YEAR: 1966

SEASON: Fall

STATE: Missouri

COUNTY: Platte County

NEAREST TOWN: Near Leavenworth

OBSERVED: I think it may have been about 1966. I was stationed at Leavenworth Kansas as a guard superviser. It was during the Missouri deer hunting season. I had a Missouri Licence for deer and got up long before dawn to go deer hunting. I went across the river into Missouri long before daylight at Leavenworth. It had snowed about a inch or two between 3 and five in the morning. I went north on a gravel road on the Missouri side of the river. It was fresh snow and no tracks but mine, evan on the gravel road. There was a field a few miles north about 1/2 mile across or so that led to the woods along the river. I got there before daylight. There were no tracks from anyone or anything. It was a fresh snow, not over a couple hours old. I walked to the edge of the woods along the river and found footprints that made me look like a little kid when I put my boot in them. It was like a barefoot person with really big feet. I tracked him for a little ways. He had come out of the wood to the edge of a river bottom field and walked along the egde of the woods, then backtracked himself in the edge of the woods to where if anything were following him they would go right by him. He then bent over some smaller willows and ate the bark off off them. From there he went back into the really thick stuff along the river. I did not attempt to follow. There is no doubt in my mind that it was a bigfoot. To question what I saw would be a insult to my itelligence.

ALSO NOTICED: He ate bark off of smaller trees

OTHER WITNESSES: No

OTHER STORIES: No

TIME AND CONDITIONS: Dawn

ENVIRONMENT: Heavily wooded river bottom along the Missouri river

Follow-up investigation report by BFRO Investigator Steve Moon:

I spoke with the witness on the phone and found him to be very credible. We discussed maps and this location at length. A few additional details were added to the original report. The witness recounted many vivid details regarding the observation.

In 1966 the witness returned from Viet Nam and requested that he be stationed as close to Sioux City, Iowa as possible, wanting to be near home. He and his new wife lived just outside the Fort Leavenworth base. He was hunting deer along the Missouri River on the Missouri side, across from the area of Fort Leavenworth.

On the way into this location he had not seen any other car tracks, so he knew that he was alone. He found a set of tracks that were human looking and large. The prints were perfect, and had to be fresh. His size 11 combat boots fit inside the prints and made his feet look small by comparison. The animal had a long stride, and the witness had to jump to produce the same stride. He tracked the animal and at one point it back-tracked on itself, paralleling about twenty yards to one side of where it had walked, just inside the woods. It did this for twenty to thirty yards and then stood for a while next to five or ten small willow saplings. It stood there long enough to strip the bark off of two of them, from about five feet off the ground on up. The creature then headed toward the river through thick brush. The witness decided at that point to concentrate on his deer hunting.

About BFRO Investigator Steve Moon:

A native of southeast Iowa, Steve has long been a cave explorer and outdoor adventurer. He became involved in bigfoot research in 2008. Steve organized BFRO IOWA Public Expeditions in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016, and is currently organizing a 2017 IOWA expedition. Steve is an artist, photographer, farmer, anthropologist and professional researcher. His primary research areas are the river basins of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and all of eastern Iowa.

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