💥 Beyond the Badge: The Olympic Peninsula Cop Who Saw the Truth

My name is Rich Jamo. I was previously in the Marine Corps Reserves and spent fifteen years in law enforcement, leaving in 2012. I’m a trained observer, meticulous and rational. But the things I’ve seen in the Olympic Peninsula have shattered my conventional understanding of reality and exposed a deeper truth about the world we live in.

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1. The First Sighting: La Push, 2000

The first Bigfoot-related incident I had was in July 2000. I was working the swing shift as a cop in La Push, Washington, driving down the road toward the lower reservation around 7:00 p.m. It was a straight stretch near the Second Beach trailhead, where Lonesome Creek Fish Hatchery sits on one side and a local store on the other.

I was driving when, about seventy-five yards in front of me, a very large figure stepped out of the dense brush on the oceanside. It proceeded to cross the road in front of me and hit the fence line of the fish hatchery, disappearing into the salmon berries.

I was in shock, but my police training kicked in. I immediately registered the details:

Size: The creature was huge, about eight feet tall, and I estimated its weight between 800 to 1,000 pounds.

Appearance: It was all one color, dark brown/black hair.

Locomotion: It was walking upright.

Gait: What truly unsettled me was its movement. It had a very eloquent stride, much smoother than a human walk. It took only about four steps to clear the entire roadway.

I stopped my car, heart pounding, trying to categorize what I had seen. My rational mind insisted it wasn’t real, but my trained eyes knew it was no known animal. I finally accepted the impossible: I just saw a Bigfoot.

I drove to the office, where my sergeant and a county deputy immediately noticed I was “shooken up.” After I told them my story, they relayed finding large tracks months earlier. I filed an official memo to the sheriff’s office and a CAD entry documenting the incident.

2. The Unraveling Worldview

The encounter had a profound and immediate effect: I felt utterly betrayed by my own government and the system I lived under.

If the government knew that something as massive and impossible as the Sasquatch was real—and that I had to experience the trauma of realizing this alone—what else were they hiding? The realization forced a fundamental shift in my mindset.

“If that was a lie, you know, meaning that this thing was real and it wasn’t supposed to be real… I started to question a lot of things because if it affects everything, not just Bigfoot in general. It affects your whole worldview. It starts to make everything shift.“

This change in perspective led me to question every sector of life and the entire system I operated under. It was the beginning of seeing “holes in things”—the realization that what we are taught as truth may not be the complete reality.

This questioning eventually led to direct confrontation within my career. By 2008, I became a whistleblower regarding non-Bigfoot-related government and law enforcement issues at my work, eventually leaving law enforcement entirely. I even ran for sheriff, using the political campaign platform to expose some of those inconsistencies to the public.

3. The Reignited Fire: Founding the Olympic Project

My personal involvement with the research was reignited in 2008, eight years after the initial sighting. I was dealing with immense stress from my whistleblower situation when I went on an elk hunting trip. There, I found what seemed to be tracks off the Bogachiel River and had another incident where something followed me—culminating in a large branch breaking right before I reached my car.

This experience, coinciding with my need for a new mission, led to the formation of the Olympic Project in November 2010.

Founding: The original members were myself, Derek (another credible researcher), and later Cliff Barackman. We were the “first generation.”

Strategy: We established a methodical, science-based approach. We raised funding (partially from Wally Herson, who invested a large sum) to place 50 game cameras in suspected travel routes, using topography and historical sightings to find the “path of least resistance” where the creatures migrated.

The Intent: The goal was to establish repeatable, verifiable evidence—to move the entire subject out of the realm of myth and into the realm of science, driven by the personal knowledge that the creatures were real, intelligent, and existed on the periphery of our world.

My years of working in the field—tracking, setting cameras for 20 to 30 hours a week, and witnessing continued anomalous activity—have only reinforced the original traumatic truth from La Push: the world is not what we are told it is. The creatures are real, intelligent, and are deliberately hiding, forcing those who see them to confront the shocking reality that the deepest secrets are hidden in plain sight.