1 / 5

Kristen Hebestreet photoJesse Haycock, of Payson, adjusts a motion-activated camera near a trail he hopes may be used by a Bigfoot.

2 / 5

Kristen Hebestreet photoTerry Baddley hoped this was a track of a Bigfoot, but after he cast it in plaster, he discovered the print showed a human arch to the foot.

3 / 5

Kristen Hebestreet photoMoose can be seen in this photo taken in Perry Canyon. Experts say some Bigfoot sightings may really be moos.

4 / 5

 

5 / 5

 

❮ ❯

PERRY — The bull moose on the next hill lowered his big head, flared his cavernous nostrils and stared through the leafy baneberry brush at the Sasquatch hunters. His velvet antlers were still small and barely discernible.

“See that moose?” said Jesse Haycock, of Payson, who was standing on the hilltop where, judging in part from the bent grass, the moose had probably bedded down. From that vantage point, there was a 360-degree view and two trails leading up to the site. There were also moose pellets nearby.

“If you look at him straight on, he looks like a biped,” Haycock said. “See the big head and shoulders there? If you’re not used to it, straight on, the moose looks like a man … and it turns around, and when you look right now … you only see two legs again from here. If you’re not accustomed to it, it will look like a Sasquatch.”

Haycock and Terry Baddley, of Brigham City, were on a Bigfoot expedition recently up Perry Canyon. Bigfoot was absent, but five moose made an appearance: a moose cow with young calves, a young bull moose and an older bull.

The two men are members of Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, a San Juan Capistrano, Calif.-based group formed under the nonprofit Bigfoot Outdoor Services, LLC, and with about 250 members nationwide. Started in 1994 by Matt Moneymaker, the volunteer network classifies and collates local, state, regional, national and international sightings.

Besides systematizing the sightings, BFRO formalizes language use: The plural of Bigfoot is now “Bigfoots.” The act of seeking Bigfoot in the wild is called “squatching” because of Bigfoot’s Canadian alias, “Sasquatch.”

Both men squatch several weekends every year. On this trip, a moose standing in the brush on the next hill beneath the aspen trees was doing a respectable Sasquatch impression: His dark brown lowered head blended into his dark body, his big shoulder hump looked somewhat like a head, and his withers resembled shoulders.

Bigfoot moose are part of the mistaken identities now part of modern legend, like stories of the East Coast hunter who came to Wyoming and bagged someone’s pet llama because he thought it was an elk, or the California hunters who brought a burro to the big-game checking station after they thought they’d shot a mule deer.

“People see what they think they’ll see,” Haycock said.

Some folks might see a dark shadow in the trees and call it a sighting, even if it’s a person or a bear or some other wildlife, Baddley said.

“Imaginations can run wild,” he said. “Any little noise they hear, they’re already thinking ‘Bigfoot!’ “

Arlo Wing, a wildlife specialist with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said he has given some thought to what animals might be mistaken for Bigfoot, such as a bear standing up on its hind legs to investigate something.

“Squirrels do odd things,” he added. “They’ll toss rocks at you, pine cones.”

Bigfoot profile

Unlike a mule deer, elk or unfortunate llamas and burros, Bigfoot hunting does not mean bagging one: Both men agree shooting Bigfoot dead would be tragic, as would a Bigfoot kept in a cage to amuse people.

There are other ways to get DNA besides killing one, Haycock said.

“There’s nothing wrong with a little mystery in this world,” Baddley said.

Neither man has ever seen a Bigfoot.

Both have heard interesting noises and heard many, many stories. Baddley found out his “SASQACH” license brings in so many Bigfoot stories that his two youngest daughters can recognize that purposeful walk when some stranger sees it and crosses a parking lot.

“They say, ‘No, Daddy; not again!’ ” Baddley said.

One man who visited the campsite that Saturday had found Baddley because of the license plate. The man — who spoke with the understanding his name would not be used (“I have a job. I have a family. People know me at church”) — said he saw what looked like a white juvenile female Bigfoot spying on some Boy Scouts camping in the Uintas. He said he also heard of another sighting up Ogden Canyon of a similar white female Bigfoot crossing the road.

Squatchers like Baddley and Haycock have created a behavioral profile of what most people believe is a myth. These two men agreed the Bigfoot is curious and solitary, eats meat, and stays on the move. The hairy manbeast also prefers to avoid adults, but gets curious about children and teenagers.

Debunkers

Despite their sincerity — Bigfoot or Sasquatch, the forest primate, is real to them — the two men say they consistently debunk potential Sasquatch evidence when they are out in the woods.

That promising barefoot track in the mud by the pond was from a big person: Other Bigfoot tracks show they do not have arches in their feet, Baddley said. Some moose bones scattered underwater at the edge of the pond were not broken or chewed.

“I’d love to see (Sasquatch): a daylight sighting, as close as possible,” Haycock said.

The best way to find what might be evidence of Bigfoot is to look where other people have reported seeing one, Baddley said. These squatchers were looking in this particular place because several mountain man re-enactors heard such spooky noises one night several years ago, they stayed up all night in a circle with their guns ready.

Audio bait

Much earlier that morning, while the starry sky showed the Milky Way, the squatchers went up a well-traveled moose trail on a steep hill to find a place where sound would travel a long distance.

Baddley, Haycock and Haycock’s future brother-in-law, Chad Corbin, of Salt Lake City — who was not a squatcher and just along for the experience — wore battery-powered head lamps lit with red LED lights.

Since red lights like these are not something a Bigfoot would normally see, Haycock said, the Sasquatch might be drawn in by curiosity.

Baddley and Haycock played tapes allegedly made from Bigfoot noises to see if one might entice the beast to answer.

Some people use recordings of crying babies to lure a Bigfoot, since the manbeast is said to be interested in children and adolescents. There were whoops, an animal scream and one set of sounds that sounded like a chimpanzee gleefully strangling a litter of puppies. (The latter sound is said to be under copyright.)

“We’ve played some of these and had coyotes start howling back right off,” Haycock said.

The red lights were dim, the hill was steep, the path was rocky and Bigfoot declined to make an appearance, despite Baddley and Haycock whooping through a bullhorn and knocking trees with hollowed-out baseball bats they modified so the sound would carry farther down into the valleys.

“If you get a reply every time you knock, it’s probably a person,” Haycock said.

The men said they might hear knocking on trees or some kind of Bigfoot noise on one squatching expedition in five.

Secret cameras

After the sun was up, Haycock, Baddley and Corbin hiked up another mountain, where they taped up motion-activated cameras to see if a Sasquatch might be using the trails.

The trick is to set it up so blowing leaves don’t trip the cameras, which would leave the amateur researchers with nine hours of recordings to go through.

Many people report feeling nauseated or nervous before a Bigfoot sighting or hearing noises, Baddley said. Some report smelling garbage or a sewer type of smell.

“I never have, but a lot of people say that happened to them,” he said.

And if a Bigfoot were captured, and any doubt of its existence was settled?

“Some people say they wouldn’t ever go into the woods again,” Baddley said. “Why would it be any different than going in the woods now?”

Cybersharing

The Internet changed squatching, Haycock said. People now communicate with each other about sightings, or what they interpret as evidence.

Many cultures worldwide have stories of giant, hairy, human-like primates living solitary lives in the wild and mostly avoiding people. There are accounts of the Yowie in Australia, Yeti in the Himalayas, Orang Pendek in Indonesia — the unidentified forest primate there is said to be short — the Chuchunya in Siberia and the Fear liath in Scotland.

Bigfoot is known as the Arulataq in Alaska, Grassman in Ohio, Momo in Missouri, Iceman in Minnesota and the skunk ape in Florida. Louisiana is blessed with what are called Wookie legends.

“Now you can talk to the whole world on the Internet; all the different encounters people have with them in different parts of the word,” Haycock said.

Once a Bigfoot report comes in, a researcher’s job is to prove the encounter didn’t happen, said Todd Strong, of Syracuse, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization expedition organizer for Utah.

Whether or not Bigfoot exists, researchers like Strong are sincere.

Strong starts with a phone call, during which he takes notes and listens for “red flags” indicating the caller is crazy or pulling a prank. Pranksters tend to be crude, he said, but everyone gets a chance.

“Unless you have a daylight sighting within 10 to 20 yards, most sightings can be explained by something else,” Strong said,

About 5 percent to 10 percent of all investigations cannot be dismissed, he said.

Weber County leads the state in numbers of Bigfoot sightings reported on the BFRO web page. Ten reports date from 1962 to 2007.

Summit County follows, with nine reports, and Utah County has eight. Locally, Davis County has five, Morgan County shows two, Box Elder County shows a single sighting, and Cache County has reported six.

Anonymous Weber County witnesses include Bigfoot reports in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest in 2007 near Huntsville, with additional sightings from the same extended family spread over several years and including some at LaPlata, Hardware Ranch and Monte Cristo. Family members also reported two young Bigfoots near Limestone Springs, in that same general area.

Other sightings listed by the BFRO:

• A daytime sighting near Six-Bit Springs near Monte Cristo in 1998

• A large, hairy, biped crossing the road on the North Ogden Divide in 1997

• Growling, screaming and rock-throwing in October 1987, east of Pineview Reservoir

• Glowing red eyes looking in a window in 1968 near Wheeler Canyon

• A daylight sighting off U.S. 89 in the Wasatch Mountains in 1962

• In 2006, a man visiting his mother-in-law who lived near East Canyon Reservoir in Morgan County heard screaming that lasted 15 seconds, followed by whooping. He said his mother-in-law had heard the noises near her house for the past 10 years, according to the BFRO report.

• Another Morgan County incident was reported in 1977 near Farmington Peaks Road, where four men reported hearing growling outside a tent. A dog that was with them barked for 30 minutes in response to the growls.

The BFRO website is www.bfro.net.