Fayette Bigfoot Newly Sighted
Posted by: Loren Coleman on July 20th, 2009
The following breaking news has just been received from Pennsylvania researcher Stan Gordon.
Motorist Has Near Collision With Bigfoot In Pennsylvania
July 20, 2009
A report of a possible Bigfoot encounter in Pennsylvania was received by the Sasquatch Watch of Virginia and was then referred to Eric Altman, the Director of the (PBS) Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society to investigate. The incident occurred on July 10, 2009, outside of Uniontown, in Fayette County.
On July 15, 2009, a team from the PBS traveled to the location where the reported Bigfoot encounter occurred to interview the witness and to look over the area for any possible physical evidence. The team was comprised of Eric Altman and PBS members Dave Dragosin and his wife Cindy. Eric also invited me to go along to participate in the investigation.
When we arrived on the scene, the witness and her husband were awaiting us. We went through our introductions, then walked over towards the roadway where the encounter had occurred. The location of the incident was on a two lane roadway outside of Uniontown.
It was about 6 P.M. when the event occurred, and the weather was warm and clear at the time. The witness was driving down the road about 35-40 mph, when suddenly, she caught out of the corner of her eye, a figure coming from the left side and approaching her. Her first thought was that a person was about to walk out in front of her car, and she was about to hit the subject.
She suddenly swerved over to the right side of the road, and was thankful that nobody was there. As she was making the turn, she got a good look at the figure, and suddenly realized that it was not a person, but a strange creature. As she sat there for a moment, she looked into her rear view mirror, and realized that the creature had gotten behind her car. “I looked into the rear view mirror and I saw it leap across my trunk.”
While still pulled over on the roadside, the woman remained seated in her car, trying to regain her composure. She could not believe what had just occurred. Seconds later she looked up to see the creature now on her right side running quickly down the middle of another road about 75 feet away. That was the last time she saw it. The entire incident had lasted just several seconds, but enough time for the witness to recall a detailed description of a creature which she was certain was not human, or a person in a costume.
What she saw in daylight and at very close range was a dark colored, hair covered man-like creature, which she estimated was, “at least 6 feet tall or slightly taller.” The creature, which walked upright on two legs, had a head that was said to be large and elongated, and covered with hair that just looked wild.
The neck was somewhat hard to explain since it was covered in hair. The witness said that it appeared to be thin and long. “The neck looked strange because the head was big and the shoulders were wide.” The face was mainly covered in hair, yet the area that was exposed appeared to be very white. There was hair coming out from all over the face, like that of a dog or a wolf. The nose was flat and dark, but was also mostly covered in hair. The mouth could not clearly be seen. The ears were not seen since they were covered with hair as well.
The eyes were it’s most prominent feature that really caught the witnesses’ attention. The eyes were at least twice the size of a human and circular in shape. The eyes were dark, possibly black in color, wide set, and “wild looking.” There was “no iris, no whites.” The witness thinks that is why the eyes looked so odd. The wild look and the fierceness of the eyes of the creature, scared the woman.
The creature was stocky and muscular in appearance. The chest area was described as thick and hairy. The shoulders were wide and rounded. The arms were very long, hanging down to the knees or beyond. The witness said the hair on the arms was long, like ape hair. The woman didn’t recall seeing any muscles, however, it appeared as though it was muscular, and in good physical shape.
The witness had the impression that this creature was older in age. Very little detail was observed below the waist. There was no unusual sound or odor noted during the observation. The witness did have her windows up and air conditioner on.
At the scene, Dave Dragosin sketched an illustration of the creature under the direction of the eyewitness. Eric and the witness’s husband searched a wooded area not far from the location of the encounter, but nothing of interest was found.
We also went over to examine the car. As I was looking over the car body, I noticed what appeared to be an unusual scratch mark on the trunk surface on the left side of the vehicle. I pointed it out to the others, as well as the woman and her husband. They had never seen this surface area damage before.
The affected area was about 6 inches from the left tail light to the first striation of the scratches. The scratched area was about 8.5 inches long and 2 inches wide. There were numerous vertical and horizontal very thin scratch lines that went into the paint surface. There is the possibility that this might be related to the creature’s movements as it leaped across the trunk area from that side.
It was my impression that the witness was very sincere and competent. As she described to us what she had seen and experienced that night, it was evident that she was still emotionally upset by what had occurred. The witness told me that after the encounter, she drove down the road a short distance and parked her car. She sat there thinking about what had happened. She was trying to convince herself that this was a person, but realized that it couldn’t have been.
These are her reasons why she feels it was not a human. (A) The rate of speed the figure came across into the path of her car, it didn’t care that it was going to get hit. (B) The fast movement of the creature and the way it leaped over the trunk. She also had a good look at the creature and some facial features. The eyes of the creature frightened her.
When she arrived home she waited a little while before telling her family about what she had seen. She was initially met with some disbelief from her children. Her husband listened to her and believed that she had seen something. He told her she should call the police to see if anyone else had reported something similar. The witness said she was not calling the police, concerned that she would be ridiculed.
The direction that the creature was last observed moving towards would take it into a heavily wooded area in the direction of Jumonville [not Jammonville]. There has been a long history of Bigfoot sightings being reported for many years in this same general area of Fayette County.
For information on Bigfoot sightings in Pennsylvania, visit the (PBS) website. ~ Stan Gordon
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Hmmm… a long, thin neck? That’s the one part of this report that truly strikes me as odd – indeed, one of the few really noteworthy things that will likely make it stand out in my memory for a while. Were it not for the neck, I would be perfectly happy saying that this looks like another fairly typical sighting, and I’m sure some people would be disappointed that the creature had not been run over, owing to the possibility of collecting a body.
However, with the description of the neck, I am at a loss as to what this might be – Sasquatch isn’t exactly known for its impeccable giraffe impression, after all.
The long neck is weird but at the same time, I think it makes the story more believable to me. The witness isn’t just spouting off the same description we’ve heard every time that the average person could describe. Every unique description or account adds to the complexity of the North American Bigfoot.
From accounts of 7 foot tall bulky creatures in Northern California to the skinny 5 foot skunk ape descriptions in Florida, there does seem to be regional difference in these reports.
The article states it was hard to describe the neck, so it may have been on par with most other reports. A truly interesting sighting, and the woman sounds like a reliable witness.
“The neck was somewhat hard to explain since it was covered in hair. The witness said that it appeared to be thin and long. “The neck looked strange because the head was big and the shoulders were wide.” The face was mainly covered in hair, yet the area that was exposed appeared to be very white.”
These are not Bigfoot traits at all. Also, the creature didn’t have muscles, but appeared muscular? That is quite the contradiction. Also, this somewhat aggressive actions are odd. I’m a little skeptical.
Zilla – I believe what the witness meant was that she didn’t get a good look at the actual musculature of the animal, possibly because of the hairy covering, but that it appeared to have a fairly strong build.
Interestingly enough, it’s said that Pennsylvania and Ohio are the two states with the most reported ‘Bigfoot/hairy monster’ sightings, rather than California or the northwest as one might imagine.
There doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to doubt the witness at this point; she experienced something. My suspicion, based on her physical description as well as the creature’s apparent lack of concern about being run over/harmed, is that this was perhaps paranormal. It brings to mind the many instances in which these kinds of creatures are indeed hit by a car, attacked by dogs or even shot at with no apparent ill effects.
What about the second road the creature ran down the middle of? Was this a dirt road that could be checked for prints?
I expect that someday we’ll find that this critter is more kin to Mothman than to Bigfoot. Note the odd eyes and the effect they had on the witness.
Definitely in the paranormal category.
The neck is indeed anomalous; but I just read a report that described something similar in a MI sighting. And I’m sure I’ve read a couple of others at least, although the “no-neck” is overwhelmingly in the majority.
I’m just starting to think that we’re either seeing different species here, or a wide range of appearances that is characteristic of, well, at least one other primate. I don’t think that natural selection travels in a much narrower alley for the sasquatch than it does for humans. It’s odd; but can’t rule it out based on the rest of the account.
This is one of those occurrences for which no “mundane” explanation sounds mundane to me.
Odingirl: there are numerous accounts of sasquatch getting hurt (and at least a couple of one being killed) by bullets, and a couple by vehicles. I don’t think based on what I’ve read (and what’s in this account) that this animal either wanted to get hit or would have gotten out of the encounter alive if it had been. Animals also seem to have a problem with the idea of cars and how to avoid them. (The sas, with its apparent smarts, quite a bit less than others.) I’ve hit several; and in each case an animal with an easy escape route chose to my shock to dash under me at the last moment. Great thought about the road, though. Yet another issue with amateurs – especially amateurs under stress, like boy was this one ever – having encounters. They’re not playing CSI. They’re still trying to get their heads around what they saw. Some think that what they saw was so compelling they needed to look for nothing else – a mistake a scientist, we hope, wouldn’t make.
The long neck doesn’t seem out of line, if you consider what we are calling this, a Bigfoot, which many believe they are more human than an ape. So if that is indeed the case, then if like humans they all come in different size and shapes. I believe they are a product of their environment, we see many different sizes and shapes. Also we (people) do not describe everything the same as everyone else does. What is seen in a moment of high excitment may be described differently. So I do not discount this sighting.
The observation about the ears being invisible due to the amount of hair was the first thing that struck me, because it suggested to me the witness was either trying to reframe her ‘apparition’ into human terms, (thus making her account more compelling), or had certain preconceptions about what such ‘creatures’ SHOULD look like.
It also struck me because I personally think some of these Dogmen accounts are due to encounters with Bigfoot that have almost Alsatian dog like ears. Patty, for instance, seems to me to have such pointy ears. Whether such aural pointiness is due to species variation or gender, though, I’ve no idea.
Which brings me to the peculiarly skinny neck.
At first that didn’t quite chime right to me, though it seemed to confirm the witness is trying to be honest.
But then I remembered when a friend showed me a load of pictures of his partner and told me never to mention in her company her unusually long and narrow neck.
I hadn’t even particularly noticed, until he pointed it out, (other than perhaps to casually muse to myself as a painter it had a certain swanlike Modigliani-ness to it), but for weeks afterwards I went around noticing how many people had unusually long and thin necks.
The point being, if it’s possible some Bigfoot might have pointy ears, and it’s a fact some humans do have unusually long and thin necks, then maybe some Bigfoot might have long thin necks too.
I generally agree with Odingirl. The witness sounded very believable. It indeed could be paranormal. I also go by the witnesses’s sense that this could be an older Sasquatch. I’ve read of older Sasquatches that are “mature” enough to be unafraid of us “smooth-skins.”
Besides the report of the long neck, what struck me as most interesting was this description:
“The eyes were at least twice the size of a human and circular in shape. The eyes were dark, possibly black in color, wide set, and “wild looking.” There was “no iris, no whites.” ”
I’m not sure about it but it does not sound like this fits most decsriptions of Bigfoot eyes that I’ve heard of.
Since there have been reports of other “hairy beasts” running around in our forests besides Ole Hairy—could it be possible this may have been something else of Non-Sasquatch origin?
Maybe one of the “wolf beings”? Aliens? Who knows???
Odingirl’s conclusions make more and more sense the more I think about it. Good post and report.
cryptidsrus:
““The eyes were at least twice the size of a human and circular in shape. The eyes were dark, possibly black in color, wide set, and “wild looking.” There was “no iris, no whites.” ”
I’m not sure about it but it does not sound like this fits most decsriptions of Bigfoot eyes that I’ve heard of. ”
That actually squares with a lot of accounts I’ve read. The “lack” of whites and iris may not be so much one at all, but just that these may not be picked up by some witnesses because a different eye structure from humans makes them harder to see, especially given viewing angle, time of day, and…well, a host of other factors, but the first two would be prominent I would think. (A number of accounts do mention seeing whites.) The sasquatch seems to be primarily nocturnal; a very large proportion of sightings are at night, when we are less active. (And very unlikely to be active at all in the places in which these animals are usually seen.)
Alanborky makes the point that “long” can be in the eye of the beholder. And again: we’re primates too. And if an alien picked up almost any two of us at random, she might think she was dealing with two different species. I’d expect – and reports seem to bear out – a lot of individual distinctions within the “type” sasquatch description.
It’s a black-eyed kidsquatch!
Seriously, the long neck and black eyes sound like a deer. Everything else does NOT, though; but maybe seeing it in an odd posture for some reason and expecting to see a human she may have given an anthropomorphic interpretation of the deer.
Fhqwhgads – So, you pick two details out of the whole thing, and pronounce it a deer? What about the lack of visibility of the ears? The absence of a snout? Lack of hooves?
That’s like taking a description of an orange and, seeing that it’s round and textured, pronouncing it to be a golfball. Bit of a logical leap, or at least it seems like it to me.
This person in no conceivable way witnessed any known animal.
OK, let’s put it this way. If she did, she should never get her license back, and should probably not be permitted to walk around unattended, either. Or she’s making up the least likely lie a person would make up to account for bad driving.
As I said: for an encounter like this, there is no “mundane” explanation that sounds mundane. If she didn’t see a bigfoot, she’s stranger than what she didn’t see. Just sayin’, and everything in that account backs me up.
Cryptoinformant: Read past the first sentence. “Everything else does NOT, though” look like it was a deer. I just wonder if the observation may have been too brief to rule out even such a stretched interpretation.
I take issue with the statement that she saw anything. From the account it appears that she glimpsed something instead. “The entire incident had lasted just several seconds”, and apparently consisted of 3 distinct views, each of which must have been very brief indeed. Other parts of the story are clearly intended to make us believe that she had plenty of time to notice all kinds of details, like whether its ears were visible, but that seems inconsistent with the description of the time she had.
The biggest argument against a deer being mistaken for bigfoot is that the brain is more likely to fill in the details as something commonplace, like a deer along the side of the road, rather than exotic. On the other hand, we seem pre-wired to see people. I find it easy to pick out faces in the floral patterns of wallpaper, for example, and I think many ghost sightings are explained by this tendency.
I look for these in any account:
Does it seem likely the witness saw anything different from what is claimed?
Do anomalous details seem prominent enough to put this one in the “junk” category?
Does the witness seem from the account credible enough that the account can be taken seriously?
This one seems to pass on all three counts. The neck detail doesn’t, to me, disqualify it. If skeptics think witnesses can misidentify known animals to come up with something like a huge bipedal ape, they certainly have to go with the possibility that a witness – in the heat of a rapid-fire, stressful encounter – could misconstrue details of an unclassified animal. Not to say that we know enough about this one to know whether the witness in fact misconstrued it; it’s not the only time I’ve seen a report that wasn’t a no-neck animal.
Other things seem consistent with numerous reports I’ve read.
Until I know more about an account than I know about this one, I use the reasonable-man standard. That is, I presume a witness that has gotten this far in her life driving motor vehicles, among other things, isn’t certifiably insane. Which markedly escalates, absent other info, the possibility that she saw exactly what she says she did.
Fhqwhgads responds:
“Cryptoinformant: Read past the first sentence. “Everything else does NOT, though” look like it was a deer. I just wonder if the observation may have been too brief to rule out even such a stretched interpretation.
“I take issue with the statement that she saw anything. From the account it appears that she glimpsed something instead. “The entire incident had lasted just several seconds”, and apparently consisted of 3 distinct views, each of which must have been very brief indeed.”
I read past the first sentence. Many times. I say, emphatically: she saw what she says she did. Or: she’s lying. Or: they need to put her in a really-long-sleeved coat.
Most of the animals I see, I identify, conclusively, in far less than a second. That’s not particularly fantastic; we tend to do that with stuff, all of us do. The witness is emphatic on the subject’s color and bipedality. When she compares, only two subjects come up as possibilities, both emphatically rejected by the witness: human, or human in costume. And several seconds is a huge amount of time in which to do that.
What she describes couldn’t be a deer. Not if she is sound of body and mind as anyone driving a car needs to be. I’ve never seen a deer I didn’t identify as one, instantly. And I think that’s average.
Unless I see evidence that tells me the witness could be lying or unhinged, I consider what the witness saw a high-order possibility. A moment’s reflection on how all of us depend, instant to instant throughout our lives, on what our eyes tell us should tell us that this is reasonable to do. Unless all of us start doing that, i.e., believing that witnesses are not automatically to be doubted, a sasquatch is going to have to walk into a zoo and lock the gate behind it before we start coming close to confirming what people are seeing.
I mean, it’s just an ape. What could the big deal be here?
Final note: I can’t “take issue with the witness’s statement that she saw anything.” She was there. Were you?
Fhqhwgads – I did read past the first sentence; you ended your post by making it sound, quite clearly, as though you thought she saw a deer “in an odd posture”, and, “expecting to see a human”, turned the deer into Bigfoot.
The item that I found most interesting was the time. It was a Friday night at 6pm with clear skies … and there were no other eyewitness reports?
No kids playing in the streets, nobody coming home from work, etc.
bill 1962:
Oh, I’d be surprised if a hundred people didn’t see it. OK, fifty. Twenty, at absolute rock bottom minimum.
But some – indeed many, possibly most – might not have gotten near as good a look as this witness got, not enough to be really sure of anything
Now. Who’s gonna be the nut who steps forward and says they saw Bigfoot?
Looks like we got at least one. Just kidding. Maybe more will come forward now. Bless that driver’s heart.