The Claudia Ackley Bigfoot Encounter, Blue Jay

Claudia Ackley lived in Crestline, in the San Bernardino Mountains of California. She called herself a Bigfoot researcher. In 2014, on a trip to Washington State, she believed she had seen a small Bigfoot about five feet tall.

March 17, 2017. Some reports say March 27. Between 6:30 and 7 p.m., around dusk, Ackley was on a trail in Blue Jay, near Lake Arrowhead, with her two daughters, aged 11 and 14. The girls were several yards ahead. Then they froze in their tracks. Ackley found them "standing right there frozen looking at something." She assumed a bear.

It was not a bear, she said. "We were face to face. He was 30 feet up in the tree." It was barrel-chested, about 800 pounds, with a head three times the size of a human's. "He looked like a Neanderthal man with hair all over him," she said. "He had solid black eyes. He had no expression on his face at all. He did not show his teeth. He just stared at the three of us."

Ackley began whooping at it. The creature rocked back and forth and shook the tree. Limbs snapped and fell to the ground. Her youngest daughter, who filmed the encounter on a phone, said she saw two more creatures on the ground. They ran into the woods. "All I'm thinking is please don't get near us because I have my children," Ackley recalled. She told the girls to walk away slowly. All three left safely.

Ackley called 911. She remembered the reply. "I'm sorry you saw a bear." A detective from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reached the same conclusion. Ackley refused it. "My daughters have seen bears. They're not scared by bears," she said. A bear, she argued, would have left claw marks on the tree. "I know what I saw."

She said the creatures kept coming onto her property. She left out soda, Fritos and fruit, and a voice-activated picture book she made, recorded with words like "fur" and "candy."

January 18, 2018. Ackley filed a petition in the Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino. It named the State of California, the California Natural Resources Agency, the department and Natural Resources Secretary John Laird. Her co-petitioner was Todd Standing, maker of the Netflix film Discovering Bigfoot. The petition sought a writ "commanding Respondents to recognize Sasquatch as a hominoid or primate type of species."

In February 2018 the San Bernardino Sun and the Press-Enterprise broke the story, and it spread across the country. The department declined to comment on pending litigation. A status hearing was set for March 19, 2018. A few days before it, Ackley dropped the case. She promised to refile. She died before she could.

The video is the heart of the case, and its weak point. Shot at dusk, it is dark. Viewers described trees and shadows, a dark blob in the tree. Officials saw a bear, the animal Ackley herself first suspected. Legal blogger Kevin Underhill called the petition a publicity stunt for Standing's Netflix documentary. Standing's own suit against the government of British Columbia was dismissed. No one has formally shown the footage to be a hoax.

Ackley went on to run an online support group for people who say Bigfoot encounters left them traumatised. On July 3, 2023, she was found dead in her home in Tennessee. No court ever ruled on whether Sasquatch lives in California.