Part VI… Bigfoot Sightings

My partner at the time was David Smith. We had some history together. We had first met when a newspaper ran an article about Dave putting together a Bigfoot expedition at Mt. Saint Helens. There was a big picture of him and a group of people with all their equipment laid out on a lawn. It looked like they weren’t joking around. I called and offered my services for the trip since I had been going to the area for many years and knew the place quite well. He accepted me into their group and we went from there… but this is about Blewett Pass, Washington, two years later.

It started when I received a phone call from Eric Beckjord… yeah, that’s right. I had never heard of the guy but he had some information about a sighting that hadn’t been released to the newspapers yet so I took him at his word and jotted down all the info. He wanted to meet with us in person at a house he was watching for a friend before he gave us the exact location of the sighting. Dave and I went over to his place that evening. He showed us some Bigfoot scat he had been storing in the refrigerator of the homeowners. I wondered if they knew about that. It was pretty small in size and I think Dave jokingly said something about it looks small enough that Eric could have made it himself, which kind of set Eric off. Well… how were we suppose to know any different? He did have some pictures of it, where it was found, on what looked like a regular lawn.

He toned down after making his point that he was a force to be reckoned with when it came to this kind of stuff. Did we or didn’t we want to check up on this and get back with him? Well, the article in the newspaper had already come out so we knew enough to at least get close to the site, but we made the decision to drive on over and see if we could find out any more to the story and promised that if we found anything we would call him. He gave us the contact information and off we went.

It was snowing and 20 degrees below as we drove up the side of a mountain, to a small green house with chickens running around everywhere… a one armed man was standing on the porch with a rifle and a plastic pail, held by his crooked stump. Dave and I gave each other a quick look before getting out of the car.

We walked up and introduced ourselves to Dean DeWees (I will use that name now because of the newspaper article, but it is wrong) and asked if we could interview him about the incident. Dean had lost his arm in Vietnam but seemed adept in running the farm without it. He was happy to talk about it since he couldn’t get anybody else to listen to him. We asked him about that. Was he being ridiculed because of the sighting or what? He said, only by the Game department, they told him that they had to put up some bear traps since it was obviously a bear, ran off on four feet did it, and that since it kept coming back for more chickens, something was going to give soon. They had to try and protect the local inhabitants. It was too cold and maybe the bear was sick and couldn’t get it’s own food. And, Oh, by the way, don’t worry, there is no such thing as a Bigfoot.

Stop the cart here… this is January people. Dead of winter at 4000+ feet elevation. Bears should not be out and about, least not getting late night chicken snacks.

We just let him continue to tell his story. It was an emotional event for sure. His nephew shooting at the thing stealing chickens from the pens and then ducking out of the way so Dean could unload on it as well as it screamed at them. They had to shoot it, it was just reaching in to the center of the pen, maybe four feet from where it stood, plucking up chickens, one at a time, twisting their necks, then dropping them back by it’s feet and then on after another. Dave wrote it all down and then had him draw a picture/map of the incident.

Later, re-reading the newspaper story and then reviewing Dean’s actual words told us quickly that the reporter hadn’t actually been very thorough. It almost sounded like the story got to him second-hand. Oh well. What’s new?

After getting the real story about what happened we asked Dean if he knew anyone else in the valley that may have had similar events happen to them recently or if he knew of anything strange – out of the ordinary going on. No. Just the scream they heard. Oh and there was a cave nearby that maybe the creature was using for shelter in this cold.

We asked him where the cave was and just then a car pulled up with a man and a woman. They got out. The man was dressed in a leather jacket and wool hat, the woman in clothes not fit for that time of year. The man had a large-bore revolver around his waist, in a leather holster. Dean pointed across the hood of the car to a rock face on the far side of the dirt road, no more than 20 feet away. There, he said. We noticed the dark opening in the cliff side.

Rick Noll About Rick Noll
Rick Noll has been actively searching for the Sasquatch since 1969 and continues his pursuit with extended field trips into the Pacific Northwest's most remote regions. Rick has worked with Peter Byrne, René Dahinden, Grover Krantz, John Green, Jeff Meldrum and the BFRO during all this. He helped with many documentaries on the subject including Animal X: The Skookum Expedition and Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.

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