Today over at my friend Rand’s blog Paranormal Activities, there is an interesting looking video that the Bigfoot Field Researcher’s Organization (BFRO) has released. The story behind this footage describes a five day camping trip during which Don Young, a BFRO investigator, spent several nights observing the wilderness near Phillips, Wisconsin in the summer of 2008.

On his fourth evening out, Young had begun to experience activity near his campsite, which included stones and other objects being thrown at him. He began to observe an area near a walking trail that led to his campsite, when a creature became visible, partially obscured by low-lying brush. “After I watched it for a while with the thermal I got the sense that it was watching me, and it was peeking over a clump of brush on the edge of the trail. I watched it for a while, until I accidentally kicked into my bag of cans and garbage. I also bumped into the tripod when this happened, which jerked the thermal to the right a bit. Then the blip stood up and ran off on two legs, hunched over.”

My one experience with a thermal imaging camera was in the dead cold of winter on a mountainside in Cherokee, North Carolina. I was amazed to see mice scuttling along in the cold snow that covered the ground, as well as raccoons and opossums clinging to branches fifteen to twenty feet up in several trees, watching me silently. Had a creature as large as what Don Young filmed appeared in my frame, I don’t think I would have watched quite as calmly! Considering the circumstances, this is very good camera work, though it’s obviously inconclusive as to what the creature that appears in this clip may actually be. In a statement included with the report published at the BFRO site, Matt Moneymaker, head of the BFRO, also concludes that “(the video’s) quality will not stand on its own to convince the world. The key portion is only about a second long,” though he maintains that “This shortfall doesn’t change its authenticity, and thus its importance.” Is the creature that appears in Young’s film indeed a Bigfoot, or is this simply too difficult to discern from little more than an instant of footage depicting some creature in the Wisconsin forest?

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Author: Micah Hanks

Micah Hanks is a writer, researcher, and podcaster. His interests include areas of history, science, archaeology, philosophy, and the study of anomalous phenomena in nature. He can be reached at info@micahhanks.com.