Texas Bigfoot Conference Returns to Jefferson for Its 26th Year

For one weekend every October, the old river port of Jefferson, in Texas’s Piney Woods, turns into a meeting place for people who think Bigfoot is real – and for many more who simply enjoy the stories. The Texas Bigfoot Conference opens there on Friday, October 16, for its 26th year, with a full day of talks on Saturday at the Jefferson Tourism and Visitor Center on East Austin Street.

It is one of the oldest events of its kind in the country. Our festival calendar could not confirm this year’s dates when it was written; the Marshall News Messenger, KKYR radio in Texarkana and the event’s own ticket page now do.

Who’s on the program

The headline speaker is Adam Davies, a British explorer who, according to the conference’s promotional material, has led expeditions from Congo and Sumatra to Mongolia and Nepal, chasing creatures such as the orang pendek, China’s yeren and Norway’s Seljord serpent, Selma, and has appeared on television shows including MonsterQuest and Expedition Unknown. He closes the Saturday program and gives a second talk after the evening dinner.

Lyle Blackburn, a Texas author and musician, gives the Friday-night presentation and speaks again on Saturday. He is best known for The Beast of Boggy Creek, about the Fouke Monster of southwest Arkansas just across the state line, and his latest book, KKYR reported, is about Fort Worth’s Lake Worth Monster of 1969. The Friday dinner and talk had sold out by early October.

Also listed are Todd Neiss, who says he saw a Bigfoot himself and has spent more than 33 years investigating; Shelly Covington-Montana, a certified wildlife tracker; retired investigator Richard Stewart Taylor, who traces his interest to something he says he saw in North Texas some two decades ago; and the She-Squatchers, Jen Kruse and Jena Grover, who bill themselves as “the first all-female Bigfoot research team”. KKYR reported a new Sunday outing this year: a Caddo Lake tour and lunch with the She-Squatchers and Neiss.

How Jefferson became Bigfoot’s Texas home

The conference is the work of Craig Woolheater, who told the Marshall News Messenger that he became hooked after seeing a tall, hairy figure walking upright beside an unlit, swampy road in central Louisiana in 1994, on a drive home to Dallas. After going online in 1997 and finding others who shared the interest, he co-founded the Texas Bigfoot Research Center, which collects reports. Inspired by a conference he attended in Ohio, he held the first Jefferson event in September 2001; about 130 people came, he said.

The town has embraced the visitors. According to the News Messenger, Mayor Carey Heaster Jr. proclaimed Jefferson the Bigfoot capital of Texas in 2018; the Marion County Commissioners Court declared the county a safe haven for sasquatch in August 2023, and this year passed a proclamation naming Bigfoot the county’s official cryptid. Woolheater told the paper that this year’s audience will also see footage of a reported Bigfoot sighting near Greenville, northeast of Dallas. He did not describe it. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has published a family’s phone video, taken in a pasture near Greenville on October 4, 2025, of a distant upright figure crossing toward a pond. A BFRO investigator wrote that she thinks it shows a real Bigfoot; the witnesses themselves said the figure is so far away that, enlarged, it is hard to tell what it is. We could not confirm that this is the footage being shown.

What the record shows

Northeast Texas is not short of reports. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization’s public database lists 261 Texas reports, and Cass and Harrison counties – both bordering Marion County – are among the five Texas counties with the most. These are witness accounts, screened by volunteers but not confirmed. No body, bones or verified DNA of an unknown primate has ever been produced in Texas or anywhere else.

Some researchers offer a down-to-earth suspect. In January 2024, data scientist Floe Foxon published a study in the Journal of Zoology comparing Bigfoot reports across the US and Canada with black bear numbers; after allowing for human population and forest cover, sightings rose by about 4 percent for every 1,000 bears. Foxon stressed that this does not prove Bigfoot is absent – only that many sightings may be bears. Our explainer on how scientists test Bigfoot evidence covers that work and the DNA studies in more detail.

East Texas has had a live example this year. Texas Parks and Wildlife said in 2025 that there is no resident black bear population in the region, but in April it reported that a young male it had tracked since July 2025 – seen 55 times last year – appeared to have spent the winter along the Neches River in Cherokee and Anderson counties, possibly the first documented bear to overwinter in East Texas in more than 50 years. A dark animal that can stand on its hind legs, glimpsed briefly in thick woods by someone who isn’t expecting a bear, is exactly the kind of sighting that skeptics say turns into a Bigfoot report.

None of that is likely to spoil the weekend. For most people in Jefferson’s brick-paved downtown, the conference is less a scientific meeting than a celebration of East Texas folklore – the same Piney Woods tradition that runs from the Big Thicket north to Boggy Creek.