Posted by: Craig Woolheater on July 6th, 2011

Cryptomundian Skinwalker tips us off to this update.

Richard Lindsay has offered this chronological rundown of the events covered here on Cryptomundo concerning the purported shooting of two Sasquatch and the inclusion of said two Sasquatch in the DNA study of Dr. Melba Ketchum. The Erickson Project, and/or the Okympic Project.

Chronology of the Recent Bigfoot Shooting Story

I know most of the players in this story, and I believe that it is true. At least the shooting part. Here is what happened.

1. The shooter shows up on Taxidermy.net and starts a thread saying he just shot 2 Bigfoots, now what do I do? The shooter is well known on the site and is a frequent contributor, though not well liked at all (regarded as unethical hunter).

2. Thread quickly spins out of control going to many pages. Story is revealed on the thread.

3. Mods get message that shooter is being harassed and threatened by people as a result of the thread, apparently mad that he killed two BF’s.

4. Thread is shut down.

5. A man named “Bear Hunter” from Taxidermy.net gets involved, calls up the shooter and questions him at length. The story outline results:

The shooter was a passenger in the truck near the Dixie Mountain Game Refuge on the Plumas National Forest west of Frenchman Lake in the Sierra Nevada on the border of California and Nevada. It was mid-November 2010 and they were bear hunting. They came around a bend, and there was a Bigfoot in the road on all fours. The shooter grabbed his gun and jumped out of his vehicle. As he jumped out, he saw the Bigfoot get up on two legs and start running towards him waving her arms at him. When the Bigfoot saw the gun, she turned and started to run away. The shooter shot her in the side of the chest, and the bullet penetrated her lungs. She crashed off into the brush and died. The three men went down into the brush and saw her there. It was then that they realized that she was not a bear at all. They walked back up onto the road. When they got to the road, they saw two small, strange creatures running towards them, sometimes on two legs, sometimes in four legs. The shooter raised his gun, fired and shot one of the creatures dead. The other small creature apparently escaped. As the shooter cradled the dying creatures in his arms, they all three realized that it was a young creature of the same type that got shot. The shooter did not shoot the young Bigfoot because it was threatening him. Apparently he just shot it for some unknown reason. At this point, they figured out that they had killed two Bigfoots. The two men with the shooter were so hysterical and upset about the shootings that they took the shooter’s gun away from him and pointed it at him, threatening him. They told him that if he tried to shoot another one of those animals, they would shoot him instead. The story is that everyone was so upset by that point, that they left the area. The shooter said that they left the animals in the road. The shooter said he was not going back to the area until next fall. The basic outline of the story is uncontroversial and is acknowledged by everyone who believes the story. The only differences are about the motivations of the shooter.

6. Bear hunter puts the shooter in contact with the Olympic Project (OP) in Washington State. The OP says, “We’re just trying to keep the shooter out of jail! The shooter is said to be very frightened of going to jail over the killing of the two Bigfoots. At this point, the story seems to die.

7. Suddenly Bear Hunter realizes that the shooter is deeply involved in the OP. This seems odd. Why is a guy who just shot two Bigfoots suddenly a major part of this organization?

8. Mysteriously, the Olympic Project appears on various Bigfoot forums, bragging that they have enough Bigfoot DNA samples to last for years. Bear Hunter regards this as curious and suspects that the OP may have harvested one or both of the killed Bigfoots or parts of them and is keeping them on ice somewhere.

9. Bizarrely, the Olympic Project submits a very strange sample to Melba Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA project. It resembles a slice off the thigh of a human cadaver, except that it is very hairy. The color of the hair is the same color as that of the killed mother Bigfoot. Dr. Ketchum freaks out because she thinks she is in possession of tissue sliced off a dead human. She is worried that police will raid her lab and tries to get others to hold it for her instead. The others decline to take it off her hands.

10. Bear Hunter states that another slice of dead Bigfoot tissue was also submitted to Ketchum, this one the same color as the baby Bigfoot that got shot. No one knows how the samples test out.

11. I break the story.

12. Pandemonium ensues.

13. The OP appears on forums, agreeing with the basics of the story: that the two Bigfoots were shot in the time and place where they were killed. They differ on the motivations of the shooter. They also reveal that the shooter went back to the site two weeks later, dug through the snow and found a nice chunk of the dead Bigfoot mother. The shooter turned the chunk over to the OP, who then sent it to Ketchum.

Credibility:

Adrian Erickson, the Olympic Project, Bear Hunter and the shooter all think that the Bigfoot shooting story is true in its basic facts. They also agree that a chunk of one dead Bigfoot was sent to Ketchum’s lab.

Adrian Erickson, Richard Stubstad and Ketchum agree that Ketchum freaked out when she got the sample because she thought it was from a human cadaver.

People associated with Taxidermy.net agree that the long thread existed until it was shut down.

Possibility of a hoax: The general conclusion on the Net is that the story itself is fake. Let us look at that possibility.

We know that the Taxidermy.net thread is real. What if the shooter just made up the whole story? It’s possible, but I do not think he made up this story. I don’t like him at all, but he’s not a faker or a hoaxer.

What if the OP is making up the story? I don’t like these guys either, but they don’t make stuff up. They are good researchers with excellent integrity. They don’t hoax. However, it is possible that they were hoaxed by the shooter, although I don’t believe that this happened.

The hunk of flesh, so human that it freaked out the DNA lab, adds credibility to the story. The OP says it’s a chunk of Bigfoot flesh from one the killed Bigfoots. Could it have been hoaxed? Possibly. However, someone would have had to have had access to a human cadaver and then sawed off a chunk of the thigh. How likely is that? Further, this would have had to have been a very strange human cadaver, one covered with hair. And the hair would have had to have been the exact same color of the hair of one of the Bigfoots that got shot. How likely is that?

Conclusion: As you can see, there is a great deal about this incident that seems to point away from a hoax or a lie. In fact, I believe it is neither. I believe the basis for the story is true. The two Bigfoots were indeed shot dead in California in November. At least one piece from one of the Bigfoots was sent in by the OP to Ketchum’s DNA lab for testing. The chunk looked so much like a slice of human cadaver that the director of the lab, a veterinarian, freaked out.

There you have it.

About Craig Woolheater

Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005. I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films: OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.