The Freeman, Sumerlin and Laughery Bigfoot Sighting, Mill Creek Watershed, 1995

The Blue Mountains east of Walla Walla, Washington, were familiar ground for Paul Freeman. A former U.S. Forest Service employee and long-time Bigfoot hunter, he claimed four earlier sightings of a similar creature. The Associated Press would note that he "has often claimed Bigfoot encounters." In August 1995 he went in with two companions. Wes Sumerlin of Walla Walla. And Bill Laughery, a former state Game Department employee.

Saturday, August 5, 1995. The Mill Creek watershed, about 25 miles east of Walla Walla. The signs came first. A strong odour. Small trees twisted, with clumps of long black hair caught in them. Footprints about 15 inches long and 7 inches wide. According to the BFRO, the group tracked three sets of fresh prints.

Then they saw it. Through dense timber, a creature with tan-brown hair. Laughery put its height at nearly 8 feet. The BFRO summary places it within 100 feet of the men. They had carried still and video cameras. Under the trees the light was too low. No picture was taken.

They came out with what they could carry. Two plaster casts of the prints and hair samples, bound for Grover Krantz, the Washington State University anthropologist. Freeman brought back part of a twisted tree. W. Henner Fahrenbach of Beaverton, Oregon, later studied the hair under the microscope. It came, he concluded, from two individuals of one species, differing in colour, length and growth cycle. It had never been cut. It was also "indistinguishable from human hair by any criterion." At Ohio State University, P. Fuerst and J. A. Poe attempted DNA analysis. No diagnostic mitochondrial sequence emerged.

A paper for the Journal of Cryptozoology was nearly finished in January 1998. In March 1998 the authors withheld it. The results were ambiguous and "could be misused by either side." In November 1999 Fahrenbach reported no evidence of deliberate hoaxing. Man-made fibres in one sample, he suggested, might be environmental contamination.

Freeman's record shadowed the case. René Dahinden had called his 1982 Mill Creek casts fakes. Border Patrol tracker Joel Hardin, sent by the Forest Service, concluded that an animal had not made those tracks. A Skeptical Inquirer item later said Freeman produced more than one set of supposed hairs that turned out to be artificial fibres. It does not say whether the 1995 samples were among them.

Sceptics also point to the conditions. A glimpse through dense timber, in poor light. Hair that could not be told from human hair. Defenders, Krantz and Fahrenbach among them, stood by Freeman's evidence. Even the number of creatures shifted. The AP reported one. Later retellings spoke of two, and one of three. No government agency is known to have investigated.

The story went out on the AP wire on August 8, 1995. In January 1996 the Los Angeles Times profiled all three men. Freeman died in 2003. No photograph of the creature exists. What remains is plaster, hair and the word of three men who followed the tracks into the Blue Mountains and say they saw what made them.