♪♪
[ crow caws ]
♪♪
[ various animal sounds ]
♪♪
[ growling ]
♪♪
- There we go. Come on, baby. - [ laughs ]
You always think, "ah, there's a answer for everything."
Not for this.
[ gasps ]
It was like a freaking volcano just erupted.
Get that light going, man.
It infests my days sometimes.
[ growls ]
Is it something that's escaped from hell?
[ growls ]
It's like he wanted your soul.
- No, no, no. - Come on, baby.
Start.
Chaos.
I got it. I got it. Let's go! Come on. Push us off.
You know you're not getting out of there.
There's another one!
[ growling ]
♪♪
Hey, guys, quick!
Immediately, it was obvious that these were not human tracks.
♪♪
I got this overwhelming feeling that something was watching me.
I just started shaking.
Then suddenly there was a loud crack behind me,
The sound of a limb cracking.
Where are you?
[ growling ]
And it's getting closer and closer.
What the heck is this?
I could feel the warmth air of this whatever.
It huffed on the side of my face.
He's looking right at us.
We need to get off the mountain.
♪♪
Larry: My name is larry thibodaux.
Gonna be kind of weird.
I never really sat down and told anybody the whole thing.
♪♪
This whole thing started in lake texoma, north texas.
We have a lake house up there.
So we're there July 4th, big weekend.
Have a wife, three kids.
Where's the guys?
I figured they'd be here by now.
Our family is big into the woods, big into outdoors.
We love to fish, love to hunt.
♪♪
On one side of the lake, there's houses,
Everybody goes out, hang out at the boat dock.
The family is there making sandwiches, making burgers.
Kids are filling up water balloons,
Throwing them at each other, having a good time.
But the other side of the bank,
That's completely different.
♪♪
These woods,
They go on forever.
It's thousands of acres.
I used to go in there at night.
I'd go in there and walk around.
There's no trace of human sign.
Loved the quietness. I loved hearing the coyotes.
I loved just the serenity of it.
[ howling ]
I don't do that anymore.
I don't know if I'll ever do that again.
- Hey, there! - Geez!
[ laughs ] you nearly gave me a heart attack.
Happy 4th of July.
How you doing, baby brother?
My name is buster thibodaux.
- Good to see you. - We're just about ready here.
My brother keeps his boats on lake texoma.
When we come back, we'd planned on having, you know, a fish fry.
♪♪
Danny!
Danny, him and his family would be up there
Just about every weekend.
I've only talked to him once since then.
How are you doing, big fella?
I think, to him, whenever he is up there,
He has to relive what happened.
- You got the beers? - Of course I brought the beer.
It's a fishing trip, ain't it?
We were just kind of wondering
If we were gonna catch enough fish to feed everybody.
All right, let's get this show on the road, shall we?
♪♪
Good luck.
You got a lot of mouths to feed tomorrow.
Thank you, baby. I know.
Don't drink too much.
I never do.
We took the smaller boat that day.
We had a 25-horsepower motor on it.
♪♪
Of course, we have a spotlight.
We knew that day we were gonna be fishing at dark, for sure.
♪♪
We always like to go where no one else goes...
Cheers.
Whoo! [ laughs ]
...Kind of stay out of people's way.
We got almost 700 pounds of dudes in this boat
And not going real fast.
So two, three hours out in the middle of nowhere,
We stop.
This looks like a good spot.
♪♪
Some places for catfish to hide.
♪♪
We do a lot of -- in texas we call it jugging.
You have these gallon jugs.
They got string on them. You put these hooks on them.
You bait them up, and you go put them on the creek channel.
We got a late start.
It was already after 9:00,
And the good thing about when you go jugging,
You can catch a large amount of fish, you know,
In a short amount of time using that,
So that's why we did that.
And we knew we had about 15 more minutes of sunlight.
♪♪
Hey, danny, you want to get that light fired up?
Yep.
♪♪
The cables that you put on the battery,
We've used them for so long.
They're all taped together,
And they came unconnected three or four times.
♪♪
But he finally gets the lights going.
♪♪
Oh, hey, got one.
- All right! - There we go. Come on, baby.
And as I'm pulling it...
- All right. Hey. - High five.
- Good job. - Oh.
...Lights go out.
Get that off that hook. Put that baby in the cooler.
♪♪
That's when all of this started.
♪♪
Your teen is not gonna be happy.
Shh.
- What? - Shh, shh.
Y'all hear that?
[ growling ]
I start hearing growling.
Buster: This thing is, like, breathing harder
Like, growling harder.
Sounds like we got company.
We didn't know until later, but it wasn't just a big old animal
That's just out there walking around.
It was something else.
You always think, "ah, there's an answer for everything."
Not for this.
♪♪
We're 20 yards away, maybe 25.
You could hear it.
[ growling ]
Danny, go get that light going again.
[ growling ]
At that point, all I was doing
Was just trying to figure out what it was.
Danny puts the light on there.
Then it just stops.
Let's get back while that spotlight is still working.
Yeah.
♪♪
It felt like an automobile just fell right next
To the boat from the sky.
♪♪
What the hell was that?
It was like a freaking volcano just erupted.
Whatever threw that had to have a massive amount
Of just brute strength.
♪♪
[ growling ]
I feared for my life. I didn't know what was going on.
I thought -- I didn't know if whatever threw
That was gonna come after us or what.
♪♪
Everybody eyes are following the light.
[ growling ]
And we're trained always to find animals' eyes at night.
You look.
[ growling ]
The lights keep coming off.
♪♪
And I'm cussing, "get the damn light.
Get the light on. Get the light on."
♪♪
When it hit him, it's...
You don't -- you never -- you don't ever forget it.
[ growling ]
The first thing you see is the eyes,
Different than a deer or a raccoon
Or a hog or anything.
They just...
The strangest thing you've ever seen.
They were just evil and death.
It's almost -- it's like he was kind of looking at me.
It's like he wanted to take my soul.
[ growling ]
It was on all fours.
It was about 51/2, 6 feet and staring us down.
That's when it stood up.
♪♪
It was a bone-on-bone noise.
It was almost like if you crack your knuckles,
But if you just had a massive knuckle
And you were just cracking them.
It was so solid.
It's like he had to break his bones to stand up,
And when the bones stopped cracking,
It was every bit of 10 foot tall.
Lots of things went through my mind.
Is it something that's escaped from hell?
You're just -- you're petrified.
♪♪
Danny ripped the spotlight out, so it went totally dark.
Then I looked back over at him,
And it's almost like he disappeared.
Where'd it go?
But as soon as that happened,
I started hearing the leaves cracking as it was walking.
[ thudding, growling ]
Larry: We're used to deer walking.
We're used to things in the woods.
We're used to bears walking.
We understand. We know what they sound like.
It was a little different.
Get that light on.
- Come on, man. - I'm trying.
This was heavy,
Loud, and purposeful.
Oh, man.
And it was starting to get closer.
Danny!
I thought, "I hope I'm not going to die.
I got a kid. I got a family."
Come on!
I panicked.
Danny had this lighter to see what was going on.
After, like, six or seven times, it finally stayed on.
♪♪
I heard, like, a hissing sound,
Like air being shot out of giant tractor tires.
Shine your light over there.
When deers try to alert other animals,
They let out what they call a wheeze.
It's a loud -- they expel a bunch of air.
It was very similar to that, except 10 times, so forceful.
Was he scaring us, or was he alerting something else?
♪♪
And there he is.
Looked like it was crunched down more
And I think, "was it smaller? Was it a different one?"
♪♪
"was there another one?"
There's two of them.
I thought, "I'm gonna die."
♪♪
At this point, it's fight or flight.
You got to go.
Come on, man. Get out of the way. Here.
So next thing is, get the damn motor started,
And I pull the cord.
I take good care of my engines. They always start.
Come on! Start!
But of course, this time it wouldn't start.
Buster: He tries to start it again.
♪♪
And then that's when we started hearing, like,
Freaking just like a bulldozer going through the woods,
Crashing through the trees.
[ branches snapping ]
[ growing ]
When that happens, you know you're dying, okay?
I knew that moment, in those seconds,
You think about years of things --
My kids, my wife, my mom and dad.
You know what's gonna happen.
You know you're not getting out of there.
[ growling ]
It's coming for us.
I think I started saying, "all right, man.
Come on. Come on. Start it. Start it."
Let's go, baby.
Let's go. Come on.
It's just running over to us.
I'm just praying that we make it out of this alive.
Come on.
Thank god, it just felt like we could finally move.
I got it! I got it!
Let's go! Come on, boys. Let's go.
This happened so fast.
Come on! Go!
Let's get out of here. Come on!
It's chaos.
Come on. It's coming. Let's go.
Get in the boat, buster!
That's when I started screaming, "get the damn light.
Show me where I'm going. Show me where I'm going."
♪♪
[ growling ]
♪♪
On the way back, everybody is in shock obviously.
♪♪
And it took hours to get back.
It's just silence.
Just thinking,
"what just happened?"
I was afraid I was gonna cry.
I was so scared, and I didn't want to cry in front of them,
So I just kind of kept quiet.
♪♪
I thought, "I can't tell anybody, my wife, our kids.
"I don't want to tell them this.
I wouldn't believe it if someone told me."
♪♪
Where were you? I was getting worried.
I didn't want to do this.
Honey, what happened?
And I start crying, and I don't --
I like to be tough, you know?
[ exhales sharply ]
And I start telling her, and she was laughing.
I start telling her, and then I started breaking down,
And then she realized.
I remember grabbing her, and I just said, "I promise."
I said, "I swear to god. You have to believe me."
♪♪
A couple days later after I got home,
I started researching it because I wanted to know what this was,
And if I could identify what it was,
I need to tell the game warden,
The park ranger or something.
And I came across the encounters that people had.
They think it's been around for a long time.
They call it the dog man.
I think it came from hell.
Bigfoot, werewolves, angels, demons, all that stuff,
I didn't believe in any of it, but this has opened my eyes.
♪♪
Let's go! Let's go, man! Let's go!
♪♪
There is other stuff out there that we don't know about,
And just because we haven't seen it
Or lived through it or experienced it, we, you know,
We can't laugh and mock people that's had encounters.
♪♪
Larry: I disbelieved and ridiculed people
That had similar experiences like this my entire life.
I said, "if bigfoot is real,
"there's a billion cameras out there
That probably would've got him, you know?"
But then I find myself going out during the day.
I won't go at night,
And I've been putting cameras out.
♪♪
I guess I want closure,
And that's kind of why I'm here today.
I thought it would help
And I think it will.
Without a doubt, that happened that day.
That was real, and I'll never be able to change that.
♪♪
Will I ever see it again?
It infests my days sometimes. It just infests.
It's all I think about sometimes.
♪♪
When you see trees, you think about it.
You think about what's there.
♪♪
Hey, guys, quick!
Immediately it was obvious that these were not human tracks.
I got this overwhelming feeling that something was watching me.
I just started shaking.
Then suddenly there was a loud crack behind me,
The sound of a limb cracking.
Where are you?
And it's getting closer and closer.
What the heck is this?
I could feel the warmth air of this whatever.
It huffed on the side of my face.
He's looking right at us.
We need to get off the mountain.
♪♪
I had my experience in southwest missouri.
My name is chris reinhardt.
I've just started doing sasquatch research
About a year ago, and that's how I met shane.
He has a project going on in southwest missouri
In the middle of the ozark mountains.
Another guy, randy, and myself
Came down to do five days of research.
To get into the ozarks,
You're looking at an hour and a half drive southeast,
About 100 miles or so from springfield, missouri,
To the southeast.
[ engine starts ]
♪♪
It's a beautiful place, you know,
Just a lot of thick woods, a lot of bluffs.
Has a creek that runs through it and the rest of the area
Is nothing but deep, deep, deep woods.
♪♪
It's not great for hiking.
In areas, it's really, really rough.
♪♪
We drove out and to the property.
The mountains are just gorgeous place to be.
You're in the middle of nowhere, no hustle and bustle.
I love the woods.
I feel a lot more at ease in the woods.
- Wow, it's beautiful. - I know. I told you.
I brought in chris and randy,
And the plan was to spend five days
In this particular area camping.
♪♪
Very nice.
It was a beautiful day. The birds were chirping.
It was, you know, maybe 65 degrees out.
Take a walkie.
Make sure you stay in contact.
I wanted to get out halfway deep into the woods
And see what kind of evidence we could get.
♪♪
[ various animal sounds ]
It was what you'd expect when you go into nature,
You know, all the beautiful sounds
That you're gonna hear, you know.
♪♪
I went 20, 30 foot forward,
And as I hiked by myself...
[ crack ]
...There was a loud crack,
The sound of a limb cracking behind me.
♪♪
And I immediately turned and scanned the woods.
♪♪
And I wasn't seeing anything.
Where are you?
I yelled for the guys, but there was nothing.
♪♪
I started looking just to the side of the trail.
I was in pretty deep,
All by myself.
♪♪
And then all of a sudden, I got this over overwhelming
Feeling that something was watching me,
Staring me down.
♪♪
I was really scared.
♪♪
So now I'm alone by the trackway now,
And then all of a sudden, I found something amazing.
Hey, guys.
You'll never believe what I just found.
♪♪
So now that uneasy feeling came back again.
It felt like something was watching me.
Everybody has different theories on what it was,
But there's no other animals in the woods
That could do this stuff.
Oh, wow.
This was like nothing I had seen.
♪♪
There was this large arch,
This tree that has been bent over.
The sasquatch structure is not the same trees that are around.
They bring them in, and they make structures
In the middle of the woods.
I got pictures on my phone.
♪♪
All woven in and branches that are from all over the place.
It's really, really amazing.
Sasquatch make them maybe as a marker or a warning to others.
♪♪
We're out here looking for these things, you know?
And we are camping in this area tonight.
So I thought, "hey, that's a great place to put our tent."
- Is that cool with you? - Are you serious?
Definitely.
♪♪
From being right next to the sasquatch structure,
We figured we would get reaction.
This has got to be a new tent.
Everything is going smooth. We get camp set up pretty quick.
It shows.
This is gonna be fantastic.
Meanwhile while we're getting our campsite up,
Randy went to set up a bait station,
And we had 18 apples 30 feet from our campsite.
A lot of the people use the apples, bait stations.
Some people call it gifting.
Some call it trading post.
The plan was to try and bring them in closer to you
And have interaction that you can actually document.
♪♪
We get finished setting everything up, eat.
They start talking about this,
What we're gonna do tomorrow morning,
What we're gonna do tomorrow night.
[ laughs ]
- Cheers, fellas. - Cheers, guys.
Everything was normal, and everything was cool.
You know what?
I think I'm gonna go check the bait.
I'll be right back.
Here.
♪♪
And I went to that same spot
Where we had just put out 18 apples.
♪♪
I was pretty surprised.
I'm like, "oh, my god. Oh, my god."
Hey, guys, quick! Come check this out!
♪♪
What you got?
♪♪
There's a bunch of apples that were gone,
And then one apple had a big bite taken out of it
And just, like, thrown off to the ground.
♪♪
We've been told our whole lives
That these creatures aren't real.
♪♪
You know, there's excitement in the air at this point
Because we're already getting evidence,
And this is evidence that is really hard to get.
So we were pumped.
I was very excited, very, very excited,
And I'm like, "this is first night.
I can't believe this is already happening."
♪♪
The next day, randy goes down into the creek bed.
It's probably about a five-minute walk
From the camp.
♪♪
But it's pretty secluded once you're down in it.
♪♪
He starts shouting.
Guys! Guys, I found something!
"you guys got to come over here. You got to get over here."
He's excited.
I grab chris, and we go down to see what is going on.
♪♪
Immediately, it was obvious that these were not human tracks.
♪♪
I'm thinking, "this is wild." what the heck is this?
The footprints were, like, two to three inches deep.
I'm a size 11.
I was excited. Randy was very excited.
Chris, on the other hand, was thinking,
"oh, my gosh. What have I gotten myself into?"
Chris: I was on edge.
I'm thinking, "something had an eye on us,
And he knew where we were."
Just thinking that he's gonna come back again.
♪♪
I immediately knew that they were the tracks
That we were looking for.
So we brought all the casting material down,
And we casted it.
Shane: So here's one of the castings we took.
For something to leave a track this big
And to have a foot this big,
You would think it would be well over 400 or 500 pounds
Because you can see the toes kind of splay outward.
And there is a little bit
Of a sign of a midtarsal break within the foot
Which is something that humans don't have.
♪♪
The good part is we have track,
Track, track,
Track, a smaller one.
♪♪
Here is a really good one.
♪♪
Chris: So we get back to camp. We get a fire going.
There's just energy at the camp.
Now everybody is talking about the prints.
Hey, pass it over. Let me see that.
♪♪
This thing, for something to have a foot this big...
♪♪
...Chances are it's probably still out there.
♪♪
And it could be tracking us.
Ooh.
♪♪
I was sitting there, and I was just tense,
And I was just,
"what's gonna happen? Now where do we go from here?"
♪♪
[ rustling ]
[ growling ]
♪♪
About 2:00 in the morning I woke up and I heard footsteps.
[ growling, crunching ]
Steps like it's creeping on you.
♪♪
And it's getting closer and closer to the tent.
♪♪
I'm thinking to myself, "what the heck is this?
What the heck is it?"
I just started shaking.
♪♪
What is this outside the tent?
♪♪
They stop.
♪♪
I could feel the warmth air of this whatever.
It huffed on the side of my face.
I was petrified.
♪♪
Guys, guys, guys!
What? What is it?
- There's something out there. - What was it?
I wake up. Chris is just ghost white.
It breathed on my face.
...Completely freaking out.
- What was it? - I don't know.
I had to get out. I had to get out of the tent.
We can't leave the tent.
- Screw the tent. - Come on.
- Let's go. Let's go. - Let's go.
- Go, go, go. - Come on.
I eventually got enough nerve to run outside.
♪♪
We only have headlamps on,
And we're trying to keep the headlamps off
Because we don't want to be announced
Or seen going up the side of the mountain.
♪♪
Let's go.
That's when the fear really set in.
Come on.
I was running as hard as I could.
And I'm scared to death now.
I was shaking so bad. My heart is racing.
I'm just thinking that something is gonna come up the side...
And grab you.
And I'm just thinking to myself it's not for me again.
I just -- I can't take it.
Come on, boys. Let's go.
♪♪
I just wanted to get off the mountain.
♪♪
And then all of a sudden,
A rock comes flying from off to the right.
♪♪
What the hell was that?
♪♪
It was quick. It was -- boom!
♪♪
There's not many things in the woods that can throw rocks,
Especially rocks this big around.
I'm freaking out again.
Couldn't even move, I was petrified.
Shane: I looked in that direction.
♪♪
This thing stepped out from behind a tree.
I look at chris, and chris, once again, is ghost white.
♪♪
He's completely out of his element.
♪♪
I couldn't -- I think fear just took over so bad.
He's looking right at us.
Now we have rocks being thrown at us.
We're in the middle of the ozark mountains
On this mountain going up to this ridge.
He knows we're there.
We got to get out of here.
♪♪
Let's get the hell out of here.
♪♪
[ roaring ]
♪♪
The hardest part of this experience
That I've had is wanting to tell people
That are close to me about these experiences with sasquatch
And knowing that there's that glimmer of doubt
That they're gonna have
Because the stories are so crazy.
♪♪
It made me more aware of what's really around us, you know?
Like I said, I believed before but now I left this trip,
Now I know that they exist.
Imagine having something happen to you that's life-changing,
And you can't tell anybody and expect them
To believe you 100%.
It's been a hard road, to be honest.
They're there in the woods with us.
I know for a fact.
♪♪