YEAR: 2012

SEASON: Spring

MONTH: May

DATE: 19

STATE: West Virginia

COUNTY: Pendleton County

LOCATION DETAILS: I don't want the exact location information published. My son would be furious. The location is about 10 miles southwest of Franklin near the end of Smith Creek Road. The driveways are given road names. This one was ******* Way, which runs for 1.1 miles west and south off of Smith Creek Rd with 2 locked gates to get through.

NEAREST TOWN: Franklin, Pendleton County

NEAREST ROAD: Smith Creek Rd

OBSERVED: I was alone trying to map out the northern boundary of my son's property on the side of a mountain. It was very difficult to locate the boundary and then to map out the slope. I was marking trees with blue tape at eye level and then siting the blue tape from another location to determine the slope of a section. After two hours I was getting tired and came to a tree I wanted to mark and realized I had left the roll of tape 100' up a 15 degree slope. So to avoid going up and back twice in order to do the measurement, I decided to site on my machete instead. So I tried to hit a 4" tree hard enough for it to stick at eye level. It took me 4 whacks about 3 seconds apart to get it to stay. I was standing there trying to decide if I could see the handle from 100 feet away when I heard a sharp single tree knock less than 100 yards away due north of me. Being a Finding Bigfoot fan, I knew exactly what I heard. There was only one and I didn't hit any more trees! I did work for another 2 hours, but I was very quiet and wary. I wasn't anxious to see a Bigfoot!

ALSO NOTICED: I set up a trail cam 2 months later near where I thought the knock originated and hung a small, open jar of peanut butter from a tree with fishing line as a lure so it would be 12 feet off the ground. It was there for 3 weeks, and when the cam was retrieved, I got 23 30-second videos, 20 of which were deer. The other 3 showed no source of the trigger. Nice try.

OTHER WITNESSES: I was alone.

OTHER STORIES: Not personally. I know there have been a number of sitings near Seneca Rocks about 10 miles north as the crow flies, but I was stunned and frightened when the incident occurred. I have stayed on the property several times this past summer and have seen a bear, many deer, turkeys and even a skunk. But I have heard or seen nothing unusual. The forest is very quiet at night. I did hear what sounded like a mountain lion roar, even though there aren't supposed to be any in the state, but that's another story!

TIME AND CONDITIONS: 2PM, clear, warm weather.

ENVIRONMENT: It is heavily forested with hardwoods on a 15-degree slope. The knock came from a nearby clearing that had been logged and had a lot of fallen trees left behind.

Follow-up investigation report by BFRO Investigator D.K.:

Upon contacting the witness, he had the following details to add:

"The knock sounded like a baseball bat against a tree. Very sharp, one hit. I've heard limbs break and fall. This was very different. I estimate the distance at 100 yards because it was relatively loud. My machete strikes against the small tree sounded like knocks rather than an axe because it wasn't very sharp. The pause between my last strike and the return knock was not more than 10 seconds, which is a relatively long pause if you count it out. That's the only knock I've ever heard any time in my life."

And upon further reflection the witness recalled the story of an encounter his adopted father had during the years of World War II. He related the story as follows:

"He was drafted in June 1943 and after basic he was assigned to the medical corps at Walter Reed in DC until he was discharged late in 1945. What was neat about his duty was that he worked Monday through Friday regular day duty and had the weekends off. So on many Fridays after finishing, probably around 3:30 as most hospitals run, he would hitchhike home. ... When I was a kid we used to drive to his home in Homer City, PA along the route he described seeing Bigfoot. I know it had to be the winter of '44-45 because he would have just arrived at WRAMC in '43. He said he was near Bedford heading home on a Friday night and he [was] trying to catch a ride on PA 56 toward Johnstown. It was snowing and cold ... when a sailor and his girlfriend picked them up in an old pre-war car with transmission issues. The road was narrow with few houses and they hadn't gone but a mile or two when they saw a guy walking toward them in the road. When they passed him, they saw it was covered with hair and towered over the car. They all asked the same question at the same time, "What was that?". [He] wanted to turn around and go see it again but the sailor was afraid of getting stuck trying to turn around and the transmission might not allow him to change gears, so they didn't get another look."

"My adopted father was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist and was a conscientious objector, that's why he was in the medical corps. He was an honest religious man so I believed him completely and heard him repeat the story to friends on a number of occasions. That story is why I believe in Bigfoot and when I heard the tree knock, there was no doubt in my mind what it was."

This witness' encounter occurred in a sparsely populated region of West Virginia that, in recent years, has recorded an increasing number of sightings.

About BFRO Investigator D.K.:

D.K. is a business executive with an MS in Systems Engineering. Formerly a linguistic analyst, he applies his knowledge to the collection and study of sasquatch vocals and communication patterns. BFRO expeditions attended: Tennessee 2010, Pennsylvania 2011, Ohio 2012, West Virginia 2012 & West Virginia 2013

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