A man in northern Texas says an incident that took place in the winter of 2012 changed the way he thinks about the Bigfoot creature. The entire ordeal was caught on video and released to the public to be shared with the rest of the world.
The footage lasts about seven minutes and consists of two men looking for the cryptid in the woods.
“I think that we have a Sasquatch in these woods…,” says the man behind the camera.
“Oo ooh! Oo ooh!” calls the other. “So, what’s happening right now is, there is a lot of movement…heavy foot falls, where we just picked the camera from…and across that trail over there,” he says to the camera as he points his finger at a location on the right side of the screen. “Pretty much they are watching us right now.”
“I am definitely hearing it,” replies the camera man. “In this direction. Hell yeah!”
You can see the men noticeably nervous as the camera zooms in and out of different spots in the area surrounding them.
Then, the sounds begin. They are similar to primate vocalizations, prompting one of the men to classify them as “low grunts”.
“This is the most action that I’ve ever gotten in…probably two or three years,” says the man with the hat.
According to the pair, a group of Sasquatches has them surrounded.
There is some tapping, it sounds like someone knocking on wood.
Finally, the video ends.
Later on, during the digital edition of the footage, the men notice an unusual shape hiding behind a tree. They dub the video “Sasquatch Hiding Behind a Tree,” and that’s how it all began.
They uploaded the film to YouTube, people watched it many times, and the comments started. Some were supportive, some highly critical. Was this a product of their imagination or was it real? Was there really a group of Bigfoots watching the two humans?
We talked to the men to find out.
- Courts Griner and Blake Downing stand in the exact spot where one Bigfoot was purportedly hiding in 2012. Photo courtesy of Blake Downing and Courts Griner
Wearing a military jacket and equipped with a camera, a backpack and some bait, 27-year-old Blake Downing and his “Bigfoot guide”, Courts Griner, have been venturing regularly into the woods of Texas for two years, hoping to find the clues that lead to the cryptid’s discovery.
“Courts is the guy who trained me on on how to look for Sasquatches,” Downing tells Cryptozoology News. “He was the guy who introduced me to ‘bigfooting’. He was a stranger I met, became my ‘bigfoot guide’, now we are good friends and partners in crime.”
Courts is also a member of the Timberline Bigfoot Team, a research group whose mission is “to search for viable, physical evidence of the existence of the creatures collectively called Sasquatch or Bigfoot.” He has been looking for the creature for about seven years. He has had close encounters with the animal a few times in the past as well.
But what made Downing, a self-proclaimed former skeptic, begin the search for an animal whose existence science repeatedly denies?
“I graduated college and I had some extra time on my hands that I wanted to devote to a film project. I wanted to film a documentary and didn’t know what about. I just knew I wanted it to be something interesting with a little crazy attached to it. So I turned to the Internet and placed an add on Craigslist looking for film subject ideas. Courts responded, told me he was attached to a Bigfoot research team and I could join him if I wanted to. We met and he seemed like a legit guy, so we headed out to his research location the following weekend. That first day I was skeptical of what was going to happen…” Downing explains.
His interest in Bigfoot wasn’t there prior to meeting Griner. Sure, he had always liked to read about the cryptid as a child, but he never “gave it too much thought”.
“Actually taking to the woods to look was something I told myself I had to do at least for a couple weeks of my life. That day I found a Bigfoot track in the forest floor. Courts did not lead me to the track, I just happened to see it and we documented it. I was hooked, totally believed in my guide, Courts. From that moment on we pounded ground and documented every moment for the past two years.”
The snapshot that became the main subject of the video, “Sasquatch hiding behind tree”, was digitally enhanced, augmented and explained by Downing and his partner Griner. They positioned three yellow circles on it in order to explain the visible body parts of the alleged Bigfoot.
“Yes that is a head, hand, and a foot circled,” says Downing.
Some researchers claim that “nest” structures made out of interwoven branches, similar to those the great apes build, are typically around the areas where Sasquatch sightings occur. These places are also accompanied by a foul odor that increases as the eyewitness approaches the animal.
“In the area this encounter took place we have located multiple stick structures,” he recalls. “No smells were experienced during the encounter. The conditions were light rain so that was the most prominent smell. Wet forest.”
He also admits that he was scared, but excited at the same time, and that he didn’t feel that the animals wanted to hurt them.
“I felt that they were more curious than anything. It was two of them that day that had flanked us in the woods. I got the impression that what we were dealing with was highly intelligent and great at stalking.”
The only problem, he says, is that he wasn’t able to get a clear view of the animals. He couldn’t see any hair or eyes. But they could definitely hear and feel them, hiding behind the vegetation.
“I tried my hardest to get a visual on them but was unable to see them. I could hear them snapping branches and could at times see moment behind the brush but they concealed themselves very well. I just pointed my video camera in the direction the noise was coming from and hoped for the best, and what came of it after reviewing the footage was some decent vocal huffs, a pixelated image of a face and possible hand and leg. I wish it could have been better but it is what it is. It was amazing beginners luck for me.”
Mountain lions are known for their stalking ability, and they are masters of disguise. But these large cats are solitary animals.
“The wild thing,” explains Downing , “was that there were no other animal noises, and in most cases when we have had close Bigfoot encounters, the woods will go silent prior. The sound that came from this animal was amazingly loud! And deep with base, reminded me of a lion I once stood in front of at the zoo. It barked this low base, like a dog bark over and over. You could feel the base rumble your organs. When the huff call rang out in the woods, it bounced off of everything, all the trees, it sounded like it was all around you. It shook my organs, I could feel the base in my chest. It made my bladder clinch and I had to stop filming and relieve myself against a tree right there on the spot. The huff calls that we heard, they did not really repel us like a threatening call might. It was so brief, and exciting that we just remained recording. I felt confident that they were not just going to step out in the open and reveal themselves or coming charging at us. I just got the feeling they were checking us out from a safe distance but as the sun started to set Courts and I did get the feeling it was no longer safe to be out there and we quickly made our exit.”
Great apes are highly intelligent animals capable of vocal and hand sign communication. There are also certain primates that can emit high-pitched sounds that human ears can’t detect, such as the Philippine Tarsier.
High-pitched sounds do not carry as far as low-pitched sounds and are usually made by smaller animals, but it is possible that if the high-pitched sounds were indeed made by the supposed group of “stalking Sasquatch”, they were intentionally made as to elicit fleeing behavior from other nearby group members (Lazaro-Perea 2001). The alleged low-pitched vocalizations in the video could indicate that, if there were in fact any creatures hiding from the intruders, they were perhaps serving two purposes simultaneously: as a “bark” to warn the men and as a way to alert the main group located farther away.
“Later after reviewing the audio from the footage I found this strange high pitch chirp these two Sasquatches were using as a way of communication. Over the past couple years I’ve gotten this high pitch chirp on my footage on occasion. It was out of my audible hearing range but picked up by the video cameras microphone,” Downing explained to us.
While the video is not enough evidence to prove the existence of Bigfoot, the two men appear to be honest people that have nothing to gain from telling their story. To them, everything was real. It is also safe to assume that Griner’s seven years of experience in the field would have definitely helped him discern between bear -or other possible animal- and primate behavior. It is not just about the picture or the video; it is more about analyzing the human reaction to a certain stimulus.
- Downing’s camera shows the location where the incident took place. March, 2012
Perhaps one needs to be there in order to understand what really happened that day. Or, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, “to make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound. Any one else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is ‘really’ of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected. For most practical purposes these differences are unimportant, but to the painter they are all-important: the painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the colour which common sense says they ‘really’ have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear. Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy — the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, between what things seem to be and what they are. The painter wants to know what things seem to be, the practical man and the philosopher want to know what they are; but the philosopher’s wish to know this is stronger than the practical man’s, and is more troubled by knowledge as to the difficulties of answering the question.”
You can watch the original video below:
For other videos with Blake Downing and Courts, visit their YouTube page.
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