Bobby Clarke's Nelson River Sasquatch Video, Norway House

Norway House is a remote community of about 6,000 people, roughly 500 km north of Winnipeg. The Nelson River runs past it, and a ferry carries vehicles across. Bobby Clarke, a member of Norway House Cree Nation, worked that crossing as a car-ferry operator. He was not the only operator with a story. Former ferry operator Hubert Folster described a similar sighting of his own. "It just wasn't right," he said.

Saturday, April 16, 2005. About 6:30 a.m. Clarke was taking a vehicle barge across the river. On the opposite bank, some 250 to 300 metres away, he saw a big, black figure. A massive creature. He reached for the old camcorder he said he always carried and started recording.

The figure walked upright, calf-deep in water along the river's edge, through the bulrushes. It was dark, covered in hair, 8 to 10 feet tall. Near the end of the clip it seems to turn toward the camera. No face can be made out.

Word spread fast. The first Canadian Press headline asked it plainly: "Bigfoot caught on tape?" Hundreds of residents came to the house of Clarke's mother, Georgina Henry, to see for themselves. His sister Sharness Henry was blunt. "He's really hairy." Outreach worker Missy Flett arrived with doubts. "I was kind of skeptical when I went over. But after seeing it, I truly believe it's the real sasquatch." She ruled out bears and local wildlife. To her, the figure moved gracefully, like a human, but clearly different.

Accounts of the footage's length vary. Most put it at 2 minutes 49 seconds. One report said 49 seconds. The family spoke about enhancing the video and about copyright. Then they sold first screening rights to Fox's A Current Affair, which aired it. One press report put the price at as much as $100,000. That figure did not come from Clarke. The attention took its toll. Clarke became too stressed to deal with the press and took time off work.

Matt Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization studied the image. Not a trick of the light, he concluded. Not a bear. Not a fabricated image. The dark figure with arms and legs was "either a human or a sasquatch," he said, but it "is not clearly one or the other." TV commentator Franklin Ruehl was more enthusiastic. "It was an exciting moment. I saw an intriguing entity that certainly appeared to be an ape-like human hybrid."

Bill Borody, founder of the Manitoba Sasquatch Research Centre, told the Winnipeg Free Press it was "bogus." The shape was wrong, he argued. Narrow at the top, fanning out at the bottom "like a tent," not barrel-chested. The figure did not seem to move while the background did. And there was too much light. At 6:30 a.m. in April, he said, Norway House is still dark.

A year later, Loren Coleman looked back. Reviews had been mixed, he wrote, and the footage was too "fuzzy and distorted to prove much." No confession or exposé ever emerged, and no official inquiry was ever reported.

Filmmaker Caelum Vatnsdal returned to the story in the documentary There's Something Out There. It follows Clarke and the clash between Hollywood tabloid TV and Norway House. The figure on the Nelson River remains exactly what it was that April morning. Dark, distant, and unresolved.