BRAINERD — How does one try to explain seeing something in the woods when they have no plausible explanation for what they saw? Some may run, some spend their lives looking for it and others are taught that not everything is black and white.
What they saw is often described as a massive bipedal creature that was glimpsed for a few seconds, something that does not fit into any category of known creature which is often described amongst only the closest of friends in hushed tones as — Bigfoot.
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When a recent video of a supposed Bigfoot sighting in Colorado made waves for a few days on social media, It highlighted America's fascination with something which defies American cultural norms.
Many cultures across time and through history have recorded seeing and hearing strange creatures, said John Houston, a philosophy professor with Logos 4 Wisdom. Houston teaches an online class called .
“The Philosophy of the Weird and Bizarre is a bit out of the norm, not only for what I offer but for what academics would offer in general,” Houston said in a recent phone interview. “It's a course that focuses on the fact that people have strange encounters or experiences in life, for which they have no category.”
Houston’s course focuses on three big anomalies people talk about — Bigfoot and cryptozoology, ghosts, and demons and demonology, with a speaker for each one of those subjects.
“We look at different possible sources of explanation,” Houston said. “We begin with the mundane, reason by process of elimination. So making sure that a person is, you know, of sound mind, that they're not lying, that they're not fabricating, that their senses were properly operative.”
Minnesota researchers
The speaker for Bigfoot and cryptozoology in Houston’s Philosophy of the Weird and Bizarre class was Michael “Pops” Hexum, a member of the . Hexum is a 66-year-old man from northern Itasca County who has been a Bigfoot researcher for the past 40 years.
“I was about 14 years old, deer hunting and I had one walk into a shooting lane and it was about 20 feet away,” Hexum said. “It startled and looked around — kind of bewildering. I was downwind so it couldn't scent me but I could smell it and it stunk. At first, I thought it was a man dressed in black. I made a noise and it turned and looked at me. It had a human-looking prehistoric face and it stood there for about five or six seconds staring at me. Then it took three steps and was into the woods. I never saw it again after that. That was my first experience back in the early ‘70s.”
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Hexum said he immediately “got the hell out of there. The thing went one way. I grabbed my rifle and my stuff and went the other way.”
Though he would go about his life for the next few years, Hexum said he always kept alert anytime he was in the woods. When he had a second encounter with the mysterious creature crossing the ice, he started becoming involved in research and got involved with some groups to go out looking for Bigfoot.
One Minnesota researcher never intended to begin looking for Bigfoot until finding a set of tracks in Alaska. Doug Hajicek, film producer and researcher, was actually looking to film a rare 6-foot lake trout while working for Animal Planet.
“We then ran into footprints,” Hajicek said. “Big huge human-like footprints that came out of the beach, traversed in the sand, very clear footprints. Then in the pea gravel, which we couldn't even dent, there were deep (prints) into the pea gravel, then into the moss and then followed the tracks to a small stand of trees. What was truly life-changing for me was there was a footprint in front of the tree, a 7-foot stunted black spruce tree, and there was a footprint directly behind the tree. In a straight line. Which means whatever it was, stepped over the tree, literally just like a weed.”
Hajicek, best known for his series “MonsterQuest” on the History Channel, said from that point on he wanted to know more.
“Came back wanting answers and curious,” Hajicek said. “If this was a Bigfoot it was very real to me and I thought I would get into researching that, and then came up with the idea of doing a scientific documentary. So in about the year 2000, they did the first scientific documentary on the topic. … It was called ‘Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science’ and I did that for Discovery Channel.”
Hajicek was one of the first researchers who filmed the birth of a black bear in its den, a 54-foot giant squid free swimming in the ocean and put a camera into a beaver lodge to see what had not been seen before.
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“So I just kept doing this kind of stuff, just out of curiosity,” Hajicek said. “The Bigfoot mystery was no different. I couldn't understand why scientists would be hesitant to investigate something when there's so much fuel.”
Not everyone looking for Bigfoot became interested in the mystery in the same way. Abe Del Rio, founder of the Minnesota Bigfoot Research Team, said he and his team have been looking for, examining sighting sites and researching Bigfoot in Minnesota for the past 23 years.
Del Rio, who hosts the Minnesota Bigfoot Conference and posts his excursions on his , said he became interested in Bigfoot in the ‘80s after visiting Como Park Zoo and Conservatory with his parents.
“Mom and Dad would take me to Como Zoo, and I would see the gorillas,” Del Rio said. “At such a young age, I was just awestruck and fascinated with them. I just wanted to stay there and look at them. To this day, I still want to look at the gorillas.”
Along with spending countless hours at the library, anytime a report would come through the radio or newspaper, Del Rio would look into the sighting.
“Going into the school libraries and public libraries and looking at some books and pictures and seeing that famous picture of the Patterson-Gimlin film in black and white of what looks like a huge gorilla to me, walking on two legs. That's where it kind of made a lasting impression.”
Also growing up in Minnesota and getting into researching Bigfoot after seeing something in the woods is Bigfoot researcher and author, Mike Quast.
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“I've just kind of been naturally drawn to every paranormal topic under the sun for some reason, including cryptozoology, Bigfoot, Loch Ness and things like that,” Quast said. “But when I was 8 years old, I had my own Bigfoot sighting that kind of cemented things for me. I was at a place called Strawberry Lake in Becker County, Minnesota in the summer of 1976. I was with my parents and my sister; we were just out on a Sunday drive. We were at a farm family, but during the summer, we would go for drives on the weekend sometimes. It was a forested area, and I was just looking around and about 150 yards up the road, I happened to see this black object standing next to the road about 7 feet tall.”
Quast said at first he thought it was a burned tree trunk. But when it stepped away from the road on two legs and disappeared into the woods, he could tell it wasn't a bear.
“I can't really explain why I was the only person in the car that happened to see it,” Quast said. “I have been told by some Native American people more recently that I was the only one who was meant to see it. And it was invisible to everyone else. I don't know what to think about those kinds of beliefs, but that's what I was told.”
Looking in the woods
Minnesota is a high-volume place for credible sightings, Hajicek said. “In fact, in many ways, Minnesota sightings are more credible because Minnesotans have very little culture of Bigfoot Minnesota.”
Hajicek said he believes it is an undiscovered, very advanced North American ape.
“If you go back, the Native Americans literally discuss through oral traditions,” Hajicek said. “First Nations people discussed, basically, ape behavior, stick-wielding, rock throwing. These things weren't even known until the ‘60s, but yet the Native Americans described so much of the primate behavior before researchers ever linked it to the creature.”
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When going out into the woods, Quast said they don't just pick a random spot in the woods. They do some research to find out where there have been recorded sightings already, including many national and state forests, where permission from a landowner is not needed.
Del Rio said he often uses a website called the , the BFRO, to look for both historical and new data.
“We kind of want to go to a place in the woods where there's a lot of streams, creeks or tributaries,” Del Rio said. “A water source, and where there's a water source, you're going to have food and a lot of things use that water source. And what we believe them to be, is an omnivorous creature.”
Del Rio said after they check the topography of the area, they hike out to areas and look for tree formations — trees laid out in a pattern which do not appear to be naturally made. They also use vocalization, such as a “whoop” or a “howl” from suspected encounters to solicit a response.
Another technique to solicit a response is “wood knocking,” Del Rio said.
“We try to solicit that response by banging at a piece of wood against a tree,” Del Rio said. “It has a good acoustical sound that resonates and travels quite far.”
Although there have been reports through the region going back years, Quast said he has been looking around Beltrami County, specifically Blackduck.
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“My most recent book from , where there's been ongoing activity since 2013,” Quast said. “So that's where I've been spending most of my spare time for the past few years, since December of 2019. I've been able to witness a lot of stuff there. There have been 28 sightings on that property so far by the landowner and his family and people who visit.”
The proof?
The question of how they got here or where they came from remains a hotly debated topic in the research field.
“I think in my opinion, they came over across the land bridge from Europe when the land bridge existed,” Hexum said. “And basically back in that time, modern man was evolving and he's seen as a cousin to modern man.”
Hexum also believes Minnesota is very active, especially up in northern Minnesota, because of how remote the area is.
Quast said there is recent debate as to whether the creature is flesh and blood.
“Their origin lies somewhere else,” Quast said. “Since I've been visiting this Blackduck property, I used to be a pure, just flesh and blood animal guy. But with some of the things that go on up at Blackduck, I've had to say I'm on the fence now about whether there's something paranormal about these things or not.”
Though the creature remains as elusive as it has ever been, Hajicek said, “there is probably a sighting every few minutes, literally every few minutes. No, I'm not talking about hoaxed videos. There was recently a video in the news from Colorado from a tourist train. That takes three seconds of me viewing it to know it's a hoax. I can see the bell bottoms. You know, the bell-bottom costume used to cover shoes.”
Hajicek said he does not forgive scientists for not being more curious about the existence of Bigfoot. As he has previously filmed things not thought possible in the scientific community, he questions what it will take for people to remove the “monster” stigma and begin looking for scientific explanations for the creature.
Quast said he thinks it would take capturing or killing one for the masses to believe in the existence of Bigfoot.
“Should one be shot and killed to prove that they exist,” Quast asked. “I've always kind of been on the fence about that. A lot of people say they'll never be proven real until we have a type specimen.”
Quast said an anthropologist from Washington State University, Grover Krantz, once asked, “if you had one in your sights, do you think you could really pull the trigger? His answer was that he really wasn't sure, but that whichever decision he made, he knew he would regret it for the rest of his life. So I guess I've always kind of felt the exact same way.”
In his class Philosophy of the Weird and Bizarre, Houston said they discuss and look at different possible sources of explanation.
“If there's every good reason to think the person did have an anomalous experience, then there's the question of what are the potential causes of that experience,” Houston said. “And that's where we have to entertain the strange possibility that there might be things that are beyond our normal, everyday experience that people are encountering, and we might not have any ready-made category to think about that. We might have to make room in the world of our own thoughts. Entertaining the possibility that there are creatures or entities that exist beyond the norm beyond what we usually understand.
“As human beings, one of the things that we rely on is disambiguating the world. We need to understand the world to survive. And when we encounter something that we do not understand, we want to try, maybe a little too quickly, to put it into a ready-made category or to explain it away,” Houston said.
TIM SPEIER, staff writer, can be reached on Twitter , call 218-855-5859 or email tim.speier@brainerddispatch.com .
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