Bigfoot Chronicles: A Researcher's Continuing Journey Through Minnesota and Beyond

INTRODUCTION

As I begin to write this, I am in the days surrounding my 50 th birthday, a major turning point that often makes people look back at what we hope will be the first half of our lives if we would like to try and live to be 100, which - because why not? - I would like to shoot for. My father's mother made it to 103, but it keeps me humble to remember that he himself passed away at 61.

My first 50 years consisted of me growing up on a dairy farm in Minnesota in an area where I was able to appreciate nature and the privilege of being able to observe wild animals and then being led to an interest in art and writing and studying those things in technical college, but ending up with a career in menial labor jobs mostly involving cleaning up after people. I currently work as a custodian in a school, which comes with a halfway decent benefits package and lets me maintain a certain level of comfort, but it is definitely not the passion in my life.

Since my earliest memories, I have had an unending fascination with the paranormal and supernatural. UFOs and aliens, ghosts and psychic phenomena, monsters and cryptozoology- all of these things have always called to me in a way that didn't seem to require any kind of specific trigger but just kind of seemed to be a natural part of me, and as a kid, I devoured every book I could get my hands on involving those subjects. I have often wondered how important it was to maintain this level of interest that at the age of eight in 1976, I happened to have my very own sighting of Bigfoot.

While on a Sunday drive with my family in the summer of that year in the forested area around Strawberry Lake in Becker County, Minnesota, I saw a tall black object standing beside the blacktop road about a hundred yards ahead of us that I at first thought was a burned and blackened tree trunk about seven feet tall, but in a few seconds, it suddenly walked away from the roadside on two legs and disappeared into the woods. Why I was the only one in the car who saw it is something I have never understood, in spite of Native Americans who would eventually tell me that I alone was meant to see it and that it was invisible to my parents and sister.

I immediately knew that what I had seen could not have been a bear since they do not walk for any great distance on two legs, nor was it likely to have been a man in a costume since if he was trying to scare people, I would have thought he would have let our car get a lot closer before disappearing. My eight-year-old self knew instinctively that I had just seen a Bigfoot, one of the huge hulking manlike/apelike hairy creatures that are alleged to inhabit North America. Even at that young age, I understood that many people scoffed at the idea of such things existing but that thousands of sightings over the years argued otherwise.

My interest continued all through elementary and high school, and after I graduated in 1986 I determined to start investigating Bigfoot reports in my home state of Minnesota. Though my studies told me that the majority of reports came from states like those in the Pacific Northwest and a few other hot spots around the country, there were a few recorded for Minnesota and I used those as my starting off point.

Over much time I would eventually discover that what had been recorded in books was just barely scratching the surface and that Minnesota was just as much a hotbed of Bigfoot activity as any of those other more famous states like Washington or Oregon or California or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida. I had thought that my own sighting had been a freak occurrence, but I came to understand that hundreds of other people in my state had seen similar things. My database of reports grew bigger and bigger over the years as I started to network with other investigators, sharing information and collecting the reports they'd gathered on top of the ones I'd uncovered myself. It was almost as big a thrill to realize that other people were doing this same work as it was to meet with Bigfoot witnesses and hear their eyewitness accounts of what they'd seen.

I had a level of notoriety in the 90s as my name became known to the other members of the Bigfoot community around the country, and I decided to delve into the world of self publishing. In 1990, I produced a book entitled 'The Sasquatch in Minnesota,’ and then a follow up the next year called ‘Creatures of the North: The New Minnesota Sasquatch Encounters,’ which were really cheap projects banged out on typewriters and containing hand-drawn illustrations as well as black and white photos. I also launched the monthly newsletter 'The Sasquatch Report’ which was just as amateurish a job but ended up garnering quite a few subscribers and lasted for several years. It was a fun time, my 20s, bolstered by my frequent forays into the Minnesota wilderness in the physical search for the creatures that fascinated me, sometimes leading to dangerous encounters with rough terrain or wild animals or even sinister people. I took it all in stride as being the price one pays for this quest, with the payoff being the actual physical evidence I occasionally found.

In 1996, I did an updated combination of my first two books entitled 'The Sasquatch in Minnesota- Revised Edition,’ and then in 2000, I did a very unique project called ‘Big Footage: A History of Claims for the Sasquatch on Film’ in which I used my artistic skills to do recreations of all the various photos and films of Bigfoot that people claim to have captured over the years. I could never do that book today, as the Internet has produced scores of supposed Bigfoot videos far too numerous to be included in one volume, many of which are fake.

But the real evidence was out there if only one would look for it. In exploring areas with reported Bigfoot encounters I have found the creatures' tracks well over a dozen times now and I have even had the priceless experience of hearing what I believe to have been Bigfoot vocalizations, a crazy wailing cry from such a powerful pair of lungs that the woods practically shook with it. I have found trees and branches broken and arranged in such weird and dramatic ways that it almost has to be done by something with intelligence and great strength rather than just a natural happening.

At one time, I felt that the term Bigfoot sounded too silly and cartoonish to be a name for a real animal and preferred to use the name Sasquatch, which is thought by many to be a Native American word. It is actually a name coined in the 1950s by a white man named J.W. Burns who was a teacher on an Indian reservation in British Columbia and who took various tribal names he was hearing for the wild men of the woods and combined them into the word Sasquatch. Since my earlier days as a researcher and investigator, I guess I have softened a bit, and with the massively widespread use of the term Bigfoot, I have let it grow on me and come to embrace it.

Bigfoot is real. I have seen one, I have heard them, I have seen their tracks, and the other traces they leave upon the land. I have interviewed witnesses who have described seeing things that are so amazing they put my own brief experiences to shame. The fact that these things go on year after year, not only in my home state of Minnesota but all across North America, without the creature ever being proven to be real is absolutely madding to me, and I have taken it upon myself - as have many others - to try and be the one who proves that these things exist.

Why do I do this when the rewards are so few? I do it not only because of my own experiences, which I know to be true but also for all of those other witnesses and all of our experiences that have been utterly ridiculed by skeptics. I don't mind people being skeptical in a general sense, but I do mind when people who are simply telling what they have seen are cut to pieces because of it. Just picture this for a moment. You see something incredible that changes your worldview of what is real and what isn't, and you decide to tell people about it. If people don't believe you, they are really telling you one of three things.

One - No, you didn't really see that, and you are lying to me.

Two - No, you didn't really see that, and you only think you did because you are crazy and have extreme hallucinations.

Or three - You didn't really see that because you are so stupid that you can see a normal animal or an old tree stump and think that it is a Bigfoot.

Imagine being given that treatment by people you have always loved and trusted, just because you tell them you have seen something. I feel for all those people because I am one of them. I endeavor to keep on striving to prove that Bigfoot is real because if the day comes when that becomes proven, then all who have ever been ridiculed for saying that they have seen them will be vindicated. That means more to me than I can possibly say.

Having said that, I would like to introduce to the Bigfoot field a friend who has not rejected my belief in and experiences with Bigfoot. His name is Dean Opsahl, and we have been close friends since the first grade. For several years he has been my unofficial partner in my search, accompanying me on many a wilderness foray even though he is actually an agnostic when it comes to Bigfoot, on the fence as to whether the creatures actually exist but finding the subject intriguing enough to be involved. We argue about the various aspects of the subject all the time, spirited debates about what makes for a justified motivation for pursuing it, what impact final proof would have on society and many other things, but our partnership endures, and we truly have fun together whenever we are out in the field. Dean is my best friend, and he will be mentioned here and there in the stories that follow.

I have also taken on a special project of attempting to document every single Bigfoot report in the state of Minnesota for all time. I know that is impossible and that I will never succeed in getting them all, but I intend to come as close as anyone ever can. To that end, I have searched every published and online source that I've been able to find as well as collaborating with other Minnesota researchers on a personal basis in order to add their information to that which I've collected myself to assemble the most comprehensive list of Bigfoot repots for the state that anyone has ever assembled.

I will present that list of reports as an appendix at the end of this book, and the total number of reports promises to be astounding. In this book, I will present a memoir of the continuation of a Minnesota Bigfoot researcher's 30-year journey since the publication of my last books, as well as my thoughts and observations on other aspects of the whole Bigfoot field.

There is a chapter on the Minnesota Iceman case, which actually has only a tenuous connection to the state but which I felt it my responsibility to investigate, and also one on the famous California Patterson-Gimlin film which I am fascinated with and have delved into because of my deep interest in Bigfoot photos and films even though I am an outsider. I hope you, the reader, will both enjoy this account and be able to learn something.

Dean Opsahl with Mini-Bigfoot friend.

1

IN MEMORIAM

Iwanted to begin by honoring the memory of a few people involved in the Bigfoot field in Minnesota, that have sadly passed away since my last book came out. We've lost so many big names now on the national and international scenes - John Green, Rene Dahinden, Grover Krantz,

Bernard Heuvelmans, John Bindernagel, and others - it feels as if all the great sages are leaving us. I had some level of correspondence with most of them, and I feel their loss, but the handful of names I will share here were people I knew in person and will always hold a special place in my heart.

ED & NOVA TRIMBLE

My second book, ‘Creatures of the North: The New Minnesota Sasquatch Encounters’ published in 1991, was mostly based on the experiences of this wonderful man. He first came to my attention when he reported to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in December

1990 that he had found what appeared to be Bigfoot tracks on his property in Clearwater County near a tiny community called Zerkel, 15 miles south of the slightly larger town of Bagley (population 1,400). The DNR referred him to me, and after receiving a four-page handwritten letter from him complete with drawings of the tracks he'd found, I drove up to the area, located his home, and knocked on his door.

Ed was 76 years old at that time and lived with his wife Nova on a rather ramshackle little farm in the midst of a vast series of rolling wooded hills, very near the White Earth State Forest and an area locally unofficially known as the Buckboard Hills, a major wilderness region where logging and hunting were common.

Ed and Nova welcomed me into their home with warmth and friendliness on that winter day and impressed me from minute one with what genuinely nice and decent people they were. Being in their golden years, they were retired, but Ed had worked as both a farmer and a truck driver and had lived in Iowa but had spent the most time doing what he loved the most working in the Minnesota wilderness as a professional animal tracker and trapper. His knowledge of predators like wolves and bears rivaled that of any zoologist.

He even had a bit of a dubious attitude toward certain scientific experts who he saw as refusing to accept what people like him who actually lived upon the land know from personal experience, such as the fact that mountain lions are still native to Minnesota. In his deep but soft voice, he regaled me with stories that made me come to know that if there was anyone in a position to know what they were seeing when Bigfoot tracks turned up, it was him.

Ed was staying very active in his retirement with various projects, from becoming a commercial beekeeper and producing honey to doing various environmental landscaping work around his property, including creating hybrid trees and taking charge of water sources by building earthen dams to form a large manmade pond a couple of hundred yards from his house.

It was just offshore on that frozen pond where the tracks first appeared, pressed into the snow atop the ice. To his trained eye, they instantly had to be bipedal, but not human, something that he said left him stupefied. He had always had a vague awareness of the Bigfoot subject and had even had several mysterious experiences over the years that had made him wonder about it, but here now was what seemed undeniable evidence that two creatures- one larger and one smaller- had walked across his pond on two legs.

He was referring to them as Mama and Junior. And with Ed being the unique character that he was, it didn't seem to be enough that he had found Bigfoot tracks. They had to be markedly different from any other such tracks ever found.

The tracks on the pond were not human-like in shape but rounded, with the smaller set being slightly oval-shaped and the larger being nearly circular, but each showing two large toes and three tiny ones that left impressions only about the size of a dime with what looked like impressions of hair growing underneath the toes. In size, they were not massive, both less than nine inches in length and approximating the size of bear tracks but showing no claw impressions.

What was this? As bipedal creatures, they fit within the realm of Bigfoot, but their feet were like nothing ever seen before. It caused a level of controversy within the Bigfoot field when I wrote about it, some researchers insisting that it could not be Bigfoot and not seeming to care that even if it wasn't, it was still something extremely cryptozoological that deserved to be studied, especially when the tracks appeared again in March 1991 when Ed estimated that he saw up to 2,000 prints meandering around his property in the snow.

Over the next few years, I visited Ed's place several times, and now and then, the tracks would sporadically turn up. There came a point where he and even some of his neighbors began to also find the more familiar human-like tracks that are normally associated with Bigfoot, and a scenario began to evolve that suggested that the traditional Bigfoot existed here alongside some kind of subspecies that had a completely different kind of foot. Ed became very active in researching the subject and collecting stories from the area, and it turned out that there had been several sightings over the years that sounded like any other Bigfoot reports I had ever heard. This area and, in particular, the Buckboard Hills became my primary focus as a Bigfooter in the 90s, and I made some track finds there myself. One night while camping on Ed's property, I had the priceless experience of hearing what I believe were the crazy high-pitched screams of two Bigfoot creatures calling to each other, terrifying me to no end.

Since I was a young fledging Bigfooter then and Ed was a venerated woodsman, I suppose it was only natural that he would become a mentor to me, and I learned much from him. He accompanied me on hikes through the woods several times, during which he would try and educate me about the different kinds of trees and other such things, eventually becoming amused with how I seemed to only want to stay focused on Bigfoot.

One memory that stands out in my mind is how we were once making our way down a trail that had a flooded patch, and after he skirted it fairly easily on one side, I was struggling to do the same on the other and he said, If you fall in, I'm gonna laugh at you. I could only respond, Yeah, and I'll deserve it too. This was on a foray that he and I made into Itasca County together to investigate reports there that turned up some of the best Bigfoot evidence I have ever documented involving wooden highline poles attacked by something that tore large pieces off of them and left teeth marks up to seven feet above the ground that clearly came from a mouth bigger than a bear's.

I guess all things must wind down and have their end. As the mid-90s passed, the activity on Ed's property seemed to wane. I still continued to do searches in the Buckboard Hills until a huge thunderstorm with hurricane-force winds struck the region in July 1995 and felled over a million trees. After that, the Bigfoot activity in the Buckboards seemed to stop. I didn't see Ed for a long time but we exchanged letters from time to time, and he told me that his wife Nova was having health problems and had to be moved into a nursing home in Bemidji and that he had moved into an apartment there to be near her and was no longer on the farm.

I wish I could recall the date now in the late 90s when I last saw Ed, when he showed up unexpectedly one night at my apartment building in Moorhead after Nova had passed away, and he had insisted on transporting her himself to be cremated in Fargo. The cremation was to take place the next day but he needed a place to stay for the night, and I gladly allowed him into my home. After all he had done for me over the few years that I knew him, it was the least I could do.

I will always remember him and Nova as sharing a true love story, as he told me that not only was she the first girl he had ever kissed, but she was also the first that he had ever held hands with.

I lost track of where Ed ended up after that sad time but in the spring of 2002, a college student named Beverly Brandenburger produced a research paper for school on the subject of Bigfoot in Minnesota, for which she had interviewed me online.

She informed me that she had learned that Ed had since followed Nova into the great beyond. I have told myself that what should one expect when befriending the elderly but that the friendship will be short. One fond memory I have is how when I turned Ed on to some of the Bigfoot literature, he decided to contact the famous Canadian researcher John Green both by letter and by phone, and the two enjoyed a long-distance friendship for a time. I'm so glad I was able to get those two old men together, both of them gone now.

Ed was my Old Man of the Woods, and I really miss the guy.

Ed Trimble displays his honeybees.

MARK HALL & TIM OLSON

In the summer of 1989, when I took some vacation time to go on a Bigfoot fact-finding tour of southeast Minnesota I looked up the cryptozoologist Mark A. Hall in the Twin Cities suburb of Bloomington. Mark was a veteran researcher and a virtual human storehouse of knowledge, with a huge book collection dominating his apartment.

For a living, he was a government employee who worked for the Department of Agriculture and the Customs Service, but his passion was cryptozoology which he researched as a mostly under the radar figure, never becoming really famous in the field but providing much information to it. In addition to his interest in Bigfoot, one of his best-known writings was the book Thunderbirds: The Living Legend, which chronicled accounts of the seemingly impossibly giant birds that have been sighted across North America.

He was a close personal friend and collaborator of one of the celebrities in the cryptozoological field, Loren Coleman, who continues to soldier on. Mark suffered on and off with cancer in his last years and died in September 2016 at age 70.

When I met Mark, we chatted in his apartment for a while on the Bigfoot subject in general and about how keyed up I was at the time about just having met the keeper of the Minnesota Iceman Frank Hansen earlier that day (more on that in a later chapter).

He then suggested that we drive over to meet with his friend Tim Olson who lived nearby, a fellow Bigfooter. I will always remember Tim as being on the younger side even though he was six years older than me. He was living at that time in Bloomington with his father, but he also had roots in northern California where his mother lived, having attended college in Arcata at Humboldt State University in the region where the term Bigfoot had first been coined and where the famous Patterson-Gimlin film had occurred in 1967.

For a time out there, he had worked with Rich Grumley of the California Bigfoot Organization. Mark, Tim, and I had a very spirited discussion of all things Bigfoot while sitting around the kitchen table in Tim's dad's house. It led to Tim becoming my Bigfooting partner for several years.

Tim and I only did field investigation together for one brief period in Minnesota in the summer of 1990 in which we camped in the Chippewa National Forest and then ended up actually finding some Bigfoot tracks in an area called Vergas Trails, but after that, he became my co-editor of the Sasquatch Report newsletter that I published for several years.

Before long, he moved back to California where he lived with his mother, and I remember very long phone conversations with him when he would call from there. He loved to talk.

In 1995 when I felt that I had run out of fresh ideas for the newsletter, Tim took it over as lead editor and managed to keep it going for another couple of years.

Tim suffered from epilepsy and was plagued by frequent seizures that took the form of extreme fainting spells in which he would just suddenly blank out and fall heavily onto his back.

I witnessed several of them. They were scary, but within a few minutes, he would always come out of it and regain his composure. However, he was also a very devout Christian and often talked about his faith and how it was the thing that saw him through his illness. I remember him talking about how when he would go on Bigfoot expeditions into the California wilderness, he would wear a bicycle helmet to protect his head from rocks in case he suffered a seizure and fell.

Tim died unexpectedly on February 3, 2015, when he was at home in Areata and suffered a seizure in his bathroom, falling and hitting his head against the bathtub. He was 52. He was a dedicated Bigfooter and a really good person.

Miss ya, man.

Tim Olson.

Tim Olson.

2

KETTLE RIVER

WHEN FINDING BIGFOOT COMES TO TOWN

The cable network Animal Planet first appeared on American television in 1996, a channel whose theme was that every program they aired would have something to do with animals.

Amidst the many wildlife specials and shows about humorous pets, there was one show that quickly took its place as the network's flagship series - 'The Crocodile Hunter" starring Steve Irwin, the operator of Australia Zoo in Queensland. Most people will remember him as that extremely charismatic chap in the khaki shorts who loved animals as much as he loved people and was never afraid to get up close and personal with even the most dangerous of creatures.

I remember being one of his many fans, but in retrospect now, I also remember always having the thought, Something is gonna get that guy someday. When it happened in September 2006, it was not in the way I had imagined. He was killed by a stingray while filming underwater, stabbed in the heart by its poisonous barb. I had assumed it would be something with teeth, most likely a croc or a shark, but the culprit didn't matter. Steve knew the dangers every time he got close to wildlife, and he accepted them, but it was an extremely sad episode for anyone who values the environment and a horrible tragedy for his family and everyone else who loved him.

It was left to Animal Planet to decide how they were going to go on after the death of their major star. Their choices in the decade-plus since then have been a mixed bag. One of my favorite shows they've produced has been River Monsters, beginning in 2009 and chronicling the adventures of the British extreme fisherman and biologist Jeremy Wade as he travels the world searching out little known but deadly and toothy denizens of the world's waterways.

Part of what I enjoy about the show is that it sometimes touches on the realm of cryptozoology, and it does it respectfully. But alongside quality shows like this, the network has also delved into the realm of mockumentaries, shows that are made to look real but which the credits explain is actually fiction meant as nothing but entertainment.

The most notorious of these has been Mermaids: The Body Found, which aired in May 2012, a show that told the story of scientists that had discovered that mermaids were real and had found the remains of one, complete with convincing video evidence. It was 100% fake, but to this day, there are people who still buy into it in the same way that people were convinced that 'The Blair Witch Project was real. Mockumentaries are usually one-off specials, but there was at least one series called Lost Tapes" that did the same thing, a found-footage show presenting fictional stories of various cryptozoological creatures as if they were true.

In May 2011, into the Animal Planet arena stepped a show entitled Finding Bigfoot. Like most Bigfoot enthusiasts, I was thrilled that such attention was being given to the subject, but time would tell just exactly what kind of show it would be. One thing it did was to introduce some new words into the English language- Squatch (both noun and verb), Squatchin' (verb), Squatchy (adjective), etc. It definitely had a sense of humor about itself but was absolutely not a mockumentary.

It ran for an impressive 11 seasons, ending in May of 2018. Finding Bigfoot followed the exploits of a four-person team traveling North America and even sometimes venturing into other regions of the world, checking out places where Bigfoot-type creatures have been reported.

It was largely formulaic, consisting of them coming into an area and holding a public meeting in which they invited the locals to share their stories, then zeroing in on a few of those stories they selected to focus on and investigate at the places where they occurred, augmenting them with computer-generated animations of what was reported to have happened.

The episodes always ended with the team geared up with night vision equipment and two-way radios out in the woods attempting to lure Bigfoots to them by making loud imitations of Bigfoot sounds. Sometimes they found nothing, and sometimes there seemed to be credible sights or sounds to suggest they might actually be close to their quarry, with the emphasis on making it all as scary as possible.

On rare occasions, they actually thought they had captured audio or video evidence of Bigfoot. But in spite of the wealth of good information this show brought forth, I think I am hardly alone in what my overall opinion of it turned out to be.

I think that Finding Bigfoot was not a good name for the show since they were clearly not interested in actually finding one of the creatures. Even in the episodes in which they found truly tantalizing evidence, it ended with them packing up and moving on to the next location rather than staying and continuing to search the most promising areas.

Actually finding Bigfoot would mean an end to the show, and so they continued on with the same formula as all the Ghost Hunter shows that populate cable tv. Having said that, however, I should add that I understand what happens once someone is locked into a Hollywood contract.

I'm sure that each of the team members separately would be thrilled to be the one to make that ultimate discovery, just not on the show. I do appreciate Finding Bigfoot very much for the number of reports it brought to light.

Time now to introduce the team:

Matt Moneymaker founded the BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers' Organization) in 1995.

It is the largest and most extensive organization of its kind and hosts a website that catalogs many hundreds of reports across North America. He has hosted many expeditions in areas far and wide for BFRO members, but he has his share of critics who complain that he will only network and share information with paying members of the BFRO. I suppose that makes his last name rather ironic.

I don't begrudge him, though, for the work he's done in bringing the Bigfoot subject powerfully into the public eye. He is a burly, long-haired, and bearded guy with a charismatic personality who acted as team leader on the show.

Cliff Barackman came across as the most sensible and no-nonsense member of the team. He is known as a Bigfoot researcher who spends as much as 200 days a year out in the field and was often portrayed as the voice of reason on the show. He also has a friendly and engaging demeanor that makes him one that anyone seeking information on Bigfoot is highly recommended to seek out.

James Bobo Fay is a big man who was often used on the show in reenactments of Bigfoot sightings to stand in the same spot where the Bigfoot was in order to determine its size.

He was also the comic relief character, making frequent jokes. He and Barackman are friends who investigated Bigfoot reports together well before the show came into being.

And finally, there was Ranae Holland. I will call her what she is -- the token skeptic. She is a field biologist who says her father was fascinated by Bigfoot when she was a child and that that is largely what brought her to her position as the member of the Finding Bigfoot team that found the subject interesting but wouldn't accept that the creatures really exist until she saw absolute proof. She was the foil against which the other three members bounced off. In almost every report they investigated, she tried to rationalize some non-Bigfoot explanation.

Having delved into things a bit myself, I feel it my responsibility to report that a source I will not name told me that after talking to Ranae, he knew that she is, in actuality, a Bigfoot believer and only played the part of the skeptic on the show because the script required her to. I can neither confirm nor deny that allegation.

I mean Ranae no ill will, but on a humorous note, I just have to say that since I first began watching the show, I have referred to her as Velma because she kind of looks like the character by that name from the Scooby-Doo cartoons. The way the team toured the country in an SUV even calls to mind the Mystery Machine, just without the dog.

All in all, I am glad that the show came to be because it did a good job of getting the word out to a wide audience that might not otherwise ever know that Bigfoot is seen all across America.

After all, your average Joe doesn't normally seek out books or films or websites on the subject on a casual basis, but almost everyone channel surfs and will eventually run across the show. I wondered how long it might be before the team came to Minnesota.

It wasn't long. The fourth episode of the show's second season aired on January 15, 2012 and was set in a part of Minnesota where I'd never been, the Kettle River area in Carlton County, about 50 miles southwest of the major city of Duluth. The river flows through a region of farmland and small towns, but it is not exactly like the prairie farmland where I grew up in west central Minnesota.

Rather, it is peppered sporadically with dense woodland and swamps that cover many square miles, and as I discovered from watching the show, it was the scene of a series of dramatic and fascinating Bigfoot encounters between 2008 and 2010 that I instantly wanted to learn more about. I made three trips there in 2013 and 2014, twice by myself and once with my partner Dean, and was able to flesh out some of the information given on the show a bit farther and also to get a feel for the kinds of subtle changes that are often made when true stories are brought to television.

What first called attention to the area was a report by BFRO member Andy Pieper who made a tantalizing audio recording on September 13, 2009, that became officially known online as the Minnesota Howls. Pieper is also a member of a Minnesota-based group known as the Sasquatch Research Association (SRA) and is an avid investigator.

The recording is of wolf howls that seems to have something else joining in, a deeper and throatier howl that sounds distinctly un-wolflike. Pieper appeared on the show to present the recording, after which the team members debated whether or not it sounded like only wolves.

Typically, only Ranae thought that it did. The show moved into the town meeting they held on August 22, 2011, indicating that it was in the small town of Tamarack, which is a few miles north of where all the reports featured occurred. The meeting hall was jampacked with up to 200 people on a hot summer day in sweltering conditions, the local people evidently feeling that the subject was important enough for them to show up and endure the heat.

When Matt Moneymaker asked for a show of hands from anyone in the crowd that had seen Bigfoot, an astoundingly large number of hands went up. I remember hearing commentary on the episode that described it as one of the biggest returns they had ever had.

I would eventually learn, however, that some clever editing had been used. The meeting did not actually take place in the town of Tamarack but at a rural meeting hall called the Lakeside Community Club a short distance outside of town, which confused me when I first came to the area because there was a building in town that at first seemed to fit the bill.

Admittedly, that was partially my mistake. However, there was also some deliberate deception, not a big deal, really, but still something that struck me. I was told that two questions were asked at the meeting, the first being how many people had seen a Bigfoot and the second being how many people knew of someone who'd seen a Bigfoot. What was featured on the show was the first question being asked, but the hands then being raised were actually the response to the second question, which were much more in number.

It's mildly shady, but that's Hollywood for you. There was also the fact that the narrator for the show described the location as being northern Minnesota near the Canadian border.

There is about 130 miles of Minnesota north of Kettle River before one reaches Canada. Much more important, though, were the stories shared at the meeting. I know there were many more than were actually featured on the show, but the ones told were all quite incredible.

A young blonde woman with glasses and a ponytail named Kristy Aho stood up and told her story of what marked one of the earliest occurrences of Bigfoot in the area, and she spoke with such conviction that she really impressed me. Her husband Dale was a logger who was often away on jobs, and he wasn't there, so it fell to her to describe what they and their children had seen.

On a day in September of 2008, they had all been out in the woods on an ATV four-wheeler sharing the experience of Dale hunting partridge, stopping at various spots where Dale would walk into the bush to try and flush out his quarry. At one such spot, he flushed out something much more than that. A huge black hairy creature suddenly stood up from out of the bushes where it had apparently been bedded down, its height estimated by different members of the family as anywhere from 7 1/2 to eight feet, and took off on two legs through the woods at a run passing within full view of Kristy and the kids as they waited on the ATV.

What Kristy stressed the most were how its footfalls made the ground shake, driving home how massive a beast it was. I seen it run by probably 15, 20 feet from where we were sitting, she said. And the ground shook when it run. It was just boom, boom, boom. Dale was present after the town meeting when the team went with the family to the sighting location, and as he so often did, Bobo went to stand where the creature had stood to establish its size.

This resulted in the conclusion that it had been even bigger than first thought, perhaps as tall as nine feet. The team judged it a solid sighting, but it was not the only one the family had had.

Nearly a year later, in July 2009, the family had a second sighting while driving at night in their pickup truck. In their headlights, they first saw red eyeshine about 200 feet away that then approached them and formed into a Bigfoot creature that they thought seemed even somewhat bigger than the earlier one, swaying back and forth as it walked. They retreated from the encounter when the children started crying from fear.

Even more contact with the creatures was suggested when Kristy spoke at the town meeting and said, My husband has seen them, probably a family, several times, but he is not here tonight to talk about his experience.

The Kettle River, between the towns of Kettle River and Moose Lake.

The Lakeside Community Club where Finding Bigfoot held their town meeting.

On my last visit to the area, I had the brief pleasure of meeting Kristy Aho. By then, I had been in contact by e-mail with Cliff Barackman from the Finding Bigfoot team since he has a website and makes himself fairly available, and he told me that since the airing of the show the Ahos had stopped speaking publicly because there had been a lot of trespassing on their property by people that had seen it.

I tracked down where they lived and knocked on the door there around mid-morning, a rustic place with several large pieces of logging equipment scattered about.

Dale was apparently again away on a job, but I could hear the kids running around inside just before Kristy came to the door. She was a bit bedraggled, not yet put together for her day, and I felt bad about disturbing her but was also somewhat excited to meet this woman who