‘I know what I saw’: Making sense of Bigfoot sightings and our place in nature

About 15 years ago, I was in the Garfield Heights Reservation playing frisbee with a group of friends. I went long on this pass. I got off fast and broke left on a flag route like a gazelle, like Randy Moss. 

Just like Randy Moss. 

I turn up to look at this gorgeous pass my friend ripped my way. I raised my arms to pull it in, and it flew right through my hands in what I would regard as the most glorious drop in the history of sports. 

“Sorry!” I shouted as I went off to get the frisbee that was still flying through the air away from me and into a clearing where about four doe were hanging out, eating twigs, figuring out which drunk person’s car they were going to jump in front of later. 

Deer stuff.

As I got closer to the frisbee, I startled the deer, and they dispersed into a thicket of tall grass, completely out of sight and away from the “civilized” lummox who generally doesn’t consider them or nature as often as he probably should. At no point in this exchange did I once consider the deer whose world I stepped into and disrupted, and to be honest, I didn’t care until a gigantic eight-point buck emerged from that same thicket, a specimen I can only describe, for lack of a better word, as a brick shithouse.

That buck stared me dead in the eyes and made me consider it. 

Now, I am not a naturalist or anything, but I do know a few things about animals that I can share with you. 

1. They don’t speak English.

2. They don’t need to when they want to let you know to back off. 

That frisbee that stood between me and the buck acted as a border between my world and the harsh, violent reality of nature. Had I crossed that threshold, I would have entered a world that had been bred out of me thousands of years ago. I went from Randy Moss to completely and utterly futile in a matter of seconds. 

I backed away, I decided that the frisbee wasn’t that important, and I could always return to get it later when the coast was clear. I retreated until I felt I was at a safe enough distance, and then I turned my back towards the buck and faced my friends, whose terror and uncomfortable laughter told me how close I had come to getting gored over a frisbee. It was stamped into my memory. The first thing I asked when I got close enough to them was, “Did anyone get a video of that?” 

I was met with blank stares. 

No one even thought to pull out their phone. No one thought to pull out their phone because the importance of that present moment outweighed the desire to remember it later. As I think about it, there are very few moments in my life where I can honestly say I was truly present, and all of those moments have one thing in common. 

Fear. 

Fear is not an emotion. It’s a response. Fight or flight. It is the oldest system we have, and it doesn’t care about rules. Only causality. A decision will be made whether you want to make it or not, and instinct, not rationalization, will make it for you. It will paralyze you into not even considering pulling out your phone to take a video. 

Now, looking back on that moment, the thing that scares me the most wasn’t the threat; it’s how thin the line was. It’s how quickly things could have gone bad if that buck hadn’t shown me mercy. But, even through the fear and volatility of that scenario between me and the buck, I understood it. The buck and I had an understanding. Neither one of us spoke the other’s language, but we were at least familiar with one another. 

Between March 6 and March 10, 8 reported sightings happened spread across Portage and Trumble counties, according to The Bigfoot Society, a podcast and preeminent source for people who are interested in the Bigfoot phenomenon. These people ranged from experienced hikers to people just trying to go home. They described tall, bipedal figures between 6-10 feet tall, covered in hair, and moving through wooded areas and roads, and despite the differences in time and location, the stories all share striking coincidences: stilt-like strides, low-hanging arms and an awareness that they’ve been seen. There was even a report of the scent of this creature. 

I used to be firmly in the “no chance” Bigfoot camp. There would be a carcass, or some bones. There would be evidence, something concrete to lend credence to the mythology. Something more than blurry footage and footprints that look like they were made in a backyard.

But what stuck with me wasn’t the idea that these witnesses were right. It was the idea they didn’t care if people thought they were. These weren’t coordinated claims. The sightings were miles apart. Anonymous and disconnected. People were calling in because something happened to them that they couldn’t quite process. They were calling out to let someone know there may be more to this world than we know. I’m not even talking about supernaturally, I’m talking biologically. Could there be a species of ape that has evaded us all this time? 

We rediscover animals all the time. Species we thought were gone, or didn’t know existed at all. Dense forests, migration patterns, camouflage … There are entire systems out there that we barely understand.

Whatever these things may be, they are not hanging out near trails where people are. They’re deep in the woods, and every now and then, someone sees something they weren’t looking for when a creature crosses the frisbee into our world. 

Ohio alone has millions of acres of forest. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve seen a coyote once, maybe twice, even though I know they’re everywhere. Not because they’re rare, but because they don’t exist in the version of nature I occupy. Trails, parks and hunting reservations are not natural. It’s a version of nature we negotiated for ourselves. They’re marked, and they’re safe enough for us to pretend that we belong there. The real stuff exists beyond those borders, operating under rules and laws that have absolutely nothing to do with us. Even the most nature-hardened person you know probably only goes hunting or backpacking a certain number of times per year. They have jobs, families, and car payments, and when I hear someone tell me that they feel like they “belong in nature,” I look at them the same way I’d look at a dachshund that thinks it’s a wolf. 

I’m not saying they couldn’t survive out there, but surviving isn’t living. We’ve tricked ourselves into believing that we’ve beaten nature and that we have bent it to our will, but all it takes is one storm to break the levees. These systems, this infrastructure we’ve created, aren’t real. It doesn’t exist in the real world, and don’t be fooled. This version of reality we invented, surrounding morning commutes and politics, is just as much of a hoax as Bigfoot is. That is not the real world. The real world is out there, beyond our comfort and what we’ve turned ourselves into inside this artificial habitat. Out there, there is just a line, and every once in a while, people find themselves on the wrong side of it staring at something that’s staring back at them, and whether it’s a buck or a Sasquatch, it isn’t impressed by your credit score. It will quickly remind you that even though there are 8-billion people in the world, we are drastically outnumbered by literally everything else.

We are not the only citizens of this planet.

I don’t love nature, because love, unlike fear, is an emotion, and I try not to anthropomorphize things that I shouldn’t. I like people too much to love nature. I respect nature. I respect it even though it doesn’t consider me in the slightest. But, every now and then, someone you trust will hand you something they saw out there in the forest, and when they do, you have to hold it carefully, not just because of what it is, but because of who is handing it to you.

Someone I’ve known for close to 25 years reached out to me recently to tell me he’d seen something a long time ago. When I read his message, I didn’t know what to make of it at first. I laughed, actually. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve known him a long time and would never have expected in a million years to receive that message. In all the years this person has existed in my periphery, I had never known him to tell tall tales or to be attention-seeking in any way. 

So, I took him seriously, and we talked for close to an hour about something he saw as a boy 22-years ago. He was 14-years-old when he saw something that scared him one afternoon. He and a friend were playing video games in another room when they paused the game so he could use the bathroom. As he was standing at the bathroom sink, he looked out the window and saw something across the street. Something he had never seen before. 

A gigantic thing. 

Reddish/brownish hair and the top of its head reached the gutters of the house it was standing in front of. He screamed and called out to his friend in the other room, who rushed over to see what all the fuss was about. When he entered the bathroom, his friend saw the exact same thing he had. 

They stood there in awe of this thing. In his explanation, he seemed careful not to use the word Bigfoot with me, cause he knew what he saw, and what he knew was that he didn’t know what he saw. He seemed to imply that even he knew that this story sounded too fantastic and wild to be true, and was very aware of how it came across. 

Then, the creature started walking towards the house they were in. 

They ran downstairs, locked the doors, armed themselves with knives and baseball bats, to give themselves a puncher’s chance just in case it entered the house. They watched it walk past the house and disappear into the woods in the backyard. Its pace, he explained to me, was that of a person “walking through a grocery store directly towards the milk aisle. Walking with purpose, as if it knew exactly where it was going.”  

Now, what struck me wasn’t the story per se, but it was how it was communicated to me. I asked questions deliberately. I was trying to trip him up and poke holes in his story, but I couldn’t. He believes he saw what he saw, and what he saw scared him, and he can’t explain it. 

I asked him how often he thinks about it, “More times than I’d like,” he said. “Like once a week or so, it crosses my mind. I just want to know what I saw. I either want confirmation or a rationalization. I don’t care if it was Bigfoot or not, I just want to know what it was.” 

I can’t confirm what he saw, and unfortunately, no one can. He will never know for certain what he saw out there that day. But what I can confirm is that many things can be true at the same time. I can believe him, and also not believe in Bigfoot as a literal biological anomaly that has evaded observation all these years. I can believe those people’s claims as truth, and that they genuinely believe what they saw, even though the facts don’t support it. 

I can believe that Bigfoot exists in the same way that frisbee did. As a symbol to remind us of who we are and who we used to be when we were truly a part of nature. That’s the real “missing link.” 

I reached out to my friends the other day to ask if they remembered what happened with the frisbee and the buck. I was very disappointed in them. None of them remembered it, or, if they did, it was a fragmented memory, remembered in abstractions. It bothered me initially that, as time went on, my story faded away, and I was too paralyzed by fear in the moment to pull out my phone to record it on video so I could have it forever. But then I found myself in my car, driving back to the area of that park where I got to meet a buck. I paused for a second, looked into that thicket of tall grass, and realized that even though I don’t have video of that day and my friends’ memories of it have faded, it didn’t really matter. 

I know what I saw.