Mike Quast - BIGFOOT CHRONICLES: A RESEARCHERS CONTINUING JOURNEY

To report Bigfoot encounters in the state of Minnesota or for further information the author may be contacted at .

Copyright 2019

As I begin to write this, I am in the days surrounding my 50th birthday, a major turning point that often makes people look back at what we hope will be the first half of our lives if we would like to try and live to be 100, which - because why not? - I would like to shoot for. My father's mother made it to 103, but it keeps me humble to remember that he himself passed away at 61.

My first 50 years consisted of me growing up on a dairy farm in Minnesota in an area where I was able to appreciate nature and the privilege of being able to observe wild animals and then being led to an interest in art and writing and studying those things in technical college, but ending up with a career in menial labor jobs mostly involving cleaning up after people. I currently work as a custodian in a school, which comes with a halfway decent benefits package and lets me maintain a certain level of comfort, but it is definitely not the passion in my life.

Since my earliest memories, I have had an unending fascination with the paranormal and supernatural. UFOs and aliens, ghosts and psychic phenomena, monsters and cryptozoology- all of these things have always called to me in a way that didn't seem to require any kind of specific trigger but just kind of seemed to be a natural part of me, and as a kid, I devoured every book I could get my hands on involving those subjects. I have often wondered how important it was to maintain this level of interest that at the age of eight in 1976, I happened to have my very own sighting of Bigfoot.

While on a Sunday drive with my family in the summer of that year in the forested area around Strawberry Lake in Becker County, Minnesota, I saw a tall black object standing beside the blacktop road about a hundred yards ahead of us that I at first thought was a burned and blackened tree trunk about seven feet tall, but in a few seconds, it suddenly walked away from the roadside on two legs and disappeared into the woods. Why I was the only one in the car who saw it is something I have never understood, in spite of Native Americans who would eventually tell me that I alone was meant to see it and that it was invisible to my parents and sister.

I immediately knew that what I had seen could not have been a bear since they do not walk for any great distance on two legs, nor was it likely to have been a man in a costume since if he was trying to scare people, I would have thought he would have let our car get a lot closer before disappearing. My eight-year-old self knew instinctively that I had just seen a Bigfoot, one of the huge hulking manlike/apelike hairy creatures that are alleged to inhabit North America. Even at that young age, I understood that many people scoffed at the idea of such things existing but that thousands of sightings over the years argued otherwise.

My interest continued all through elementary and high school, and after I graduated in 1986 I determined to start investigating Bigfoot reports in my home state of Minnesota. Though my studies told me that the majority of reports came from states like those in the Pacific Northwest and a few other hot spots around the country, there were a few recorded for Minnesota and I used those as my starting off point.

Over much time I would eventually discover that what had been recorded in books was just barely scratching the surface and that Minnesota was just as much a hotbed of Bigfoot activity as any of those other more famous states like Washington or Oregon or California or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida. I had thought that my own sighting had been a freak occurrence, but I came to understand that hundreds of other people in my state had seen similar things. My database of reports grew bigger and bigger over the years as I started to network with other investigators, sharing information and collecting the reports they'd gathered on top of the ones I'd uncovered myself. It was almost as big a thrill to realize that other people were doing this same work as it was to meet with Bigfoot witnesses and hear their eyewitness accounts of what they'd seen.

I had a level of notoriety in the 90s as my name became known to the other members of the Bigfoot community around the country, and I decided to delve into the world of self publishing. In 1990, I produced a book entitled 'The Sasquatch in Minnesota, and then a follow up the next year called Creatures of the North: The New Minnesota Sasquatch Encounters, which were really cheap projects banged out on typewriters and containing hand-drawn illustrations as well as black and white photos. I also launched the monthly newsletter 'The Sasquatch Report which was just as amateurish a job but ended up garnering quite a few subscribers and lasted for several years. It was a fun time, my 20s, bolstered by my frequent forays into the Minnesota wilderness in the physical search for the creatures that fascinated me, sometimes leading to dangerous encounters with rough terrain or wild animals or even sinister people. I took it all in stride as being the price one pays for this quest, with the payoff being the actual physical evidence I occasionally found.

In 1996, I did an updated combination of my first two books entitled 'The Sasquatch in Minnesota- Revised Edition, and then in 2000, I did a very unique project called Big Footage: A History of Claims for the Sasquatch on Film in which I used my artistic skills to do recreations of all the various photos and films of Bigfoot that people claim to have captured over the years. I could never do that book today, as the Internet has produced scores of supposed Bigfoot videos far too numerous to be included in one volume, many of which are fake.

But the real evidence was out there if only one would look for it. In exploring areas with reported Bigfoot encounters I have found the creatures' tracks well over a dozen times now and I have even had the priceless experience of hearing what I believe to have been Bigfoot vocalizations, a crazy wailing cry from such a powerful pair of lungs that the woods practically shook with it. I have found trees and branches broken and arranged in such weird and dramatic ways that it almost has to be done by something with intelligence and great strength rather than just a natural happening.

At one time, I felt that the term "Bigfoot" sounded too silly and cartoonish to be a name for a real animal and preferred to use the name "Sasquatch," which is thought by many to be a Native American word. It is actually a name coined in the 1950s by a white man named J.W. Burns who was a teacher on an Indian reservation in British Columbia and who took various tribal names he was hearing for the wild men of the woods and combined them into the word "Sasquatch." Since my earlier days as a researcher and investigator, I guess I have softened a bit, and with the massively widespread use of the term "Bigfoot," I have let it grow on me and come to embrace it.