Long Island Bigfoot #5

**This is a guest post by researcher, Karl Sup. For more of the prior installments about the Long Island Sasquatch, please see these links - 

Long Island Bigfoot 1
Long Island Bigfoot 2
Long Island Bigfoot 3
Long Island Bigfoot 4

Long Island Sasquatch #5

Central Long Island, New York (city withheld)

July-October 2015

I returned to the woods of Long Island on July 15th and decided to focus the bulk of my research that week in the northern end of the forest preserve. This area of the preserve borders beautiful homes, with dense growth right up to short, chain-linked fencing at the back of these lots. There are several dirt hiking trails through these woods, but they do not appear to be well maintained.

the majority of the area is wild

There was a prolific display of mushrooms and raspberries sprouted out from the undergrowth nearly everywhere I looked. 

As with the portion of these woods that extend south and border the corporate centers, there were no springs, creeks or running water of any kind. 

I did notice that a number of these homes had sheds or garages near the back of their properties with trash receptacles stored behind them. I would imagine that these would be readily accessible once night fell.

I also noted a lot of tree falls, and vegetation that was grouped together. At first glance, they appeared to be out of place and suspicious, but upon close examination each area was carefully discounted as a natural event and not a constructed bedding area. 

I continued hiking until it became very dark and the fireflies began to sparkle along the trail. The mosquitoes also started to swarm on that warm night.

It rained the rest of that week, and the following two weeks I was not in New York; working from Arizona and taking a well-deserved vacation. 

I was back out on Long Island the first week of August with eagerness to test out a new concept. I decided that I would place an apple near the trash pile area behind the corporate center, but would deploy it in a manner that would insure that our squirrel friend would not intercept the apple. I had decided to suspend the apple from a high branch using what I had in my carry-on bag: dental floss. 

The apple was suspended 8 feet off the ground and secured by the apple stem. It was also hanging approximately two feet above and four feet away from the nearest branches. The apple remained untouched during that week. 

I returned on August 17th to discover the apple had been taken. The dental floss was wrapped around the stem of a vine that was growing nearby. It is possible that after the apple was taken that wind blew the loose floss around the ivy, however, the floss crossed over itself. 

I was wondering if the squirrel I had captured on camera last time had managed to reach the hovering apple. It was then that I noticed a small rock was now sitting on the branch closest to the apple!

I don’t believe the squirrel left the half dollar-sized rock balanced on the branch. There were no footprints, traces of the apple, or disturbances in the surrounding forest litter. And nothing had been rearranged in the trash pile. I truly appreciated the gift exchange, and set out several more apples throughout the week. 

Before I headed off to the airport, none of the new apples had been taken. 

I didn’t return to Long Island for two weeks. By that time, all of the apples were gone and no gifts were left. 

I decided since the weather was so nice, I would spend what little time I did have researching the large forest preserve area north of the corporate centers. The same area that I researched in the Long Island Sasquatch #1 report. 

What I found there surprised even myself. 

On September 15th, I hiked into the woods at 6:45 p.m. Within 12 minutes, I realized I had hiked down the wrong path to research the broken bamboo that I had found in August 2014. I took that in stride, and continued hiking down the wrong path. As with many times in my life, I’ve faced what is believed to be the wrong path when, in fact, it is exactly where I was meant to be.

The further I walked, the fewer jogger prints I saw until there were none. The trail led to a small gravel quarry. Rather than taking the high trail that skirted the quarry basin, I decided to take a run at the sloping hill across the far side of the quarry leavings. 

As I headed up the hill, all I could hear was my labored breath and shoes against the loose gravel. As I neared the top of the ridge but before I could see over it, another sound reached my ears; that of the crashing of branches. I caught my breath and walked towards where the branches had been snapping loudly. Only a few twig snaps and crunching could be heard still down below the ridge, then all was quiet. 

I walked 30 feet further down the trail to get a better view down into the gully and walked directly into the worst, foul-smelling stench I have ever smelled in my life. 

The stench only bisected a 10 foot stretch of the trail. I can only describe it as a combination of rotting road kill, summer outhouse with a hint of rotting vegetation. It was so strong and putrid that I had to concentrate just to keep myself from involuntarily gagging. 

I finally stepped away from it, and began taking photos down into the gully. By the time I had walked 50 feet up the trail and back, the stench was dissipating. I looked down on the ground in the area of the smell, hoping to see a print. 

As I had my head down, I heard the impact of a small rock about 20 feet from me. Looking up, I just caught the last two or three bounces of a tiny, dime-sized pebble skipping away from the gully area. I stood up and took a few more pictures area. 

The sun had been down for about 20 minutes, and the forest was now getting dark. I decided to head back out of the woods before it was pitch black. The trail I had been on circled around the small hills and valleys of the forest preserve. 

Half way back to the car on the trail, I came across the stench again. This one bisected the trail again, but was mostly dissipated yet still very distinct and, once again, in an approximate 10-foot swath. I made it to the car just as darkness fell. 

The next evening I returned to the woods to continue the research. I hiked down into the gully. There was a large, 15” left footprint depression in the leaves, a tree break, and a fence that had been ripped down in a section with an unusual stick structure next to it. 

The vertical portion of the structure was actually broken on both sides and driven into the ground to a seven inch depth. I initially thought it was just a small tree naturally snapped off, but a closer look found the structure to be purposeful. To what purpose, we may never truly know. I do know it wasn’t a natural formation. 

I continued hiking along that trail until it intersected one of the main, well-traveled paths a ¼ mile to the east. It was starting to get dark in the woods again, and I was hoping to get a closer look again at the bamboo. 

Along the trail, I did see a white-tailed deer, and was glad it posed for a photograph instead of running off into the woods. Just one of many food sources in this area. 

I reached the bamboo before nightfall, and there was now a structure there that had not been there previously. This bamboo varies from 1 to 1-1/4 inches (2.5 to 3 cm) in diameter with a height over 20 feet (6 m) tall. The bamboo had been bent over, broken, and torn in half to create this structure. The majority of the bamboo are bent or broken off at the 8 to 9 foot (2.5 m) level. I tried to break a young bamboo that was only ½ inch in diameter, and I was unable to budge it.

On September 28th I returned to the area again. By this time, the leaves were starting to change, and the oak trees were dropping acorns by the hundreds. 

In one area of Arizona, we found evidence of the Sasquatch people harvesting and eating acorns (see Sasquatch Sighting #3). I would have to believe that the same would apply on Long Island. 

I found a depressed print in the hard-packed forest floor that was approximately 15 inches long. There was slight evidence of toe grip. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but looking at the print close up, it was a right foot. 

I continued back over to the bamboo for a closer look. It was almost dark by the time I reached the area, but got a few more compelling photographs of the bamboo. The hand strength alone to break bamboo like this is mind-boggling. 

Consider this: A36 structural steel has an ultimate tensile strength of 400-550 MPa. For comparison, bamboo tensile strength rates at 350-500 Mpa rating. The majority of these breaks were 7-9 feet off the ground. These bamboo had had their new shoots stripped from the tops. 

On October 20th (on the anniversary of the Patterson-Gimlin event) was sadly my last venture into the woods for 2015. 

I returned to the near-sighting area, but decided to travel a different path around the back side of the quarry. The trail ended after 100 feet, so I made my way down the hillside. That’s when I noticed a print in the leaves. It was about 15 inches long. The remarkable observation was that there were NINE of these prints traversing up the hillside. The first print at the bottom of the hill was at a 45 degree angle, but the rest of them were in line with a stride of 58 inches… UPHILL. 

I tried to replicate this spacing with sorry results, and I’m 6’5” tall. This was such an exciting and incredible find. In my opinion it is the best evidence to date on Long Island. 

I continued from the bottom of the hill into an area without trails and found a series of notable stick structures. Two sticks propped each other up. Several of the sticks in the structure did not come from any tree falls or debris nearby and were definitely placed in position. It appeared that two of the branches were woven into the structure as well. I will definitely be returning to this location to keep my eye on these and the bamboo structures throughout 2016.

In over 7 years of research I have had many close encounters, with the majority of them in Arizona. I had never encountered the smell I experienced here from any previous event. I am certain that if I had been about 10 seconds faster running up the quarry hill on September 15th, I would have had my seventh sighting and the first reported on Long Island in over 100 years! 

Onward to 2016! 

Karl Sup is a software architect, developer and analyst, and an avid Bigfoot researcher working in the mountains of Arizona for many years. During this research and in other states including New York, Maryland, Georgia and Wisconsin, he has been fortunate enough to interact with and view multiple subjects over the years. Karl also has had decades of audio analysis and editing experience, and assisted in helping M.K. Davis clean up and enhance audio from VHS tapes he had been studying and discovered the presence of infrasound within those recordings.