WAUSAU, Wis. — A summer employee had just finished cleaning up Amco Park near here in June 2001 when he saw the beast.
"I hunt, so I am for damn sure it was not a deer or bear," the person posted on the website of The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. "It also moved very fast. This thing was big, hairy and tall, (like) your typical stereotypical sightings."
The person went on to report that he never believed in Bigfoot before that sighting, and always thought those who did were a little crazy.
"Not anymore," he wrote. "I'm not totally convinced, but whatever I saw freaked me out."
The poster said that when he told other people about his experience, "everybody just laughed at me."
But his isn't the only Bigfoot sighting in central and northern Wisconsin. This story, along with plenty of others like it, is part of the reason why the producers and on-air team for the show Finding Bigfoot will be filming an episode later in July in the area. The investigators from the Animal Planet TV show, Matt Moneymaker, Cliff Barackman, James "Bobo" Fay and Ranae Holland, are asking people from the area to email the stories of their Bigfoot encounters to FindingBigfoot.Wisconsin@gmail.com.
Most people think that Bigfoot is the stuff of campy legend, but according a survey of American fears done in 2015 by Chapman University in Orange, Calif., more than 11% of us accept that the creature is real (albeit tremendously elusive).
Moneymaker, developer of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, is an adamant believer.
"I know for sure they exist," Moneymaker said via phone from his home in California. "I've had one 20 feet in front of me."
Moneymaker, 50, bills himself as the "No. 1 Bigfoot researcher in the world," and he has devoted decades to tracking and studying the creature. Bigfoot, he said, is its own species of animal, a sort of an ape-like creature. It is "a very misunderstood" animal, Moneymaker said, that is nocturnal, an eater of plants and animals and nomadic. The species grows to about 9 feet tall and weighs 1,000 pounds, he said.
At the same time, the creatures are extraordinarily smart and have the ability to think in ways that humans cannot match, Moneymaker said.
"They have the largest brains in the animal kingdom," he said, which gives them the advantage in avoiding people and being seen.
He's studied Bigfoot in Wisconsin before, he said, and he's eager to come back. The vast forested areas of northern Wisconsin and its plethora of whitetail deer make it good Bigfoot habitat.
Finding Bigfoot follows a general reality-TV formula. It features people telling their stories and includes re-creations of those tales. And it also includes a segment that features the investigators looking for the animal. It's extremely unlikely that Bigfoot will be found in those segments, Moneymaker said.
"Spending four hours in one location trying to look for the most elusive animal in the world just won't work," Moneymaker said. "It takes a lot more work, a lot more time, than that."
Still, the show highlights good stories about Bigfoot, he said, and highlights the similarities of such tales from around the world.
Follow Keith Uhlig on Twitter: @UhligK
