with serious lung capacity. Nine calls at the same volume over seven minutes seemed to surpass human capacity.  And to have heard the sounds as we heard them, live, was to discount the possibility that a human being made them. The howling just didn’t sound human, or like a human imitating a bigfoot.

This is about as loud as novice human calling can get, as Ben practiced in camp:

The call we heard, despite its distance, was much louder and deeper-voiced, and I’ll compare it, in a very general way, to a well-known recording from Ohio that is not an exact match, but is a sound that comes with the same distinct strangeness, non-human tenor, and resonance-over-distance that we heard that night in New York (note the barking dog going nuts in the recording). Imagine that Ohio howl as sounding “female,” less powerful-sounding, in a shorter note, but calling out nine times, and you’ve got a close idea. I’m not making an exacting or direct comparison of the sounds themselves.

I will say that howling was one of the oddest things I’ve ever heard outdoors.

[To be continued. . .]

Part 1, Part 2.