The Truth Is Out There

SASQUATCH, BIGFOOT, YETI—YES, THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO SAYTHEY HAVE SEEN HUGE, HAIRY CREATURES IN FORESTSAND ON MOUNTAINS.

EVEN THE NOTED EXPLORER, SIR EDMUND HILLARY, REPORTED SEEING GIANTFOOTPRINTS ON MOUNT EVEREST. SO WHY DO WE FIND IT SO HARD TO BELIEVE?

- Josh Sims

LAST YEAR HARRIET MCFEELY became the oldest woman to date to hike BluffCreek in Nebraska. It’s a fact she’s rather proud of. After all, it was here that the Patterson-Gimlin film was shot in 1967. That may not be as well-known a piece of amateur footage as, say, the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination, but in these parts, it’s a big deal. The film captures what purports to be Sasquatch loping across the creek, at one point turning to look directly at the camera. Sasquatch— known colloquially as Bigfoot—is a figure that has fascinated McFeely since she was eight, when she first read about Edmund Hillary seeing giant footprints on Mount Everest.

“Even then I thought no person in their right mind would be barefooted three-quarters of the way up that mountain. And, really, the subject of Bigfoot has been one of the loves of my life ever since,” she says. She isn’t kidding. She recently opened her own Bigfoot museum, the Nebraska Bigfoot Crossroads of America. “All my life people have said I’m weird for believing Bigfoot exists, but I see it as a compliment. It’s important to be open-minded. There are hundreds of new species discovered every year, so I don’t understand why there’s not an acceptance of Bigfoot.”

Acceptance, of course, is easier if you’ve actually seen one. And McFeely says she’s seen four, all at the same time. She was hiking with a group in central Colorado when they spotted a family group near the top of an incline. The largest of the group had, she recalls, “red eyes the size of tennis balls... Seeing them was just the weirdest feeling—us looking at them, them looking at us,” she says. “It was hard to process. But there they were.”