Waiting for Bigfoot -- Part 2

Author’s note: This is the second in a two-part series on Kansan Randy Harrington’s quest to find Bigfoot.

Randy Harrington knows Bigfoot exists – he’s seen one. An eight-foot-tall, human-like creature covered with reddish-brown hair. It approached his truck one night and rifled through the bed.

Randy knows because he was in the cab of the truck waiting for it.

“When I was a kid I read a Bigfoot book in elementary school and have been fascinated by it ever since,” he said. “Now I know it’s real.”

Randy, 41, of Leavenworth, Kan., has investigated Bigfoot for the past five years. And, although Bigfoot officially remains unknown to science, Randy said there’s evidence to support Bigfoot’s existence. Overly large human-like footprints, trees twisted into X shapes, and eyewitness accounts – almost everything but a Bigfoot.

“I don’t deny the fact that we do need a body,” he said.

During Randy’s investigations with the Green Country Bigfoot Research Center in Oklahoma, he’s seen enough evidence that Bigfoot isn’t just real, it’s intelligent.

“The twisted trees and the X formations, these things mean something to them,” he said. “We can say they’re territorial markers but we don’t know. I’m thinking it’s gotta be some kind of mapping system for them.”

Randy’s current Bigfoot stalking spot is Oklahoma’s Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

“There’s something that happened down there that shows us just how intelligent they are,” he said. “We found evidence that they bait their own prey. We have found a pound of acorn meat that had been hulled. They were stacked up in a little pile. A week or so later a hunter heard that a deer had been attacked and killed on that spot.”

Then there are the eyewitness accounts.

Randy said one Oklahoma woman reported seeing multiple creatures in her yard.

“There was a lady (Bigfoot) eating fruit in her back yard with little Bigfoots, and when they got too far away she slapped her thigh and they came back to her,” he said.

Why a Bigfoot hasn’t been captured is evident to Randy – they take care of their own.

“There’ve been multiple reports of one who’s fallen or have gotten shot and they’ve been carried off by other Bigfoot,” he said. “They do not want to have anything to do with us.”

In Missouri, Randy is involved in investigations in the Mark Twain National Forest and St. Louis.

“There’s a lot around St. Louis,” he said. “Any low-lying area that’s heavily wooded will have a breeding population of these animals. The fact that they will come in close to society is starting to be more and more clear. The park system where I had my encounter was near Sulfur (Okla.) and there were reports of them coming into town and eating out of Dumpsters.”

Missouri has its Bigfoot history, mainly around Louisiana in the early 1970s, but there have been reports throughout the state from the 1920s through today.

“I think they’ve been there all along,” Randy said. “When you go back through history and look at the names they gave animals, you think of the Missouri Momo, the Green Hills Monster, and that was probably a name for Bigfoot.”

Randy spends a lot of spare time in Oklahoma in a small trailer he built just to hunt Bigfoot. Although he’s seen one of the creatures, he wants to capture Bigfoot on video. But if he doesn’t, he at least knows he’s seen the most sought-after, unknown primate in North America.

“I’m basically doing this for me,” he said. “I just want to see one again. I want to look one in the face.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

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