Does Bigfoot Live Outside of Houston? These People Think So – Houston Chronicle

“I hope you have somebody warm to cuddle up with tonight because you might be scared,” museum director Susan Kilcrease said before introducing Mayes to the sold-out crowd.

Mayes said he was “interested in all the monster stuff as a kid”— the Lochness Monster, the Abominable Snowman— name a monster, and Mayes was into it.

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He also loved Elvis, Evil Knievel and Steve Austin, the bionic action hero of the 1970’s TV series “The Six-Million Dollar Man.”

His fascination with Sasquatch started with the latter.

“What put me over the top was when the Six-Million Dollar Man brought Bigfoot on an episode,” he told the audience.

However, his fascination with monsters waned as he got into high school, where sports and girls took a greater pull on his attention.

And, he noted, in the 1980s there was no internet or broad cable channels catering to special programming like fabled monster lore.

Mayes’ life followed the usual path after graduating from Nederland High School in 1985.

He went off to college in Belton, Texas, where he played basketball, got his teaching degree, and met a girl in nearby Temple, whom he later married.

They started a family. He taught history and coached at a Temple high school.

But the internet phenomenon was taking hold, and with it came access to sites catering to Mayes’ childhood interests, like Bigfoot.

Suddenly, he saw reports of sightings and details about groups like the North American Wood Ape Conservancy (NAWAC), who was devoted to recording data and finding new information chronicling the existence of Bigfoot – or in Southeast Texas parlance, “the wild man of the Big Thicket.”

On May 14, 2005, Mayes and a friend who shared a mutual interest in Bigfoot sightings, decided to go on their own venture.

Sight reports listed nearby Sam Houston State Park as a Texas hot spot for Sasquatch activity. The pair drove deep into a forested area and parked. They napped at sunset until midnight then began driving along Forest Service Road 208.

It was several hours, with no other cars in sight, when the pair came over a rise near Stubble Field Lake at nearly 3:15 a.m. and saw in front of them “this thing standing in the road. It turned and walked off into the woods,” Mayes recalled.

It was nearly 7 feet tall and wide in its body.

That was Mayes’ first sighting.

“There’s only two things it could be: a person dressed up as a monkey or what we went out looking for,” Mayes said.

He and his friend drove several more hours. They didn’t expect to see the creature again, but they were looking for evidence of anyone else – a possible “hoaxer” – who might be pranking them.

It was an unlikely scenario, as “nobody knew we were out there or why,” Mayes said, but they had to rule it out.

The pair found no evidence of any parked vehicles and didn’t see another vehicle on that road for several hours more.

“Hoaxers want to be seen, and we were on a very remote road,” he said.

The odds that a prankster had a friend drop him off in a large ape-like costume on a dark remote road that somebody would drive by seemed remote at best.

“And this is Texas,” Mayes said, adding, “You traipse around in a monkey suit trying to scare people, you’re gonna get shot.”

Shortly after that sighting, Mayes joined NAWAC, which he’s currently the director of and an author who’s related his experiences with the group and its sightings in areas of interest, including the Big Thicket in Southeast Texas.

When Mayes joined NAWAC, the then-current Big Thicket National Wildlife Preserve Superintendent was amenable to the group doing research on the grounds.

Operation Thicket Probe: Lance Rosier Unit – Big Thicket National Preserve was the name given to that research project, which started in September of 2005. They’d set up camp, with audio and visual equipment ready to record whatever encounters may transpire.

The group would do “call blasting” – sending out loud animal calls and waiting for a response. The roars they recorded were unlike any other animal Mayes had ever encountered.

“The volume of these things’ screams is so intense, you feel it in your chest,” like a loud car stereo bass, he told the crowd.

In 2006, a new superintendent took over the Big Thicket Preserve, and NAWAC’s welcome mat in the Big Thicket was pulled from beneath them.

They went in search of another site known for Sasquatch sightings and found more hospitable reception in the forested regions of Oklahoma, which is part of a region known on sighting maps as “Area X.”

It sounded like something out of a cable TV docudrama and provided as much for Mayes and NAWAC fellows as they endeavored to continue their research and document the existence of the fabled Bigfoot creature.

The location offered more than they could have hoped for in terms of Bigfoot encounters— maybe more than they actually wanted.

Mayes recalled one night when he and others camped inside a corrugated metal-roofed cabin. They awoke to the sounds of something loudly hitting the rooftop and howling sounds coming from the woods.

The next morning, they found medium to large-sized rocks scattered atop the cabin roof.

“Acorns fall out of trees, rocks don’t fall out of the sky or the tree tops, something threw them up there,” Mayes said.

Again, he points to primate behavior. Chimpanzees, for example, are known to throw things at zoo spectators, for example.

It’s pure primate behavior, which fits the model that a wood ape, aka Bigfoot, would engage in similar behaviors with beings trespassing their territory.

The data gathered to date is what make Mayes and others in his NAWAC consortium believe that what is known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch is actually a member of the primate family, albeit one with origins that date back to prehistoric days.

Specifically, they point to the last Ice Age and the land-bearing opening between Asia and North America— the Bearing Straight.

Fossilized remains of a massive primate, identified as Gigantopithecus Blacki, have been identified in Asia. Other species like the Asian-indigenous red panda have been found in North America, Mayes noted.

So, it’s not a quantum leap to suggest that Gigantopithecus Blacki, too, might have crossed the Bearing Straight into North America, Mayes told the crowd.

“That’s the theory that holds the most stock,” he said.

Mayes further noted that Native American lore is rife with accounts of creatures being spotted and totems that suggest they also had encounters with ‘Bigfoot.’

“They all describe the same features” in terms of hairiness and size, Mayes said, adding, the “Wild Woman of the Navidad” in the 1800s was depicted as 6 feet tall and “fast as a horse,” and the Cherokee Nation’s ‘Bear King of Marble Falls’  was described in similar terms after they were forcibly relocated to Texas.”

In Louisiana, the “Rougarou” was the common legend for a hairy, bayou-woodlands living beast.

“These stories go way back,” Mayes told the crowd, and include figures well-known in American history— people like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Theodore Roosevelt.

All of the swashbuckling pioneers recorded encounters with ‘Bigfoot’–like creatures throughout their ventures into the American West.

“This is where the water is and has huge tracts of land where they can live in,” Mayes noted, so it makes sense that places like Sam Houston State Park, the Big Thicket. Oklahoma’s refuges, the Pacific Northwest and more might be home to the wood ape that hopes to remain a mystery.

How have we not known they’re here?

That’s another mystery.

In a way, we’ve always known they’re here, Mayes explained, but proving they’re here is another matter.

“The strong survive,” Mayes said, adding, “If the shyest ones, the best hiders are survivors, those traits get passed on.”

Those who learn to remain hidden, live – “you don’t find them, they find you,” he said.

Mayes has logged “17 years of field note experience” searching for Bigfoot and gathering evidence that has sometimes been so chilling, “it made me reconsider my hobby. This endeavor is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent terror.”

In the course of their work, they’ve collected casts of massive footprints, hair fibers and scat, which should provide DNA evidence.

“The DNA analysis comes back as either human (because researchers touched it while collecting the material) or it’s unidentified” when cross-checked against a database of all known animal DNA, Mayes said.

And getting any notable scientist to investigate further has proved to be an uphill battle.

“This topic is like career death to biologists,” Mayes explained, adding, “On the record, they want no part of it.”

Mayes believes the only way to prove Bigfoot’s existence is to capture a Bigfoot – dead or alive.

Mayes isn’t sure that kind of proof might not have been available years ago.

“There’s a saying in Southeast Texas – ‘shoot, shovel, shut up,’ ” he said.

People who may have shot or killed a Bigfoot may not report it out of fear of repercussions for harming a protected species.

Further muddying the waters is the fact that the Bigfoot is said to have human-like features, specifically their noses, which have a more capped human form than the open-nostril type seen in primates.

“Some people might have been about to shoot but didn’t, thinking it might be a person,” Mayes said.

And where are the bodies if they have been killed or simply died in the course of nature, Mays asked the crowd.

“Hunters, have you ever seen a dead bear in the woods, or a dead bobcat or panther?” he asked.

They don’t exist, because, “Mother Nature doesn’t allow things to last very long, especially here, in this climate of warm and humid weather,” Mayes noted, adding, “and you have scavengers.”

Bigfoots could live, die and not leave a trace, much like any other animal in the wild. Bigfoots have also eluded any kind of public recognition, because, “nobody’s going into that deep backcountry except weirdos like me,” Mayes said.

And their mission is complicated by the very technology that’s also enabled them to capture evidence through thermal imaging and audio recordings.

”No one will believe a photo anymore,” Mayes told the gathering. “The public is hungry for images, but they’re always going to doubt those images,” he said.

Photopshop and other programs touting the ability to alter images has permanently erased the veracity of photographic proof.

“Are they real? I believe they are. They’re not aliens; I think they’re animals,” Mayes concluded, referencing a quote from an early Bigfoot researcher – “something’s making those damn tracks.”

The audience included plenty of folks who share Mayes’ belief in the existence of Bigfoot, because they’ve had encounters of their own right here in Southeast Texas.

Several came to the Ice House Museum in hopes of connecting with others who’ve had similar encounters.

Stacy LaJoie was among them.

“You can’t really talk about it with anyone, so that’s why we came here. We thought, ‘there’s got to be other people out there who’ve had similar experiences, ‘ ” she said during the Q&A following Mayes’ talk.

She’s heard howling similar to the recorded Bigfoot calls from her home near Mill Creek in Hardin County.

It brought back memories she hoped she’d left behind two years prior when living in California.

While camping and fishing at her family’s favorite remote spot in California’s San Joaquin River Gorge, LaJolie looked up from the riverbank to see a massive creature of nearly 13 feet tall, just 40 feet away.

She remembers it being more human than ape-like and “almost eloquent in the way that it walked in that rocky terrain,” she said.

LaJolie says she was terrified to ever go into the woods again, although she’d always wanted to live there.

Her new home in Hardin County seemed a perfect fit, until learning there were Bigfoot stories there, too.

“I never believed in (Bigfoot) before. I thought people who talked about that were wackos,” LaJoie said.

Now, that’s no longer the case. And LaJoie wasn’t alone in that sentiment.

After the program concluded, Mayes was surrounded by over a dozen Southeast Texas residents recounting stories of personal encounters.

“People wouldn’t talk during the presentation, but they lined up to talk privately with Michael afterward,” Kilcrease said.

After hearing their stories and Mayes’ riveting encounters, she added, “I may never, never go off the concrete again.”