I’ve Seen Bigfoot Since 1976 — But What He Said the Day My Son Died Changed Everything
Chapter One
The Thing That Watched Me First
I am seventy-three years old now, and my hands no longer obey me the way they once did. When I hold a pen, they tremble—not from fear, but from time. Age takes things quietly at first: strength, sharpness, certainty. Then it takes louder things—people, memories, the illusion that the world makes sense.
There are mornings when I cannot remember what I ate for breakfast, or what day of the week it is. Names drift away from me like smoke. But there are memories that time has never touched. They remain sharp, vivid, unmovable. They live inside me with a clarity so strong it feels as if they happened minutes ago.
I remember the first time I saw him.
I remember every time after that.
And I remember the day he spoke.
Before that day, I spent forty-eight years being watched by something that should not exist—something the world calls Bigfoot, Sasquatch, a myth whispered around campfires and dismissed in daylight. To me, he was neither myth nor monster. He was a presence. A watcher. A constant shadow at the edge of my life.
My name is Thomas Whitaker, and this is not a legend. This is a true story.
My family’s land lies in northwestern Montana, a stretch of forest and meadow that has belonged to us since 1921. Three hundred and twenty acres backed up against the endless green of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. There are places on that land where sunlight never fully reaches the ground, where the air feels older, heavier, as if the forest itself is breathing.
I was born there. I learned to walk there. I learned to hunt, to fish, to listen.
If you grow up in the wilderness, you learn early that silence is never empty. It is full of things watching you, measuring you, deciding whether you belong.
Most people think the forest is something to conquer or escape. To me, it was home. I knew the mountains the way you know your own house in the dark—by instinct, by memory, by trust.
That is why, when I saw him in May of 1976, I knew immediately that something was wrong.
I was twenty-five years old then, newly married, working as a wilderness guide for hunting and fishing expeditions. Vietnam was behind me, though it still lived in my dreams. I trusted these mountains more than I trusted people.
That day, I was scouting terrain for an upcoming elk hunt, moving alone through a high meadow bordered by dense timber. The air was still. Too still. The kind of quiet that presses against your ears.
At the far edge of the meadow, nearly two hundred yards away, something stood perfectly motionless.
At first, I thought it was a man.
A trespasser, maybe. A hunter who had wandered onto my family’s land.
Then my brain started correcting itself.
The shape was wrong.
Too tall.
Too wide.
Too solid.
Humans shift their weight without realizing it. They move, even when they think they’re standing still. This thing did not move at all. It stood like part of the landscape, as if it had grown there.
I raised my binoculars.
The moment the lenses focused, my stomach dropped.
He was enormous—easily eight feet tall, maybe more. His body was covered in thick, dark brown hair, matted in places, streaked with gray around the shoulders and chest. The face beneath that hair was the most unsettling part.
It was not animal.
It was not human.
It was something in between.
The eyes were deep-set and intelligent, not wild or confused. They held awareness. Recognition. They were studying me as carefully as I was studying him.
We locked eyes through the glass.
Thirty seconds passed.
Maybe more.
In that time, my combat training, my rational mind, every explanation I could reach for collapsed under one simple truth:
I was being observed by something that understood what I was.
No aggression.
No threat display.
No fear.
Just attention.
Then, without urgency, without drama, he turned and walked into the trees.
Not crashing.
Not running.
Walking—smoothly, deliberately—disappearing into the forest as if the forest had opened to receive him.
I stood there long after he was gone, my heart hammering, my hands cold despite the sun.
I had seen bears.
I had seen moose.
I had seen men die in war.
I had never seen anything like that.
That night, I told my wife, Sarah.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, the lamp casting soft light across her face. She listened without interrupting, without laughing, without that subtle tightening people get when they think you’ve lost your grip on reality.
When I finished, she nodded slowly.
“My grandfather used to talk about the forest people,” she said. “He said they’ve been here longer than any of us. He said if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone.”
That was all.
No panic.
No denial.
Just acceptance.
I never told anyone else.
In 1976, admitting you had seen Bigfoot was a good way to be labeled a drunk, a liar, or worse. I had a family to protect, a life to live. So I kept quiet.
But I did not stop seeing him.
The sightings came slowly at first. Once, maybe twice a year.
Always at a distance.
Always watching.
Sometimes I would glimpse him between trees, a massive shape moving parallel to me through the forest. Sometimes I would see him standing at the tree line near my property, just beyond where the land officially became wilderness.
Once, years later, I saw him on a ridge above my house, silhouetted against a burning orange sunset. He stood there for nearly an hour, looking down at my home.
Not threatening.
Not curious.
Observing.
At first, I told myself he was simply interested in humans—an intelligent creature studying something unfamiliar. But as the years passed, a more unsettling realization took hold.
He wasn’t watching humans.
He was watching me.
Tracking my life.
Marking changes.
Learning.
And in time, I would understand that his watching was not random.
It was intentional.
It was patient.
And it would lead, decades later, to the worst day of my life—the day my son died, and the day Bigfoot finally spoke.
After the first sighting in 1976, I tried to convince myself that what I had seen was an isolated event, a trick of light and distance, the mind filling in gaps where fear lived. That lie lasted less than a year. The second time I saw him came in early autumn, high on a ridge where larch trees were turning gold. I noticed the silence before I noticed him. Birds stopped calling. Wind stilled. The forest held its breath. Then I saw the shape moving parallel to me, far enough away that I might have dismissed it as shadow if it had not moved with such purpose. He did not rush. He did not hide. He walked as if he knew exactly where I was and had calculated the distance he wished to keep between us. That was the moment I understood that the encounter in the meadow had not been accidental. I was not a witness who had stumbled onto something secret. I had been chosen.
Over the next few years, the sightings continued with unsettling regularity. Always one or two a year. Always when I was alone. Never when I carried other people’s lives on my shoulders as a guide. He appeared when I hunted, when I checked fence lines, when I moved through the deeper parts of the forest that most humans avoided. I never heard him approach. There was no breaking brush, no warning sound. One moment the forest felt wrong, and the next moment I would see him—standing still, framed between trees, watching me with that same impossible calm. Fear came later, in the hours after, when my mind replayed the memory and tried to force it into something logical. In the moment itself, what I felt was not terror. It was the awareness of being studied by an intelligence that did not need to announce itself.
Sarah noticed the change in me before I admitted it to myself. I spent more time looking over my shoulder, more time standing at windows at night, listening. When I finally told her that I had seen the forest man again, and again after that, she did not react with disbelief. She reacted with caution. “Maybe he’s guarding something,” she said once. “Or someone.” The idea unsettled me deeply, because by then I had begun to sense that whatever his purpose was, it was tied to my life in a way I did not understand.
In 1979, Sarah told me she was pregnant. The night she shared the news, joy and fear tangled together in my chest, because I knew—without knowing how—that the watcher would notice. I did not have to wait long. The very next morning, after a heavy snowfall, I saw him standing at the tree line behind our house, a massive dark figure against white ground, completely still. He did not move when I stepped onto the porch. He did not retreat. He watched the house, not me, his attention fixed on the place where something new had entered the world. Sarah stood beside me, her hand resting on her stomach. “He knows,” she whispered. That was the first time either of us spoke the thought aloud.
After our son Jacob was born, the pattern became undeniable. Major moments in our lives drew the watcher closer—not closer in distance, but closer in frequency. When Jacob took his first steps, I saw the figure on a distant ridge that same week. When Jacob spoke his first words, the forest fell unnaturally silent during a hunting trip, and I found myself under that familiar gaze again. It was as if the creature was marking time not by seasons, but by us. By our growth. By our changes.
Jacob grew up hearing stories of the forest people, not as bedtime fairy tales, but as quiet truths. We taught him respect for the land, for boundaries unseen but deeply felt. Still, there was one strange rule that emerged without discussion: the watcher never appeared when Jacob was present. Not once in his childhood. If Jacob was with me, the forest remained empty. At first, I believed it was coincidence. Later, I understood it as something far more deliberate. Protection, perhaps. Or restraint.
As Jacob grew older, the watcher appeared less often, but with more intention. No longer fleeting glimpses or distant silhouettes, but long moments of observation. Once, I found tracks near the edge of our property—massive footprints pressed deep into soft earth, placed carefully, as if whoever made them understood exactly where our land ended and the wilderness began. He respected that boundary. That respect unsettled me more than any threat could have.
Years passed. Jacob became a man, then a husband, then a father. Sarah grew ill and faded from our lives far too quickly, leaving a silence behind that even the forest could not fill. Through all of it, the watcher remained, aging as I aged, his fur growing more gray, his posture heavier, his presence carrying something that felt like weariness. We were growing old together, he and I, two beings on opposite sides of an invisible line, bound by years of silent observation.
By the time I reached my late sixties, I no longer wondered why he watched me. I knew. He was learning. Studying how humans lived with the forest rather than against it. Measuring whether coexistence was possible. I did not yet understand that this long study would end in tragedy, that the thing watching my life for decades would one day step across the final boundary—not in curiosity, but in grief. I did not yet know that when my son disappeared into the mountains, the watcher would become the only one willing to tell me the truth.
At the time, all I knew was this: I was not alone in these mountains, and I never had been. Something ancient had been watching me grow, love, and lose, waiting for the moment when silence would no longer be enough.
