The Syracuse Figure: BFRO Report #82485

The pond sits in a rural part of Onondaga County, New York. The BFRO describes "a glacial carved valley with a shallow pond and boggy land surrounded by steep mountains." A parking lot. A path to the water. A trail through the reeds. Signs that read "No swimming/wading." The nearest town and road have been withheld on purpose. A human swimmer, the BFRO reasons, could prove it by naming the place.

Monday, August 10, 2026. About 1 p.m. The witness, a woman in her 50s known as K.D., was hiking alone on her day off. The lot was empty. She walked the main path, filming as she went, and photographed the whole pond. Then she noticed a figure wading to her left, about 240 feet away. She took it for a naked, elderly, heavyset man and took a couple of photos. It "seemed to snap its head around and look right at me in such a strange way that I got creeped out even more."

She walked back up the path. A family of three passed. None of them matched the figure. She followed a trail near the reeds toward where it had been, felt uneasy, and left. She never saw it leave. At home she looked at the photos. "It really looked inhuman."

BFRO investigator Ben C. met the witness. About six days later they returned to the pond with a tripod and walkie-talkies, recreating her camera position while he recreated the figure's posture. From his own six-foot height and an 11-inch tree trunk in the frame, he put the figure at about 4 feet 9 inches. That is "roughly -3.9 standard deviations below the mean" for adult human males. He noted a light brown or honey blonde colour, and photos that "strongly suggest a visible brow ridge."

Wading to the spot took him about ten minutes, past waist-deep pockets of mud. "But for a presumed naked and elderly man, this would be an incredible feat, and furthermore, for what purpose?" He concluded the witness "did see and photograph something other than a human," and judged a juvenile sasquatch more likely than a person. Still, "we cannot rule out the extreme improbability."

BFRO founder Matt Moneymaker, formerly of Finding Bigfoot, posted the photos on Facebook. "The Syracuse Figure does not look like a classic bigfoot, but it does not look like a normal human either." The sagging skin, he suggested, "may actually be thinning wet fur that is laying flat." And he was frank. "It might be an old man, or it might not be."

Sceptics took the first half at face value. "I've never seen a more obvious picture of an old guy," said one online commenter. Others pointed to the distance, the zoom and the tall grass, which can distort faces and proportions. Moneymaker himself noted that reported sasquatch heights usually sit near seven feet. The BFRO countered with terrain painful for bare feet, the swimming ban, and the absence of any odd smell on a wind blowing from the figure toward the witness.

Gray News carried the story to dozens of stations, though its wire copy gave the witness's age as 25, apparently a misreading of her 25 years in central upstate New York. Patch and Fox News followed. On Planet Tyrus, the witness, named there as Kelly, walked Tyrus and Moneymaker through the moment it turned. Wikipedia's Bigfoot article records a photograph that "sparked debate online." Moneymaker later wrote that no one in Onondaga County had come forward to say they had seen this "old man" before. The figure remains unidentified.