Former CIA Agent Admits They’ve Been Tracking Bigfoot Since 1962 – Sasquatch Conspiracy

The year was 1994, a time of transition and tension, when the shadows of the Cold War still stretched long across the bureaucratic hallways of Washington, D.C. In the back of a Georgetown cafe called Murphy’s, I sat across from Richard Morrison, an investigative journalist for the Washington Post. My name is Derek Shepard, and I was about to violate every national security oath I had ever signed. My hands remained steady around a lukewarm cup of coffee, but my mind was back in 1980, the year Project Silverback was born.

It started as a joke—a “nonsense” assignment for a junior field operative like myself. A Forest Service ranger in Washington state had reported a bipedal primate stealing food, and because the NSA had detected heat signatures in areas devoid of human activity, the CIA was called in. The initial fear was Soviet reconnaissance; the reality was far more profound. We found 8-foot-tall, hair-covered beings with human-level intelligence. By 1982, I was deep in an operation tracking seventeen distinct family groups across North America.

The tragedy of the American government isn’t just that it keeps secrets; it’s the sheer, cold-blooded hypocrisy with which it manages them. For fourteen years, I was part of a team that monitored these creatures like a secret military asset. We watched them through night-vision goggles, mapped their migration with satellites, and whispered about their DNA—which sat somewhere between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus. We kept them a secret ostensibly to prevent “chaos,” but the real reason was far uglier: economic leverage. If the public knew an intelligent, indigenous species occupied the Pacific Northwest, billions of dollars in logging, mining, and land development would grind to a halt under the weight of ethical and legal protections.

The moral rot peaked in 1986 during a mission in the Olympic National Forest. I watched Dr. Patricia Chen, a zoologist on our team, break protocol to sit with an adult male. They shared food—a handful of berries for a granola bar—in a moment of inter-species peace that should have changed the world. Instead, the agency buried the photographs and ordered us to “observe but never engage.”

By late 1993, the mission curdled from observation into something predatory. A team led by Agent Frank Holloway recovered a wounded male near Mount St. Helens. Against every standing order, they didn’t just stabilize him; they captured him. I watched as men from Langley, who didn’t even know the name of our project, performed invasive, agonizing “sampling” on a sentient being. He died in a shipping-container lab, his distress calls echoing off the metal walls. His body was never sent to the official archive at Fort Detrick; it was disappeared by a private contractor.

That was when I knew. The agency wasn’t protecting these creatures from the public; they were preparing to weaponize their biology while waiting for the species to go extinct in the wild. “Genocide by inaction,” I told Morrison, as I slid him the population projection charts. By 2050, at current rates of habitat loss, they will be gone, and the government will simply delete the files.

As we sat in that cafe, a man in a dark raincoat entered. He didn’t order coffee. He just sat at the counter, a silent sentinel of the state. It was a chilling reminder that the agency doesn’t let go of its ghosts easily. I fled through a back service alley, the cold March rain stinging my face, knowing I was now the target of the very machine I helped build.

A few days later, in the damp silence of Rock Creek Park, Morrison and I met for the final time. He showed me surveillance photos of the long crate leaving the contractor’s warehouse. Whatever was inside wasn’t dead. The government had pivoted from monitoring a legend to managing a resource. As we stood there, a low, resonant vocalization carried through the trees—a call I’d heard years before. They were watching us. They knew.

“Sunlight is the only defense,” Morrison said, clutching the tape recorder that held the truth about Project Silverback. We agreed to publish, to force the government’s hand before the last of the “ancient people” are harvested for their DNA or paved over for timber.