A glimpse into the world of those who pursue one of nature’s great mysteries while attempting to understand why proof of Sasquatch still eludes them.
Story by Andrew Creasey
Photos by Will Kanellos
Illustrations by Edwin Ouellette
A clear, moonless sky casts dim starlight, illuminating the faint outline of Thom Powell’s shoulders. It is one o’clock in the morning on what was just hours ago a cool Saturday night, and Powell and his dog, Wilson, are threading through the dew-strewn prairie grass that runs parallel to the Clackamas River on the forested outskirts of Oregon City, Oregon.
Suddenly, Wilson shatters the eerie silence with an agitated spurt of barks. Powell’s flashlight flicks on. Its beam pierces the darkness, scanning the scattered pine trees for a glimpse of what alarmed the dog. A pair of eyeballs hovers in the blackness like a pair of glowing orbs. Powell edges forward to get a closer look. As his flashlight’s radius increases, the fiendish night beast is revealed to be a mere cow.
Powell looks back with a barely discernible, wry grin. “I hear coyotes all the time. There have been wolf sightings, too,” he says in a grave whisper. “Sometimes it takes nerves of steel to be out here. I figure I’ll be OK as long as I can run faster than you.”
For Powell, this is not an ordinary stroll through the woods. These are lands he has traversed hundreds of times with a specific purpose in mind. He is on the prowl for a creature more formidable than a pack of coyotes and more elusive than a wolf: Powell is searching for Sasquatch.
While tromping through the woods in the wee hours of the morning in search of a mythical, ape-like human is not a common weekend excursion, Powell is not alone in his quest. He is a small facet of a closely knit, zealous subculture of Sasquatch seekers.
The first reported Sasquatch sighting in North America was in New York in 1818, printed in New England’s The Exeter Watchman. The report relates the experience of a man who saw a hairy, upright creature emerge from the woods. While this marks Bigfoot’s first appearance in the modern media, he has existed in the myths of Native Americans for many years prior. The Kwakiutl of British Columbia claim to have regular encounters with Bigfoot-like creatures during vision quests, while the Hoopa Valley Tribe of the Redwood Forests and the Athabascans of the Yukon River also tell tales of a “wild man of the woods.”
The modern Bigfoot phenomenon surfaced in 1958, when a man named Jerry Crew received national media exposure when he brandished a pair of plaster castings depicting two enormous feet, produced by what the press dubbed “Bigfoot.” Then, in 1967, a short, blurry strip of film captured by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin in Bluff Creek, California, ignited a debate that still rages today.
For those who believe the creature captured on film exists, they spend their time casting plaster, examining limb ratios, researching the evolution of bipeds, and studying locomotion. They camp out at night with thermal cameras, whooping into the air in the hopes of culling out the elusive creature that could redefine our conception of the natural world.
It’s a difficult case to sell. Sasquatch hunters face ridicule from all sides. Skeptics continually point to the lack of skeletal remains as proof that Sasquatch is a hoax. Most scientists are already convinced that Sasquatch doesn’t exist so they do not investigate it. To them, it is akin to a formal study of the methodology behind Santa’s gift delivery route.
What then motivates these hunters? Is the search for Sasquatch galvanized by the need to solve a scientific mystery or by the lust for media attention and fortune?
Regardless of their motivation, they investigate a field that John Napier, a British paleoanthropologist and one of the first scientists to research Sasquatch, calls the Goblin Universe. This is the categorization where all fantastical creatures undiscovered by humanity, reside. As tangible, testable remains of these creatures mount, the Goblin Universe has been given a new name, one that displays its newfound scientific fortitude: cryptozoology.
Sitting beside a crackling campfire on his secluded acreage, the firelight paints a flickering pattern across Powell’s gaunt, stubble-ridden jaw line. His weathered hands hold a sharpened stick skewering a bratwurst over smoldering embers. His property is vast, abutting a forested hill that marks the beginning of miles of uncivilized territory. It’s around ten p.m. Powell’s wife and two children are already asleep. For Powell, however, the night is just beginning. Over the campfire, Powell dissects the Sasquatch phenomenon, revealing the theoretical and methodological divisions among researchers and hunters, while telling a tale of his own journey through the Goblin Universe that ranges from bait traps to aliens.
The story of Powell’s evolution as a Sasquatch hunter began in a way similar to many others confronting the phenomenon for the first time: He was a skeptic. His first encounters with Bigfoot occurred as a middle school teacher when he lived in Portland. On the days before a break, when half the class was already sunbathing in tropical locales, Powell would show documentaries of Bigfoot to his class as an example of pseudo-science.
After viewing the tapes six times a day, Powell began to see the supernatural enigma in a different light. Around that time, he moved to a rural corner of Oregon City and started hearing tales from his neighbors about the strange sounds coming from the woods at night.
As reports from the community continued, Powell was increasingly drawn to further investigate the Sasquatch mystery. From that moment on, his journey began as a flesh-and-blood hunter, one of two different classifications of Sasquatch investigators he identifies.
The basic tenant of the flesh-and-blood approach is that Sasquatch is an ape possibly related to the ancient primate species Gigantopithecus, which lived up to 300,000 years ago. Hunters who believe this theory hike into the woods outfitted with camouflage and thermal cameras. They hit trees with sticks and call into the night in hopes of eliciting a response from Sasquatch, who, they believe, will be caught with enough time and technology. For Powell, this was a logical place to start.
“I started out thinking, ‘Bait the Ape,’” Powell says. “I figured I’d just put some cameras out and get to the bottom of this thing.”
In the mean time, Powell fantasized about the glory that would accompany his incoming Sasquatch evidence. “There are a lot of hunters that have delusions of grandeur,” he says. “They think that they will find this thing and be great and famous. I remember feeling that way myself when I first started out, because it felt like such a solvable problem.”
Other than footage of blurred shadows, the images never appeared. Instead, his cameras showed constant signs of tampering. The wires would fray, or the whole device would be ripped from its perch. Once, Powell found a single, solitary leaf placed over the camera lens. For Powell, the implications of his consistent failure at the hands of some mischievous, intelligent force were daunting.
“You never get the picture you’re looking for,” he says. “I only got more mystery and pretty clear indications that I was being toyed with. The message seemed to be: You’re not watching us; we’re watching you.”
It wasn’t long until Powell experienced an event that, to him, transformed his doubts into reality. It was an encounter that changed his approach to hunting Sasquatch.
One night, while walking the trails that lace the woods behind his house, Powell heard a crashing noise that he mistook for a buck. “Up to that point, I could see the outlines of the trees by the moonlight,” Powell says. “The next moment, I couldn’t see anything at all. I could hear it scuffing its feet though. It was less than ten feet away. It was right there.”
Without a flashlight, Powell was left with the illuminated dial on his digital watch. “I was terrified,” Powell says. “So, I shine my light to try to see this thing and at that exact moment, something from behind me flicks my ear.”
Startled, Powell whirled around, holding his watch by his face, desperately trying to penetrate the darkness. “At that point, I felt incredibly stupid,” Powell says with a laugh. “Here I am, holding this wristwatch like it’s a phaser that will defend me. I just got out there and ran back to the house.”
As he sat on his deck to take his boots off, he heard a loud cackling emanating from the woods. It was so loud that Powell saw his wife turn on the bedroom light. She does not believe in Sasquatch’s existence, but said it was unlike anything she had ever heard in the woods before.
“Something was laughing at me,” Powell says. “They had me back there. I was surrounded.”
Several weeks later, some friends visited Powell and camped out in his backyard. While Powell stayed by the fire, they went out into the woods to explore. Powell recalls hearing some crashing around, but he didn’t give it any thought, thinking it was just his friends. They, however, came back to campsite in shock.
“They said they were sitting on the bench, and all of a sudden they couldn’t see,” Powell says. “It was like something threw a blanket over their vision. And I never told them that I experienced that same thing, so their encounter was not colored by my thinking.”
These are the kinds of encounters that Powell became aware of—encounters that didn’t fit into any traditional scheme of Sasquatch legends. When he tried to frame his experiences of sudden blindness around Sasquatch, Powell started suspecting they had an ability to render someone partially incapacitated.
“Once you reach that conclusion, it really changes the game,” Powell says. “You’re not going to catch anything. The only things you’re going to catch are what they are willing to give you.”
After that experience, Powell stopped looking for footprints. He dismantled his cameras and took a different approach, which landed him in the camp of the second kind of Sasquatch seeker: the paranormal types.
Along with his evolving thoughts regarding the nature of Sasquatch, Powell was becoming frustrated with the lack of conclusive, physical evidence. The camera tampering and the unexplainable, shadowy images did not stand up as proof outside of the context. Powell reached a point when he realized the evidence that was coming in was not advancing the research.
“At a certain point, it’s like ‘I get it,’” he says. “There are only so many footprints, and ‘I saw Bigfoot crossing the road’ sightings that we can use until they stop teaching us something new. There are so many sighting reports online now that anything you read seems to be just a rehash of older ones. They are less useful now than ever because they are contaminated by the pool of reports that already exist.”
Convinced that continually gathering the same accounts and evidence from anomalous sightings was fruitless, Powell started to work with habituation investigators—people who live on the fringes of national forests and wilderness areas, claiming to have regular contact with Sasquatch. From there, he found a couple living near Mt. Rainer, Allan and April Hoyt, who claimed to have observed three generations of Sasquatch, which they even named. For Powell, this was the type of work needed to advance the field of cryptozoology: regular encounters at a consistent location to develop behavioral patterns and possibly foster communication with a creature Powell regarded as intelligent.
Powell was delving into the paranormal world where Sasquatch’s existence was not questioned, and his status as an intelligent being was merely a jumping-off point. These people despise the term “Bigfoot believer” because it implies that some sort of faith is needed to pursue the phenomenon. They have moved past the mainstream hiccup of existence that holds most people back from lending any serious credence to the ideas the paranormal researchers supported.
At this point in his journey, things turned bizarre. Through his studies, he became aware of a group of people within the Sasquatch community that claimed that they could communicate with the creatures through trance-like dream states. One of them, Steve Frederick, who has had four separate visual sightings of Sasquatch, started working with Powell on the habituation case in Mt. Rainer.
“Communicating with Sasquatch is like a phone call,” Frederick says. “It may have good reception, and you don’t always know where the receiver of the message is located.”
Using a double-blind study method, Powell developed a plan to test the legitimacy of Frederick’s claims of contact with Sasquatch. Powell asked Frederick to tell the creatures to step in front of the cameras that the Hoyts had placed around their property. Without telling Frederick where the camera was located and without telling the Hoyts what he had planned, Powell waited for confirmation that the message had been sent.
Frederick, entering into a meditative state, tried to oblige Powell’s request. “I just try to be respectful and pleasant,” Frederick says. “They don’t want any tricks or games.”
It didn’t take long. Frederick called Powell and told him the message was delivered. Less than 48 hours later, according to Powell, the Hoyts called him in excitement. They had hours of footage of large, shadowy shapes with faint shoulder outlines moving in and out of the frame—by far their busiest night since they installed the cameras. To Powell, however, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t conclusive, and it wouldn’t convince any of the skeptics.
So Powell called on Frederick again. This time, Frederick was to ask the creatures to leave a bone. Powell was after physical proof. Again, Frederick sent the message; and again, less than 48 hours later, the Hoyts, who had not been informed of this latest request, called with news that they had just found a bone at the base of the camera tree.
The bone turned out to be the breastbone of an emu. Once again, the evidence was compelling and difficult to explain, but could not stand alone outside of context.
Powell forged on. He talked to more people and encountered more extraordinary theories. He found people who believed Sasquatch was an alien that traveled to Earth from an undiscovered planet through wormholes in space. He chronicled all of these tales in his book The Locals: A Contemporary Investigation of the Bigfoot/Sasquatch Phenomenon. The book was both lauded and lambasted for its inclusion of every type of Sasquatch encounter, from the scientifically framed theories focused on footprint analysis to the paranormal claims that went as far as to say that Sasquatch was a hyper-dimensional being teleporting around the country imbued with the power to render a human immobile through will alone. While these ideas seem laughable to most, they encapsulate the essence of Powell’s approach to Sasquatch: stay open to any idea, because, until the mystery is solved, anything is possible.
Today, Powell is more or less retired. He has chased physical evidence of Sasquatch for over a decade. “At this point, it’s not a scientific thing; it’s a hobby,” he says. “If I continue my pursuit of physical evidence, I’m just jousting with windmills.”
He also can’t disprove the common argument that Sasquatch hunters are creating patterns in chaos and seeing things that aren’t there, essentially creating the Sasquatch phenomenon in their minds to validate the work they have done.
“I understand that the brain can trick you into believing and seeing things. After you spend so much time out there and encounter these things, you think you can develop a better sense of what’s real and what’s not,” Powell says. “But for the skeptics, that’s the first thing they think: ‘They’re making it all up.’ I don’t blame them. I would, too.”
He knows that his stories are bizarre, and he doesn’t try to convince people of their validity anymore.
“There’s a standard of evidence that the Sasquatch phenomenon cannot provide,” Powell says. “Even though I pursue it seriously, I use it in class as an example of something that is scientifically not proven, and therefore, doesn’t exist. I’d like to see the day when that changes, but I’m not holding out hope that it will.”
He still teaches his classes about Sasquatch, using it as tool to instruct students about collecting evidence and conducting the scientific method. It’s one of his most popular topics. “The kids are fascinated about the subject because, to this day, it is a scientific mystery,” Powell says.
Ultimately, there is something going on in the woods of the Northwest. Whether a creature undiscovered by science is roaming our lands, or a vast, silent conspiracy of men, spanning across five decades, is scattering fraudulent footprints in remote locations to fool the public; the Sasquatch phenomenon is real. The pursuit of this mystery, the willingness to cast aside what we think we know, in the face of public ridicule, is at crux of the hunt for Sasquatch. These people don’t have pictures of the creatures smiling for the camera or skeletal remains. What they do have is an urge to discover something new to redefine what we think we know.
This concept, this ceaseless pursuit of a truth yet to be proven, validates the Sasquatch investigation. Hunters like Powell are proof that people remain fascinated by mystery. Since the dawn of our existence, we have constantly sought answers to questions labeled as far-fetched or unsolvable. It’s this wellspring of curiosity that has propelled civilizations forward, and it’s this same force that continues to lure Powell into the forest, scanning the darkness for a sign of Sasquatch.
 

Gallery • 6 Photos

In the Shadows of Sasquatch