Jefferson is best known for its wall-to-wall concentration of bed-and-breakfasts, its boomtown past as an important river port and the state's weirdest newspaper name: The Jimplecute.
But the really big news in town this season is the fourth annual Texas Bigfoot Conference, Oct. 22-23.
No, it's not a roundtable summit of hairy 8-foot ape-men. It's a meeting of Bigfoot enthusiasts and witnesses, and it will bring in cryptozoologists (oh, why didn't my guidance counselor tell me about that profession?) from as far away as British Columbia and the United Kingdom, lecturing on sightings and even, perhaps, science. (Primatologist Jane Goodall has said that she thinks the existence of Bigfoot/sasquatch creatures is a strong probability.)
Didn't know Texas was a Bigfoot hotbed? The Texas Bigfoot Research Center in Jefferson notes that sightings have been reported for hundreds of years, mostly in the Eastern forests, and are reflected in local American Indian legends, too. Jefferson is at the center of it all: Many of the region's encounters have been reported at the nearby swampy, primeval Caddo Lake.
At the conference, there's sure to be talk about the most famous creature ever spotted in Texas. It was our own Lake Worth Monster, a huge beast that terrorized lake visitors for a few months in 1969. The Star-Telegram reported on the sightings under the headline: "Fishy Man-Goat Terrifies Couples Parked at Lake Worth."
But there are also the Caddo Critter, the Haskell Rascal and the Hawley Him. The Texas Bigfoot Research Center's Web site, www.texasbigfoot.com, has a map of the state's sightings. There, you'll learn that if you don't want a messy windshield encounter with an 8-foot ape-man, stick to roads in the Panhandle, the Rio Grande Valley and southwestern counties. Don't even think about venturing east of Interstate 45.
IN THE KNOW
Everything's Bigfoot in Texas!
Texas residents have reported numerous sightings of huge, hairy, biped creatures throughout the years. Among the reports:
• In 2003, a motorist reported an 8-foot-tall Bigfoot crossing Texas 154 in Harleton at Little Cypress Bayou.
• In December 2001, a deer hunter saw a "7-foot, upright, stooped apelike figure, dark brown in color." The creature, spotted near Marshall, was observed picking up apples.
• In October 1995, a man was looking at land that he was considering buying near Cleveland, 40 miles north of Houston. He found a creature lying on the ground that rose on two legs, ran toward him and hit him in the chest. He caught the creature on video as it retreated into the woods. The footage was later shown on the television show Strange Universe.
• In June 1978, in Vidor, a couple moved out of their home because they'd had enough of the Bigfoot sightings.
In 2000, residents of Sabine reported seeing a gray, ape-like creature in the area's dense forests. The local newspaper dubbed the creature the "Sabine Thing".
A similar beast called the "Caddo Critter" is said to have inhabited the bottoms around scenic Caddo Lake in the 1970's. The Sulphur River along the Texas-Arkansas border has been a source of similar sightings for decades.
As strange as those stories may sound, they are not the only cases of mysterious ape-like animal sightings in Texas, not by a long shot. "Bigfoot" (a.k.a. "Sasquatch") is a term associated with the US Pacific Northwest, but a handful of investigators are searching for the same (or very similar) animal right here in the Lone Star State.
Bobby Hamilton of Warren is founder of the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization (GCBRO), a group dedicated to solving these mysteries in Texas and elsewhere. "I know it sounds crazy, but there are Bigfoot creatures right here in Texas," Hamilton said. "That's a lot to swallow, but I've been researching these creatures in the field for quite some time now. They're out there.
" Something Hamilton likes to make clear up front is that his organization believes these creatures are real flesh and blood animals, not part of some paranormal government conspiracy. "They're flesh and blood animals. We don't believe they are flying around in UFOs or are shapeshifters or anything like that. In fact, we don't allow anyone into our group who talks about that kind of stuff. We believe these animals to be a primate, a very smart primate that we just haven't yet proven exists." The GCBRO keeps a log of sightings by county in Texas and other states, and according to Hamilton, reports come in on a weekly basis. "Some of them are recent reports while others may be 30 years old," he said. "But they all tell us something. If an area has a bunch of sightings over a long period of time we know that's a good area to research." Researching an area consists of looking for sign like footprints and twisted limbs and listening for vocalizations. "We have recorded some noises we just can't place with known animals. Some of these sounds are pretty amazing, even frightening," Hamilton said.
The group has even found some hair samples. Primatologists who examined the samples said they were from "no known animal." One came back as matching alleged Bigfoot hair gathered in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond gathering physical evidence of the creatures' existence, Hamilton said some in his group have had close encounters. "There are people within our group who have seen these creatures, myself included. Some joined the group because they saw one and others have seen them in the course of research.
" Craig Woolheater is a researcher for the Texas Bigfoot Research Center (TBRC), another group studying the Bigfoot phenomenon. "Several of our members have seen these creatures, and that's a big part of the reason we're so passionate about studying them. It's one thing to read about them, but another to see them," he said.
Woolheater's sighting occurred while he and his wife were traveling through Louisiana one night in the early 1990's. "This big, grayish, hairy creature was on the side of the road. It was dark, but we got a good look at it. The beast was kind of slumped over," he said.
TBRC members believe the creatures are a subspecies of the ones in the Pacific Northwest. "The basic reports are the same-a large, hairy animal walking upright," Woolheater said. "But there are some differences, like coloration, hair length and build. Until it's proven they exist, all of that's kind of a moot point. This is certainly cryptozoology's biggest mystery.
" Loren Coleman, considered by many to be the world's foremost cryptozoologist, notes that there have been several discoveries of large animals in recent years. "A new species of antelope was found in Vietnam a few years ago. Tales of the mountain gorilla used to be greeted with the same kind of disdain as modern day mystery primate sightings. One day we may find out these creatures are real too.
" Coleman, who along with Patrick Hughye wrote A Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide, said there are plenty of historical references of apelike creatures in the South, both from European and Native American culture. "The Louisiana Choctaw Indian had an animal they called the nalusa fayala, which means 'long, evil being," he said.
The most famous Southern Bigfoot sightings came from just across the border on the Arkansas side of the Sulphur River near the tiny community of Fouke. The "Fouke Monster," as the creature was called by locals, achieved celluloid immortality in the 1973 film, The Legend of Boggy Creek. Smokey Crabtree was a wildlife advisor for the film, and his family accounted for several of the sighting reenactments. He has authored two books, Smokey and the Fouke Monster and Too Close to the Mirror, and believes there are such creatures roaming the southern bottomlands. According to him, the filmmakers did not tell the whole story, or at least did not tell it accurately.
"A lot of people got the impression after watching the movie that the creature was mean and aggressive, but in my experience it wasn't," he said. "There were other inaccuracies, which is why I wrote Smokey and the Fouke Monster.
" Being a cryptozoology buff, I jumped on the opportunity to drive up to Fouke and visit with Crabtree. I interviewed him at his home and then went for a walk along the banks of Boggy Creek. I felt like a kid watching The Legend of Boggy Creek for the first time.
One thing I always wondered is why the creature in the film was never referred to as a "Bigfoot," as most mysterious North American primates seem to get tagged. "
At the time Bigfoot was something that was known of in the Pacific Northwest and in a lot of ways the area of Fouke was sheltered from that part of the world," Crabtree said. "We never heard of Bigfoot, but we knew something strange was going on around our little community."
How did Crabtree, a lifelong hunter, fisherman and trapper, react when he first heard of the creature? "
My son came home one day saying he saw this big, hairy creature in the woods behind where we lived," he said. "I could tell he was dead serious too, and this bothered me. I had never known my son to lie, but I just couldn't believe there might be something like that out in the woods I had hunted and trapped in my whole life. "
After awhile, older members of my family started coming to me and saying my son wasn't lying. They had seen such a creature in the area in years past but swore to never tell. However, they felt they had to let me know my son was telling the truth."
After that, even common incidents in the woods took on new significance for Crabtree. "I started looking back to things that happened to me out in the woods and in the bottoms in the past, and wondered if something strange had really occurred," he said.
One thing most cryptozoologists agree on is that if such a creature existed in the Fouke area, there must have been more than one of them. The natural question, therefore, regards recent sightings.
"We get reports from time to time," Crabtree said. "In fact, a few years ago I got a report from several different people who reported seeing a large hairy creature off of Highway 71. Three motorists saw this thing on the side of the road at the same time, and on the same night a lady who had no knowledge of the other sightings reported seeing the same thing in the same general area."
Do a handful of these creatures roam the vast woodlands of the Lone Star State? Well, no one has proven it. Then again, no one has disproven it either.
Think about that the next time you are in the woods alone and that creepy feeling comes over you.
Copyright 2002 by Chester Moore
Photos by Bob Chochola, 19 August 2007
4th Annual Texas Bigfoot Conference Summit makes a big, hairy deal of Texas town BY MARILYN BAILEY Knight Ridder News Service
JEFFERSON, Texas - Jefferson is best known for its wall-to-wall concentration of bed-and-breakfasts, its boomtown past as an important river port and the state's weirdest newspaper name: The Jimplecute.
But the really big news in town this season is the fourth annual Texas Bigfoot Conference, Oct. 22-23.
No, it's not a roundtable summit of hairy 8-foot ape-men. It's a meeting of Bigfoot enthusiasts and witnesses, and it will bring in cryptozoologists (oh, why didn't my guidance counselor tell me about that profession?) from as far away as British Columbia and the United Kingdom, lecturing on sightings and even, perhaps, science. (Primatologist Jane Goodall has said that she thinks the existence of Bigfoot/sasquatch creatures is a strong probability.)
Didn't know Texas was a Bigfoot hotbed? The Texas Bigfoot Research Center in Jefferson notes that sightings have been reported for hundreds of years, mostly in the Eastern forests, and are reflected in local American Indian legends, too.
At the conference there's sure to be talk about the most famous creature ever spotted in Texas: Lake Worth Monster, a huge beast that terrorized lake visitors for a few months in 1969. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported on the sightings under the headline: ``Fishy Man-Goat Terrifies Couples Parked at Lake Worth.''
But there are also the Caddo Critter, the Haskell Rascal, and the Hawley Him.
The Texas Bigfoot Research Center's website, www.texasbigfoot.com, has a map of the state's sightings.
Caddo is as awesome in winter as it is the rest of the year
Photos by Bob Chochola, 19 August 2007
Bigfoot hunter trusts his nose to find creature By Wes Ferguson
Big Cypress Bayou — The motor sputtered, then died, and as the canoe drifted deeper into the swamp, gray tangles of bearded Spanish moss gave way to murky water and black cypress.
Knuckles whitened as Charlie DeVore ripped the pull cord. His two-man canoe, 3 decades old and uneasy under the weight of three men, teetered dangerously with every tug.
DeVore yanked the cord once more, then gave up.
"We'll just have to paddle," he said.
There wasn't time to fix the propeller, and there wasn't time for precaution. The party pressed further into the swamp, because that's where Bigfoot was.
Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, that elusive creature more often associated with the Pacific Northwest, lives among these knobby trees of the Big Cypress Bayou, DeVore will tell you.
While other people have seen the creature, DeVore, well, he has smelled it. Of course, it's the most indescribably putrid, gosh-awful stench you can imagine.
"It's overpowering," DeVore said.
DeVore has discussed that stench with dozens of East Texans who have reported brushes with the hairy hominoid. He investigates sightings for the Texas Bigfoot Research Center, a Dallas-based group that documents close encounters throughout the state, most of them in the Piney Woods and Big Thicket. Although DeVore professes to be an amateur, he knows enough to understand the creature's ways.
"Bigfoot no longer scares me," said DeVore, of medium height and a bit paunchy at 64. "It might if one was standing right over me, but they've never hurt anybody. I have a fear of wild dogs and wild hogs and anything else out there that might bite my butt, but I really have no fear of Bigfoot."
So DeVore paddles the bayou in the middle of the night, a coon-hunting spotlight and night vision camera at his side. He also wanders the forest trails he's bush-hogged near his trailer house. He sniffs the night air and listens for snapped twigs.
"It's a hobby," he said, "a passionate interest."
DeVore moved to the Big Cypress Bayou, the slow-moving body of water that slinks between Lake O' the Pines and Caddo Lake, in 1990. A heart attack had forced him into early retirement. He told himself, "I'm going to sit up here beside this water until the day I die, and enjoy it."
That's just what he did, puttering around in his canoe with the little outboard motor that he'd rigged to the back, or gliding across the deep green water in his kayak, exploring inlets and taking photographs.
"It's so beautiful out here," he said. "Normally I'm not talking, and I sneak up on all kinds of wildlife."
As he paddled deeper into the forest of submerged cypress trees, stained black by years of up and down water levels, thoughts returned to the rickety little canoe, then to the cold, black water, and always to the possibility of sneaking up on the most elusive creature of them all.
The ways of Bigfoot
Although Bigfoot is reportedly huge — 7 or 8 feet tall, and more than 500 pounds — he's awfully hard to find.
That's because he hates being around humans, believers say. When people such as DeVore go tromping into the woods, Bigfoot runs the other way. He lives in uninhabitable areas, especially around the Sabine and Sulphur rivers, the Big and Little Cypress bayous, and Caddo Lake, where he is affectionately known as the Caddo Critter.
"We have more swampy areas in East Texas where humans do not live," DeVore said. "There's more sightings during deer season than any other time because people are in the woods."
With the advent of ATVs, outdoor enthusiasts can go further into Bigfoot territory than ever before. In the past decade alone, the Texas Bigfoot Research Center has investigated five sightings in Harrison County, four in Panola County and three in Rusk County. Many of them involved hunters. One Longview man said he tried to shoot the creature with his .22. It let out a terrifying scream-roar, and the squirrel hunter was so frightened he nearly wet himself, he reported.
The Longview man's description of Bigfoot reflects many others in East Texas: Long brownish or black hair, the deathly scream-roar, or scream-growl, and that stench, which DeVore believes Bigfoot excretes, possibly from his armpits, when he feels threatened.
Crystal Steiniger of Harleton says she has experienced the smell and heard the screams.
Steiniger and her colleagues with the East Texas Bigfoot Independent Study get together once a month to look for tracks and hair samples and record Bigfoot's noises on all-night camping trips. They used to attract the creature with Bigfoot calls, but they soon abandoned the calling devices because they made it too aggressive.
"If they're walking by us, we want to hear their normal, nonthreatening type of vocalizations," she said, adding later: "I've heard solid screams. I've heard grunts, kind of a grunt-growl when you get a little too close. That was one of the best recordings. Of course, we got in our vehicle real quick. We didn't leave, but we got in our vehicle."
With so many reported encounters, skeptics quickly ask for conclusive proof — hair samples or bones, for example.
"It's well known and not disputed that we have black bears in East Texas," DeVore counters. "Nobody's ever seen a body or a skeleton of those. Predators in East Texas, which are numerous, take care of a body almost overnight. There are many theories, one, that they may carry their bodies off. After all, these are groups of them, it's not one lone animal."
People have taken pictures of black bears, the skeptics note.
One of those skeptics is Charlie Mueller, a Longview-based wildlife biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He managed the Caddo Lake wildlife area for eight years, and he said he's never seen evidence for Bigfoot's existence.
"If there's a bear out there, I'm going to find bear tracks. If there's a human out there, I'm going to find footprints," he said. "But there's no Bigfoot tracks that I've seen."
Mueller said he's studied supposed Bigfoot nests, but to him, they just looked like a pile of branches that had fallen from a tree during an ice storm.
"People let their imaginations take control a lot of times, and it's easy for someone to point out things that seem to be out of the ordinary that actually are not," he said. "But to layman folks, people that don't know a lot about wildlife and the happenings of wildlife in their habitats, a lot of times they don't understand the normal things that go on."
Fear of that kind of rebuttal, DeVore and Steiniger say, keeps many witnesses from coming forward.
"A lot of people will think they're nuts, or if they do mention it to somebody they'll say, 'Oh, it was just a bear, you don't know what you're talking about,' " Steiniger said. "They'll kind of blow it off and not take it seriously because there's been a lot of people who have spent a lot of time out in the woods who've never seen a thing. They're happily trotting along without a clue."
Says DeVore, "You're going to be ridiculed. You're thinking your nuts, so most people are real reluctant to talk. If they are going to speak to you, you've got to be real quiet about it. Of course, being in the club gives me credibility."
On the bayou
It was a perfectly clear October afternoon on the bayou, and Charlie DeVore sliced his canoe through red and green water rippling under a light breeze.
He had agreed to guide a reporter and photographer to the site of two Bigfoot encounters that he'd investigated only half a mile from his house. Because the land had changed hands, the only legal access was via boat, or, in this case, an old canoe.
It's better to stick to the water this time of year anyway, he said, because it's not too smart to traipse through the woods in the middle of deer season.
As he guided the canoe, he recalled his first encounter. He hadn't even realized how close he'd come to meeting Bigfoot on that night as he walked the trails near his house.
"I had always gone with four dogs, sometimes five, a couple of my own plus the neighbors'. These dogs generally were not afraid of anything," he said. "When I hit that stench, I looked around for the dogs and realized, hey, I was alone."
He whistled and snapped his fingers, but the dogs wouldn't come. They just sat there squirming. "I decided the dogs were smarter than me, so I went away," he said.
Photos by Bob Chochola, 19 August 2007
Searching for Sasquatch
By Anthony Davis - Texarkana Gazette
Annual Bigfoot conference draws seekers of all ages
With a stuffed replica of "Bigfoot/Sasquatch" overseeing the proceedings from a corner of the conference meeting room Saturday at the First United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall in Jefferson, Texas, the third annual Texas Bigfoot Conference held the rapt attention of a standing-room-only audience.
Ladies with gray hair wrapped tightly in buns sat alongside wide-eyed youngsters and steely-eyed outdoorsmen as one speaker after another updated the audience with historical facts, current events and information on promising research on the existence of the legendary Bigfoot/Sasquatch mystery.
Craig Woolheater of the Texas Bigfoot Research Center said the two-day event is organized to address the interests of the merely curious to the serious academic.
"This event is just basically public awareness. Generally when people think of Bigfoot they think of the Pacific Northwest, and they don't think of Texas and the South in general," said Woolheater. "There is a history of sightings in Texas that goes back as far as 1924, according to the Texas Folklore Society. There's also a long history of sightings in this area dating back to the '60s and early '70s such as the legend of Boggy Creek.
"At Caddo Lake there have been a lot of things happen in the '60s , such as the thing they cited in 1965 in the Marshall/Longview/Jefferson area called the Cypress Swamp Monster. Also in the '70s around Caddo Lake there was the one who was affectionately known as the Caddo Critter running around. In the state of Texas most of the sightings are up here in the Piney Woods, Northeast area of Texas down into the Big Thicket in Southeast Texas."
As far as the type of "science" involved in the pursuit of verifying the existence of a creature, up to 8 feet in height and bearing a coat of coarse hair of some sort, Bigfoot studies come under the heading of "cryptozoology." Cryptozoology literally translates into "the study of hidden animals, undiscovered and uncataloged by science," Woolheater said. It includes such things as the Loch Ness Monster, sea serpents and "the Thunderbird legends of the Native Americans which suggest the possibility of a type of pteradactyle, birds with wingspans up to 30 feet."
Speakers such as M. K. Davis of Mississippi and John Kirk III of British Columbia were engaging commentators on their work. Davis successfully debunked one sighting alleged to have occurred in South Louisiana's Pearl River swamp, while most recently verifying the accuracy of the much-debated Patterson film from the Pacific Northwest. This footage, shown hundreds of times on television and cited in the literature, depicts a very tall, hominid-looking creature with hair covering it's entire body looking back over its shoulder as he escapes the camera's view.
"My primary interest in Bigfoot has been with the famous Patterson film. The Patterson film was taken in the Pacific Northwest, the one where the Bigfoot looks back over his shoulder," Davis said. "I did a lot of work with some of the frames. There is 100 percent evidence this was not someone in a suit. There's no way it could be. I took some frames and put them through Animation Wizard, and I was able to identify muscle movement. The hair was very thin and the sun was penetrating to the skin and you could see all the muscle movement just as plain as day. You could see skin moving and you could see the gluteus muscles tighten as he walked. It wasn't a suit."
Kirk, representing the British Columbia Cyptozoology Society, traced the history of Sasquatch, the commonly used name in his region of the continent. The Sasquatch has been depicted on totem poles of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest for more than 400 years, he said. The Spaniards became the first outsiders to encounter the creature in 1792 when expeditions sighted "large hairy men stripping limbs of berries and living in central British Columbia, which has since become Sasquatch headquarters to most of the world's researchers.
Kirk also reported on sightings by unsuspecting humans as recently as 2002, when a record number of Sasquatch tracks were identified ranging in length from 8 to 16 inches. Near the end of 2002 a woman camping alone awakened and peered out her tent to see a female Sasquatch and her two young creatures digging and eating roots from the ground. The creatures allegedly gazed at her without aggression until they moved on after completing their meal. The woman's report was substantiated by four other sightings of the trio in the same area at the same time.
These are all thought-provoking accounts for the open-minded, and the audience appeared serious and intent upon hearing information to further bolster their beliefs or skeptics who are looking for holes to punch in what some refer to as flimsy science. Presenter Chester Moore Jr. said the motivation among attendees is a function of natural, human curiosity as much as anything.
"They're curious. Some of them may have had an encounter they can't explain which they want to find an answer to, so they can verify they are not crazy, that they saw a legitimate animal," he said. "People ask me if I believe in Bigfoot and I say no, because believing to me is for religion. It's a belief in faith. I have come to the conclusion after conducting my own research and looking at that of others that we are sharing North America with a bipedal primate which is yet undiscovered."
Perhaps the mystery of the existence of the hulking, bipedal hairy hominoid will never be resolved, but the people gathered in Jefferson, Texas, this weekend are going to do their best to prove it. Woolheater probably put it best:
"What it comes down to is that if just one of them is telling the God's honest truth ... then there's something out there."
