Geographical Index > Canada > Ontario > Report # 4436
(Class A)
Submitted by witness on Thursday, May 30, 2002.
Fisherman has morning sighting while boating up waterway near Sioux Lookout
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YEAR: 1998
SEASON: Summer MONTH: June PROVINCE: Ontario COUNTRY: Canada LOCATION DETAILS: Ten miles south of Sioux Lookout NEAREST TOWN: Sioux Lookout, Ontario NEAREST ROAD: unknown OBSERVED: A friend and I were boating in a creek in the early morning. It was a very rainy and windy day. We came around a bend and I saw a figure approximately 30-40 yards from my
position to my right. At first I thought it was a bear, but the figure was too tall. Then, for a moment, I thought it was a moose. Then I realized it was neither because it was
bipedal, and thought to myself "that's a person". Then I had a moment of confusion wondering what a person would be doing in the woods in this sort of weather. Then I
quickly realized that what I was seeing was not a person either. It was bulky, black creature. I was not struck so much by its height, but its width. The shoulders were very broad
and it had a generally thick appearance topped by a small, knobby head. I watched it steadily walk towards the woods. About 10-15 seconds later it entered the woods. As it
entered, it walked up a hill and disapeared into the trees. Several things struck me. Rather than ducking under a branch, it swatted the branch over its head with its left arm. It
also never turned back in our direction to look at us and walked calmly away from us.
I was very struck by the incident and afterwards was surprised that it didn't occur to me to alert my friend to what I was seeing. I asked him later if he had seen anything in the
creek that day. He said no, because most of the time he had his head down, shielding his face from the wind and rain. ALSO NOTICED: None OTHER WITNESSES: One other person in the boat with me, however, he did not see the creature OTHER STORIES: Only at bigfoot related websites, after the sighting TIME AND CONDITIONS: About 8:00 A.M.
Rain and wind, mid 60's ENVIRONMENT: low lying wet area near a creek
Follow-up investigation report:
The witness, "M," told me he had a camera hanging from his neck when he saw the animal and that it never occurred to him to take a picture of it. But he didn't have time to photograph it, anyway. He was so transfixed by what he saw - at first trying to work out what it was, then just looking in wonder at what it seemed to be - that he didn't even bring it to his fishing partner's attention. M sat in the boat's rear and operated the motor while his friend sat in front with his head down, braced against the wind and rain.
M was struck more by how "wide" the animal was, and not so much by its height - although he did repeat that he thought it was too tall to be a bear. When I asked him to estimate the animal's height, he said he really couldn't, that it was just too hard to tell because the brush it moved through obscured its legs. When I asked him to elaborate on the animal's size and the width he was so impressed by, he said, "It was like William Perry dressed in his full football gear, with a gorilla suit on... way out of human range."
M repeated, too, that the animal's head was "knobby," and when I asked him what he meant by that he said it seemed to just sit on the animal's shoulders, like there was no neck. When I asked if he thought the animal had seen them and was walking away for that reason, M said, yes, that it probably had seen them. He was also struck by the way the animal knocked away the shoulder-height branch that was in its way. He said the animal could have just ducked under it, making it seem to M like the animal might be "a little pissed off." But he also said the animal "seemed benign... like it was getting out of our way."
When I asked M if he was sure it wasn't a bear or a human, he said he was, and said that he'd bet $1000 on it. He said the place where the sighting occurred, about 10 miles south of Sioux Lookout, was very remote and that it was cold and rainy out, and early in the morning (M seemed to be addressing the possibility of a hoax). When I pressed him to tell me what he thought the animal was, he seemed reluctant to say bigfoot/sasquatch, and in his reluctance to say that, to name the animal as that, he said... "I don't know." It came across to me that he thought that the animal was a sasquatch but that he couldn't make the psychological leap to say that, to say it out loud.
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