Follow-up investigation report by BFRO Investigator Curt Nelson:
At the beginning of May of 2003 I took a trip into Manitoba to
stay with a man with whom I d been in telephone contact on and
off for about a year. He was interested in sasquatch. Sasquatch
in Manitoba, Canada, that province above western Minnesota and
eastern North Dakota, which stretches north along Hudson Bay
where polar bears make their living. It s hundreds of miles of
bush laced through with lakes including the giants: Lakes
Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Winnipegosis. In the winter it s no
place to be without a good plan, for keeping warm and fed and
out of trouble, and the means to carry it out. Manitoba s
position in the upper middle of the North American land mass is
too far from any reasonably warm winter grounds to imagine it as
anything but the year-round home for animals found there,
including sasquatch.
The man, Peter, had become interested in sasquatch because he
told me he knew for certain they are real, and that they live
there in Manitoba. He knew this for sure, he said, because he
had a chance to look at one up close, after he d shot and killed
it: he flipped its hand over with the toe of his boot to have a
look at its palm. It was very large and there were five fingers
one a thumb, like a man s hand, he said.
The following account of the event came mainly from two visits I
had with Peter: first in early May of 2003 when I stayed with
him for three days, and in September of that year when he put me
up again for two days. We also talked about the shooting
incident several times by phone, before and since my visits. The
word-for-word questions and Peter s answers presented here were
mostly from the May visit; we sat together in his home where he
lives alone now. I taped our conversation. The reader will note
a leading tendency in my questions. The prior discussions, I
believe, are the cause of this.
It happened the first week of November, 1941, 62 years ago, when
Peter was 17 years old. He d gone hunting for moose with two
friends around Basket Lake, a small lake about 15 miles west of
Gypsumville, the town near where Peter grew up and has always
lived. The two friends hunted the east side of Basket Lake;
Peter wanted to go to the west side, which he knew was good for
moose and elk. There was patchy snow on the ground and Peter
found ambling moose tracks criss-crossing the area, indicating
feeding animals.
The spotty snow made tracking difficult but he moved ahead:
Sure enough, I did see one in the willows feeding with its head
down, and it was a cow moose no calf, I didn t see a calf, and
no horns, so I knew it was a cow. At that time the bulls still
have their horns. But, in 1941 yet before the major fires, there
were bush and willows so thick that you couldn t believe it. So
you had to shoot through willows, there s not you didn t always
have an open shot, so take a chance. So I did shoot, because I
knew take one or two steps and [It would be gone].
Q: Where did you shoot, where did you try to hit her?
P: In the chest.
Q: Was she broadside to you?
P: Pretty well, but not fully broadside and I did shoot, fired
a shot and I walked slowly and, yes, there was a little bit of
blood on the right side, you know, as it s running, you could
see where it sprinkled a little. It didn t look good; I could
see I didn t hit it properly. The bullet deviated from the
brush. But I had no choice, then, and the blood made it a little
easier to track it. There was blood here and there; you could
tell you were on the right track. So I tracked her slowly, I d
say for a half hour, but very slowly.
And I looked in the willows again, and I could see all this
hair, so I thought to myself Well, I ll slow you up, and I
took a good aim and I fired. It disappeared looked like I got
it, so I walked up to it slowly It wasn t far, 45 yards, only
cause that s about as far as you could see in that stuff if
it was that far. But I took my time, because when you approach a
big game animal you have to approach carefully. You carry your
gun across your chest with your hand on the breach, ready to
fire. If it wants to jump you, you have one good shot, point
blank. Don t raise the gun to your shoulder, just turn it and
pull the trigger. That s the last chance you got. Because a big
game animal, he gets you, you ve had it.
So I looked, I could see him what the hell is this? Holy
buckets! He s lying there and one foot was up, you know So I
nudged him in the foot and slowly walked on this side, still
hanging onto my rifle like I was supposed to, and I picked the
hand up with my right foot, to see the bottom. And I walked
around and I could see where I hit him, in the back, high in the
back, between the shoulder blades, right in the back. It must
have been bent over because to look at the moose track and
the blood or something like that I didn t see a head.
I interrupted here, and to find out just how the thing was
lying, I lay down on Peter s kitchen floor and, according to his
instructions, adjusted myself to match the creature s position:
I was on my right side with my right arm and hand pinned under
my body. My left arm lay along my side and bent at the elbow so
the hand was palm down on the ground in front of my belly. My
face was pointed mostly at the ground but the left side showed
fairly well. And my legs lay with the left foot s sole showing
(the foot was caught and held that way by brush, he said).
Peter explained that when he shot the animal he thought he was
looking at the rear end of his moose (Peter's view of the
animal: http://www.patbarker-art.com/1lores.html) and that,
given that shot, he tried to put the bullet just above where the
anus should be. He said it s the only shot in that situation;
the bullet travels above the gut just under the spine on up into
the chest cavity where you want it. The creature had stood with
its back to him; apparently it had been looking down (at the
wounded moose s trail?) because he didn t see its head. And the
big shoulders and back he thought he was looking at the moose s
rump. His bullet, meant to enter and travel just below a moose s
back bone, had hit the animal between the shoulder blades,
killing it on the spot. And this 1941-vintage 17-year-old who
never heard of anything like a sasquatch looked upon the
creature he had slain and wondered, and worried, and then became
frightened. And he got out of there.
Q: What did you do then, did you literally run out of the woods?
P: No, I walked very fast with three foot strides, I can tell
you.
Q: What kind of gun were you using?
P: 38-55 Winchester.
Q: Oh, do you still have that gun?
P: No in fact the RCMP man bought it for repairs because the
barrel was wore out.
Q: An elk is real hard to turn over once it s dead to turn it
over to skin it. It s a lot of work. What about this creature,
how big was it? Could you have turned it over?
P: Well, there s a knack, like you say, about turning an animal
over It depends on how the brush is, but I always carried a
piece of stiff cord, good cord, where you could tie the leg up
to a willow or a tree, one leg and you could roll him over like
nothing. In a half an hour I ll dress a moose for you - not skin
him, but ahh, gut him.
Q: So how big was this creature?
P: He was very between I would say like, I m a straight six
feet, and he d have been a foot and a half to two feet taller
than I was you know, just estimating.
Q: How about heaviness, I mean, could you have turned him over?
P: I didn t try it oh yeah, I could have turned him over but
I d have had to cut some willows to do that See it s very hard
to estimate the weight when he s covered with hair. I walked
around him and thought, Holy God, what the heck am I gonna do
now? If there s anymore of these things around I don t want to
be here. And I just got the heck out of there so fast you
wouldn t believe it. I don t think I spent more than, maybe,
eight minutes with him.
Q: You ve seen a picture of the Patterson creature; do you think
it looked about like that?
P: Very much so well, I can describe his body. He has a big
round chest. Huge! He s got a big chest really big.
Q: And there s no skin showing?
P: No, I didn t see any bare skin except a little on his face,
on the side.
Q: What about the palms of his hands?
P: They were bare.
Q: And the bottoms of his feet?
P: Yeah [they were bare] but they weren t white well, let s
see he s not a very hygienic creature, you know, he doesn t
wash or anything, so his skin is dirty and a little brown, but
white like my dirty hands. Not only a little dirty and heavy
fingers, and big palms, and opposed thumb. And a big palm,
like when I close my hand like this and cover my face
Q: Really, so his palm was proportionately bigger than a human s
palm? That s what you re saying?
P: Yeah, it s longer and deeper like it s a big palm.
Q: What about the foot, does it match the footprints people have
been casting?
P: Absolutely. The foot had five toes on it, and the foot looks
very flat foot, like, I have a high arch, you know, and his is
completely very flat. And the foot well I m pretty good at
estimating the lengths of different things or at least I was
because when you re a carpenter you get used to that. And I d
say his foot was around fifteen inches, fifteen and a half.
Q: So, did his coat look warm, his fur coat, was there a thick,
dense, good undercoat?
P: Most animals have a underfur and I didn t notice that on
that animal that he had short fur underneath of course I
wasn t didn t touch him and didn t look at that.
Q: Witnesses always say, whenever they talk about it they
say, it was covered in hair, and I think, well you d never
describe a bear as being covered in hair, you d never say that.
You d say it had fur. So why do people always describe bigfoot
as being covered with hair?
P: Because it looks like hair.
Q: Well, that s what I m trying to get at is why people say
that, because it s an animal, it s covered in fur, and yet for
some reason, I don t know, because it s shaped like a man or
something, they describe it as hair. And, you know, one of the
characteristics of fur that makes it fur is that undercoat, that
makes it dense. And if it didn t have that undercoat you maybe
would refer to it as just hair.
P: Well it looks like hair, not like fur.
Q: I think that s curious, that a northern animal like that,
that has to survive here wouldn t have a coat that was
essentially like a bear s, you know, with a good undercoat
that s good and thick.
P: Well you know what? You re talking about a humanoid animal
But, all I can say, it looks like hair not fur. You know, like
a man lets his hair grow straggly and you know, long well
that s what it looks like, a hair. That s why I say it s hair,
because it looks like hair.
Q: I think you told me before that the hair was about eight
inches. Is that right? Maybe you can just tell me something
about the general appearance of the fur or hair, as you
describe it.
P: I would say it wasn t that long all over. But the hair
hangin from his head, you know, and down his shoulders and
down his arms were quite long. You know when he was laying,
like, sideways, well the hair from his head kind of covered the
side of his face right down to his shoulders, you know.
Q: So how long would you say that that longer hair was?
P: Well, I would say it has to be six to eight inches long. I
didn t measure nothing but it looked fairly long. You couldn t
see an ear of any kind, you know, but I still could see part of
his face on one side.
Q: And then describe the hair on the rest of the body, was it
uniform in length?
P: Well, no, not really. It seemed to be kinda long on the arms,
you know? It was hair down the top of his hands, you know, and
partly down his fingers, but shorter, you know, half inch to one
inch, I would say roughly, but not right to the very tips, you
know But the top of the hand was covered But it was fairly
long hair down the arm, too, you know, four, five, six inches,
you know.
Q: Do you think it was also four, five, six inches along the
legs and the torso of the animal?
P: Yeah, down the legs, too, you know, it was fairly long, about
five to six inches, and it was I noticed on the, the one leg
that was up a little, you know, well, it was right down low, you
know, to the bottom of his foot, the hair.
Q: And the color, the color of the hair I think you told me
was, ah, was reddish, didn t you?
P: No, it was a dark brown.
Q: Dark brown. Okay.
P: Yeah, a dirty dark brown, I can t say, but a dark brown, and
it seemed to be a little had some the tops well, I can t
remember exactly where ah, had a, like a reddish overtone, you
know?
Q: Oh yeah, okay. I understand.
P: Top of the hair in places, not all over, but in areas, you
know, it was... looked to me it was kinda reddish.
Q: I need you to comment, again, about your thinking in not
telling anybody about it. I mean that s a very important point,
and it s an obvious question that everybody has.
P: Well, for one, I was very shocked to see this thing. And, it
was during the war years World War II and the thing was,
people can be very funny, if you talk about something that s out
of line right away you re crazy, you re not all there, you
know. And I did a lot of thinking myself, I could not place an
animal in my brain, like that. Was it half human, half ape, or
something like that?... The thing is, just a year or two ago
people were calling me stupid in believing in such a
thing you re crazy to believe in those things Today! Never
mind sixty years ago.
Here Peter told me how for a while he d worked aboard an
aircraft outfitted with skis, and traveled all over northern
Manitoba where he talked with a lot of aboriginal people. From
them he heard stories about something they saw, something that
sounded like what he d shot ( and from their stories they were
seeing this thing, too, what I shot, I could make out ).
Q: Okay, go back, though, to immediately after the killing
occurred. Were you, ah, somewhat afraid of being prosecuted for
killing something like that, or was it mostly a matter of, um,
being thought crazy for?
P: Not only that
Q: But of course, Peter, also you have to anyone would say that
anybody that would have called you crazy you could have brought
them to the animal and proved that you really did it, that you
weren t crazy. So I need you to discuss why you didn t do that.
P: Well, in the first place, I was with two older people. They
were hunting going in a different in the opposite direction.
And it was not easy to do at that time, (Peter means it would
not have been easy to show his hunting partners or anyone
the animal since it was far from where the other two had gone,
in a very remote spot). But, for one, I was hunting illegally.
Do you know what I m talkin about?
Q: No. In what way were you hunting illegally?
P: Well I had no license to hunt for moose.
Q: Oh, uh-huh.
P: I had no license I may have had, I don t remember, a deer
license. But I didn t wasn t fussy about shooting deer because
they re a small animal and you don t get very much meat for a
day s work. You know what I mean?
Q: Sure, yes.
P: So I go as long as I could get in the bush well there was
days I d get two-three. Well, for a large family (Peter had 10
brothers and sisters) it was enough to supply meat for the
winter... But I was strictly hunting illegally.
Q: So you didn t want to reveal that fact by
P: No, that fact alone. But, another thing, you hear these weird
stories, especially in old days, about these guys living in
hermits in the bush and all that stuff. So you don t really
know what to think.
Q: So you thought, in some corner of your mind, you considered
the possibility that it was one of these one of these hermit-
type people and you might have killed a
P: It was a, a cross or something, one of these hermit people,
people used to talk about. I didn t want to be charged with
shooting a hermit, or something human.
Q: So you thought that it was a possibility that it was
something like that and that you could be in legal trouble for
revealing it, is that right?
P: That s right. See, because, at those days nobody talked about
a Sasquatch or or a, a Bigfoot.
Q: So when you walked up on that animal and you were looking it
over and stuff, did you determine where its tracks came from,
whether it had been tracking your moose?
P: No. It would be hard to see tracks, because there were small
amounts of snow hay and everything and I didn t look. I was
too scared.
Q: And so it was done breathing, it was not alive?
P: Oh no, it took me
Q: Do you think you shot it through the heart?
P: Well, the bullet didn t enter the body at a ninety degree
angle He had to be bent over because when you hit a animal on a
angle it will shear part of the fur before it will enter. And
that s what it looked like to me, of course it was so much hair
it was so much harder to tell.
During a recent phone call Peter said: The bullet had to go
through the spine, because it was dead center in the back. And
when a bullet hits bone like that it expands and it would have
gone into the chest and done tremendous damage. The creature
was stone dead, lying crumpled where it had been standing when
he fired.
(How the creature looked: http://www.patbarker-
art.com/2lores.html)
Q: Can you still go back in your mind and remember that scene in
your mind s eye; is that memory still vivid for you?
P: Oh certain things in your memory it coulda happened
yesterday. You don t forget things like that. The most shocking
part about it is the sheer size of the animal.
Q: Really?
P: Yes. It s just unbelievable because anything that big should
have been seen and reported and in books and everything. You
think you re on a different planet or something.
Q: Was it a male, do you know?
P: Yes, it would be a male, because I d have seen the breasts.
Q: Did you see genitals?
P: No, because the way he was laying on the side, kind of folded
up.
(Front view of creature: http://www.patbarker-
art.com/3lores.html)
Q: So tell me a little bit more about the appearance of it, you
said it had a real big chest, barrel chest
P: Big barrel chest. A human body, like yours, the chest, you
know, well it s flat in front to back. But theirs is big, round,
barrel chest
Peter was just shy of his 79th birthday (he s just 80 at this
writing) when I visited him. The next two days he took me around
to show me places where others have had bigfoot (or windigo, as
some of the natives call it) sightings. Two of the witnesses
were women, residents of the Fairford Reserve, who had had
recent sightings one just two days prior to my arrival and the
other about three weeks before that.
In the late sixties/early seventies, after the Patterson-Gimlin
film brought bigfoot into the public consciousness and into
Peter s consciousness he realized what the animal was that he
had shot. When he saw the hair covered creature in that film he
immediately knew that what he killed in 1941 was the same kind
of animal. It was not some strange hybrid person, a thought that
had occurred to him as he looked, puzzled, worried, and then
frightened over the huge man-like creature his bullet had cut
down. No, it was the same kind of animal as the one in the film
taken by Roger Patterson in northern California. That s what it
was! A bigfoot.
After Peter s life loosened up some, when the children had gone
and he d cut back on his work and had a little time, his
interest in sasquatch developed. He talked freely about the 1941
incident around his community. Others offered their own stories
of sightings of such a creature or its tracks.
I d asked Peter if that early life incident, the killing of such
a thing, as frightening and upsetting as that must have been,
had troubled him during his subsequent life before he d come to
realize what it was. No, he said. He got married, they had eight
children, he worked hard as a farmer, carpenter, and commercial
fisherman on Lake Winnipeg; he just didn t have time to worry,
he explained. So for about 30 years Peter lived his life and
told no one about the 1941 killing. But he didn t forget. And
when he saw the Patterson-Gimlin film and knew what a bigfoot, a
sasquatch a windigo was, he knew they were not just in the
Pacific Northwest; they were there in the Manitoba bush, too.
We ve gone over it many times and I m convinced Peter did what
he said he did: he shot a good-sized male sasquatch to death in
1941 when he was just 17. There has been no hint of
untruthfulness or indication that he was or is not thinking
clearly about that event. If anything, Peter has been
understated and overcautious in his statements to me about that
day. At first I had a hard time getting him to tell me about it.
Instead he has wanted to talk about recent sightings. He just
wasn t interested in it anymore; it s old news to him. And he
has told a lot of people about it (local people, mostly), and
the response he s gotten from them has been pretty negative;
he s been called stupid, crazy, and a liar. That is how it goes
for people like Peter who have had a close encounter with a
sasquatch and talked about it. It s punishing.
Beyond that Peter has the attitude that since he can t prove it
happened, his story isn t really worth telling, that it s just
another unsupportable claim. (Undoubtedly he has come to that
conclusion over the years because he has talked about it, told
the story, and instead of being believed he has gotten grief for
it.) So Peter doesn t care whether or not his story is told
because he doesn t think it matters. What matters to him now are
the current sightings, the ones that could yield evidence to
prove sasquatches are there, have always been there, in the
Manitoba bush.
And recently, when I commented to him on what a remarkable
experience it was, how fortunate, (obviously apart from the fact
that it involved the killing of such a creature), he was to have
seen a sasquatch close up he said, not really, that it wasn t a
situation where he could appreciate it, and that he was scared.
He wishes he d seen it alive and moving, like the William Roe
sighting, he said. But in the more than sixty years since, with
all the hunting and time in the bush he s spent, he hasn t seen
another one. He has seen a track, one good track, however.
That was in association with a 1979 sighting in which several
other people saw the creature when it moved through the area. It
was near where Peter lived and he got onto it and was able to
track the animal s movements through a strip of bush and out
into a hay field where it stepped on an ant mound and left a
good impression of the front part of its foot, toes and all (he
didn t cast or photograph it). He tracked the creature to a
stack of big, circular hay bales the rolled type, which weigh
about 1000 pounds. Peter surmised that the creature had rested
there inside the stack of bales: two bales had been pushed apart
and one showed a clear compressed area, as if an enormous back
had leaned into it.
The only explanation I have for what Peter says happened is that
it did happen. At one point during a conversation about the
sasquatch problem, when we were particularly struggling with
its difficulty, I blurted in exasperation, Did that really
happen?
Peter replied emphatically, Yes, it really did.
I pushed further; Was there any possibility at all that it was
a bear a man?
No. He was certain it was some other kind of animal, the same
kind as what s on the Patterson-Gimlin film, a bigfoot, he
said.
In
