Class 3b Encounter Report in Battiest, OK, Case #02090006

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Case: 02090006

Class 3b

Family hears vocalizations and finds possible track.

Report Details

Witness Account:
A little background to the discovery: we were on a short vacation in S.E. Oklahoma just a couple of miles south of the US Post Office in Battiest, OK. We rented a cabin on the Glover River for a couple of nights. My children and I had just returned from a camping trip in the Wichita Mts. (in southwestern Oklahoma) and I rented this cabin so my wife could come with us this time. The cabin had beds and air conditioning which was a prerequisite for my wife coming along. The road to the cabin was on the corner where the post office sat in Battiest. Directly across the street from the turn-off was the Battiest Public School Building. The Elementary was down the road a couple of hundred yards to the west. Again the cabins are 2-3 miles (my estimate) south of the Post Office. The cabin is somewhat remote but not terribly so. It is in the area just between the Ouachita National Forests and Weyerhaeuser Lands. If you look on a topo map of Oklahoma you will see what I mean. There was timberland that had been harvested on the way into the cabin site so Weyerhaeuser had been active in that area. The cabin was one of three that people could rent on land that also had an office/house for the proprietor just next door to a farmhouse. The farmer owned the lands adjacent to the cabins to the north, east and south. I assumed the land on the north bank was his. The cabins laid alongside the Glover River, which, from what my wife read, was one of the few remaining pristine rivers in the US having never been dammed. The forest was along the river in a band about 1-200 yards across each side of the river. It is wider in some areas and was so thick we couldn?t see any open land on the opposite bank. The flora and fauna was near pristine as well except for the farm animals of course; mostly cattle; and I did see a number of trout in the river which had to have been stocked. When we arrived at the cabin around 5PM we could hear an eagle sounding off. It called for a couple of hours. I never could see the bird because it was downriver just past a bend. I couldn?t locate it and since I was busy unloading the car and getting us situated I failed to go far enough downstream to find it. I?m very familiar with most of the calls of the local fauna and this call was definitely an eagle. I have an undergraduate degree in Zoology. I?ve seen and heard them many times in Central and South Central Oklahoma on Lake Arcadia and the Washita River so I know they live and nest in Oklahoma. At least they spend the spring and summers in Oklahoma. I?ve never seen them in the winter. The sound was almost the same as the African Fish Eagle which looks very much like a Bald Eagle only smaller. I lived for a time in East Africa and was very familiar with the fauna there as well; especially the birds.

After getting us situated my kids and I walked up the road toward the office to retrieve a canoe to row down the river to our cabin. We found the print at about 6 or 6:30 PM on 6/22/09. My son & I discovered it at the same time and my daughter noticed it half a second later. It was a very large human looking footprint that is consistent with Sasquatch prints depicted in books and on the internet. I took a photo of it but the low sun cast a shadow in the print that makes it difficult to see. I took the photo after we collected the canoe using my cell phone, as we forgot to bring our cameras on this trip. It must have been about 30-45 minutes after we returned to the cabin with the canoe. I stacked a few small rocks next to the print so I could locate it later. The phone has a 4GB card that I should be able to download as soon as I find the card reader for my desktop. If you contact me within the next week or so I should have it available to send to you. For what it?s worth the print was just one single print of a right foot that was in the loose dirt just off the edge of the graded dirt road. It was pointing toward the river in between the first cabin and the office at a bend in the road. If you stood where the print was no one could see you from the first cabin or the office. It was just out of site from those buildings. We were in the second cabin down river from the office. I looked for other prints and at the foliage where it might have stepped into to get back into trees and couldn?t find any kind of disturbance that would indicate that the creature had walked into the foliage, nor could I find any evidence of where it came from. Across this road to the south, where I assumed it came from, is a large open field with a six strand barbed wire fence enclosing it. Too tall to step over even at 7-8 foot tall. I half expected to see hair on the barbed wire. I found nothing else except the one print. Both the kids and I remarked that it was too big for a man but looked very human like.

Around dusk I was the only one outside and I heard two distinct howls coming from some distance downriver. The time was probably around 8:45 ? 9PM. Since the days are long and sunset is late I assume this time to be near correct. I didn?t look at the time to verify it though. I don?t know what time sunset was on that day exactly. The time is approximate and the sound heard was at dusk and at least an hour or two past when the footprint was discovered. I was out in front of the cabin coming off the road toward the front door of the cabin. All the night sounds were starting. The tree and river frogs and insects were beginning their chorus. I even heard a couple of different owls; a Screech and a Great Horned shortly after hearing the howls. Later my wife was out on the porch that overlooked the river in the back of the cabin and she said she heard a strange animal sound she had never heard before. This was about 30 minutes or so after I heard it and of course no one else was outside at that particular moment. She said it was different from any of the other calls we were hearing that night including the owls and the mooing cattle. When I asked her where she thought it came from she pointed in the same direction that I heard the howls come from. It was the same direction and farther away from the farm and cattle on down the river. I never heard what she heard and she never heard what I heard; and the kids never heard anything at all. The howls I heard were somewhat consistent with recorded sounds on the internet of supposed Sasquatch.

We never heard anything else like what we heard that first night nor did we find any other prints. However the next day I was out front again and I heard a crashing sound as if something were walking through the forest that was large. I walked over to the fence in front of our cabin and looked across the field. There was a small very muddy cattle tank about 25 yards across at the edge of the woods at the end of the field, about 150 yards or so from where I was. When I looked over there where I thought I heard the crashing sounds a murder of crows burst out of the trees going in all directions and telling whatever disturbed them of their displeasure. This was just on the other side of the tank. I never saw or heard anything more & I don?t know if it is even connected. All the cattle were in the smaller east field together. None were in this particular field.

Hand/foot prints:
The footprint looked wide and long with 5 distinct toe prints, an obvious heal and at the mid-tarsal area was a break that had a ridge going all the way across the foot. The ridge had a double line in it as if it were the lines on the palm of your hand about a centimeter wide between the 2 lines. There was no mistaking it for any other kind of print. When I first went down the hill behind the cabin to the river bank I found what looked like a large cat print in the hardened mud coming off an animal trail out of the woods next to the slope which curved down to the river bank. That print was neither as clear nor as obvious as the large human like print. The large human like print was photographed with a dollar bill next to it for scale. I did not have a tape measure to do any better. It was at least as wide as the dollar and more than twice the length in my estimate. I took pictures of it the next day and it had degraded substantially since the night before.

Sounds:
The howls resembled those on the websites of supposed Sasquatch. I heard 2 distinct howls lasting 5-10 seconds each. The howls were about 3 minutes apart. They sounded very clear but far off somewhat. If it was a human they would have to be about 100 yards from me to sound as loud. They sounded somewhat human but different in a way that I can?t describe. I cannot come close to imitation but I can approximate the sound. Two ouwoooooo?s very clear and distinct and long in duration. I would say at least 5-10 seconds each. It did not sound like coyote, cow, owl or anything else I am familiar with.

Additional observations:
Just the crashing sounds and the scattering of the crows.

Investigator's Observations

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