They caught . . . something.
And 15-inch tracks in the snow.
Now, Bill Brock is going to buzz their western Maine woods with a drone looking for Bigfoot.
The star of the “Monsters Underground” TV show and longtime Bigfoot hunter from Durham isn’t ready yet to declare the figure in their footage the real deal.
“It still feels too good to be true, but I do believe the eyewitness 110 percent,” Brock said Monday. “I believe that these people are telling me what they experienced, but I don’t know if what they were experiencing was a Sasquatch or somebody playing tricks on them. We don’t have enough information or science to basically give you a 100 percent answer either way — but I’m trying.”
Hoax or not, the story’s gone viral: Videos of the family’s two separate sightings and an interview with the homeowner that Brock posted on YouTube have gotten more than 130,000 views in five days.
Last week, the homeowner originally posted one video on Facebook which showed a dark, upright figure, walking near a fence line.
After a friend of a friend brought the video to their attention, Brock and A.J. Marston of Standish were at the homeowner’s door in less than 24 hours.
Trying to shield the family’s identity, Brock is vague about the location, even the town, reasoning that the homeowners don’t need more strangers descending on their woods. (So far, everything in video clips has been labeled “Turner,” though “Turner area” might be more accurate.)
In Brock’s 11-minute video interview, the teenage son of the homeowner, who says he’s a hunter, reports hearing weird howls coming from the woods, which prompted him to leave his phone’s video camera running outside.
“It doesn’t sound like anything else,” the teen tells Brock in the interview. “I usually don’t see people just walking around. That’s what freaks me out.”
After arriving at their home, the son showed Brock a second, clearer video clip, shot by a snowmobile trail in their woods in late December. Again, a dark, tall figure briskly walks from right to left across the screen.
When Brock and Marston walked the property last week, they found 15-inch prints with defined toes and broad heels in the snow.
“We don’t understand what it could have been,” he said. “We couldn’t find any clues out there to prove that this was fake. We found more clues to say this was real than we have to prove that it was fake.”
The teen, Brock said, seemed genuinely spooked.
“I do know the boy saw it with his own eyes out the front window and it was terrifying to him,” he said. “We were out there doing a recreation (to estimate size and stride). He wouldn’t even come out in the woods with us.”
On Tuesday, Brock planned to release another video with their reaction to everything gathered to date. He and Marston also planned to take to the woods with an IRIS+ drone with an eight-times zoom lens and full-spectrum camera, passing the area in a grid pattern at 100 meters in the air.
“I haven’t seen a Bigfoot yet or a Komodo dragon,” Marston said. “We’re just in favor (of) taking pictures and video and see what we can see in it. If it’s out there, why not find it?”
Brock said they would also place three trail cameras out in the woods that could hold up in the cold.
“I’d like to prove what it is,” he said. “Whether a guy or a freakin’ Bigfoot.”
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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