In the Shadows – Investigating Encounters - Article 3

One of the great opportunities a Bigfoot researcher can have, is to go investigate sightings and other encounters that occur.  In that capacity over the years, I have been involved in investigations of some really interesting events. 

Perhaps one of my favorite investigations happened near Pumpkin Hollow near the Illinois River, in which a Chicken farmer, who had several large industrial chicken houses, had an encounter he would never forget.  It would seem strange with the number of chickens in a large chicken house to notice any missing, but this farmer had begun noticing that a fair number of chickens were disappearing.  After a week of this, the farmer was walking down the outside of one of the chicken houses when he turned the corner and ran smack into a Bigfoot carrying an armful of chickens knocking the farmer down.  Stunned apparently from being caught, the Bigfoot dropped the chickens and exchanged stares with the farmer for what seemed to be an eternity before scooping up several nearby chickens and heading off at a rapid pace towards the woods.

The speculation was, that Bigfoot had been watching the farmer and his farmhands going and opening the doors, figuring out how to do it on its own.  Needless to say, the farmer sold his farm within several months and moved away, he continued to have bad dreams about the encounter.

 The wildest investigation I had done, was south of Stilwell where a local family had been encountering Bigfoot in the area and their sons had seen one down in a field behind their house.  My wife and I traveled up to do a night observation post in the field and was joined by the husband and wife whose sons had seen the Bigfoot along with their youngest son.  As it began to get dark, a large Bigfoot was spotted standing in the corner of the field with a night vision scope, only to duck down and make a lot of noise walking along the edge of the field in the woods.

The couple with us had settled down to wait alongside us, with the wife playing on her cell phone, which lit her up in the darkness.  Presently, she began feeling something hitting her, and her son, thinking it was a bug flying around because of the light of her phone, went over to find it and remove the pest.  Instead of a bug, he discovered several “grass balls” laying at her feet where they had fallen after hitting her. 

 As investigators, my wife and I knew to watch the husband and the son to see if they were throwing them at the wife, just to make sure it wasn’t them.  However, now grass balls began landing nearby everyone there, and as we gathered them up, it was apparent that it wasn’t the family that was throwing them as we were all gathered around the small table looking at the collected grass balls when one came sailing in from above on us.

Something was nearby laying in the tall grass throwing these at us, so after 20 minutes of these balls being thrown at us, I decided to walk into the field where I thought it was laying at.  As I neared the location, my wife hollered to me that a grass ball had just come from the opposite side of where we had been sitting.  Clearly, we had more than one individual throwing these at us.

After an hour had passed by with no more incident, we decided to go home and come back the next day to see if we could find any sign of where the individual throwing at us would have been hiding and to look for more grass balls we might have missed in the dark. 

Upon arriving the next day, it was easily discovered from the large grassy area that had been compressed from something laying on it, not more than 40 feet from where we had been sitting, that something had crawled up to that spot, covered by several large clumps of weeds, and picked the grass there.

Having discovered this, we took several of the grass balls to see if we could throw them to the spot where we had sat at the night before, none of us could get more than halfway there.  None of us could also re-create the grass balls, including my 7-year-old grandson, who had smaller hands and we thought might be able to do it. 

Was it a Bigfoot that was throwing these balls at us?  I can’t say it really was, outside of the fact that we had spotted a Bigfoot in the area just prior to getting these thrown. 

“While not actually a ball, these are some of the recovered “grass balls” from the night of the investigation.”

While folks may see on Bigfoot TV shows where it appears that they have activity non-stop when doing research or investigations, please keep in mind, that researchers usually go for long periods of time with nothing happening.  Going back out to that location where the grass balls were thrown on multiple nights, didn’t provide any further activity.  Sometimes, a researcher will go months or years before encountering more activity.

I hope you enjoy these articles, if you have had an encounter, please visit our website at www.mabrc.com and fill out a sighting report.  And don’t forget to attend the Oklahoma Bigfoot Symposium next March at CC Camp, where you can interact with the researchers themselves and discuss more about Bigfoot with them.