Oregonbigfoot.com Photo Research Journal

Mission: Night Scream I
May 1999
FINAL REPORT AND PHOTO JOURNAL

The Group:

John (Magellan) Freitas, Crescent City, CA - Project Coordinator
Joel (The Caboose) Borges, Crescent City, CA - Command Leader
Jeremey Maine, Ukiah, CA - Command Leader Asst.
Brian Dischler, San Jose, CA - Perimeter
Autumn (Scarlet) Sheppard-Williams, Cottage Grove, OR - Perimeter & Response
Meaghan Dischler, San Jose, CA - Perimeter
Lance (Commando) McVay, Hayward, CA - Response
Manuel (Manny, The Assassin, asesino) Solorio, Eagle Point, OR - Response
Kelly (Goat Boy) Berdahl, Bakersfield, CA - Response
Mark & Mara Stone, Madera, CA - Perimeter
Guillermo DeHollander, Ellensburg, WA - Perimeter & Response
Don LeBars Jacksonville, OR - Response
Jonathan LeBars Jacksonville, OR - Response
Scott LeBars Jacksonville, OR – Response

Mission: Night Scream was the brainchild of John Freitas, B.F.R.O member and former police officer, currently a resident of Crescent City, California.

Friday, May 28, 1999

Guillermo and I had arrived early in the afternoon. Since we weren’t meant to meet up with the others until 6 p.m., we took a drive and ended up in an area called Grassy Flats. There, two local boys were waiting for their overheated truck to cool down. We asked them if they needed help and the subsequent conversation turned to the BFRO and what we were doing there. I asked the boys if they had ever seen a bigfoot. Both said no, but one mentioned that he had heard one once. The boy’s name was Ryan Lee and he was a resident of Crescent City, CA. Ryan reported that on July 4, 1997, at about 11:30 p.m., he and several friends drove to the river access point on Walker Rd. outside of Hiouchi to set off some bottle rockets. Approximately half an hour later, the boy who owned the truck was playing with the stereo system while Ryan and another friend climbed around on a large redwood log. He said the friend had the music turned down and the bass turned up when suddenly, over the top of the boom, Ryan heard a sound coming toward them. Whoop, whoop, whoop, grrr… The soundmaker was about a mile away and approaching fast. The boys heard the pattern four different times. He mentioned that the volume was remarkable and the hair stood up on the back of his neck. I theorized that perhaps the whistle of the bottle rockets had attracted the creature, which reportedly makes a similar sound.

Bear track in mud near Walker Rd.  Note the large toe prints

Ryan gave us exact directions to the location and Guillermo and I went to check the area. We located Walker Road easily and stopped to poke around. Fifty yards from the road Guillermo found a marshy spot. The mud around the small creek yielded two prints. Five toes were clearly visible on each track, but there were no heel prints. I took some video and crossed the stream. At the other side of the marshy area I found some broken trees in a clearing. No sooner had we begun to inspect the trees than something crashed through the brush nearby. We followed the intermittent crashing and crackling sounds until we reached the road but saw nothing. After making a note of the exact location, we drove on past and located the river-access where the boys had shot their fireworks. By then, it was time to meet the others.

We all met for dinner at Patrick Creek Lodge around 6 p.m. After introductions, Guillermo and I shared our story with the group and showed video of the track we found. Manny brought in a cast of a bear track that looked remarkably like our print, but we couldn’t be sure until we investigated the site more thoroughly.

The conversation turned to the latest sightings in the Hayfork area. Our original travel plans placed us in the southern Oregon, Kalmiopsis Wilderness area the first night, the Bluff Creek area the second night, and south to the vicinity of Hayfork the third night. Coincidentally, however, in the last month before the trip, four purported sightings came out of Hayfork, forcing us to rethink our itinerary. After much deliberation, John elected to adhere to our original plan for the first night, but to modify the remainder of the trip in order to arrive in the Hayfork area on the second night. Then, if any activity occurred, we’d have one more night to stay in the area. But if that location proved unfruitful we could move to Bluff Creek for the duration of the trip. At some point during the trip we would also investigate the track and the broken trees. However, since the track didn’t show any heel print, I was reluctant to modify our entire outing to go look at it.

Outside after dinner John debriefed us all on the sound survey method and confirmed our team assignments. Our trip began as we headed north through O’Brien, Oregon, into the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.

Once there, John blasted some test calls near Snow Camp to make sure the equipment was working and we stopped to receive instructions for spacing the vehicles. With a spread of 2/10ths of a mile between each car, we zeroed-out our odometers and via radio communications John advised how far to move each time. A mile down the road, John promptly got stuck in the snow. Kelly had to pull him out, and John’s tires stank like burned rubber the rest of the night. We couldn’t have smelled Bigfoot if he was breathing down our necks!

Approximately 8 miles north of Snow Camp we received our first return call. Lance, who was in Manny’s truck a few hundred feet in front of John, radioed that he heard a whistle or scream just after John played a moan. The transmission follows:

Lance: This is car #1, we’re in position.
John: 10-4, everybody ready?.
(John plays wailing moan twice, then plays a whistling scream)
Lance: John, uh, car #1. We’ve got something.
John: 10-4 Go ahead and let me know if you want another call or whatever. Try to get a location out of it.
Lance: We just got it again. Go again, John.
John: Are you getting a call back?
Lance: Unless you just broadcast it again.
John: Negative.
Lance: Then, yeah, we got something.
John: Ok, is it in front of you, up to the right or down here in the valley?
Lance: It’s up to the left. Up to our left.
John: About one o’clock or what position?
Lance: Pointing directly down the road it’s right toward the moon from us.
John: OK, 10-4. About how far out?
Lance: Way out there.
John: OK, 10-4. Everybody black out, get on the yellow (radio), tell everybody to black out, drive real slow and let’s go ahead and creep up and let’s go two miles. If that about right?
Lance: Well, we’re about one mile ahead of you so why don’t we all go one mile and you broadcast from where we are?
John: 10-4. Everybody copy?

We moved another mile down the road as instructed. John blasted another series of calls, and we waited. After getting no response, John decided we should attempt to drive to where the caller was; in order to do this, we had to backtrack several miles to Oregon Mt. Road. The repositioning took over an hour, and once there we had a single return call that came from in front of John but behind Lance and Manny. There no further response; however, John thought he might have captured the sound on tape.

The call led us to the bottom of the valley near where the road met back up with Hwy 199. For half an hour we shined our lights into the creek bed, hearing slight popping and cracking, but seeing nothing and hearing no more calls. At the junction of Oregon Mt. Road and 199 we stopped and broadcast again, but all was quiet. After much deliberation, we agreed to drive back down to Walker Rd. where Guillermo and I had found the track, set up camp on the sandbar and retire for the night. John left to go repair the speaker mount, which had broken in a fall during the drive. The excitement of the evening, in addition to Manny’s hilariously awful jokes, made it difficult to sleep and it was 4:30 a.m. before the last of us passed out. We woke up between 8:30 and 9 a.m., groggy and exhausted.

Saturday, May 29, 1999

The Redwoods at Walker Rd, near the spot where the Playmate,
or Redwoods, Footage was recorded
VIEW THE VIDEO - NOTICE: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE

John returned while we were packing up camp, with the speaker mount repaired. Guillermo and I led the team to the location of the track and after close inspection we concluded that it was a fresh bear track. However, I went to further inspect the broken trees and saw that one of them had hair all over it.

John inspects one of the broken trees

The hairs were about 3" long, wavy and medium brown in color. John secured the samples, cutting off the entire portion of the tree and placing it in a brown paper bag. We then collected stray hairs from the rest of the tree and bagged those as well. John mentioned the hair appeared very similar to a sample he sent in previously which came back as no known species.

John saws off the portion of the tree with the hair on it

John holds up one of the hairs - notice the wavy appearance and brownish-red color

A small bunch of the hair sample. The hairs to be analyzed
were handled with rubber gloves. This was our keepsake. :)

Meaghan also found a single, whitish hair on another of the broken trees. The trees were small, 1" to 1 ½" in diameter Douglas Firs that had been broken and twisted approximately three feet off the ground. The hairs will be sent to the Oregon Primate Research Center to be analyzed by Henner Fahrenbach.

Meaghan watches John retrieve the hair sample she found while Mark films

John informed us that this was the exact location where the Playmate footage was filmed two years before (in which a film crew was in the area shooting a Playboy Playmate video in the late summer of 1997. They shot footage of a Bigfoot creature crossing the road in front of their motor home). The clip has been discounted by some as a hoax, but interestingly enough, the boys’ story of the Bigfoot "whooping" in that area coincides perfectly with the date of the Playmate video. Suddenly, it dawned on me that the twisted trees were located within a crabapple orchard, which John explained was part of the old Walker homestead. The apples would have been ripe at the same time, providing an excellent food source for the creature.

We were on the road by 1:00 p.m. with hair samples in hand. About an hour and a half later we arrived at the museum in Willow Creek to take a look at the progress on the new Bigfoot Museum which will be finished by its scheduled Grand Opening on Labor Day weekend. Some group photos were taken and we spoke with some tourists and locals.

The group poses for a photo in front of the new Bigfoot statue at the Willow Creek Museum

Bob Everett shows John the locations of the latest sightings

From there we traveled to Weaverville to meet with local researcher Bob Everett who was busy promoting the Bigfoot Gemboree rock and mineral show. Bob gave us details and locations of the four reported sightings around the Hayfork area. One of the sightings he called "iffy"; the woman reported seeing two creatures, a mother and a baby, yet it was dark and she didn’t have her glasses on at the time. Bob also claimed that a female fire department volunteer was fired for discussing her sighting of a male creature, 6’ o 7’ tall, 80 yards away, which stood completely still until she went to move to a different fishing hole. Barker Creek, 6.3 miles off Hwy 3 before Hayfork, was the location of one of the sightings. Another sighting occurred at Ewing Reservoir (which Bob felt was the most credible report), and yet another at Drinkwater Gulch, on Hwy 10, which is the back road leading to Hyampom. Also, a man named Dwight, on the last day of deer season in 1998, saw a sasquatch up near Barker Pass in a burned area near a rocky outcropping. Bob also mentioned that on road 29N31 there was a 30’ by 60’ area of trees broken off at the 8’ or 9’ level. All of the recent sightings occurred no more than five miles away from the next; it appeared that the creatures were moving toward the southwest.

A deer looks on as we blast screams into the hills

After consulting the map, we drove to Hayfork, ate dinner, charged the radio batteries and went toward the sighting area. On the way, we spotted a herd of deer and blasted some calls to see what effect it had on them. The animals, four does and a buck, were visibly disturbed when the calls were sounded; they bounded up the hill with their ears back. We played the sounds for a herd of cattle and llama, none of which seemed very startled. During the drive, we also came into a valley where the birds were chirping loudly, and I asked John to play the sounds to see what effect it had on them. They kept singing throughout the broadcast; I wondered then if it wasn’t the sound of the creatures in the woods, but their actual presence which accounts for the silence of the rest of the wildlife. Once in the woods, we continued to blast calls until just before dark, when we came upon a gravel pit and set up camp.

Once base camp was set, a team of five went out to broadcast and try to draw the creatures in. With Lance and Manny in car #1, John in position #2 with the sound system, and Kelly and I in the third car, we drove about 8 miles up from base camp and blasted calls all the way back to camp. Unfortunately, the night was quiet and there was no response.

Sunday, May 30, 1999

This hilltop rock quarry made for a great centralized camp and the calls carried well from here

In the morning, The LeBars boys went out to play some sounds from a small recorder to see if they could drum up some activity. Kelly rode his quad-runner out to have a look around. Meanwhile, back at camp, we heard knocking sounds as if someone was chopping kindling deep in the woods, but we had seen no other campers in the vicinity. There were four sharp knocks in quick succession, and the pattern repeated three or four times. I hit rocks together in order to get a response but it didn’t happen again. Kelly’s trip was uneventful and Jonathan and Scott didn’t find anything. But they did scare us witless when they came back from a different direction than they left. We thought Bigfoot was closing in for sure!

This is the area where I heard a whistle over the top of Kelly's diesel

On the drive out towards old Hyampom road, we stopped in the Indian Camp area. I had heard a loud, sharp whistle, and before I could alert the others, Guillermo radioed and asked, "Scarlet, did you hear that?" I confirmed that I had, and knew that it had to have been really loud because I heard it over the top of Kelly’s growling diesel engine. We stopped and broadcast some sounds and a local woman came up to see what we were doing. When we explained, she said that she thought she had heard a response to our calls, but couldn’t clearly identify the direction from which it came because she was talking on the phone at the time. We heard semi-automatic gunfire coming from the shooting range several miles away. An owl hooted. Brian and Meaghan heard a moan along with the sound the owl made. We tried to use the parabolic microphone to record it on tape but failed. We did record the owl sound, however, and John mentioned that Bigfoot has been reported to sound like an owl when up close; he plans to send those vocalizations off to be analyzed. There were no subsequent sounds, so we continued on.

Since the Hayfork trip had been so quiet, we would try to make it up to Bluff Creek and Louse Camp. The area is not only a history lesson for new researchers and Mecca for all those interested in bigfoot, but has proved to be a hotspot for activity up to present day. It was this road that Jerry Crew was building in 1958 when all the activity began that eventually led to the filming of the famous Patterson footage on October 20, 1967. Manny had found a footprint and cast it two years earlier at Fish Lake, near there, and I had found broken trees and heard a whistle in the area in 1993. We were looking forward to camping at infamous Louse Camp, where Tom Slick and his crew had stayed years before.

Unfortunately, Bluff Creek Road was gated off about 15 miles up due to Dutch Elm root disease, so we had to turn around. Manny thought that perhaps we could camp at Dry Lake, so we drove down there, blasting calls all the way, scaring a couple of campers in the process who said they "thought Bigfoot was coming"!

Down around the bend, Manny and I were communicating via wireless headsets, and he said, "Scarlet, did you hear that!?" I heard a knocking sound, but thought it was my headset bumping against the doorframe of the car. I said, "That knocking sound? Did that come from outside?" Manny confirmed that it did and we radioed the others to stop. John was up two cars ahead of us and got out of his car. He walked several yards down the road and was promptly startled by something crashing through the brush right in front of him. The night was pitch dark and he couldn’t see what it was. He moved back toward the safety of his truck, but didn’t hear it again. Soon, the owl sound came again. We waited, but heard nothing else, so we moved on to Dry Lake.

Lance is lit up dramatically by firelight as he tells a ghost story

The road to Dry Lake was gated as well, but rather than drive around all night looking for another place to camp we decided to just stay there on the gravel road. Brian and Meaghan left, having to catch a flight at 10 a.m. Guillermo left as well. The rest of us set up camp and proceeded to broadcast screams for the rest of the night. Half of the crew went to sleep; the remainder sat around the campfire. Don scared us with every Sasquatch be-heading story he could muster up. Lance told a fantastic, lyrical ghost tale he wrote and John amused us with his foul mouth and quick wit. Kelly did an amazing Arnold Schwartzenegger impression and Manny and I giggled all night, having drunk far too much coconut-flavored rum (which, by the way, is the most heinous stuff on God’s green earth!). We played the last scream at 4 a.m. Everyone who was already asleep was so exhausted they didn’t wake. The birds sang us to sleep that morning.

Monday, May 31, 1999

The following day, we were up bright and early again at 9 a.m. We took a brief trip to Fish Lake, but the campground was so crowded that it was hopeless to try to look for tracks. Mark and Mara, and Don and the boys said goodbye. The remainder of us went to check a grassy meadow that Manny said was usually muddy. It was dry when we got there. We didn’t find any tracks, but we did find a large pile of scat with bones fragments and hair in it that we thought was cougar.

Lance examines a pile believed to be cougar scat

On the way back up Hwy 101, John also made a brief stop at the Hunter Creek area, where some footage of a sasquatch was shot a couple of years back. The hill where the bigfoot was seen looks steep but fairly easy to traverse, covered by mostly deciduous growth. The riverbed has big sandbars for camping and tracking, and the whole area has been active for quite some time. It looks like a good spot to concentrate our efforts next time and many of us are already looking forward to the next trip; we plan to tackle a smaller area, with more foot traffic and less driving.

Summary

In many ways, the trip was largely a success. We managed to get an extremely diverse group of people together and cover a lot of terrain in a short amount of time. The response the first night was exciting, as was finding the hair samples the second day. Many of us felt, in retrospect, that perhaps we should have stayed in Southern Oregon and pursued the responses further, but we had to make a judgement call based on the information that there had been multiple sightings in the Hayfork area. John will be posting updates about the hair and vocalization samples as we get them.

Text: Autumn Williams
Photos: Bob Williams

Do you have information which might be helpful to us? Please drop us a line!