A Costume, a Road Crossing and a Pond: The Northeast’s Bigfoot Summer

The Northeast is not the Pacific Northwest, but it has its share of Bigfoot stories – and this summer produced three that made national news. One came from a driver on a dark Connecticut road, one from a hiker’s iPhone in upstate New York, and one, in Maine, was solved within hours. Together they make a useful lesson in how such claims are reported, investigated and, occasionally, explained.

Connecticut: a crossing at 1:45 a.m.

In the early hours of Sunday, July 5, Kevin Klimas of Westerly, Rhode Island, was driving home from a friend’s rented cabin in Voluntown, in Connecticut’s New London County, near the Rhode Island line. In a report he submitted to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) the same day – published as report #81329 – he wrote that just after crossing a bridge near Wylies School Road and Forge Hill Road at about 15 to 20 mph, something “jump[ed] into the road from my right” and crossed into the woods on his left in three strides.

He described an upright animal about eight feet tall with long, matted brown hair, very broad shoulders and arms hanging to its knees, seen only in profile in his high beams. “This was not a bear,” he wrote. The BFRO classed the report as Class A, its label for a clear sighting. Investigator Mike Young interviewed Klimas at the spot two days later and called his account “accurate and honest”; BFRO founder Matt Moneymaker, who did not visit, wrote that heavy rain and a pine-needle forest floor made it unlikely any tracks would be found, and speculated that the sound of Fourth of July fireworks around nearby Beach Pond might have drawn an animal out of the forest.

Fox News’s OutKick picked up the story on July 26, and Boston.com followed on August 8 with a broader look at New England sightings. Klimas told Boston.com that he had considered himself an “optimistic skeptic” before that night, and that the encounter made him a believer. The site, citing the BFRO, counted 126 investigated reports in New England since 1994, and spoke to Jon Wilk, a former Massachusetts park ranger who says he saw a six-and-a-half-foot creature cross in front of his truck in Savoy State Forest in the early 1990s and now leads a group called Team Squatchusetts.

Boston.com also asked academics. Eva Garrett, a Boston University biology and anthropology professor who studies primates, said there is “no scientific evidence that a large ape currently exists” matching Bigfoot’s description, and called it very unlikely that scientists would have missed one. Her colleague William Giraldi, who teaches a course on UFOs and Bigfoot, noted that black bears – which can rise on two legs – are abundant where sightings cluster. Boston College’s John O’Connor, author of The Secret History of Bigfoot, described many Bigfoot expeditions as “wilderness larping.”

New York: the ‘Syracuse Figure’

In August, the BFRO published two photos that started a lively online argument. According to the BFRO’s report (#82485, a Class B report) and a Gray News story from August 29, a woman identified only as K.D. took them on her iPhone around 1 p.m. on Monday, August 10 at a glacial pond and bog in a rural part of Onondaga County, New York. Both show a hunched figure at the water’s edge, partly hidden by grass. K.D. told the BFRO she first assumed she was looking at a naked man, until it turned and looked at her “in such a strange way” that she left.

BFRO investigator Ben C. visited the site and tried to recreate the shots. He reported that reaching the spot took 10 to 15 minutes of wading through roots, debris and “waist-deep pockets of mud,” in a place where swimming is prohibited, and estimated the figure’s height at about 4 feet 9 inches. He and Moneymaker suggested it could be a juvenile Sasquatch with wet, sagging fur.

(Gray News described K.D. as 25, but the BFRO investigator’s write-up says she is in her 50s and has lived in the area for 25 years.) The obvious alternative – that the figure is simply a person wading or bathing, as K.D. first thought – has not been ruled out. The BFRO has withheld the exact location, it says, so that if the figure was a swimmer, that person can come forward and prove it. Height estimates from a single photo are also notoriously unreliable without a known object for scale. As of mid-October, the BFRO report carried no update from anyone claiming to be the wader, and we found no independent analysis of the images.

Maine: case closed

The summer’s last Bigfoot story had a tidy ending. On Tuesday, September 1 – the first day of school – the police department in Damariscotta, a small town on the Maine coast, received what it called an “unusually high number” of calls about a hairy, Sasquatch-like figure walking around town, including on Main Street and near the local school during morning drop-off. NBC Boston put the number at about half a dozen.

Officer William Smith found the figure sitting on Main Street and spoke with him. It was, police said, a Maine man in a “very convincing” costume, someone some residents recognized from a past television appearance; he was not named. Police Chief Erik Josephson said there was “nothing nefarious or criminal” and no charges were filed. The department’s Facebook post closed with a joke: Bigfoot “remains at large… provided he puts his costume back on.” The episode was a reminder that eyewitness reports, even several at once, can describe a person in a suit – something skeptics have long said about other Bigfoot sightings and films.

Reading the reports

None of these accounts is confirmed, and two of them – the Connecticut crossing and the Syracuse Figure – rest on a single witness, vetted by a private enthusiast group rather than wildlife authorities. That doesn’t mean the witnesses are lying; brief, startling encounters at night or at a distance are exactly where perception is least reliable. For more regional lore, see our pages on Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.