I was about 5 when my mom checked out Mrs. Clarke’s book from the library for me (being only 5, I wasn’t allowed to check it out myself). But this is a story I had heard all of my life. Being native to the Lake Worth/Eagle Mountain area, I spent quite a lot of time around the Ft. Worth Nature Refuge and Greer Island. I saw many things: alligators, snakes, muskrats, beavers, deer, and turtles. I watched the prarie dogs and fed alfalfa to the buffalo. But I never saw the Goat man. Mind you now, this was in the 80’s and 90’s, so perhaps he has gone into retirement.

Still, every time I went, I kept an eye out for him. I never saw him, and chances are good that I never will. Does he truly exist? Maybe. Does he exist in my mind, and in the minds of all the people whose parents told them the story? Absolutely.

Further, the hairy wild man does have deeply-resonant, archetypal relevance within the human psyche. If it is true that the act of observation influences that which is observed, and if this influence is far more profound than we realize, then it is only natural that the icons of the human mind should express themselves this way. Many Ufologists, crop circle and earth energy researchers, and more than a few ghost-hunters have proposed this as a distinct possibility.

Researchers, however, are caught in a conundrum- Are we seeing the expression of the archetypes because they’re all in our heads, or are they in our heads because they’re real, and we’ve been exposed to them long enough to leave an impression. It is well worth noting that snakes are deeply iconic too, and no one would doubt that they exist, and that we’ve been encountering them since before we could stand upright…just food for thought…

Photos of monsters rising up from the ground, where it was assumed that they were sleeping, may be photos of something taking shape from the very essence of matter once called elementals.

The photo of the critter taken at night which appears as something covered in mud may be an elemental entity coming to form in the range of frequencies which are perceptible to us.

I tend to believe folks (especially this many folks telling the same/similar story) when they say they’ve “seen something”. It’s evident they saw “something”. I would like to know what “thing” they saw.

I live in the Rockies and I always keep my eyes peeled for a creature in the woods. I haven’t yet seen one that defies explanation; but I’ve heard things and smelled things that were clearly inexplicable. Those intangibles that can’t be proven are the types of things I see again and again in sighting reports. I have no doubt that “something” is out there somewhere.

But I’m sure he thought it was real when he snapped the shot. With years of reflection, however, examination of the entities observed actions as compared to what one would EXPECT an animal to do, etc., he has talked himself out of believing.

I was still six years from birth when this occured, so I can’t offer any real insight one way or the other. But as he noted, with all the guns around, any high school kids in a suit would have been playing a pretty dangerous prank. (Which, again, wouldn’t be the first time HS students had done something stupid.)

An interesting cold case study nonetheless.

The best way to get a Bigfoot to clear out of an area is to get crowds of people with flashlights out there. This is the closest thing to a Homo Erectus hunting party we could muster, & I think would trip off all the instinctive flight impulses in the secretive, highly adapted Sasquatch, which has, in my opinion, adapted to its nocturnal, stealthy behaviour precisely because of ancient conflict with early man over the same sorts of food sources.