(Historic) Glenn Thomas

The Glen Thomas Sighting I have spent only one day out in the brush in Oregon as compared to months in California and British Columbia, but I rate that day as the most productive I have ever spent. The man who made it possible refuses to let his name be made public (note: the man was later publicly identified as Glen Thomas), but he did put his story on tape, as follows:

"I was supposed to be watching a catskinner as he was fire trailing, but it was awful cold, and I walked a mile or so down the trail, because he had no need of anyone at that time, and I thought I’d warm up and see the country. Up where he was, it was a cold east wind blowing; a little further down it was a west wind coming in. It was late fall, the last weekend in deer season I think, in 1967.

"It was a mountain trail - they have several of them up there - footpaths, and for horses. The elevation was about between four and five thousand feet. I came out lower down, into the fog, before I saw anything, and the fog was freezing on the trees because it was so cold, but if the wind would blow, the fog would break, and fall off. That made it kind of noisy, it sounded like walking.

Image is used with the permission of the photographer, Joe Beelart. 1967 Glen Thomas site - Burnt Granite Mountain July 1999 Mt. Jefferson in the background.

"I came around a bend - well, first I noticed some rocks that were turned over. All the other rocks were wet, because of the fog, but these rocks were dry. Then I looked up, about forty or fifty feet, up on a ridge of rock, and I saw these animals there - looked like human or just about. Large male; the female wasn’t so large; and a small baby - well, not really small. It was moving with them. It was standing up, mostly. The two older ones were squatting down and sort of bending, as they picked up rocks and smelled them. They were kind of careful. They moved on for a few minutes, and then finally the male found possibly what he was looking for and dug real fast down into the rocks, which were large boulders - not the round-type of rocks, but the flat, sharp kind.

"I could not explain why these rocks were there; there hadn’t been a slide or anything. They were on top of the ridge, so they wouldn’t have come down from anywhere. They are loose, quite a few holes underneath them, and they are as if they had been broken up - definitely not the round river-type rock. But they (the animals) would pick them up, and, after they smelled them, they would lay them down, on top of each other. They didn’t just lay them back where they had picked them up, they stacked them up, in piles. And when the male found what he was looking for, he really made the rocks fly. The big rocks weighed 50, 60, or even possible 100 pounds; he just jerked them out with his hand. He didn’t seem to take any precautions for his safety. Later on I looked, and there was some rock there that could have fallen on him, but he wasn’t concerned.

"He brought out what appeared to be a grass nest. Possibly some stored hay that small rodents had stored there. He dug through that, and brought out the rodents. It seems they ate them. The rodents appeared to be in hibernation, or asleep, or something. There were about 6 or 8 rodents. The small animal, I noticed, only got one, but the others got 2 or 3 apiece.

"But about that time they became aware of my presence. And well, just became alert. I was along side of this trail that follows the ridge. I didn’t remember getting there, but I was squatting down beside a small tree when I became aware of where I was. As soon as they realized I was there, they suddenly began to move. Real quiet, behind some low-hanging limbs on a tree there. I didn’t see them again after that.

"I tried to follow their tracks in the direction I thought they would have to go, but I couldn’t find any, although there was frost there. But the next day I found 2 tracks, I heel print, and the front part of the foot, the toes, but they were in a different direction - the direction from which I had come - and I never did get to connect them up with exactly which direction they had gone or know anything about them.

"The footprints, I would say, but there wasn’t enough of the track to tell. They were possibly 5 inches wide, I don’t know, at the widest point. I don’t think they could have been 6. I didn’t know if it was one of the animals I had seen that had made the footprints.

"I saw the toe print as it came out of the old landing. I saw the heel print as it went in. The heel print gave me the impression that the heel protruded. The tracks were in dirt. It was just as if you had a level piece and scooped it out for about 2 feet deep, and it would cave in some. It (the animal) had stepped down into that and left a heel print, and as it stepped out on the other side you could see the toe print.

"When I left the catskinner, he was on Low Creek, but I had walked to Jim’s Meadows, possible a mile or more. I saw the footprints between where the catskinner was, and where I had seen the other animals.

"After the animals disappeared I watched and looked for a few minutes and then decided I didn’t want to go in that direction. So I just headed back. I didn’t tell the catskinner about seeing them. I didn’t tell anybody about it… until _______ asked me to ask among my crews - maybe some of them had seen them. That was the only time I had even mentioned it to any of the fellows out there, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was a nut or something or other.

"The only time I saw their faces was when they became alert. They gave me an impression of having a face a little like a cat, without the ears. I couldn’t remember seeing the ears. It seemed like the nose was much flatter - it didn’t stick out like a human’s. The upper lip was very short, and seemed very thin. I couldn’t remember that it had a chin, like a human has. So somehow or other, I felt that it was a face more like a cat than a human.

"The male was darker than the female, a dirty brown, where the female was a buckskin or fawn-colored animal. The male had much longer hair on shoulder, head, and neck, and hung in strings, like you see it on an Angora goat. He was much heavier in the shoulders than the female. From just above the hips, the male got larger; he had a very wide "small" of the back. From there on up, he just got bigger and bigger. They had very rounded or stooped shoulders. The head was set lower on the shoulders than on a human. They don’t seem to have the neck "stand up" as we do.

"Most of the time they were not standing, but were squatting down and leaning forward to pick up the rocks. I didn’t see them stand actually erect until they became alert that I was there. I didn’t see them walk, as such. The only movement I saw was when they made a quick, short dash to get behind the limbs of the trees. I saw them move alright, but in a humped-up, stooped-over position, just moving across the rocks. But they were upright when they made that quick dash at the end. It seemed to me that the mother picked the baby up on her lap and ran holding the baby in front of her, possibly right below the breast, and her breasts hung real low, much lower than on a human.

"I couldn’t say how thick through the body these animals were, but they were very heavy-set -particularly thick and heavy at the small of the back, and on up through the ribs. I think the male was over 6 feet tall, but I’m an awful poor judge of height and weight or anything. I didn’t think the female was a tall as the male, in fact I think she came possibly up to his shoulder, but I saw them standing up so little, I didn’t know, but they were much larger than a human, much bulkier. The baby didn’t come up to the mother’s hips actually, I don’t think, but I don’t remember for sure. The first time I saw them standing up was as the male stepped out of the hole he dug with the grass but it was only a very short while until they took off. I didn’t see them after that.

(Q. How did they eat?) "They ate by just taking it in their hand and eating it as one of us would if we were eating a banana. They ate it skin, feathers, and all-just bit it in two, and as they would bite part of it well then just cram the other right on in. The little one though, he had a little more difficulty, because he didn’t have quite enough room for all of it, where the older ones did. It wasn’t like a human would band the food to the baby, he had to get his–he was scratching through the grass that they bad and got it himself, and the female did the same thing. They gave you the impression in that way of not taking care of the baby, like people would. I’ve been wondering now if that group lived together as a family, and I hope to go back and look into it deeper.

(Q. Did you form any impression of the proportions of, say, the legs in relation to the rest of the height? Would they be like a long-legged man, or short-legged?) "I don’t know; I couldn’t say for sure; but the arms were such that when they squat down they have to bend forward to pick up anything-their arms are not long enough to reach. This one that was digging just seemed to go right on down. I didn’t remember seeing him get up, but as he was down here, he was just digging and kept going on down, and … well, at that time I couldn’t see exactly where he was, because I was down, and they were up a little bit on the side of this rock, which kind of levels off some, and he went down, and so I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing in there, but I did see when he came out. At that time I was a little bit nervous…. I’m not sure, now, about half of it-seemed like it was a bad dream for a while. I just couldn’t believe it was really happening. It just couldn’t be, but it is.

(Q. Did you notice the hands at all?) "I noticed that it had hands; I did not notice if it had thumbs. I couldn’t tell from the way it worked-it didn’t seem to use the thumb. And I didn’t see any ears. I didn’t see any knees projecting when it squatted. They were in an awkward position because of the rocks, and they couldn’t just squat down like we would on a floor. They would be on different levels; and off too far to be comfortable. That’s as close as I could explain it.

"When they went from place to place they would shift in position, according to the terrain. The male, well, actually both of them, seemed to be moving in a certain direction, possibly from tracing the small rodents. I thought possibly it was the scent left by the rodents coming up through the rocks, because it was not a runway that they could have been picking, because they were just picking the rocks up anyplace, and as they picked it up, they’d turn it over and smell it, and then lay it on the stack. They left it very definitely in a pile. They would leave anywhere from three to fifteen or twenty in one pile, as they would reach back, and then, oh, six to eight feet farther, they would leave another pile-start laying them in another."

With Rene and my daughter Kathryn and son Jim, I went with this man last July to the spot where he had seen the three creatures. We found the piles of rocks to which he referred, not only at the spot be showed us, but on almost every other area of broken rock we found in two hours of scrambling around on the mountain. They were obviously piles manufactured by something or someone, the rock could not have rested that way naturally, and there were dozens of them.

The hole he saw the male Sasquatch dig was about five feet deep and almost as steep sided as a well. No bear or anything else without hands could have lifted out the rocks. A man could undoubtedly figure out a way to do it if he had any reason to take the trouble, but in this case the story had only come out as the result of an enquiry from someone else who had seen footprints in the snow in January of this year, and there was no reason to expect that anyone would be coming to look over the site.

From On the Track of the Sasquatch, Copyright © 1973, John Green. Text used with John Green’s written permission.

Glen Thomas and René Dahinden standing on the pile of rocks thrown up by the Sasquatch family (Bord 1982)