As a child, growing up in the foothills of Mt. Rainier, I saw a Bigfoot. Two of them, actually.
(You can read the full details of our encounter in Mom’s book, Valley of the Skookum, if you haven’t already.)
Growing up, Mom used to get pretty irritated with me. I had this ongoing fascination with eyes. I would doodle them on everything… the cover of the telephone book, the power bill she had yet to pay… any piece of paper, really, that happened to be handy. At the same time, I avoided looking at pictures of anything that had really weird eyes; I remember my sister having a picture book called “A is for Annabelle” and several pages in, there was a drawing of cat with huge, dark eyes. I would skip over that page reallysuperfast… only to thumb back, with my heart pounding in my throat, to take a quick peek before I’d slam the book shut and throw it across the room.
I was an adult before I finally put two and two together and realized why I always had such a visceral reaction to certain eyes.
When I first began talking about my encounter year ago, I would try to to pinpoint what it was about the eyes I’d seen that had stuck with me. In trying to explain it to others, I remember describing them as very humanlike, but being frustrated with that description because it just didn’t accurately describe them. It finally dawned on me that, despite the AWARENESS in the eyes of the creature, the eyes were very, very UNhumanlike, and that was what was so incredibly disturbing about it.
The face was humanlike. No doubt about that. But seeing eyes very similar to a deer’s or any other forest critter that whose eyes have a sort of a convexity to them in a human face? Just. Plain. Wrong.
Let me show you what I mean…
This is, by far, the closest depiction of those eyes I’ve ever seen. The face is different, of course. Just as one person you know looks different from another… the facial features are much more delicate than what I remember. But the EYES have it.
I don’t know who the artist is… I wish I did. This drawing has been in my stuff for years now. The first time I came across it, I actually had a difficult time looking at it. Again with the visceral reaction: My gut seized up. My heart pounded and my blood literally felt like it ran cold.
The strange thing is, as I’ve read through reports of up-close bigfoot encounters and spoken with too many witnesses to count, there seems to be a wide variation in the descriptions of the eyes. I know… believe me, I’ve paid attention. *grin*
In some reports, the eyewitness describes seeing eyes very much like the ones I saw.
The first written account of the North American ‘Wildman’ occurred in 986 AD when Leif Erikson and his men landed in the new world, several centuries before Christopher Columbus. In Samuel Eliot Morisons account of the Norse voyages, Erikson mentions creatures which were “horribly ugly, hairy, swarthy and with big black eyes“.
The European Discovery of America – The Northern Voyages. MORISON, SAMUEL ELIOT (1971) Oxford University Press.
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June 1999: Cypress Grove (on Pocono trail) 1 mile up Highway 9 from downtown Santa Cruz, California – at San Lorenzo Creek.
My friend and I were having lunch by the creek. There is a well worn trail in the first pull-out on the right hand side of Highway 9 just up from Highway 1 and Highway 9 intersection in downtown Santa Cruz.
It was a weekday around lunchtime and there was one other person, a fisherman wading in the creek and fishing less than 50 yards away. The brush is fairly heavy there, so I do not think he even noticed us.
We were eating sandwiches and enjoying nature. I looked to my right, “spacing out on the forest” when I noticed about 20 yards away a pair of big black eyes. At first I thought it was a person, maybe a homeless person (there’s lots residing in Santa Cruz), but as I focused I noticed that it was a large gorilla-like hominid “Mimicking me – eating my sandwich!” It appeared to be a juvenile female – lifting a leaf to its mouth in the same motion and speed as I was eating my sandwich. Except when I saw it do that and realized this was happening – I slowed down my bite to the sandwich in shock and so did it – with an expression of amusement and kindness at mimicking me! I wasn’t scared, but definitely in shock.
I slowly turned to my left to nudge my girlfriend to show her, and no sooner did I do that, when I looked back it was gone. It could have just closed its eyes! It’s camouflage was incredible! It was as tall or taller than me. I was sitting down and it was sitting or squatting. I could not see it’s legs. It had black/brown fur – noticed no neck and huge shoulders. Hand and face looked gorilla like except that the front of its face was flatter than that of Primates known. I could see it had straight, white teeth. No fangs. I also noticed that it seemed to have had gray moss on its fur, definitely did not bathe, but did not smell anything. (And I’d never seen a homeless person with moss on them – soot, maybe, but not Spanish moss).
The expression of amusement and the mimicking me eating a sandwich was probably more shocking than just the mere sight – although that was incredible in-of-itself. The intelligence was not animal-like! It was eating what is believed to be the Cypress leaves (young growth there in the spring). Also note: next to a creek. Seems like most sightings are in the creeks. It is imperative that migratory patterns and food sources are noted in our sightings. I studied primate anthropology in college two years after I saw a Bigfoot and it’s taken me years before I thought it important to report this and I would take a lie detector test to prove this was a truthful encounter.
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It was medium brown in color, but I could see skin under the hair, and it was a blackish gray color. It had thin lips, a flat nose and face, large black eyes, with no white that I could see. Its palms were the same blackish/gray color and huge, with really long fingers and the hair came down over its hands. It had hair all over, but it was thinner on the arms and chest area than on the shoulders. Big and wide at the shoulders, hair was matted looking in places. No sounds other than breathing. But I think that’s what was making that weird Donald Duck sound and whistling. There was the same musky/dead smell.
http://www.texasbigfoot.org/reports/report/detail/289
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Yeti from Russia’s Vyatka
Moscow explorers discovered a wigwam of a creature unknown to science in the snow-covered forestMembers of the Kosmopoisk association have returned from an expedition to Russia’s Kirov Region where they searched for a bigfoot that allegedly lived in that region. Kosmopoisk leader Vadim Chernobrov says the expedition has discovered a den occupied by a mysterious giant and an underground passage dug obviously not by a human.
Ivan Konovalov has been working as a forest warden for 30 years in the Kirov Region. At first, the man did not plan to stay in that region for long, however he had an important meeting in November 1985 and changed his mind. Ivan Konovalov tells about that meeting: “It was snowing on the day when I was walking along the fir wood and suddenly heard snap of twigs. I turned around and saw an awesome creature covered with dark hair that was much taller than me. It smelt strongly. The beast leant against a pine tree and started bending it down to the ground. The tree was rather thick, but it cracked under the creature’s burden. Then the creature started breaking the tree against the knee. Its hands were as thick and long as its legs. Quite of a sudden, the creature felt something and turned its “face” to me. I saw two black eyes and the impression at the bottom of the eyes deeply impressed me. I still remember the look of the eyes. Then the creature flung the tree and quickly left. But I stood thunderstruck and could not move a finger.”
(Now, the eyes that I remember seeing may have been black, or may have been dark brown. I can’t say for sure. They were dark, big… and intense.)
In other reports, eyewitnesses describe seeing small, beady eyes, like those of a bear. Take William Roe’s account, for example:
The shape of this creature’s head some-what resembled a Negro’s [sic]. The head was higher at the back than at the front. The nose was broad and flat. The lips and chin protruded farther than its nose. But the hair that covered it, leaving bare only the parts of the face around the mouth, nose and ears, made it resemble an animal as much as a human. None of its hair, even on the back of its head, was longer than an inch, and that on its face was much shorter. Its ears were shaped like a human’s ears. But its eyes were small and black like a bear’s. And its neck was unhuman. Thicker and shorter than any man as I had ever seen.:
Why the discrepancy in eyewitness descriptions? Are we seeing two different types of creature? Do the descriptions vary so widely because of the way individual eyewitnesses perceive, process and disseminate the details of their encounters? Or do bigfoots simply differ in appearance from one another as much as humans do?
I don’t know. I do know, however, that I’ve been looking for bigfoot for the last 20 years of my adult life… and if I do have another face-to-face encounter, I’m not sure that I WANT to see those eyes again.
In fact, I fully expect to pee myself.
If you’ve had a close-up encounter and would like to share a description of the eyes you saw, please feel free to post a comment below.
Autumn
