It's killing me to admit this, but....

This is a story from Karl over on Cryptozoology.com

From Cryptozoology.com - Hominids Forum

Topic: It's killing me to admit this, but....

From Karl posted Fri, Apr 1 2011, 7:16am 

"It's no secret that I do not believe Bigfoot exists, but I have to return to my blog just this once to admit that I've finally been stumped.


You would think that being a skeptic, I would associate with like-minded people, but the reality is that most of my acquaintances believe in things I dismiss as unproven or untrue. I was with one such acquaintance at his cousin's house assisting with some house work. The acquaintance and his cousin are both widowers in their late seventies and early eighties. While we were clearing out the pantry to reorganize it, I moved an old newspaper with pumpkin seeds scattered on it and one of the articles mentioned our local cryptid, the Bear Lake Monster. We started talking about it, and the cousins, Jack and Don, both expressed their doubts, but admitted that anything was possible. I gave my two cents worth with the full thrust of skepticism: how a breeding population of one hundred and fifty foot air breathing monsters in a relatively small, highly visited lake would be seen a great deal more often than has been reported, etc. Jack, the older cousin, gave me a patronizing smile, looking at me as though I were some foolish high school kid who thought he knew everything. He said I sure seemed to know an awful lot about what not to believe in. I responded that everything I had heard about the Bear Lake Monster gave me more reasons to disbelieve than otherwise. Then out of the blue Jack asked, "What about Sasquatch, you believe in that, don't you?" I explained that after a lengthy examination of the phenomena, I could not find a single substantial reason to believe there was any possible reality to the myth. Jack gave me that patronizing smile again, while Don just shook his head and chuckled. Don asked Jack, "You going to show him?" Jack simply said, "Maybe later", and we finished working on the pantry and straightening up the rest of the basement a bit.

When we were done, Jack asked me to follow him. We went into the largest room of the basement, which can be best described as a storage area. We maneuvered through some junk to a corner of the room where Jack pulled an old canvas tarp off some boxes. He pulled out a wooden crate, removed an old shoe box from the crate, and removed a piece of paper from the box. He handed it to me, and asked me what I thought about it. The piece of paper was an old California hunting license with a drawing of Bigfoot and a California seal watermark on it. The wording on the license stated that it was good for the capture or kill of a male and/or female adult hairy giant. I handed it back to Jack, and said that it was obviously phony; probably a souvenir sold in one of the Northern California Bigfoot shops. Jack assured me that it was very real. It was my turn to shake my head and chuckle. I told him that if that were true, the Bigfoot fanatics would have posted those licenses all over the internet to support their belief. Don pointed out that if it were some sort of souvenir, that it would surely have been posted on the internet as well. I bowed to his reasoning, and wondered why I hadn't seen it before. Jack explained that they were a very rare and special issue, and that only a select few were able to obtain them, and that the one he had belonged to his Great Uncle, Ignatius Beauregard Leave (call me old fashioned, but I love that name). Jack told me quite a bit about Ignatius, but it isn't pertinent save to say that he was in a position to obtain such a license. He said he wouldn't be surprised if his was the last surviving license to hunt hairy giants. I chuckled again, and told them they could stop trying to pull my leg, because it wasn't working. Jack's patronizing smile returned to his face, and he headed upstairs and asked me to follow him again.

We entered a room Jack uses as his office. He pulled a very old scrapbook out of the closet, set it on a table and searched through a few pages. When he found the page he was looking for, he pointed to a photograph and asked me what I thought about it. At first all I saw was a man sitting in front of a bunch of bear skins and a few skulls, and I said so. Don pointed at one of the skulls, and asked if I was sure that was a bear skull, then at one of the furs and asked if I was sure that was a bear fur. On closer inspection, I could see that the skull did not belong to a bear. I admitted that I could not explain the skull, which did not mean there wasn't an explanation, but that the skin, though it looked like a gorilla suit, could still easily belong to a bear. Jack looked at me as though he were losing patience, and said there was a letter he had lost years earlier that spoke about the man in the photo. Jack said the man's name was Clement, and that he was a hunter and trapper by trade. Clement explained to the letter writer, (Jack could not remember who it was), that he was out checking traps when he saw what he thought was a young black bear. He shot it, and was more than a little surprised to find a hairy man that was about his size. He skinned it and boiled the skull like he would a bear, and put them out for trade. Jack was unable to tell me who took the photograph, or how it came into his possession. I asked to see the negative, but Jack said he did not have it. He said he did, however, have the negative to an even better photograph. Jack turned a page of the scrapbook and showed me another photograph. There was no questioning this one; that was definitely supposed to be a Bigfoot.

There was just no way I was going to believe this photograph was real. I raised a suspicious eyebrow at Jack, and he just gave me another of his irritable patronizing smiles. He said that not only did he have the negative to prove the picture was authentic, he also had a journal that explained the photo. Jack turned to the back of the scrapbook, and pulled out what appeared to be about twenty large negatives tucked in an envelope. He found the one he wanted and held it up for me, but would not allow me to touch it. Sure enough, it showed just what the photograph showed, and for the life of me, I didn't know how to explain it away. Still, I could not, and would not believe the photo was authentic. Jack pulled an old journal out of the closet and said that it belonged to an uncle, his mother's oldest brother. I read the entry, and didn't know what to say. The journal was clearly very old, and the writing just as old. According to the journal, it was written in Orleans, California, and the entry is dated as 5 of August, 1909. Here is the journal entry about the photo in its entirety:

"Sam and Jesse figured to go hunting real early friday morning. Digs and Cob didn't have many chores and Mr Peters didn't need me to help with the printing so we asked if we could join along and they told us to bring our rifles. I do not own a rifle but my uncle Chase let me take his. We was only going into the woods just out of town and we did not plan to be gone a whole day so we did not take a pack horse. Just some jerky and water.


We had been walking real quiet for about an hour without seeing anything but some squirrels and birds and a couple a lizards. Cob was about to shoot a lizard when he failed to catch it but Sam stopped him. Sam said it was bad enough we could not find any game without Cob shooting and scaring off anything that we might still have a chance to hunt.


We had all been spread out pretty good but we all came together while Sam was having it out with Cob. We was just getting ready to spread out again when Jesse saw some movement about fifty yards south of us. Sam motioned that he and Jesse would follow it south and waved the rest of us east toward the creek. We all had not taken two steps before there was some rustling in the bushes and then something I had never seen before stepped out into a clearing.


It was one of them hairy giants I had heard tell about. It had to be six hands taller than a horse. It just stood there staring at us and we was not doing nothing but staring back. It was clear that Jesse could not believe his own eyes. He said something I cannot in all good conscience put to paper and then the giant turned away from us and started walking like it did not have nothing to fear. Without saying nothing Sam raised his gun and shot the giant in the back. The giant turned to look at us and snarled or growled or something like that. It turned away and started running. Sam shot at it again and started chasing the giant. We all took off after Sam stopping to shoot when we had a clear shot. I could not say how many times we shot the giant but it was a fair amount more than ten or twelve times. I can not say that all our shots struck the giant because it was gaining distance on us fast and becoming an ever smaller target but I know of a truth that we are all good with a rifle and yet after all that shooting the giant just kept on running.


Of a sudden Sam stopped running, and we all stopped with him. He pointed at a small puddle of blood and said he did not figure the giant would live much longer. We commenced walking keeping an eye out for the blood trail. We was walking for a good half hour when we found the giant. We all confessed our disbelief when we saw that it was still alive. We could see that the giant was real weak from loss of blood. It just sat there staring at us for a few minutes, then it turned and tried to stand. Its back was all matted with blood. Sam walked up to about twenty feet distance and shot the giant in the back of the head. The giant went down and tried to push itself up. Sam shot it again at the base of the skull and the giant went down and died.


It took about all we had left in us to drag the giant back to town. It was going on 3 o'clock when we finally and gratefully arrived. The Darcy twins saw us just as we was coming out of the woods and ran into town to announce us and what we was dragging in. James ran out from the printing office and helped us drag the giant over to Mr Grays stable. Some of Mr Grays men got some rope and tied it around the giants elbows and hoisted it up so that Mr Peters could photograph it. We all got next to the giant and let James join us since he helped drag it a bit. Digs found a deer skull in the stable to hold up the giants head.


I was real tired and went home to rest a bit. Later on I went to see if Mr Peters needed me at the printing office. The giant was not over by the stables any more but I do not know where they took it. I figure tomorrow I will ask Sam what he is fixing to do with the hairy giant."

In the next entry, the journal writer (I never learned his name) simply states that a man from San Francisco purchased the hairy giant and that his share was five dollars.

I was admittedly dumbfounded, but I still could not allow myself to believe what I was seeing. I asked Jack if he had ever shown any of this to anyone before. He said he had only shown it to a few friends and most of his family. I asked why he hadn't shown any of it to the professors at the local university. He said that if he did that, the photos and journal would most likely disappear, and he would never see them again. I tried to convince Jack to let me bring a professor to his house to look at the items, but Jack flat out refused. I kept on bugging him, but he became impatient with me, and I knew it was time to just let it go.

The next day, I returned to Jack's house to try and convince him again. I asked him to let me photograph the items, and swore that I would not tell anyone where they were. Jack wasn't smiling any more, and flat out said he was sorry he had ever shown them to me. I pleaded with him, and he finally agreed to let me photograph the license as well as the journal and negative together, if for no other reason than to just get me out of his hair. Jack scanned the photographs for me, and held me to my promise. He refused to scan the negative, he feared it might get damaged somehow. I asked Jack to hold the negative up to the light, (he still would not let me touch it), but he refused; he told me to photograph it on the journal, or not at all.

I just photographed the items yesterday, and I haven't been to the university yet; I'll be taking them in as soon as I reach Dr. Atkinson by phone. I'm more than a little unhappy that I don't have the negative. With just an image of it, this all can easily be laughed off, and I'm guessing that it will. I know I would laugh it off.

I saw no harm in posting the items on this site as long as I keep my promise. Just to see the feedback I'll probably get from the university.


I photographed the license on the crate where Jack keeps it.



The first photo Jack showed me.







The second photo Jack showed me. I've gone over the photo again and again, and cannot find artifacts or pixilation of any kind.

This is the journal. I have two other photos of it so I could get the entire entry. Sadly, you can't see the negative very well, but as I said, Jack refused to hold it up to the light. He's very protective of the negative.

Karl's website: http://www.enigmaticstatic.com/

Note: Of course this is an April Fools Day joke on Karl's part lol but anyway
Happy April Fools Day lol!!

;)

-Rob