Sgt. Ken Cooper and the Lummi Reservation Sasquatch wave

Autumn 1975. Reports began reaching police on the Lummi Indian Reservation in late September. The reservation lies about seven miles west of Bellingham, in Whatcom County, Washington. Something large and hairy was being seen. Soon it was being blamed. Three dogs were found dead. A horse needed 16 stitches for a neck wound, and some accounts spoke of two horses with their necks ripped open. No people were attacked. Sgt. Ken Cooper of the Lummi Law and Order Department said he had seen or heard the creature three times since October 10.

October 23, 1975. That evening, Emma Smith, 78, told police that a Bigfoot was trying to break into her home on Scott Road, and she fled in terror. Officers found the plastic on her storm door torn and the wooden frame splintered. Two boards had been removed from a nearby fish smokehouse.

At about 2:30 a.m., Cooper arrived to find about seven people with car spotlights fixed on the creature. He judged it about 7½ ft tall, covered with black hair and very muscular. It appeared to be a gorilla, though Cooper thought it might be someone in a gorilla suit. He aimed a 12-gauge shotgun and called out: "If there's somebody just fooling around you better knock it off because we have weapons."

He closed to within 35 ft as the creature lowered itself until just its head was showing. Cooper kept the gun on it for about 20 minutes. Then came noises in the brush to their right, and people said they were seeing more bigfoots there. He never pulled the trigger; one 1975 account said a Bureau of Indian Affairs official had told him a new law made shooting a Bigfoot manslaughter. His cousin, Marvin Cooper, had a pistol and held fire too.

After dawn, Cooper found bare footprints in the frost. They were 18 in long and 7 in wide. About four days later he saw the creature again. This time it fled across a field at roughly 40 mph. Cooper said huge tracks on the reservation indicated three creatures of different sizes. He also said he had tape recordings of their vocalizations.

The witnesses came to include Cooper's wife, his brother Lee Cooper and all three members of the reservation's federally run police force. More than 100 reports came in. So many people were chasing the creature with guns that the Lummi tribal council voted to outlaw shooting it.

Capt. Fred Guardipee, the BIA officer in charge of Lummi police, said he had no reason to doubt his officers' word. He did not think he had the facts to justify calling in further investigation. No formal inquiry is on record. Canadian Sasquatch investigator Rene Dahinden gave his own assessment: "This looks like a good one."

No hoax claim or conventional explanation appears in the surviving coverage. The only doubt on record is Cooper's own, from that first moment when he wondered about a man in a suit.

In November 1975, the story went national. The Vancouver Sun ran it on November 12 under the headline "Now It's Sasquatch vs. the Indians"; the San Francisco Chronicle carried it the same day, and the Seattle Times followed on November 15. Lummi police received 60 phone calls from newspapers and radio stations from Alberta to California to Chicago. No casts of the footprints are mentioned. What remains is a police sergeant, a shotgun, and twenty long minutes in the spotlights.