Bigfoot Believer Takes Shot In Dark At Mammoth Cave National Park
MAMMOTH CAVE NATIONAL PARK, KY — Whether Bigfoot is alive, or was ever real to begin with, continues to fascinate Americans, including a man in Kentucky, a true believer who was so sure he saw the legendary ape-like creature that he opened fire in the pitch-black night.
Click Here: Kangaroos Rugby League Jersey
Mammoth Cave National Park is the kind of place Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, could steal away to and hide out for years. The longest known cave system known in the world, the labyrinth winds for more than 400 miles and was called a “grand, gloomy and peculiar place” by early explorer Stephen Bishop. And the Kentucky authority on all things related to Bigfoot claims that four people have made credible reports of Bigfoot sightings in the park.
Park rangers aren’t buying the unidentified camper’s story that Bigfoot lunged at him and he was left with no choice but to pierce the nighttime silence with gunfire to scare away the creature. But discharging a firearm in a national park is against the law, and park officials are questioning the man, whose identity they know, park spokeswoman Molly Schroer said in a statement.
Schroer didn’t confirm the existence of Bigfoot, though.
Madelyn Durand, 22, and her boyfriend, Brad Ginn, 24, don’t think Bigfoot is real, either.
They were rousted from sleep around 2 a.m. Sunday by a man and his son, who shined a flashlight into their tent and warned them to be on their guard because the creature had already destroyed their campsite. They were in “Bigfoot country,” and the man said, they should run if they heard shots, Durand told the Courier Journal.
The father and son left, but later returned to the area where Durand, 22, and Ginn, 24, were camping.
“A few minutes later we see their lights approaching again,” Ginn told the newspaper, “and as they get closer we hear the man yell something like ‘oh my God! Do you see that? There it is!’ “
As they peeked out of their tent, they saw the man raise his gun and fire into the pitch-black darkness about 20 feet from the side of their tent. When they investigated, the man claimed he “saw Sasquatch emerge from the brush near the tent and start approaching him,” Ginn said. “We’re like, ‘Are you serious?’ “
He was. He told the couple Bigfoot is dangerous. He told them he hoped they had weapons. They called 911, then hiked 5 miles out of the park to their car.
Durand told CNN that neither she nor her boyfriend saw Bigfoot when they shined a flashlight into the woods to see if there were animals — or anything unexplained — lurking in the woods. They weren’t afraid of Bigfoot, but they were afraid of being shot.
“I was mostly just concerned about him shooting the gun in the middle of the night without him really seeing anything,” Durand told the news outlet.
Legend Has It Daniel Boone Shot Sasquatch
The Sasquatch legend is especially pervasive in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, but Kenucky history is also full of Bigfoot lore. Frontiersman Daniel Boone may have shot a Sasquatch, an 8-foot, 2-inch beast he called a Yahoo (the creatures in Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”).
The Kentucky Bigfoot Research Organization, founded in 1997 to investigate and document all “credible Bigfoot encounters in Kentucky,” claims there have been about 400 sightings in the Bluegrass State.
Related: FBI Report On ‘Bigfoot Hair’ Released After More Than 40 Years
In the early 1990s, a Mammoth Cave National Park worker reportedly saw “a large hairy creature down on what he thought to be all fours walking,” according to an account on the site. “Fearing that he may have ran into a bear he began to slow down, when the creature raised up on two legs standing somewhere around [the] 8-foot mark looked at him on the four-wheeler and turned and ran into the darkness on two legs.”
The FBI Weighed In On Bigfoot
Earlier this year, the FBI released a report on the analysis of hairs collected in 1976 that were thought to have come from Bigfoot, but determined they had come from a deer. The FBI didn’t confirm or deny Bigfoot’s existence, but an Oregon man who has been looking for Sasquatch for years believes the creature is not only real, but alive.
Peter Byrne, who was running the Bigfoot Information Center at The Dalles, Oregon, collected the 15 hairs and sent them to the FBI after two U.S. Forest Service biologists reported they’d seen a large, hairy creature walking among the Douglas fir trees. Byrne figured the creature had left behind some hair because of the closeness of the trees.
“It would have been more interesting if the results had been different but they are what they are,” Byrne told Patch. “This is science. All it means is that we keep looking.”