FBI Agent Admits They’ve Been Forced to Hunt Bigfoot for Ages

Looking back on thirty-seven years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I never imagined I would spend nearly two decades chasing something most people insist doesn’t exist.

The official stance—always has been—is simple: Bigfoot is a myth. Misidentified wildlife. Hoaxes. Drunk hunters. Grainy videos and gullible eyes.

That stance is a lie.

Not the kind of lie people tell for fun. The kind that gets written into policy, repeated in press statements, and protected by careers and budgets and men who never step into the woods without a weapon.

My name doesn’t matter anymore. I’ll be “retired agent” in anyone’s retelling, if anyone retells it at all. What matters is what I saw… and what I helped build.

This isn’t a confession in the legal sense. Officially, none of what I’m about to describe ever happened. There are no case numbers. No evidence logs. No files you can FOIA. Everything I touched was buried, shredded, or classified so deep it might as well be myth itself.

But I was there.

I tracked them through rain forests and high ridges. I watched good people die making the same mistake—thinking superior tools make you superior in the land where you don’t belong. And I learned, too late, the only lesson that matters:

Some things are meant to remain hidden—not because they are dangerous to us, but because we are dangerous to them.

1) The Reassignment

I joined the Bureau in 1987 with a criminal justice degree, clean shoes, and the kind of ambition you can’t fake. Portland field office. White-collar cases. Fraud. Embezzlement. Interviews with nervous accountants who couldn’t stop sweating through their collars.

Two years of paper and fluorescent lights.

Then, spring of 1989, I was called into the Assistant Director’s office.

He had the kind of face that never softened. Square jaw. Short sentences. No warmth. He said I was being reassigned to a “special unit.” He didn’t tell me what it did. Only that I’d been selected for wilderness training and marksmanship scores.

Three days later, I was in a helicopter headed into the Cascades with four agents I’d never met.

The team leader was a weathered veteran everyone called Dutch. I don’t think it was his real name. He briefed us over rotor noise about livestock killings east of Mount Hood—ranchers reporting something huge, game wardens finding tracks that didn’t match anything they’d seen.

It sounded like a poaching investigation. Something routine.

Then we landed, hiked to a makeshift camp, and Dutch led us to a table where a plaster cast sat like a relic.

A footprint.

Twenty-one inches long. Nine inches wide. Five distinct toes. A heel strike and toe-off pattern that screamed bipedal locomotion—weight transfer the way a human walks, only scaled up into something that made your stomach tighten.

Dutch didn’t circle it, didn’t tease us, didn’t play it like a joke.

He just said, “This is what we’re here for.”

Someone snorted. I laughed—a reflex, the mind rejecting the unreasonable.

Dutch stared at me until the laugh died in my throat.

Then he said it plainly.

“Bigfoot.”

I looked around expecting smirks.

There were none.

That’s the moment I realized the helicopter, the guns, the secrecy—none of it had been for show. The federal government was deploying armed agents into the wilderness to hunt something it publicly dismissed.

It wasn’t insane. Not to them.

It was policy.

2) The First Pattern

That first operation lasted three weeks.

We worked ridges and drainages. We walked through undergrowth so dense it tore cloth and skin. We found more tracks near streams and berry patches. We found scat—mostly vegetation, but also bone fragments from deer and elk. We found bark stripped from trees ten to twelve feet high—beyond bear reach. We found crude shelters: lean-tos of broken branches arranged in deliberate patterns.

The pieces were everywhere.

The subject wasn’t.

Then, on day nineteen, I saw one.

I was alone on a creek trail, about two miles from base camp. Afternoon sun cut through canopy in dusty shafts. Water talked softly over stones. My boots sounded loud to me, even when I tried to soften my steps.

Then I heard a vocalization that didn’t belong to anything I knew—starting as a low growl, rising into a howl that made every hair on my body stand up.

It came from ahead. Fifty yards, maybe.

I brought my rifle up and moved forward.

And there it was.

Standing in the creek with its back to me, bent forward, hands in the water like it was reading the current.

It was enormous—eight feet tall at least, shoulders so broad I couldn’t have wrapped my arms around them. Dark brown hair matted and wet. Hands that were unmistakably hand-shaped, only twice the size of mine.

It pulled a trout from the water with one smooth motion.

Then it bit into the fish while it was still alive.

No ceremony. No hesitation. Teeth tearing flesh. A swallow that looked effortless.

Protocol said I should’ve radioed the team.

I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

Every documentary I’d mocked, every photo I’d dismissed, every argument I’d heard—none of it prepared me for the reality of watching something like that exist.

When it finished feeding, it straightened.

And for the first time I saw its face.

A disturbing blend: pronounced brow ridge, flat nose, mouth too wide, jaw heavy. But the eyes… the eyes were the worst part, because they weren’t animal eyes.

They were intelligent.

Dark. Alert.

And they were looking directly at me.

It didn’t charge. It didn’t run.

It just stared for ten, fifteen seconds—long enough to make time feel syrup-thick.

Then it turned and walked upstream, long strides eating distance, vanishing into forest as if the trees had opened for it.

I radioed Dutch, voice tight, and reported the sighting.

They mobilized immediately. By the time we reached the creek, it was gone.

We tracked prints in mud for three miles, then lost them on a rocky slope where the ground stopped holding stories.

Dutch wasn’t surprised. He just said, “They’re good at this.”

That first encounter established the pattern that would define the next twenty years:

We would find sign. We would catch glimpses. And whenever we got close enough to confirm in a way that would stand up in public, the subject would disappear.

Not like an animal fleeing.

Like an opponent anticipating the move before you make it.

3) The Program Behind the Curtain

Between operations I worked normal Bureau cases—bank robberies, corruption, organized crime. But it was hard to care about fraud when I’d watched an eight-foot humanoid tear fish apart in a mountain creek.

Living in two worlds creates a kind of sickness.

On paper, my job was rational. In the field, I stepped into a different reality—one that wasn’t supposed to exist.

Over the next five years, I participated in seventeen operations across the western U.S. and Canada. Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, British Columbia. Weeks and months in tents, eating freeze-dried food, living on bad sleep and worse weather.

The Bureau wasn’t trying to prove Bigfoot existed.

That had been settled internally long before me.

What they wanted was control—ranges, behaviors, vulnerabilities. A way to anticipate. A way to contain.

At first, “capture” was spoken aloud like a goal you could plan for.

Then came Idaho.

4) The Night We Learned They Don’t Hunt Alone

Summer 1992, Selway–Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho.

We had better equipment now: night vision, thermal imaging, dart rifles loaded with enough ketamine to drop a grizzly. Portable cages—massive chain-link sections we could assemble in the field. The plan was clean on paper: locate, tranquilize, transport.

We baited a clearing with a deer carcass and set motion-activated cameras.

Four nights: nothing.

On the fifth night, the cameras triggered around 2:00 a.m.

Dutch woke everyone. We moved into position.

Through night vision we watched a Bigfoot approach the bait from the treeline. Smaller than my first sighting—seven feet maybe, lighter fur. It moved cautiously, stopping every few feet to sniff the air and scan the dark.

Three agents held dart rifles, dosages calibrated by estimated weight.

Dutch gave the signal.

All three fired.

The darts hit: shoulder, thigh, lower back.

The Bigfoot jerked upright and roared—an animal sound, yes, but also something else: outrage, warning, alarm rolled into one vibration that I felt in my teeth.

It staggered three steps toward our position.

Then its legs buckled.

We thought we’d won.

We approached carefully, watching the chest rise and fall in heavy, drugged breaths. Dutch knelt, checked the pulse in the neck, nodded.

That’s when the second roar came—from the forest behind us.

Then a third from the left.

Then a fourth from the right.

We weren’t hunting one.

We were being watched by many.

Four more Bigfoots emerged from the trees—larger than the one we’d darted, moving with purpose. Not random. Not panicked.

Coordinated.

Dutch ordered retreat to the vehicles. We fell back, weapons trained.

We made it twenty yards before one charged.

It hit Agent Martinez like a freight train.

Lifted him off his feet and slammed him into a tree. I heard ribs crack from where I stood. A sound you don’t forget because it’s too final, too human.

Dutch opened fire into center mass.

Bullets struck. I saw impacts in chest and shoulder.

The Bigfoot barely flinched.

It turned toward Dutch and advanced.

Dutch fired again—this time at the head.

The Bigfoot dropped.

Then the others closed in.

We ran.

We abandoned the tranquilized Bigfoot. Abandoned the cage. Abandoned equipment we’d hauled for miles.

We ran because survival had suddenly become more important than mission.

Martinez died before we reached a hospital. Internal bleeding. Multiple fractures. Shock.

Dutch filed it as a training accident. “Fall during night exercise.” Forty pages of report, classified beyond top secret, full of diagrams and timing and approach vectors that would never see daylight.

We held a memorial. Said words like duty and sacrifice.

And then we went back to work as if we hadn’t just learned the single most important fact about Bigfoot:

They protect their own.

And they can turn a trap into an ambush.

5) The Shift: From Capture to Watching

After Idaho, capture operations were suspended. The Bureau didn’t say it was fear. They called it “strategic recalibration.”

In plain language: trying to take one alive was going to get more agents killed.

So we shifted to surveillance.

We became observers—trail cams, audio recorders, hair snag traps on branches, witness interviews conducted under fake titles. We posed as wildlife researchers. Documentary filmmakers. Anything but what we were.

In those years, I learned more about them than I wanted to know.

Omnivores. Mostly plant matter, supplemented with fish and small mammals, occasionally deer or elk. Primarily nocturnal, but willing to move in daylight if they felt safe. Vocalizations that ranged from soft chirps to ear-splitting roars.

And the strangest piece—something the analysts called “acoustic pressure.”

Infrasound.

Frequencies below human hearing that make your skin crawl and your gut tighten for no reason. The feeling hikers describe as “I suddenly had to leave.” The sense of being watched that turns into panic without a visible cause.

We began to believe Bigfoot used infrasound like a fence—nudging humans away from territory without ever showing themselves.

We recorded hundreds of calls. Some patterns repeated across regions. Linguists couldn’t confirm “language,” but they agreed the complexity was beyond typical animal communication.

It sounded like structure.

Like meaning.

And then there was their relationship with technology.

Cameras would be avoided—even newly installed ones, never triggered, as if the Bigfoot sensed something electrical about them. In a few cases, cameras were destroyed by rocks thrown from thirty or forty yards away with unnerving accuracy.

Once in Oregon we built a puzzle-box baited with food—multiple steps to open it: lift a bar, rotate a peg, pull a lid.

The footage showed a Bigfoot standing still for two minutes, then executing the correct sequence on the first try.

Less than thirty seconds.

No trial and error.

Just comprehension.

That shook me more than the roars ever did, because it wasn’t strength that scared me—it was mind.

6) Sarah in the Ravine

In 1998 we lost Sarah.

She was the best tracker I ever worked with. She could read moss like print, notice a turned leaf the rest of us walked past.

Northern California near the Oregon border. Reports of vocalizations. Fresh tracks found the day before.

Sarah went out alone at dawn to check a site.

She didn’t return by noon.

We found her three miles from camp at the bottom of a ravine. Neck broken. Massive head trauma.

Officially: slip and fall.

But I helped recover the body and I saw what didn’t fit.

Her radio wasn’t just broken—it was smashed, deliberately, as if someone wanted it silent. Her rifle was missing. Equipment scattered wider than a simple tumble would explain.

And the tracks…

Dozens of them around the ravine edge.

Multiple individuals. Sizes ranging from juvenile to full adult. Converging on the spot where she must have encountered them, then dispersing in different directions like a group executing a practiced response.

We never found her rifle.

Dutch ordered us out immediately. No discussion.

That was when I started questioning everything.

Bigfoot didn’t seek us out. We sought them.

They lived remote. Avoided humans. Became aggressive only when cornered or when young were threatened.

If Sarah died because she got too close, whose fault was that?

We buried another colleague under another fabricated story and went back to tracking the beings that might have killed her.

That kind of work hollows you out.

Not because you’re scared.

Because you begin to recognize your own side isn’t clean.

7) Dutch’s Truth

One night, years later, I sat with Dutch by a small campfire, rain tapping on tarp overhead. I told him I thought we were doing something wrong.

I expected him to shut me down.

Instead, he listened, then said something that rearranged the whole program in my head:

“This isn’t about protecting America from them,” he said. “It’s about protecting them from America.”

He told me the secrecy policy went back decades. At least the 1950s, maybe earlier. Military encounters during training exercises. Investigations that climbed to the top of the chain fast and disappeared into classification.

Presidents briefed. Decisions made.

And the reasoning, Dutch said, was brutally simple:

If the public learned Bigfoot were real, they wouldn’t survive the attention.

Hunters would flood forests. Trophy fever. “Proof.” Fame.

Scientists would demand specimens, DNA, bodies. Funding would follow cruelty.

Developers would carve habitat into fragments. Tourism would trample what remained.

Even “well-meaning” attention would become a slow execution.

So the Bureau’s job—beneath all the gunmetal talk—was to keep Bigfoot a myth while quietly monitoring populations and redirecting threats where possible.

A guardian program disguised as a hunt.

It made sense.

It still didn’t make me feel better.

Because you don’t protect something by chasing it with cages.

And you don’t keep something safe by terrifying its mothers.

8) The Mother and the Juvenile

In 2004 I led a small team in the Cascades following trail-cam footage of a juvenile—rare, valuable. Adults keep young hidden.

We set up on a hillside overlooking a berry patch, cameras and audio gear ready.

On the third day, the juvenile appeared with what we assumed was its mother.

The adult was massive—nine feet, reddish-brown fur. The juvenile stayed close, reaching up to touch the mother’s hand like a toddler seeking reassurance.

For nearly an hour we watched them feed.

The mother picked berries and handed them to the juvenile. When the young one wandered, the mother grunted and pulled it back.

And I felt my stomach tighten with the same uncomfortable recognition I’d felt in Idaho, in Sarah’s ravine, in every moment where the creature’s behavior mirrored ours.

This wasn’t instinct alone.

This was teaching.

Selecting ripe berries. Correcting mistakes. Encouraging successful choices with soft chirps that sounded like praise.

I thought of my own daughter learning to read at home. The patient repetition. The gentle correction. The pride when she got it right.

The parallels weren’t flattering to our species.

Because they forced the ethical question into the open:

If Bigfoot is that aware—if it raises young with learned knowledge—what are we doing spying on them like they’re pests?

Then one of my agents shifted, dislodging a rock. It tumbled down the hillside.

The mother’s head snapped up instantly.

Locked onto our hiding spot.

A heartbeat of frozen stillness.

Then she scooped the juvenile and ran—impossibly fast for something carrying that much weight—vanishing into the forest.

We reviewed our footage later with a mix of triumph and shame.

We’d captured maternal behavior.

We’d also terrified a mother and child.

That’s the moment I understood: even observation can be violence when the observed did not consent.

9) The Decline

By the late 2000s, our data became grim.

Populations declining. Habitat loss fragmenting ranges. Reduced genetic diversity in hair samples—a warning sign of isolation and inbreeding.

We estimated maybe two thousand left in North America, down from what might have been tens of thousands a century ago.

The Bureau floated interventions: capture-and-breed programs, controlled reserves, wildlife corridors connecting populations.

All rejected.

Secrecy remained policy. Better to let them fade quietly than to reveal them and watch civilization consume them at speed.

In 2010 we worked a case near a Montana town expanding into previously undeveloped forest. Reports of howls. Large tracks in yards.

Residents demanded a “bear control program,” which would have put the local group at risk.

We documented three individuals—two adults and a juvenile—visiting residential areas at night, drawn by orchards, gardens, trash.

Not aggressive.

Desperate.

I wrote a report recommending we push to halt development in critical areas and create corridors so the group could move deeper.

It was rejected because any action noticeable enough to protect them might raise questions.

I remember reading that rejection and feeling something in me finally stop trying.

I retired in 2012. Fifty-one years old. Tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix.

10) What Secrecy Really Does

Retirement didn’t bring peace. It brought time—too much time—to replay the moments I’d filed away.

Martinez dying against a tree.

Sarah’s missing rifle.

The mother fleeing with her juvenile.

The eyes of the first Bigfoot I saw in the creek, watching me like it knew the argument I’d later spend years having inside my own head.

We held reunions sometimes—retired agents in quiet restaurants, trading stories we could never repeat anywhere else.

Some compartmentalized it. Some obsessed. Some broke under the weight.

All of us carried scars.

People think the cover-up exists to protect government reputation, or to hide some “weapon,” or to control a resource.

Maybe some of that is true.

But the part Dutch got right—the part that still makes my stomach go cold—is this:

Secrecy is Bigfoot’s best protection.

If the Bureau dumped its archives tomorrow—plaster casts, audio, hair samples, video footage—Bigfoot would become the most hunted animal on the continent by sundown.

Not just with rifles.

With drones, thermal scopes, crowds, money, ego.

They would be loved to death.

That’s why the evidence is buried. That’s why the public debate stays alive. That’s why the myth survives.

The myth is a fence.

A flawed one. A cruel one.

But it’s a fence.

11) The Warning I Earned the Hard Way

I’m telling you this as an old man with nothing left to fear from paperwork and threats.

What are they going to do—prosecute a pensioner for describing ghosts?

Believe me or don’t.

But if you spend time in deep wilderness, you might feel it one day: the forest going unnaturally quiet, birds stopping mid-song, the air feeling heavy, charged with attention.

That’s when you’ve crossed an invisible line and become the observed.

If you hear something that doesn’t match any animal you know—if you catch a glimpse of something massive moving between trees—do the smartest thing you can do:

Leave.

Don’t chase. Don’t call out. Don’t try to prove anything.

Back away. Make yourself small. Get out.

Bigfoot doesn’t want you.

But it will defend itself, its young, and its territory in ways you will not be prepared for.

Dutch used to say Bigfoot encounters are exercises in humility.

You can have training, weapons, technology—and still be an amateur in someone else’s home.

12) The Only Truth That Matters

We hunted them for decades.

We failed to capture them. Failed to control them. Failed to protect them the way they deserved.

And maybe that failure is the closest thing to success we ever achieved.

Because the only reason they still exist—if they still exist in the numbers we once recorded—is because they remained uncatchable.

Because they were smarter than our traps.

Because their families defended each other.

Because they chose distance over contact.

Because they understood us better than we understood ourselves.

I think about that first Bigfoot in the creek, eating a fish. I think about the mother teaching her juvenile. I think about the ones that ambushed us to rescue their tranquilized companion.

And every memory leads to the same conclusion:

They are real.

They are intelligent.

And they are worthy of a respect most humans only pretend to have for wild things.

If you want a clean ending, I can’t give you one. There isn’t one.

The hunt continues quietly—smaller now, more cautious, more “protective” in language if not always in practice.

And Bigfoot continues doing what it has always done best:

Staying hidden from the species that would destroy it, whether through hate or through curiosity.

Some quarry should never be caught.

Some mysteries should never be dragged into the light.

The world is stranger than you were taught. And for once, I’m asking you to let that strangeness live—untouched—somewhere beyond the last logging road.