Government Agents Hiding Away Bigfoot on Camera Before Worst Happens – Sasquatch Story
Operation Redwood: The Night I Saw the Truth
Chapter One: The Tape That Shouldn’t Exist
My name doesn’t matter. What matters is what I saw that night and why I can’t keep quiet anymore. For years, I convinced myself it was better to stay silent, to protect myself and my family. But the truth has a way of eating at you from the inside out, and I’ve reached the point where I need to tell someone what really happened.
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Back in the early 2000s, I worked as an archival technician for a government contractor. Not one of the big names you’d recognize, just a midsize firm that handled overflow work for various federal agencies. My job was simple and boring: take old analog tapes from the ‘80s and ‘90s and digitize them so they could be stored properly. Most of it was mind-numbing stuff—training videos, safety briefings, meeting recordings. Nothing classified, nothing exciting, just hours and hours of grainy footage that nobody would ever watch again.
The work was contract-based, which meant I’d go weeks without anything to do, then suddenly get a rush job with hundreds of tapes to process. I didn’t ask questions about where they came from or why they needed digitizing. That wasn’t my job. My job was to run them through the equipment, check the quality, and upload the files to whatever server they specified—easy money. And it let me work from home most of the time. I had a whole setup in my spare bedroom: two professional-grade tape decks, a couple of monitors, a decent computer with way too much hard drive space, and enough cables to make any IT person jealous. The room always smelled faintly of dust and old electronics.
One Tuesday evening in October 2003, I was working through a batch of tapes from what I assumed was the Department of the Interior. Lots of forestry footage, wildlife surveys, that sort of thing. I’d already processed maybe twenty or thirty tapes that day. My eyes were getting tired from staring at the monitor, and I was thinking about calling it quits for the night. Just a few more, I told myself. Get through the rest of this box, and I could take tomorrow off.
I was maybe three hours into the shift when I grabbed a tape from the middle of the stack. It looked different right away. The other tapes all had official labels, barcodes, tracking numbers, dates, content descriptions—everything neat and standardized. This one had nothing but a strip of masking tape with handwritten text: Container 14, Redwood. The handwriting was shaky, like someone wrote it in a hurry or under stress. But the tape itself looked official enough—Sony Betacam SP, professional broadcast quality. The casing had some wear on it, scratches and scuff marks that suggested it had been moved around a lot over the years.
I checked my manifest sheet. Container 14 wasn’t listed anywhere. Neither was anything with “redwood” in the title. Either this tape had been thrown into the wrong batch by mistake, or someone had deliberately mislabeled it. Either way, I figured someone just forgot to print a proper label and I should process it like everything else.
I popped it into the player and hit record on the digitizer. The footage started normal enough: nighttime, some kind of loading area with big industrial lights set up on portable stands. The camera was positioned at a distance, maybe fifty feet back, filming a cargo container. You know the kind—those big metal shipping containers you see on trucks and trains, the ones that are maybe twenty feet long. This one was sitting on the ground in what looked like a warehouse or aircraft hangar. The concrete floor was wet, reflecting the harsh white lights like it had been hosed down recently. Steam was rising from somewhere, creating these ghostly wisps that drifted through the frame.
The image quality wasn’t great—typical low-light video from that era. Lots of grain and contrast issues. The timestamp in the corner read 11:47 p.m., August 14th, 1992. The camera operator was using a tripod because the image was perfectly still except for the movement of people and that rising steam.
There were people moving around the container, maybe six or seven of them. They were wearing dark suits, which seemed weird for what looked like manual labor. No uniforms, no protective gear, no hard hats or work clothes—just regular business suits like they’d come straight from an office. A couple of them had earpieces with curly wires disappearing into their jacket collars. They kept glancing around nervously, looking toward the shadows at the edges of the lit area. The whole scene had this tense, hurried feeling to it, like they wanted to be done and gone as fast as possible.
That’s when I saw what they were escorting. At first, I thought it was equipment or supplies covered with a heavy tarp being moved on some kind of wheeled platform. It was massive, maybe eight or nine feet tall and probably four feet wide at the shoulders. The platform it sat on looked industrial, with big rubber wheels and a metal frame. But the way it moved wasn’t right for cargo. The shape under the covering shifted slightly, and I realized with a jolt that whatever was under there was alive.
Chapter Two: A Glimpse of the Impossible
The sheet covering it was heavy canvas or maybe a thick industrial tarp, completely obscuring the shape underneath. You couldn’t see any details, just this huge covered mass, but you could see breathing. The fabric rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm, maybe ten or twelve breaths per minute. Each breath made the whole covering shift and settle. The size of it was just wrong—too big to be a person, way too tall to be any animal I could think of. My first thought was maybe a bear standing upright. But bears don’t move like that. This thing walked on two legs with a strange, deliberate gait—like a person, but heavier, more powerful.
The men in suits kept a careful distance from it, at least ten or twelve feet whenever possible, almost like they were afraid to get too close. One of them held what looked like a cattle prod or some kind of electronic device with two metal prongs on the end. He kept it pointed at the covered figure the whole time, ready to use it if needed. Another had his hand resting on a holstered weapon at his hip, fingers tapping nervously against the grip. A third man walked ahead of the platform, gesturing with his hands like he was directing the others.
They guided the platform toward the open container, moving slowly and carefully. The wheels made a grinding sound against the wet concrete that I could barely hear through the static. Nobody was talking, at least not that I could make out. The whole operation was eerily silent except for that grinding and the occasional shuffle of feet. These weren’t workers doing a routine job. These were professionals handling something dangerous.
I leaned closer to my monitor, trying to make out more details. The quality wasn’t great—typical VHS grain and compression artifacts—but I could see enough to know this was real footage, not some student film or hoax. The lighting was too professional, the equipment too expensive, the whole operation too coordinated.
As they got closer to the container, one of the suited men gestured sharply with his hand, and the others stopped. Everyone froze in place. He approached the covered figure alone, moving carefully, and seemed to say something, though I couldn’t hear any audio at this point. The figure shifted slightly under the tarp, like it was responding or acknowledging him somehow. He took a step back quickly, returning to the group.
That’s when I saw the hand. Just for a second, maybe two at most, the covering shifted and a massive hand slipped out from underneath the tarp. It appeared at about waist height on the covered figure, reaching out toward one of the restraints on the platform. The hand was easily twice the size of a human hand, maybe even larger. The fingers were thick and powerful looking, with what looked like dark hair or fur covering them. Even in the grainy footage, I could make out individual fingers, a clearly defined thumb, knuckles, fingernails. This wasn’t a paw or a claw. This was a hand with an opposable thumb and articulated fingers.
For just a moment, I saw it grip the edge of the fabric, the fingers curling around the tarp material with obvious dexterity. Then someone must have noticed because one of the suited men moved quickly toward the figure and the hand pulled back under the sheet, disappearing from view. The whole incident took maybe five seconds, but it was enough.
My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. I hit pause on the digitizer and sat there staring at the frozen image. The frame showed the hand mid-retraction, still partially visible, the fingers slightly blurred from motion. I could see the texture of the skin between the hair, darker than human skin, almost leathery. Not a bear paw, not a gorilla hand, something in between, something I’d never seen before.
I should have reported it right then. That was protocol for any unusual footage. But something stopped me. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was the weird feeling in my gut that this was something I wasn’t supposed to see. I rewound a few seconds and watched that part again. Sure enough, the hand appeared, then disappeared. Not a bear paw, not anything I recognized. A hand with fingers and a thumb, but massive and covered in dark hair.
I let the footage continue. The men guided the platform into the container. The camera angle made it hard to see inside, but I could tell the interior had been modified—heavy metal fixtures bolted to the walls, a space that looked less like a cargo hold and more like a mobile holding cell. Once the platform was inside, the suited men backed away quickly. One of them pulled a heavy chain across the container opening while another secured it with a large padlock. They worked fast, like they wanted to be done with this as soon as possible. Then one of them made a hand signal and the camera operator shut off the recording. The screen went to static.
Chapter Three: The Secret in the Redwood
I sat there in my home office staring at the static on my screen. The whole clip had been maybe four minutes long. My mind was racing. What had I just watched? Some kind of training exercise? But training for what? The fear on those men’s faces had looked real. The creature, whatever it was, had looked real.
I rewound the tape to the beginning and watched it again and again. Each time I noticed new details—the way the covered figure’s shoulders rose and fell with breathing, the careful distance the handlers maintained, the heavy-duty restraints inside the container. This wasn’t some low-budget movie prop. Everything about it screamed official government operation.
Then something happened that still gives me chills. I was on my fourth or fifth viewing when the audio kicked in. Up until that point, the footage had been completely silent, which I’d assumed was normal, but suddenly there was sound. Not dialogue, not machinery, just this low, guttural noise buried under layers of static. I turned up the volume on my headphones and listened closer. It was like a moan or a growl, but with this weird resonance to it, almost like vocalization, like something trying to communicate.
It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’ve heard plenty of animal sounds in my life. This was different. This had an intelligence behind it, a deliberateness that no bear or ape could produce. The sound appeared three times in the footage, always when the covered figure moved or shifted position. Each time it made my skin crawl. It wasn’t threatening exactly, more like mournful or resigned, like whatever was under that tarp knew exactly what was happening to it and was protesting the only way it could.
I knew I should report the anomaly. That was literally in my contract. Any footage containing unusual audio, visual artifacts, or potentially classified material was supposed to be flagged immediately. But I didn’t. I told myself I’d finish the digitization first, then decide what to do. That was my first mistake, the one that started everything.
Chapter Four: The Man Who Opened the Door
I completed the transfer, uploaded the file to the designated server, and logged it in my system like any other tape: container 14, redwood. No special notes, no flags, just another file in the archive. Then I put the original tape back in its case and set it aside with the others for return to the agency. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, replaying the footage in my mind—the massive covered figure, the frightened handlers, that terrible intelligent sound. What was container 14? Where was it going? And most importantly, what was inside it?
The next morning, I did something I’d never done before. I started digging. The government contractor I worked for had a pretty extensive archive system. While I didn’t have high-level clearance, I had access to enough databases to find basic information about most projects. I started by searching for anything with “redwood” in the title. The system pulled up dozens of results, mostly forestry projects and environmental surveys from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Nothing that seemed connected to what I’d seen.
Then I tried searching by date range, looking for other tapes that had come in the same batch. That’s when things got interesting. The batch I’d been working on was supposedly all Department of the Interior materials from 1987 to 1991. Standard wildlife and park service footage. But when I pulled up the full manifest, I noticed something odd. Several tapes had been removed from the original shipment before it reached me. The paperwork showed they’d been redirected to a different department for specialized processing. I traced the redirect code and found it led to something called Operation Redwood, a Cold War era program I’d never heard of.
The database entry was sparse, just a project code and a vague description about “biological surveillance and megapana research.” Most of the details were locked behind a blue tag, which meant I could see that the project existed but couldn’t access the actual files. But there were a few documents that had been miscategorized as green tag, probably by mistake. These were mostly administrative stuff, budget requests and personnel transfers. Nothing too exciting, except for one memo dated March 1989. It was a requisition request for field equipment, and the list was bizarre: scent collection kits, DNA sampling equipment, audio recording devices capable of capturing subsonic frequencies, heavy-duty animal restraints rated for weights up to 1,200 pounds, thermal imaging cameras, and, strangest of all, a request for consultation with an anthropologist specializing in primate behavior.
The memo referenced something called “non-cataloged megapana,” which I had to look up. Basically, it meant large animals that weren’t officially recognized or documented by science. The kind of thing cryptozoologists talk about. I felt my stomach drop. Was this actually about Bigfoot? That seemed insane. The government doesn’t waste money chasing fairy tales.
I found another document, this one from 1991, referencing “sample collection events.” It mentioned tree break patterns, dermal ridge analysis from hair samples, and something about anomalous mitochondrial DNA that didn’t match any known primate species. The language was dry and scientific, but the implications were staggering. They’d found something—something real enough to study.
The last document I found before hitting the classification wall was a status report from August 1992. It was heavily redacted, but one line was visible: “Subject R14 acquired through non-lethal capture following incident in Humboldt County.” R14—container 14.
Chapter Five: The Night in the Redwood Forest
The pieces were starting to fit together, and I didn’t like the picture they were forming. Whatever I’d seen on that tape wasn’t a training video or special effects. It was documentation of an actual capture. They’d caught something in the redwood forests of Northern California and transported it somewhere. The question was where, and what had they done with it.
I spent the next week obsessing over this. Every spare moment I had, I was searching databases and reading through files. I started keeping notes in a spiral notebook, documenting everything I found, drawing connections between different documents and dates. My handwriting got messier as the week went on, scrawled observations and questions filling page after page. I started having trouble sleeping. When I did manage to drift off, I’d have dreams about that covered figure, about that massive hand reaching out. Sometimes in the dreams, I could see under the tarp. And what I saw was different every time.
Then, one night, I heard the clicking sounds in the darkness. I realized I was awake, not dreaming, and the sound was coming from outside my window. I froze, heart hammering, listening to that rhythmic, deliberate clicking that had been described in the observation logs. I thought about Hail’s words: “They don’t scream, they talk.” Was this communication? Was something trying to tell me something?
A few days later, I decided to go see the location myself. The documents Hail had given me included coordinates for where R14 had been captured in the redwood forests of Humboldt County. I took a week off work, told my partner I needed some time to clear my head, and drove north to California. The forests there are otherworldly—trees hundreds of feet tall, trunks wider than cars, creating this canopy so dense that the forest floor is in permanent twilight. The air smells of earth and pine and something ancient. You can walk for hours and never see another human being.
As the sun set and darkness crept through the forest, I started to feel uneasy. Not scared exactly, but aware that I was being watched. Then I heard it: click, click, click—rhythmic, deliberate, echoing through the trees. The same clicking sound described in the observation logs. My heart started pounding. I grabbed my flashlight and swept it around the clearing, but the beam only penetrated maybe thirty feet into the darkness. Everything beyond that was just shadows and massive tree trunks.
The clicking continued, coming from different directions now—left, then right, then behind me. Whatever was making the sound was moving around my position, staying just out of sight. I thought about Hail’s words. Was this communication? Was something trying to tell me something?
I stood frozen in the center of my clearing, flashlight in hand, trying to decide what to do. Running seemed stupid. I’d never outpace something that knew this terrain, something that could move through this forest in complete darkness. Fighting was pointless. I’d seen the size of R14 in the footage. These creatures could break me in half without effort.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I spoke out loud into the darkness. I said I wasn’t there to hurt anything. That I was just trying to understand what had happened. That I knew about R14, about how it had helped those lost hikers, about how it had been taken and then released.
The clicking stopped for a long moment. There was complete silence. Then I heard something moving in the trees to my right. Not crashing through the undergrowth like a bear would, but deliberate footfalls, heavy and measured. I turned my flashlight toward the sound and caught a glimpse of something massive, maybe forty feet away. A shape too tall to be human standing between two massive redwood trunks. It stepped sideways, moving deeper into the shadows, and I lost sight of it. But for that brief moment, I’d seen enough—the broad shoulders, the massive frame, the way it moved with that same deliberate gait I’d seen in the footage. It was real. All of it was real.
I heard more movement now from multiple directions. Wood-knocking started up—that rhythmic sound of something striking hollow logs. It was all around me, creating this acoustic pattern that seemed to bounce off the trees and echo through the forest. I realized with a mixture of terror and awe that I was surrounded, just like the capture team had been thirty years ago, just like the facility had been that night in the storm.
But nothing attacked. Nothing rushed forward. They were just there in the darkness, making their presence known, reminding me that this was their home, that I was the intruder.
After what felt like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, the sounds began to recede. The clicking and wood-knocking moved away, getting fainter and fainter, until finally the forest was silent again.
I didn’t sleep that night. When dawn finally came and gray light filtered through the canopy, I packed up my gear as fast as I could and hiked back to my car. My hands were shaking the entire drive back to civilization.
Before I left the area, I found something that made me certain of what I’d experienced. Near the edge of my campsite, pressed into soft earth, was a footprint eighteen inches long, clearly showing five toes and an arch. Not bear, not human, but something in between. I took pictures from every angle, measurements, detailed notes. Then I left it there undisturbed. It wasn’t proof I needed to share with the world. It was proof I needed for myself.
Epilogue: The Courage to Let Go
So why am I sharing all of this now? Why break my silence after keeping quiet for so long? Part of it is that Hail is gone. And with him went the last official connection to Operation Redwood. His death released me from a promise I’d made to be careful, to not put him at risk by going public while he was alive. But more than that, I think the story needs to be told because it challenges everything we think we know about what’s out there.
These creatures exist—not as folklore, not as myth, but as real, living beings with intelligence and social structures and families they’re willing to die for. The government knows this. They’ve known it for decades. They captured one, studied it, and then quietly buried the evidence because they didn’t know what to do with it. The footage I found wasn’t a smoking gun that proved Bigfoot exists. It was documentation of a mistake—of humans trying to control and catalog something that should have been left alone.
R14 didn’t escape that facility. It was released by a man who recognized that keeping it locked up was morally wrong, regardless of the scientific value it might have provided. Hail made his choice thirty years ago. He chose to let R14 go, to give it back to its family, even though it meant ending his career and living with questions that would never be answered.
I still have the original tape, the one labeled container 14, redwood. It sits in a safe deposit box along with copies of the observation logs and my own notes from that night in the forest. I’ve thought about releasing it, about uploading the footage to the internet where it can’t be suppressed, but I haven’t. Not yet. Maybe I’m being cowardly. Maybe I should share everything I have and let the world decide what it means.
But I keep thinking about those creatures in the darkness making their clicking sounds, letting me know I was surrounded but never threatening me. They could have done anything that night. They could have made me disappear like so many other people who ventured too deep into those forests, but they didn’t. I think they were giving me a message, the same message they gave the capture team and the facility that night in the storm. They’re aware of us. They know we have our cameras and our weapons and our insatiable curiosity, but they’re choosing to remain hidden, to avoid us, to live their lives in the deep forests where humans rarely go.
Maybe that’s how it should stay. Maybe some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved. Maybe the fact that these creatures exist, that they’re out there living alongside us in ways we barely understand—maybe that’s enough. Maybe knowing they’re real is different from needing to prove it to everyone else.
So this is my account of what happened. The leaked footage, the observation logs, the night in the forest where I stood surrounded by creatures that could have killed me but chose not to. All of it is true. Every word, whether you believe it or not, is up to you. But if you’re ever hiking in the Pacific Northwest and you hear clicking sounds in the darkness, remember what I’m telling you. Stand still. Be respectful. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll catch a glimpse of something incredible, something that proves we don’t know everything about this world we live in. Just don’t try to capture it. Don’t try to prove it to anyone else. Let it be. Let them be. They’ve earned that much from us.
Some secrets are meant to protect, not to prove. And some mysteries deserve to remain wild.
