Did Bigfoot take a big trip east?Go ahead and scoff, but a Minnesota hunter's camera captured an image of a 7-foot-tall, black creature.
By BOB VON STERNBERG, Star Tribune
Last update: December 10, 2009 - 9:33 PM
Tim Kedrowski admits he was "super skeptical" at first. But now the 55-year-old salesman from Rice, Minn., wonders if his motion-activated camera managed to do something no one else has -- capture Bigfoot in Minnesota's big woods, far from his alleged stomping grounds in the Pacific Northwest.
Kedrowski's two adult sons set up the camera on the family's hunting land near Remer, Minn., and Leech Lake to see what animals might trigger it -- never expecting a black creature about 7 feet tall to stride through a stand of trees in late October.
Scientists, no doubt, will scoff as they always do, but Kedrowski's photo of the big lug, more formally known as Sasquatch, has given believers renewed hope that the creature might exist.
"I can't sit here and tell you I'm a 100 percent believer, but I'm a little less skeptical than I was before," he said. "You don't go deer hunting looking for this kind of thing."
Although supposed Sasquatch sightings have occasionally been reported in Minnesota over the years, most have popped up in California and the Pacific Northwest. That is, until the rainy night of Oct. 24, at 7:20 p.m., when Kedrowski's camera clicked and captured a blurry image of, well, who knows what?
"We were sure it wasn't a bear and wasn't someone pulling a scam on us," Kedrowski said. "We thought it might be a bow hunter out looking for a wounded deer -- that's the only reason anyone would be out there in the dark that time of night."
His sons -- the only people who knew the camera was even there -- initially thought the other had pulled a scam. But both were far from the hunting land that night.
Although it remains possible that it was someone in an animal suit, "that'd have to be a hell of a big person," Kedrowski said.
He said two elderly men who live closest to the site told him that late that night they had gone outside to use their outhouse and had heard strange squealing noises.
When asked to show the direction of the sounds, they pointed to the area where the camera had been.
Kedrowski remained skeptical of the photo's veracity, until he contacted Don Sherman and Bob Olson, who style themselves as the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Research Team.
They compared the image to one of an alleged Bigfoot photo taken years ago in California "and the features were identical," Kedrowski said.
Sherman said the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Research Team has been receiving reports of Bigfoot sightings since 2006 and has had reports every year since, including four reports this year.
Local wildlife experts aren't biting.
"Personally, I don't buy the fact this thing exists," said Blane Klemek, assistant wildlife manager with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in Bemidji, who notes that no one has ever found the carcass of a Sasquatch.
"All organisms die -- they don't just go away," Klemek said. "You'd think someone someday would find one."
Ever since publication of the tale -- and photo -- in the Bemidji newspaper this week, "my phone's been ringing off the hook," he said. "I tell everyone I wish I knew what it was."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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