Red Lake and Bigfoot
Posted by: Loren Coleman on October 9th, 2006
I’m going to be on the road for a few days, mostly working with First Nations people in northern Maine about suicide prevention and school shootings, so I wanted to post a timely entry here that looks at the overlap between Bigfoot and a school shooter, the Red Lake, Minnesota killer who caused the second most deadly modern school outrage on our children.
On March 21, 2005, Red Lake, Minnesota high school student Jeffrey James Weise (August 8, 1988 – March 21, 2005) killed a total of ten people. First he killed his grandfather and grandfather’s wife, 32-year old Michelle Sigana, who was his grandfather’s police force partner. Later he shot and killed seven people at Red Lake High School, including a teacher and a security guard. As many as 15 others were wounded in the school shooting. After briefly exchanging fire with police officers following the murders, Weise died by his own hand. As far as I know, everyone he killed was Native.
The incident began at home in the afternoon when Weise apparently shot his grandfather and Sigana. Weise then drove his grandfather’s patrol vehicle to the high school, propelling it into the building at around 3:00 p.m. CST. Wearing a reservation-police-issued bulletproof vest, likely taken from the stolen reservation police patrol vehicle, Weise killed the third victim (the security guard) immediately upon arriving at the school.
When the police first arrived, Weise briefly opened fire on them before going into the school. Once in there, he was said to be “waving and smiling” as he shot students at random. An attempt to break into an English classroom was thwarted by a quick-thinking teacher who had taken the precaution to lock the door.
Media coverage of Jeff Weise after the shooting was intense. Weise left electronic footprints all across the internet, on websites such as nazi.org, offering, as Wikipedia noted, “an unusual level of public insight into his thoughts and the hardships in his life that led to his depression and fascination with dark imagery in the months and years prior to the shootings.”
Besides being a neo-Nazi, liking Hitler, seeing white owls, having dreams about shooting, Weise also was interested in Bigfoot.
Needless to say, people interested in Bigfoot are not all killers, and all serial, mass, and rampage killers are not Bigfoot fans. But the overlap between the two in this case was worthy of my sociological attention. Such twilight language and coded messages exist all the more overtly in this World Wide Web age, and there’s no reason to ignore them and not examine what we might discover. (In this vein, I investigate past school shootings and the twilight language in my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect.)
The simple fact is the Red Lake school shooter liked to talk about Bigfoot, and we have the records to explore how Bigfoot worked into his cosmos.
Red Lake’s Jeff Weise
Jeff Weise would post as “Weise” at the Above Top Secret forum.
Here is “Weise” talking about Sasquatch among the Ojibwa, on 6-11-2004 (November 6th):
Almost everyone I know has a sasqautch story, almost everyone one has a person in their familly who’s probably seem him. At least thats how it is where I live, (on a Reservation in Minnesota).
I’ve asked a few elders about bigfoot, and in my language (Ojibwe) we have a name for him. I forgot it, and barely could pronounce it, but he exists in our neck of the woods, at least I believe he does. I heard a story from my cousin (he works in Tribal Government), he told me that a guy he worked with was out in the forest alone on a fast. He was near a swampy area, and midway through his fast he saw Bigfoot walking through the swamp, reaching down into the water along the way and pulling up a certain type of weed and slinging it over his shoulder.
The weed from the swamp he was pulling out was supposedly some kind of herbal medicine used by Native medicine men.
And to feed some of you peoples interest in the possibility of a sasquatch and alien connection? The lake I live by (Red Lake) is one heck of a big lake, and if you sit out at the beach on a clear summer night you’ll see lights over the lake. Everyone says they’re UFO’s, I believe that too. There was a UFO sighting in broad daylight a few years back, it was over the lake, people said it looked like a metal disc. Anyway, alot of people were reporting power outages and cars stalling on them around the exact same time.
I love living in this lively place…
Later on 11-11-2004 (November 11, 2004), responding to this quote (filled with incorrect info) from Brainiac: “Hi! The Bigfoot idea was recently found out to be made up, by the same guy that supposedly capture the creature on film in 1974. He said on his death bed that he made the whole thing up. The footage was real, but it was footage of a man in a gorilla costume… ”
Weise rather appropriately writes:
Lol, sorry, but that just wont fly in my part of the woods.
We’ve actually seen him, in the “flesh,” not just a video. The stories of bigfoot, as previously stated, have been around for hundreds of years, not just since the Patterson film.
Perhaps not coincidentally, on February 10, 2005, there were reports of tracks of Sasquatch being found on the Red Lake Reservation. Here are examples of two photographs (below) circulated on the web at the time. While initially they might look like bear prints, upon closer examination, more clearly defined Bigfoot-type toe prints are visible.
On March 21, 2004, the focus was on Red Lake, Minnesota and Jeff Weise’s carnage, and the Red Lake Bigfoot track investigations faded into the background. A year later, the talk was only of the Red Lake school shooting, not Bigfoot. This week, it may be about more school shootings, but I hope not. I’d rather be talking about Bigfoot, but to get there, I have to do what I’m doing, for awhile.
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.
Disturbing stuff. Odd mix of cryptozoology and homicidal mass murders. Don’t really know what else to say about this article. Gives me the willies. The allusion to Bigfoot collecting medicinal herbs is curious.
So far as I know, we only have black bears in Minnesota, and they tend to be on the small side. Smaller than a full-grown hog. That is a mighty big track.
“Seeing white owls”? Can we PLEASE find out more about that, Loren? The owl is a common motif in both Freemasonry and UFOlogy.
A tragic story, which unfortunately didn’t offer an explanation as to what could have made Weise act the way he did. I think it’s important to ask yourselves why this type of incidents almost exclusively happen in the US. Loren, it’s good to know someone takes their time to go talk to people about these sorts of things.
The shootings at our schools are very tragic but we must find the underlying cause and try to help the kids before things get to the point of no return. Several have been just normal looking kids who seemed to be smart and level headed to friends and family.
Keep talking and perhaps you will save some one the tragic outcome.
Kids hurting kids. I just don’t understand it. Something is horribly wrong.
On indian stories about bigfoot, don’t most if not all native tribes have stories and beliefs about bigfoot?
I know in southeast Oklahoma that the grandparents of my Choctaw friends absolutely did.
Curiosity is a great thing in the minds of young and old alike. Finding the answers to life’s questions, whether it be sasquatch or what type of government to follow, can lead us down many different roads. Some good, some bad. Choices and forming opinions in a young mind without proper guidance, can have some serious consequences. Am I trying to point a finger? When does freedom of speach make hatred acceptable to the point of taking another persons life? All I know is the answer starts with the word “LOVE”
A truely horrific tale.
As an Englishmen its all very easy for us to look at the school shooting tragedies and blame gun control. I think Michael Moore does a pretty good job of going into the whole issue in depth with his film ‘Bowling for Columbine’.
I do not really understand the relevance of his Bigfoot interest as like a lot of youths, he was interested in the unexplained.
The only thing that does come from that is that he was obviously a troubled youth who spent a lot of time trawling the internet so God only knows what sites he was visiting.
Maybe the white power nonsense was the catalyst that tipped him over the edge. Its a shame that kids like this don’t get a chance to express their thoughts and fears with people who genuinely care for them before they feel they have to resort to such extreme measures as exterminating friends and family.
I am not blaming anyone for this disaster, but I can only feel that there must be a fair number of disatisfied youth running in the States with access to firepower that do not really belong in the average home.
I think its easy to speak to the youth of today but a damn sight harder to listen to them and I think thats where we should make a start.
I was born and raised in MN and this tragedy hit home for me. I don’t really care what this kid was interested in in his spare time except where it may help the investigation. He wasn’t some tragic figure with no way out. He was a disturbed young man with no sense of right and wrong, who had too easy a time accessing firearms.
The commenter “lastensugle” writes
“I think it’s important to ask yourselves why this type of incidents almost exclusively happen in the US.”
Of course, that would be an important question to ask if it was true. It is not, therefore the assumption leading to the question is incorrect.
China has had several school incidents involving fatal stabbings, for example, as well as deaths from school shootings. My book documents several incidents in the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and Bosnia after 1999, in that subsection entitled “Columbine Goes International.”
Back to cryptozoology for me, folks….