Long Island Bigfoot Report #1

Long Island Bigfoot #1

Central Long Island, New York (City Withheld), 2014-08-15 4:30PM 71F Dewpoint 51F

(Posting by Karl Sup, part 2 tomorrow)

I have been spending every week in New York City for business in downtown Manhattan, which, with the exception of Central Park, does not provide very good habitat for our Sasquatch friends unfortunately. Concrete, lights and hundreds of thousands of people create an ideal environment to study human interaction and psychological effects, but I longed for an opportunity to get back into the woods. Five weeks into the project, we had a temporary weekend shift to offices in the middle of Long Island. I was excited to do some research, work permitting, in the woods!

Long Island is both the longest and the largest island in the contiguous United States; it extends 118 miles eastward from New York Harbor to Montauk Point, with a maximum north-to-south distance of 23 miles between Long Island Sound and the Atlantic coast. With a land area of 1,401 square miles, Long Island is the 11th-largest island in the United States and the 148th-largest island in the world — larger than the 1,214 square miles of the smallest state, Rhode Island.

Late Friday afternoon, the work schedules were determined and I was ecstatic to see that my first project tasks began early Saturday morning. I gathered up my things and headed to the large, wooded nature preserve that I had been examining on Google Earth maps for several weeks for a hike. There are legends of ghosts and spirits haunting these woods, but I was hoping there might be another explanation. The 800+ acre preserve is criss-crossed with dozens of nature trails and several structures for recreation and shelter. These miles of trails bisect large wedges of undisturbed, dense, forested areas with thick ground cover. The sun was streaming through the canopy and tree branches. It was a perfect afternoon to commune with nature, without concrete and taxis.

While hiking down one of the trails, I noticed that there was a large clump of bamboo growing about 40 feet off the trail. Bamboo is obviously not native to Long Island, but is very invasive and had profusely taken root into this habitat. I walked over toward the thicket of bamboo, avoiding the poison ivy, and found that a great number of them had been broken and twisted. These bamboo stalks were 12-20 feet in height and had been snapped at a level 5-6’ off the ground. Most of these stalks were an inch, more or less, in diameter. The breaks were uniform from stalk to stalk, and they were recent; probably within the past 2-3 weeks. On every broken bamboo stalk, the young sprouts had all been stripped and were not in the vicinity. I wasn’t convinced yet that this activity couldn’t have been done by humans, although live bamboo is very strong and would be very difficult to break in that manner, at that height. And the most important question was why would a human do this?

I continued down the trail. About 300 yards south I noticed an odd formation. Off to the side of the trail, two rocks had been stacked. Typically, I might not have given that notice but on top of the rock stack were three sticks. The sticks were placed in a perfect X shape with a bisecting stick and balanced on top of the rocks. These were not large rocks or sticks, but their placement was definitely deliberate and meaningful to someone. The ground near and around the rocks was not disturbed.

Not having a compass on me, I could not determine if the X was aligned with a compass point or not. This structure alone gave me hope that the habitat in this Preserve was supporting, at minimum, a family unit. I was still struggling with understanding their food and water sources though.

Further examination of the flora revealed wild blackberries and raspberries, as well as chestnuts, blueberry, huckleberry, wild grape, mountain laurel, viburnum and sassafras. I was fortunate enough to see a solitary deer far off the trail, trying to blend in. Plenty of rainfall occurs annually, but there were no perennial streams in the Preserve. 

Later at my hotel, I looked at the area map again and noticed that there was a contiguous band of forest that extended from the Preserve in and around a residential area that backed right up to commercial and corporate centers. There was only one, narrow two-lane road that would need to be crossed. This road had dense vegetation on both sides with no street lights. I reasoned it could easily be crossed in one, or at most, two steps by a Sasquatch before they would reach total concealment once again. These commercial buildings had trash dumpsters and garbage cans on their grounds. And the best part was one was directly across from my hotel.

With twilight upon me, I left the hotel and walked over to the nearest corporate center. A few cars were in the parking lot from the cleaning crew, but everything was closed up. I hiked through the parking lot and hooked around the back side of the lot where the woods bordered their manicured lawns. By now it was getting dark, and the dense vegetation made it impossible to see more than five to ten feet into the forest. Vines, brush, tree branches seemed to create an impenetrable barrier to intrusion. I could find no evidence of ingress/egress from this area, but I continued walking the entire length still. There was an interesting structure that seemed to be woven with vines near the edge of the grass. I wasn’t sure what to make of it (see photo). I was almost to the far corner of the parking lot, when I noticed a gap in the vegetation and signs that traffic had moved in and out of the woods at that point. There was a fresh print near the edge of the woods where irrigation sprinklers watered the lush green grass daily. And upon closer examination, there was another print just into the forest litter on the path.

It was getting very dark now, and since I didn’t have my thermal or night vision with me I thought twice about taking a walk down the trail. I wasn’t afraid of what I might encounter; I was trying to be smart about not getting poked in the eyeball by branches. After a short deliberation, I switched my cell phone from taking photos with the camera to the flashlight app and started into the woods. I carefully walked in about 6 strides when a loud CRUNCH-SNAP broke the silence about 50 yards to the north-northeast. It was not preceded by a branch fall, or succeeded by a scuttle of forest litter from a spooked deer. It was a single, deliberate branch break of what I would estimate was a branch larger than an inch in diameter. The woods fell back into silence again, but the message was received loud and clear.

I backed out of the woods on the trail and back onto the grass. I stood there for a minute, then announced in my deep, baritone voice that I was a friend using their own vocabulary based on others’ research. There was no response or reaction, so I turned and walked back to the hotel. The work schedule the next two days precluded any other research, but I knew in time much of the project work would be relocated back out here. I waited patiently until November, but took solace in one solitary thought; they were here.

FURTHER INSTALLMENTS OF THIS SERIES:
Long Island Bigfoot #2
Long Island Bigfoot #3
Long Island Bigfoot #4
Long Island Bigfoot #5
Long Island bigfoot #6
Long Island Bigfoot #7
Long Island Bigfoot #8
Long Island Bigfoot #9
Long Island Bigfoot #10

Karl Sup is a software architect, developer and analyst, and an avid Bigfoot researcher working in the mountains of Arizona for many years. During this research and in other states including Maryland and Wisconsin, he has been fortunate enough to interact with and view multiple subjects over the years. Karl also has had decades of audio analysis and editing experience, and assisted in helping M.K. Davis clean up and enhance audio from VHS tapes he has been studying and discovered the presence of infrasound within those recordings.