Is Bigfoot in the Mountain State?

[From “The Daily Mail”. 2008.]

People who believe in Bigfoot will be trudging through the West Virginia woods in a couple of months hoping for a close encounter with the legendary creature.

The Mountain State has been picked by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, considered the nation's authority on the search for Sasquatch, as the site of an April expedition.

Based on the number of recent reports by people who claim they've seen the hairy apelike animal in person, Bigfoot experts and devoted believers think there's a good shot they'll find some evidence of its existence in the state.

Among those who'll be scouting backwoods hollers and mountain trails are a couple of folks with longtime West Virginia ties.

Stephen Willis is a retired military officer who grew up in West Virginia and now runs a successful business across the state line in Virginia manufacturing parts for industrial equipment and mining machines.

Pam Lovins works in healthcare administration in Huntington.

They're both well respected in their fields, have a lot of friends and seem to be bright, logical people.

But they acknowledge their hobby - searching for Bigfoot - can be difficult for some people to swallow.

"There's not a lot of funding out there for Bigfoot research, so we do have to have our day jobs," says Lovins, who's in her 40s and lives in Kenova.

Willis, 56, and Lovins are official investigators for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

Founded in 1995 by California attorney Matthew Moneymaker, the group has dozens of volunteer investigators, who by day are scientists, journalists and business owners. In their spare time, they meet with people claiming to have had a Bigfoot encounter and decide the validity of those eyewitness reports.

In the past couple of years, Willis and Lovins have investigated dozens of reported sightings in the Mountain State.

In April, they'll join other Bigfoot researchers for the four-day expedition through the West Virginia wilderness. They'll be looking for footprints and any physical evidence to prove their theory that Bigfoot abounds in places all across the country. And as always, they'll be holding their breath and hoping for a close encounter with the creature.

It will be the second time in the past few years such an expedition has taken place in the West Virginia woods.

In 2006, the organization led a mission over two consecutive weekends in Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties.

Willis, who's been on 14 such expeditions from California to Texas, will head up the search for the first time.

"We choose areas with a history of sightings," he said, careful not to divulge the exact locations of the April trek.

"We can't tell people exactly where we're going before we do this because we don't want people coming in with guns blazing," Willis said. "There are a lot of people who'd like to kill one.

"But we are just out to collect evidence, and if we have a sighting, that's great."

***

Willis, 56, is a native of Webster County. He lived in West Virginia until a couple of years ago, when he retired from the U.S. Army and opened up his industrial business near Wytheville, Va. He's getting ready to sell that, and plans to retire with his wife and travel full time, mostly to volunteer with the Bigfoot group.

He said he there's no doubt in his mind that Sasquatch exists.

Growing up, he was accustomed to his grandfathers talking about the weird noises and howls they heard in their rural community, and of running into things in the wild they could not explain.

"They would talk about unknown creatures in the woods that would make these holy whooping kinds of sounds," said Willis, a graduate of Cowen High School in Webster County. "A lot of it was from the early 1900s, when my grandfather was a little kid. They attributed some of the noises to mountain lions, but it always sounded to me like something else."

He distinctly remembers when his interest in Bigfoot piqued. It was 1960 - he was nine - and a report surfaced in a Clarksburg newspaper that a bread truck driver had a Sasquatch encounter. The man said a Bigfoot ran in front of his truck on a rural road on the Webster and Braxton County line.

"It scared him so bad he quit his job on the spot because he was too scared to drive the route," Willis said.

But it's Willis' own experience that makes him a believer.

"Like a lot of people, I've heard a lot of stuff," he said. "As a kid growing up, all the noises associated with Sasquatch I had heard, but you never know what they are.

"When I got involved with the (research organization) and started listening to the sounds and we started talking about this, I had heard them all. And (researchers) said, 'Well, that's because you had a Sasquatch living around you.'"

The closest Willis said he's ever gotten to actually seeing one of the animals was during an expedition last year in California. He was using a thermal imaging system to monitor a patch of wilderness at night, and he says he clearly saw one of the creatures lit up in infrared.

He also has photographs of footprints he found in Texas that he says are unmistakably the tracks of a large Sasquatch and its smaller offspring.

Willis says his wife, Kathryn, saw two adult male Bigfoots walking on a trail during the 2005 West Virginia expedition.

She was on one side of the Greenbrier River and saw them walking up a bank on the opposite side, not far from Watoga State Park.

Lovins, too, said her belief is grounded on evidence she has uncovered and the second-hand stories she's heard from people who've been up close and personal with Bigfoot.

"I've never seen them, but I've seen enough evidence of them, and I do believe I've heard them," she said. "When you are out in the woods or on the side of a mountain and you hear this, there's no mistaking it. It's not a bear or an owl or a coyote unless they weight 400 pounds. You know immediately when you hear it what it is and what it isn't."

Lovins said she'd been interested in Sasquatch lore since she was a child.

"I think it was the old 70s' 'In Search Of...' shows," Lovins said. "When they would show the old Patterson film, I just got interested."

Bigfoot aficionados offer up that film, allegedly showing a Bigfoot walking in Bluff Creek, Calif., in Oct. 1967, as the best visible account of a Sasquatch. Others say it's one of the best hoaxes perpetrated in American history.

But you don't need to travel to the Pacific Northwest to meet people who say they've got a Bigfoot living in their backyard.

***

Reported sightings detailed on the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization Web site, www.bfro.net, include 13 Class A sightings in West Virginia in just the past two years.

The organization designates sightings as Class A if a creature is clearly visible to a witness. Class B sightings have more potential for misidentification because they're based mostly on audible evidence, according to the Web site.

- August 12, 2007, just northeast of Linside in Monroe County: A 12-year-old girl reports seeing a Sasquatch as she was walking up her family's quarter-mile driveway to get the newspaper. It was a sweltering day, and she bent over to pull her hair up in a ponytail. When she looked up she saw a large, hump-backed creature with short hair that was clumped together. It was not far from her in a patch of trees, but ran off into the woods when she noticed it. Other family members reported hearing strange poundings in the woods around their home at the time, and of other wildlife suddenly becoming very scarce.

- July 29, 2006, near a surface mine outside of Ridgeview in Boone County: A biology crew had been commissioned to search an active mine site for evidence that rare Indiana bats were roosting there. Crew members, who were working at night, reported hearing strange whooping and howling sounds. On the third night of the operation, three crew members were inspecting a site at about 2:30 a.m. when they were startled by a noise. One member shone a flashlight at a nearby road, and the trio saw what they believe was a 7-foot-tall, two-legged creature "completely covered in short, coarse-looking black hair," except for its face, which was brown. The creature looked at the witnesses before scrambling up a nearby embankment. After finding several large footprints, the crew was sufficiently scared enough to break down their camp and leave the site.

- July 8, 2007, on U.S. 33 between Harmon and Seneca Rocks in Pendleton County: A Virginia couple was taking the long way home after visiting friends in West Virginia. The male driver threw on his brakes, as did the car behind them, and reported seeing what he at first described as a man wearing "a tree costume." He said the creature was covered in gray-greenish hair and was about six feet tall. Investigators said this was the third similar sighting in this area of Pendleton County during the summer of 2007.

- Aug. 10, 2006, on U.S. 52 right outside of Kenova in Wayne County: A woman and her grown son were driving to work at about 4:30 in the morning. Just two miles from their home, they rounded a corner and slowed down because they thought a man was crossing the road in front of them. The witnesses said they immediately identified the creature as a Bigfoot. They said it had black hair and walked upright, but hunched over and with what appeared to be a limp.

Lovins spoke to this mother and son and investigated the incident, deeming it quite credible.

"The people who have seen these things - it really affects them profoundly," Lovins said. "When they talk to you, they shake. For many of them, it's really upsetting.

"Some of them are embarrassed, and a lot of them think no one is going to believe them."

Lovins said she has investigated at least two dozen reported sightings in West Virginia in the past couple of years, most of the time meeting personally with witnesses and going to the scene of the alleged Bigfoot encounter.

"We have very specific criteria for investigating reports," she said. "The main thing is to check the credibility of the witness and to see geographically if it's likely. Sometimes it is just a mistaken identification. That happens sometimes in rural areas."

Often though, the sightings don't happen in the midst of a secluded thicket or a remote mountainside.

"A lot of them, it's really not out in the middle of nowhere, and that's why people run across them," Lovins said. "The sightings will occur right along roadways. One will cross a road right in front of a car, and that's when it happens."

Lovins said in most cases, people will report a Bigfoot sighting while trying to talk themselves out of what they've seen. In essence, even the believers are skeptical, she said.

"One man in Jackson County, he just kept telling me, 'I'm a religious person. I just don't believe in this stuff, but I'm telling you, I saw it.' I try to explain that it shouldn't have any affect on their religion and these sorts of things, that it's not something that's out of this world. It's an animal. It's just a separate species, and there's no hocus pocus to it."

**What, exactly, is a bigfoot?**

In various parts of the world, he is Yeti, Yeren, Quatchi, Yowie or the Abominable Snowman.

Bigfoot, among those who believe in his existence, is most commonly thought of as a solitary apelike creature that stalks the most rural, wooded areas of the country.

Many of those who research the legendary animal say they believe it is descended from Gigantopithecus, an early relative of the orangutan that lived millions of years ago in parts of Asia.

Some say the creature, who might have been hunted by early humans, walked across the Bering Land Bridge to North America and has managed for thousands of years to maintain its incredibly secluded lifestyle.

Officials with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization estimate there are anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 of the creatures living in the United States and Canada. They say there have been more than 3,500 credible sightings and documented footprints found.

Witnesses who say they've had an encounter with Sasquatch commonly describe him - or her - as being anywhere from 6 to 10 feet tall, covered with long, coarse hair and walking upright, though often hunched over and with a lopsided gate.

Reported sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures around the world go back thousands of years. The first documented cases in the United State date from the mid-1800s.

But the Bigfoot phenomenon really took hold here beginning in 1958, when a couple of workers claimed to have found giant 16-inch tracks on an old logging trail near Eureka, Calif. After one of them died years later, his family members revealed it had been a hoax.

It was less than a decade later, in 1967, when Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, a couple of Bigfoot junkies, set out to make a documentary about the creature. They maintain they stumbled upon one of the animals walking near the water at Bluff Creek, Calif. They produced 53 seconds of film footage that many people still consider the best visual proof that Bigfoot exists.

While many skeptics cast it aside as a hoax, no physical evidence has been uncovered showing that Patterson, who has died, or Gimlin, faked the video.

But skeptics also point to the lack of physical evidence that Sasquatch does exist - no body has ever been found.

Those who do believe are quick to say that it's rare for the carcasses of other large beasts, such as bears, to be discovered in the wild.

Bigfoot researches site as evidence the discoveries of large unexplained footprints and "stick structures" - tall and complex pilings of tree branches and limbs that researchers believe are the work of Sasquatch.

WCSRO, 2008.