On the trail of the New York bigfoot, Part 4

When everyone returned from town, Ben and I told them what we’d heard. They reacted with interest, but not amazement. Several expedition participants were long veterans of this kind of activity, and had had their own encounters. And we were, after all, in a “hot spot” (in the morning, below).

For the second night’s observations, the expedition group broke into three teams that went in different directions. As I mentioned, a two-man team that afternoon had begun the tough climb to the very top of the hill (call it a small mountain) east of the main camp. Another team went down the trail from the night before to the spot of the thermal-imager encounter to give that spot a try again. Another group went out in a vehicle to slowly drive backroads while using thermal imagers, and stop in various spots to make calls or play recordings.

I suited up (at left) and Ben, another group member named Dave, and I drove up the road in Dave’s Cherokee to a trailhead that lead around the north face of the small mountain, going almost exactly in the direction from which the calling had come earlier. Our plan was to scale the hillside to reach a trail along a cliff-face perhaps a third of the way up the entire slope, and establish a listening post there. Ben brought his bionic ear, and both Dave and I had night-vision scopes, mine provided by the expedition leader.

Dave, like Ben, was a polite, easy-going guy, but a bit older, in his mid-30s. He was a father to two young kids, worked in heavy industry, and had a military background. He struck me as exactly the right sort of person to have on any kind of outdoors venture, and he was easily the most sure-footed of the three of us once we were on the trail. Like me, this was his first bigfoot expedition. Unlike me, he had a very real, compelling reason to come: earlier this year, in the winter, he found a set of very large human-like tracks in the snow in a very remote place in Maine. 

“I was on a snowmobile,” he told Ben and me. “I couldn’t really walk in the snow where I’d found the tracks.” 

After we parked at the trail-head pull off, I stood in the road and looked at the sky. I don’t think I’d seen that many stars so clearly since I’d been fishing in Idaho. The constellations were as perfect as any textbook illustration. Imagine living in a time when that was what you saw every clear night, any where in the country. The moon was barely a sliver, and yet I could see by pure star-shine while in the roadway.

Once inside the treeline, however, everything became very dark. The terrain was the same as the night before: tiny, tight plateaus of soil between roots, endless clusters of rocks, and a thousand ways to sprain your ankle or tear a knee. The fact that we were supposed to hike as normally as possible, and behave like hikers, not hunters, was a help, because trying to be stealthy in this stuff would have been impossible. We might as well have been wearing sleigh bells.

After every ten minutes, the three of us stopped, shut off our headlamps, and listened. I turned on my night-vision monocular, which creates a very pale green glare out the eyepiece that any nocturnal animal could see from a distance, and I scanned the marshy woods down the slope from the trail. The chances of seeing anything with this device were nil, even a chipmunk, but I liked looking through it to get a sense of the thickness of the woods around me.

Eventually, we reached the upper trail on a flat section of hillside, and we sat down on a fallen tree and once again turned our lamps off. Ben set up his bionic ear, which looked like a small, black, hand-held radar dish connected to an earpiece. Dave was radioman, although with so much rock between us and the other groups, clear transmissions were impossible.

This was a very dark spot, but I could make out the form of the ridgeline across the lake, directly in front of us. I’d say we’d hiked up maybe 500 feet in elevation. It was cold. The woods were dead quiet. Really quiet.

Ben scanned around us with the bionic ear. He didn’t pick up anything. After a while, he decided to try a howl. Dave tried to reach the guys on top of the hill to let them know we were going to call, but the transmission didn’t clear the slope very well. We heard no confirmation.

So Ben cut loose, and he sounded pretty good. Just as the single-note howl faded, a bunch of coyotes responded from across the lake. Their howls and yaps echoed along the ridgeline, sounding as if there were dozens of the dogs over there.

We sat and listened some more, conversing quietly now and then. I listened for chipmunks and heard none, although I wondered if we might have gone higher than their preferred habitat.

After a while, from off to our right, all three of us heard very soft sounds in the brush. I couldn’t tell if these were simply forest sounds – falling leaves, or the sound of a hollow spot in the hillside contracting in the cold – or sounds of animal movement. Eventually, we heard some sounds directly in front of us, below the rocky edge of the decline. Ben put the bionic ear on the spot, and he listened intently for a while.

“Chipmunk?” I said. Ben shook his head.

“Deer?” I said. Ben shook his head.

“It sounds weird, like very light, careful steps, like someone slowly walking very carefully,” he said. 

I didn’t know what to make of that. But I will say that the sequence of sounds – very soft sounds starting from our right and then moving down in front of us – suggested something traveling through, and I began to speculate about stealthy opossums, or even a fisher cat. It would have been very cool to see a fisher cat because you hardly ever see them at all.

We put in over an hour’s time just sitting, and debated about moving higher up the hillside. We checked our watches and saw the time: 12:50 a.m. We decided to slowly make our way down the trail, and then head back to base camp, check in, and then maybe venture down the swamp trail.

Going down the mountain, Ben continued to listen with the bionic ear when we made the usual stops. He didn’t pick up anything. We strolled on. Arriving at the base of the hill, Dave was twenty-some yards ahead of us, and his headlamp illuminated a few bright dots through the trees and we knew these were reflectors along the road.

Just as the trail flattened, with Ben to my left, I heard one single, quiet but perfect whoop-sound from the very top of the hill. I froze in my tracks. Ben drew a quick breath.

“Did you hear that?” I said.

He nodded emphatically. “Yes, definitely. Just the one sound.”

“Tell me that was or wasn’t an owl.”

“No. I don’t think it sounded like an owl.”

No, it wasn’t an owl. Or, it was one very weird owl.

A sudden realization crept over me – a realization that operated on several major assumptions. The assumption/realization combo was this: If there was, indeed, a smart animal up there, one that had listened very closely to our movement up, atop, and down the hill, he/she/it gave out a subtle, simple “all clear” call once we interlopers had reached the bottom of the hill. The timing was perfectly right.

Or, maybe it was coincidence, as some bird of night let out a strange, short whoop-hoot call neither of us had heard before. Whatever it was, it was back up the hill about as high as we had been, and it sounded like it was just off the trail.

The whoop-sound Ben and I heard was a softer, flatter version of the very first note of this series of recorded calls (there’s also sounds of a wood-knocking response on this recording), putting this discussion right back in the conundrum of comparing sounds of unknown origin to sounds of unknown but suspected origin.

Dave said, when asked, that he did not hear any call. He was moving through some rocks, and the sound of his boots, plus his focus on the terrain, was enough that he couldn’t say for sure he heard what Ben and I heard.

Back in camp, the three of us sat in chairs around the campfire with Nick, who was keeping radio contact the two guys on the hill-top, and the team down along the swamp. Sitting in the warmth of the campfire began to lull my mind; I checked my watch and saw that the time was nearly 2 a.m.

Then the guys at the mountaintop called in on the radio. They said they were hearing movement in the trees. They radioed back within seconds to say that they heard the sound of stomping, or pounding footfalls.

“Can you see anything?” Nick radioed back.

“No, we can’t,” one of the guys on the mountaintop said. “But definitely movement of something heavy, making hard, pounding steps. Four very heavy footsteps, like stomping. Just inside the trees behind us.”

Radio checks continued for a while, and nothing else happened up on the mountain, or down the swamp trail. I was starting to fade. I crawled into my tent, took off my boots and camo, and zipped into my sleeping back. The temperature was around 28 degrees, and my tent was a bit more summer-weight than I would have liked.

I fell asleep rapidly, wondering at the sounds I had heard that night.

*  *  *

The second morning I was groggier than the first. I did, however, sleep well. Snacking on trail mix for breakfast, I sat and watched Dave try to do something every outdoors person has or should have attempted at least once: using a magnesium strip, flint, tinder, and a stainless steel knife to start a fire. With a stiff breeze, it’s no fun, but Dave patiently worked at it.

“Did you sleep straight through the night?” Dave said to me.

“Completely. I was unconscious for the duration.”

“I heard something just on the edge of camp, early this morning,” he said.

“What?”

“Something woke me up, and I heard something moving, not far behind my tent. I heard footsteps, and some quiet grunt-like sounds, and then I heard just one very soft whoop sound. It was moving around down there,” Dave said, and pointed to a loose grove of small hemlock down a slight grade behind his tent. On the far side of that grove was the encampment belonging to the tall guy and his red-headed girlfriend.

“I heard it pretty clearly,” Dave said. “It definitely got my heart racing.”

“What happened then?” I said.

“I kept listening, and it sounded like it moved off. I didn’t hear anything else. It wasn’t the sound of the other team getting back from the swamp trail. I’d heard them earlier.”

Indeed, when the young couple came to the breakfast fire, we asked them what time they had returned from the swamp trail, and they said close to 4:30 a.m.

“I heard you come back,” Dave said. “Did you hear anything an hour later, around 5:30?”

The tall guy shook his head, but his girlfriend said, “I did hear something, like, a grunting sound, but I wasn’t sure if it was him” – she pointed at her boyfriend – “grunting in his sleep.”

The four of us laughed. But I thought for a minute about what was going on: a young couple (pictured below, ready for a night’s outing) creating a new dimension to their relationship based on a slightly off-center interest of the guy, but which his girlfriend went along with, and then she herself had some interesting experiences. Imagine them twenty years from now, married, in middle age, when they go out to dinner one night and she says, “Remember when I mistook the grunting bigfoot for you?”

The team down at the swamp experienced nothing but a long cold night. The team in the vehicle had nothing to report. The two brothers on the mountain top, when they returned, reported with certainty nothing more than the heavy stomping sound in the trees.

“Did you guys make any calls?” I asked one of the brothers.

“Yeah, just two.”

“When?”

“Late. After 10 p.m.”

I told him what Ben and I had heard just at dark, and he said he and his brother hadn’t heard that sound, but that they also hadn’t attempted nine howls in a row that early, either.

Team members spent last afternoon of the expedition hiking the swamp trails again, looking for any visible signs – maybe tracks – and collecting trail cameras that had been placed in various locations. I volunteered to retrieve one that was about 30 minutes driving distance up a rural route. As I made my way to the trailhead down a country road, I saw some pretty severe rural poverty, mostly in the form of houses repaired or expanded with scrap wood, and bare insulation.

The digital trail-cam was bungee-corded around a tree trunk. It looked back at the trail and a creek bed below. It took my picture as I approached, although digital models make no sound. In 2008, a digital camera set up in a woods in northwestern Pennsylvania recorded two frames of something that has been dubbed “the Jacobs creature,” evidence that has been interpreted as being images of a young bigfoot.

At base camp on this last night, after a dinner of venison burgers provided by a BFRO researcher from Pennsylvania, we decided that the remainder of the crew would all head out together in two vehicles (one fellow had bowed out, sick; and, unfortunately, the guy with the thermal images from the first night and his wife had gone home that afternoon while I was hiking to the trail camera). Our destination was a lake at about 300 feet in elevation. We made a 10-minute drive up the road, and the public trailhead was another 10 minutes along a winding gravel road.

Our group of eight set off on an easy grade, making our way up to the lake. Part-way up, we stopped and shut off our head lamps so some of us could scan the trees with thermal imagers. A false alarm involving the heat signature of a pair of chipmunks was quickly dispelled – another lesson in the trickiness of thermal imagers. Nick decided to have us move in twos and threes, far apart, as we continued up the grade so we didn’t seem like a small invading army.

In the dark, the pear-shaped lake was a plain of very pale blue. The place was utterly silent. The expedition group sat on the lake shore, listening, and occasionally attempting wood knocks and howls. Every note carried down the lake and slammed off a distant rock face, echoing off to our right – to the west – with great clarity. A hiccough would have made an echo.

I scanned the opposite shoreline with my night-vision scope. The image seemed a bit creepy, like panning shot out of a documentary or film: a distant wall of trees, visible in the dark. I saw nothing moving. The air was still.

Despite the cold, this place was a wonderfully serene place. I felt like taking a snooze right there under the trees. I closed my eyes and drifted, listening.

After an hour, the group decided on another location, and we hiked down the easy slope, back to the trucks, and went back down the main road toward camp. By now, fatigue was starting to catch up with some of the group, and though the time was only 1:30 a.m., a number of people opted to return to camp.

I stayed with a small group – Dave, Nick, and the two brothers – at the trailhead parking spot where Dave, Ben, and I had begun our trek the night before, right near the spot where I’d heard the whoop-call up the hillside (Ben had volunteered to remain in camp this night). Nick said he had spent a night sleeping in his car here earlier in the week, and thought he might have heard movement along the treeline, and got a sense of being watched. This was, perhaps, a spot where animals of all sorts crossed the road to take to the trail on the opposite side. 

Lots of bigfoot reports, including many that don’t result in an actual sighting but which involve sounds or movement, often include the person’s statement that he or she had a “creepy” feeling or “a strong sense of being watched.” You can read any number of studies that say that human intuition is very accurate, or that “gut feelings” are psycho-somatic. Just about everyone who has logged a lot of hours in remote places or wilderness can attest occasionally to “creepy” feelings. But there could be some primitive sense inside us that goes on alert when another sizeable mammal arrives in our proximity. Call it a “vibe.”

There’s another element of the sasquatch phenomenon for which I was about to get a tricky lesson on this night – something called “eye shine.” Put simply, this is a usually red reflection of ambient light from the eyeballs of a bigfoot when it looks directly at you in the dark. Without getting into a technical discussion of rod and cone cells, researchers have theorized that because these animals evolved for nocturnal existence, their eyes evolved to absorb light even in darkness, basically the same way a night-vision scope works – by having the extreme ability to pull in minimal amounts of ambient light. This results in a reflective effect, and while other animals’ eyes might appear gold or green when they reflect light, such as a car’s headlights, the theory goes that the particular anatomy of the bigfoot eye often sends back a red wavelength visible to human eyes.

There are a number of reports that describe this, and below is a purported video of eye-shine, but filmed through a night-vision scope, which is green:

So, we took up positions on either side of the road, facing the forest. I sat on the front bumper of Dave’s Cherokee. Nick very soon said he was watching, on his thermal imager, a coyote come trotting up the road towards us. The animal quickly ducked into the trees when it sensed us. I heard nothing in the trees in front of me. The forest was a black wall, as foreboding as anything the Brothers Grimm could have conjured. Someone tried a howl. Someone else did a bit of wood knocking. We waited for a long time.

Looking into the woods at one point, I wondered if I had heard a sound. I asked Dave, who was nearby, if he heard anything, and he said he thought he had heard a soft sound on the leaves. I thought, Well, at least my ears work.

A short time later, staring hard into the trees, I saw for just a tenth of a second two reddish spots of light, very small, that seemed to hover and then disappear. Huh? I looked and looked again, but didn’t see anything. I was loathe to use my night vision, which would have blasted my pupils with light and made me see spots.

After seeing nothing more for a short time, I called Dave over. I said quietly, “Look into the woods at about 10 o’clock flat, and see if you see any kind of eye shine.”

Dave sat and stared. Nick came over, and I told him what I thought I’d seen. He quickly pointed out one thing: my shooting glasses.

I’d taken enough tree-branch tips in the eyeball to decide long ago that when walking in the woods in the dark or semi-dark, I was going to wear clear plastic shooting glasses, as you can see from the photo above. For all I know, I still have both eyeballs because of them.

But they might have backfired this night. Nick looked inside the cockpit of Dave’s Jeep Cherokee and said, “Is there a GPS or some device in there that has small red lights on it? You might be getting some kind of reflection on the inside of your glasses.”

I was embarrassed I hadn’t thought of this myself. I looked around the front seats of the Cherokee and didn’t see anything, a phone recharging, or a radar detector that didn’t switch off. But I couldn’t disagree with Nick’s assessment, as the image of the red dots was so fleeting, and they disappeared as I moved my head, that I must have somehow picked up a reflection of a single dot on either lens.

Nick put the thermal imager on the spot where I thought I’d seen the eye shine. Nothing registered.

But then Dave said, “I think I just saw eye shine, same spot, but it was green.”

“Well, at least I’m not crazy,” I said, meaning that I wasn’t projecting anything, but that something was causing some sort of reflection, somehow.

Dave, however, wasn’t wearing glasses, and he seemed certain that he had seen something – two dots of green light – shining in the trees. Was there some sort of animal out there reflecting light from us? Nick’s thermal imager had a bright screen, and a very pale cloud of dull grayish-green light reflected off his face and into the edge of the forest when he used the device (example of a similar screen shine below). Maybe a coyote was staring at us? 

I say coyote because the dogs were all around us, at various distances, the whole time we were in the park. And not ten minutes after my eye-shine gaffe, Dave was looking through Nick’s thermal imager when he said, “Oh, there’s something out there, for sure. It’s moving. Yeah, it’s a coyote. A big one.”

“How far into the trees?” I said.

“Maybe fifteen, twenty yards,” Dave said.

I noted immediately that the coyote did not make a single sound, not even a whisper, as he trotted through. Most big animals can do that – move totally silently when they want to. Grizzly bears can do so. Tigers and cougars can do so. I’ve read any number of reports that described no sound or hardly any sound as a bigfoot moved in close. I’ve always been amazed at the stories hunters tell of hearing no sound of any approaching animal while they sat in a deer stand, only to be startled by something making a terrible roaring-howl right behind them. 

Here’s an example of a coyote on a thermal imager — not a recording of what Dave saw, as he said he saw our dog in very good detail:

Another hour went by, and none of the five of us heard anything or spotted anything more. We decided to head back to camp. While this last night might seem like a wash, I saw the value in making sure that you don’t get something that doctors call a “false positive.” There were possible and simple explanations for the small red lights that I saw. I can’t vouch for what Dave saw himself; only he knows. I’ve wondered about the difference in color between the dots of light I saw and what he saw. I’ve come to the conclusion that I saw a reflection of something inside the Cherokee, while Dave possibly saw animal eyes reflecting light from the ambient glow of Nick’s thermal imager. What animal? I don’t know.

We drove back to the parking area, not far from the main camp. The two brothers were going to sleep in their truck. I’m not sure where Dave or Nick ended up. Nick was staying at a small hotel in the nearby town because he needed a place to lock up a lot of the imaging equipment while he was scouting earlier in the week. I’m not sure where Dave went; he might have slept in his Cherokee.

I ended up walking alone along the road the short distance to the trail head, and then making my way through the trees, up a slight hill, working my way back into camp in the red glow of my head lamp. The place was totally quiet and the fire was out.

I had moved my tent the day before, from a place where the ground had sloped a bit too much to sleep comfortably, to a flatter spot in some hemlocks, farther away from the fire, along the edge of a drop-off down to the ravine below.

It was thick with branches in there, and I had to move slowly and carefully. I unzipped the door of my tent and sat down on the folded door to take off my boots. I looked at my watch: 3:45 a.m. I pulled off my wool coveralls, slid into my sleeping bag, and zipped it up. I think I fell asleep in less than a minute.

Something awoke me before dawn. My head was foggy, but I listened. I thought I’d heard what sounded like something swiping through the brush – like a branch swiping against something, or a bunch of pine needles and leaves being kicked up; a nondescript sound of movement. Nothing else occurred, and I konked out pretty quickly. The expedition was more or less over.

In the morning, as I was breaking down my tent and packing gear, I saw Ben and Nick gather by the fire pit. So I went over to talk to them. Ben had an interesting story. He had spent the night sitting by the fire, talking with the wife of the BFRO researcher from PA. Her name was Diana and she also had also stayed in camp.

“Just about eleven thirty,” Ben said, “I could hear something walking behind us, off in the trees. I didn’t look, and we didn’t stop talking, but I could hear it moving. Then I heard something like a very soft couple of grunts. We didn’t talk for a moment, and we waited a while, and then I looked over there, but I couldn’t see anything.”

“Over where?” I said.

“Along those trees near your tent,” Ben said.

He continued: “Diana was getting tired and a bit spooked, so I walked her back to the parking area [where she and her husband, Stan, had a rental RV], and then I came back to camp and sat up a while. I thought I could hear it moving very slowly, away from camp, back over there” – Ben pointed to the edge of the ravine, beyond my tent, closer to the trail towards camp.

“Did you hear anything else?” Nick said.

“No. But I definitely heard it when it was close.”

Two operative theories that we discussed among the expedition team were that, one, bigfoot are extremely curious and might venture toward or into camp on any given night, and, two, that they will make a small noise to see if they rouse any attention or awaken anyone, and if they don’t – if no one stirs in their tent, or no one stops talking and turns to look in the direction of the sound – then they will continue reconnoitering the edge of the encampment.

So, following that notion, there might have been such visitations on two different occasions, on the second and third nights, when someone heard movement in camp and a small “testing” sound – the grunt and whoop that Dave heard early in the morning, and the grunt that Ben heard in the late night.

Bears, too, can grunt, and not far from my tent was my food backpack, hoisted about twelve feet in the air over a limb to keep it out of reach of bears (there are only black bears in NY state). In either case, however, something ventured into camp and made audible sounds. 

As I finished packing, I thought to myself, O.k., for the sake of imaginative adventure, let’s say that sasquatch exist, and let’s say there was at least one hanging out in or near camp last night, not far from your tent, and you, buddy boy, walked right past it in the dark.

[The last installment. . .coming soon]

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.