September 7, 2010

The Search for Sasquatch in Minnesota

Source: Minnesota Monthly, September 2010: The Search for Sasquatch
By Frank Bures

Looking for Bigfoot in the north woods of Minnesota

Deep in the dark heart of Minnesota’s north woods, I was walking down a dirt road with a group of men. The sun had set hours ago, and I was starting to wonder if I’d gone a little insane. This could have been the case: On the one hand, here we were in the middle of the night, trying to outsmart a 9-foot-tall monkey that a local farmer and his family claimed to have seen in this place several times over the past few years. On the other hand, it was possible we were looking for a figment of our collective imagination.

A call came over the radio: “Did you whistle?”

“Negative,” replied a member of our group.

I felt a mild rush of panic and excitement. There was a whistle! Something had to be making it!

My companions and I had paid $300 apiece to participate in the first-ever, public Sasquatch hunt in Minnesota held by the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. The group was founded in California in 1995 with a mission to “resolve the mystery surrounding the bigfoot phenomenon” by gathering potentially relevant data. To that end, 42 of us had signed up to help collect evidence in the north woods. We’d been split into 15 camps, and we were carrying an armament of investigative equipment: night-vision scopes, walkie-talkies, GPS, infrared cameras, thermal-recording devices, video and audio recorders, and more. Someone handed me a thermal imager, which would show bright heat signatures of the living things in the forest. I scanned the area around us but saw nothing except a few warm rocks and something that may have been a raccoon.

“We’ve got some activity here,” came another report across the radio. “They’re walking around our site.” Whenever the group laughed, apparently, there was a rustling in the woods. When they laughed really hard, there was even more rustling.

Those lucky bastards! Just that morning I had seen the ghost of a footprint in the soft sphagnum near the other group’s tent. It looked not quite human, but not quite ape. It had toes, but it was hard to tell what kind of biped might have made it. Two of the people in that camp, a young couple who had once recorded sounds thought to be a Sasquatch running through their hometown near Cass Lake, had heard many strange noises and seen odd shapes just beyond the light of their campfire the previous night.

“We can hear it walking past our tent,” they now called over the radio. “It sounds like it’s wearing corduroys.”

“So,” someone in our group replied dryly, “Sasquatch isn’t very stylish.”

AS WITH SO MANY THINGS that lie just beyond the realm of proof, most people have strong convictions about Bigfoot. There are believers, there are agnostics, and naturally, there are more than a few skeptics. Not long before I left on the trip, for example, my wife inquired about the group’s approach.

Resd the entire article on the Minnesota Monthly website: The Search for Sasquatch

Filed under Bigfoot, Bigfoot Report, Cryptotourism, Evidence, Expedition Reports, Eyewitness Accounts, Footprint Evidence, Pop Culture, Sasquatch, Skunk Apes