Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Tracking Bigfoot





What I really want to emphasize today is that establishing contact with the Sasquatch will be bone simple. This report shows us how. You have to be patient and you have to bring gifts in the way of food he might recognize. My first choice would be apples.

Expect gifts in return and then act pleased when they do arrive. He will be watching. Once a system of exchange begins it will become way easier. Sooner or later words or sounds can be exchanged.

Since we are no longer seriously competing with them for game and wandering around the woods armed for bear, these creatures can begin to lose some of their fear of us. Notice how cautious this one was. That can be changed and it is reasonable that once a few are communicating, the creatures will come forward themselves.

After all there is plenty of mutual exchange opportunity and we have plenty of welcome goodies that will be welcome in the dead of winter. We may even provide the odd barn for winter shelter.

LOOKING FOR BIGFOOT: Archdale Public Library hosts program by famed tracker

BY JIMMY TOMLIN

ENTERPRISE STAFF WRITER



ARCHDALE – Michael Greene owes his relative fame as a Bigfoot tracker to a Zagnut candy bar.


Of all the high-tech gadgetry Greene has bought in his decades-long quest to find a Sasquatch – from infrared goggles to a thermal imager to multiple video cameras equipped for night filming – his wisest investment may have been the 60 or so cents he spent on a Zagnut bar.


If you buy into Greene’s story – and many still don’t, he acknowledges – that candy bar is ultimately what lured a Sasquatch in the Uwharrie National Forest to venture within range of Greene’s thermal imager, resulting in an intriguing video that captured the imagination of the international Bigfoot-tracking community in 2009.


“I had brought the Zagnut bar to eat myself,” recalls Greene, a 71-year-old Salisbury man who will present a Bigfoot program Friday evening at the Archdale Public Library.


Instead, though, he decided to leave the candy bar on a stump, along with some other bait – fruit, peanut butter, etc. – should any hungry Sasquatches be in the vicinity. He had planned to hide his thermal imager in the back of his car, with the tailgate open, in hopes of catching video should a Sasquatch come along.


“But then, down in the woods, I heard a little rustling noise – something was moving,” Greene recalls. “And I thought, ‘If there’s one out there, I bet he’s watching me right now. I wonder if I leave, if he’ll be less cautious.’ So I took the imager and put it on a tripod, pointed it at the stump, then got in my car and drove away.”


He came back after a couple of hours – the battery life of his imager – and discovered the Zagnut bar had been taken. He couldn’t wait to get home and recharge the battery, so he could see who or what had snatched the Zagnut. He maintains the grainy, black-and-white thermal video shows a Bigfoot.


“What you see is this white shape creeping terribly cautiously – as though he thinks he’s gonna get shot at any minute – creeping up behind the stump, grabbing the candy bar, and then retreating to the woods,” Greene explains. “About 30 seconds later he comes back, this time standing up, and he walks behind a couple of trees. He stands behind a tree partially obscured and sort of sways side to side. This swaying has been reported by lots of others. He’s apparently looking at my camp area for about 30 to 40 seconds, and then he walks back into the woods and disappears.”


Greene copyrighted his film and introduced it to the Bigfoot community, which reacted with excitement.


“This is the most important footage of a Sasquatch since the Patterson/Gimlin film taken over 40 years ago,” said Matt Moneymaker, co-host of the TV show “Finding Bigfoot.” The Patterson/Gimlin film is a famous, albeit controversial, clip of a Bigfoot alleged to have been filmed in California. Skeptics believe the film is a hoax.


Greene was later featured on “Finding Bigfoot,” which airs on Animal Planet.


Greene says that when he showed his film to Bob Gimlin, one of the two men who shot the Patterson/Gimlin film, Gimlin had tears in his eyes.


“He held out his hand and said, ‘Thank you so much – I’ve waited 40 years for this,’” Greene recalls. “Finally, somebody had backed him up with some really good footage.”


Greene became interested in the Bigfoot phenomenon about 40 years ago, when he was writing his master’s thesis in psychology on events of mass hysteria, such as mass sightings of the Virgin Mary, UFOs and Bigfoot. He ended up not including the Bigfoot sightings in his thesis, but he later revisited the subject and began going on camping expeditions – something he enjoyed doing anyway – on which he also searched for Sasquatches.


His two best sightings both happened in the Uwharries – the one he captured on video, in April 2009, and another sighting about a year earlier that he was unable to get on film, he says.


Greene says the skepticism most people feel about the Bigfoot phenomenon is completely understandable.

“I don’t blame society for not believing it at all,” he says. “It’s such an incredibly odd thing, and literally until you see one for yourself, you can’t believe it. I’ve had so many people tell me to my face that they’ve seen one, but truly in my heart, I couldn’t 100 percent buy into it until I had my own experience.”

Greene points out that he’s not “just some crackpot” making up a story. He has a master’s degree in psychology, and for 20 years he was the chief of welfare fraud and food stamp fraud investigations for the state of New Jersey. He was also a questioned documents examiner.


“So my education and my work were geared toward examining things closely and not being naive and just accepting stories off the top of my head,” he says. “This is something I’ve put a lot of research into.”

Just as he did before capturing his thermal video, Greene camps out in the Uwharries at least once a week – with all of his gadgets and, presumably, Zagnut bars in tow – hoping serendipity will grant him another experience with a Sasquatch.


“It’s not a question of being an expert – it’s just a matter of doing it over and over and over again,” Greene says. “And hopefully, one of these times they’re gonna show up. But they sure won’t show up if you don’t do it. Who knows? I may never see one again for the rest of my life. Luck is everything.”


jtomlin@hpe.com | 888-3579


Want to go?


Bigfoot researcher Michael Greene of Salisbury will discuss his years of searching for Sasquatch, including the thermal imaging video he recorded in the Uwharrie National Forest, during a program at 7 p.m. Friday at the Archdale Public Library, 10433 S. Main St., Archdale.



The program is free and open to the public.


For more information about the program, contact Jonathan Farlow at 431-3811 or jfarlow@randolphlibrary.org.



Read more: High Point Enterprise - LOOKING FOR BIGFOOT Archdale Public Library hosts program by famed tracker  

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