I Sent Bigfoot DNA To 3 Separate Labs. The Results Were Terrifying

💀 Subject 8: The Mountain and the Truth

I have kept this secret for 37 years, a dense, suffocating weight buried under layers of silence and lies. Yesterday, the government, with its black SUVs and silent threats, took the only proof I had. They took him. So today, I am breaking the promise I made to myself in 1985. Some secrets are too heavy to carry to the grave, and what I found in that ravine was not a bear, and it certainly was not a man.

The year was 1985. The storm had been battering the Cascade Foothills for three days straight, a relentless, punishing deluge that felt less like weather and more like a warning. I was living on 40 acres of dense, isolated timberland, the kind of place you choose when you desperately want the world to forget you exist. My name is Dave Mitchell, but in the nearest town, they just called me Mountain Dave—a former wannabe lawyer who traded briefs for solitude.

That morning, the silence of the aftermath was louder than the thunder. I grabbed my grandfather’s Winchester rifle, a heavy, reliable piece of iron, and headed out to check the eastern fence line where the mudslides usually hit hardest. I expected to find a downed cedar or, at worst, a deer with a broken leg. I did not expect to find a nightmare waiting for me in the mud.

The smell hit me 50 yards out. It stopped me cold. It wasn’t the scent of wet pine or rot. It was a pungent, musky odor, heavy with the metallic tang of copper and wet dog. It triggered a primal alarm in the reptilian part of my brain that screamed, predator.

I moved toward the edge of the ravine, boots sliding on the slick earth, gripping the rifle until my knuckles turned white. Down below, partially buried under a massive hemlock tree uprooted by the slide, was a shape that defied logic. It was massive, dark, motionless, and terrifyingly large. My first, frantic thought tried to rationalize it as a black bear crushed by the timber. But as I picked my way down the slope, sliding through the ferns, the sheer scale and the anatomy began to resolve, and my blood turned to ice.

The fur was matted with blood, yes, but the shoulders were too broad. The arms were too long. I was 20 feet away when I saw the hand. It was gripping the exposed roots of the fallen tree with a desperation that looked frighteningly human. Five fingers. Black fingernails. A thumb. I stopped, the breath trapped in my throat, my mind struggling to process the impossible reality in front of me. Every survival instinct told me to turn around, scramble up the bank, and drive until I hit the highway.

But I couldn’t move. I was anchored by a mixture of terror and awe.

Then, the creature shifted. A low, rumbling groan vibrated through the damp air, so deep I felt it resonate in my own chest. It turned its head, lifting it slowly from the mud. The face that looked up at me was not a wolf or an ape. It was wide, with a heavy brow and a flat nose, but the eyes—deep-set, amber-colored—were not filled with animal rage. They were filled with shock, pain, and a pleading, intelligent fear.

It saw the rifle. It saw me. And in that frozen moment, the myth evaporated, replaced by a bleeding, flesh-and-blood reality on my property. The creature let out a breath that sounded like a weeping child, and I lowered the barrel of my gun, realizing with a sinking heart that the life I knew was over.

My grandfather’s rifle was leveled squarely at its chest, a caliber heavy enough to drop an elk, but when the creature looked at me, I saw a terrified child waiting to fade. That single look stripped away the adrenaline and left only a heavy, sinking responsibility. I couldn’t leave him there to freeze or be eaten by cougars.

Moving him was a nightmare of physics. He must have weighed nearly 600 pounds. I worked for an hour just to free his leg, using a steel pry bar to leverage the massive hemlock trunk, groaning with the effort as the mud sucked at my boots. The creature watched the entire time. He did not thrash. He did not bite. He seemed to understand with an unnerving clarity that I was his only chance. I had to rig a heavy-duty tarp like a sled and use the winch on my pickup truck to drag him up the muddy incline, praying the steel cable wouldn’t snap or that he wouldn’t panic at the mechanical roar of the engine. He remained still, gripping the edges of the tarp, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain.

By the time I got him into the reinforced lower stall of my barn, night had fallen. The air inside smelled of old hay, engine oil, and the pungent, earthy musk of the creature. I turned on a single hanging bulb, and he flinched violently, shielding his eyes with a massive hand. He had likely never seen artificial light before.

I worked quickly, treating him with the same supplies I used for my horses. The injury was horrific: a compound fracture of the tibia that had torn through the muscle. The bone needed setting. I looked at him, meeting those deep amber eyes. “This is going to hurt,” I said, speaking the words aloud just to fill the heavy silence. He didn’t know English, but he understood the tone of warning.

He braced himself against the stall door, gripping the wood until it splintered. When I snapped the bone back into alignment, he let out a sound I will never forget. Not a roar, but a sharp, high-pitched whimper that sounded impossibly human.

I splinted the leg with two-by-fours and duct tape, my hands shaking as the adrenaline finally began to fade. I collapsed on a hay bale, and for the first time, he made a soft, rumbling sound deep in his chest. It was unmistakably gratitude.

For the first month, I did not sleep. I sat in a fraying armchair by the barn door, a shotgun across my lap, listening to the heavy, labored breathing in the dark. I named him Goliath, a name that felt fitting for his size but entirely wrong for his spirit, because despite his eight-foot frame, he was the furthest thing from a warrior.

Keeping him alive was a logistical nightmare. A creature of that mass required an immense caloric intake to heal. I emptied my freezer of elk meat within the first week. When my personal supply ran dry, I began buying 50-pound bags of potatoes, carrots, and apples from three different feed stores in three different counties, terrified that someone would notice the pattern. I lied to the clerks, saying I was fattening hogs, the smoothness of my deceit frightening even me.

But it was not his appetite that kept me awake. It was his mind. By the third week, the fever had broken, and his awareness returned with a sharp intensity. I watched him from the shadows as he examined his surroundings. One morning, I forgot to secure the secondary hasp, and I returned to find him sitting calmly outside the stall, stacking the firewood I had left in a messy pile. He was arranging the logs by size, mimicking exactly how I had done it the day before. He was not just an animal acting on instinct. He was observing, learning, and processing.

That intelligence made the secrecy unbearable. Every passing car sounded like a threat. I became a ghost in my own life, guarding a secret that felt less like a discovery and more like a ticking bomb. We did not share a spoken language, but we shared a solitude that was louder than words. He knew I was lonely, and I knew he was an exile. That shared isolation became the foundation of a bridge between our species.

It started with simple mimicry and developed into a silent lexicon born of necessity. A flat hand pressed palm down meant stay. Rubbing the stomach meant hunger. Two fingers tapped against the wrist meant wait. He learned these signs with a frightening speed. He was gentle in a way that defied his physiology. I once watched him pick up a field mouse that had scurried into the barn. Instead of crushing it, he let it run across his scarred palm, watching it with a fascination that broke my heart.

But the peace of our routine was fragile. One afternoon in late October, the crunch of tires on gravel shattered the silence. It was the power company, a meter reader in a bright yellow vest, walking briskly toward the house. The barn door was cracked open just enough for ventilation, and Goliath was standing right there, fully visible in the shaft of afternoon light. If the man took three more steps to the left, he would see him. I froze, my heart hammering. I couldn’t run out there without drawing attention.

But Goliath had heard the tires too. Without a word from me, without a single gesture, he understood the danger. He backed slowly into the deepest shadow of the stall, lowering his massive frame until he was completely obscured. He did not breathe. He did not move. He became a part of the architecture, vanishing into the gloom with a predatory stillness. The man walked past, recorded the numbers, and left, never knowing that 20 feet away, a legend was watching him.

It was hunting season in November of 1989 when a wounded 10-point buck led a stranger straight to my fence line. I realized in that moment that a rusted perimeter of barbed wire wouldn’t stop a high-caliber bullet, and it certainly wouldn’t stop a rumor. I was stacking firewood when the gunshot cracked through the air. I grabbed my rifle and sprinted toward the eastern tree line. I saw him: a man in a blaze orange vest standing 20 yards inside my fence.

“You are trespassing!” I shouted.

The man looked up, startled, but not fearful. He pointed a gloved finger toward the brush behind me, directly toward the barn. “I clipped a big buck,” he said. “He ran this way. I have a right to retrieve my prize.”

My heart hammered against my ribs. The wind was blowing from the hunter toward the barn. Goliath could smell him—and more importantly, he could smell the gunpowder, the scent of what had nearly ended his life five years ago. From the barn, a deep, resonant thud vibrated through the ground, the sound of 600 pounds of agitated muscle slamming against timber.

The hunter froze. “What the hell have you got in there?” he asked, his hand drifting toward his rifle.

“A stud bull,” I lied, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous register. “And he is sick, mean, and easily spooked. If you go one step closer, he will tear that stall apart. Turn around now.”

The thud came again, louder this time. The hunter looked at the barn, then back at me, calculating the odds. He saw the desperation in my eyes and decided the deer was not worth it. He backed away slowly. He left, but he took a question with him, and questions in a small town have a way of coming back as answers you are not ready to hear.

As the 1990s rolled in, the world beyond my property line got louder, brighter, and faster. But on my 40 acres, time seemed to stand still. I spent the summer of 1991 obsessively modifying the barn. I lined the walls with acoustic insulation and installed blackout shutters. The barn ceased to be a structure for livestock and became a bunker. Inside that fortress, a decade melted away in a rhythm of quiet domesticity.

Goliath was no longer a prisoner. He was my roommate and my brother. I brought a small television set into the barn. We would sit for hours in the evenings watching the news. He mourned the violence of the Gulf War, making low rumbles of distress at the burning oil fields. But it was the nature documentaries that captivated him. He would touch the glass gently when he saw forests or mountains, his eyes filled with a longing so profound it made my own chest ache. We grew old together in that dim light. My hair turned gray, and the fur around Goliath’s muzzle began to silver.

I had convinced myself that we had won. I thought that if we just stayed quiet, we could exist in this bubble forever. But I did not realize that while we were hiding from men with rifles, the world was inventing new eyes that could see us from the stars.

The first time I saw a drone, it looked like a harmless toy, a buzzing plastic insect. It happened on a clear Tuesday in late summer. A white quadcopter hovered over the exercise yard, its camera pointing down through the camouflage netting I had built. Goliath did not cower. To him, this buzzing object was a predator. He snatched a river stone the size of a grapefruit and whipped his arm upward with a fluid, terrifying speed. The drone shattered and spiraled into the trees. I spent hours finding and destroying the memory card. But as I walked back to the barn, looking up at the sky, I knew the forest walls could no longer stop the future.

Then came the sickness. Bigfoots do not get the flu. They succumb to something ancient, a biological fire. One December morning, I found him burning with a fever of $105^{\circ}F$. A respiratory infection was tearing through his system like a wildfire. I was paralyzed by the paradox of my secret. If I called a vet, the world would know. If I did nothing, he would perish.

I drove into town in a blinding sleet storm to my old veterinarian and lied with a desperation that felt like prayer. I told him I had a prized draft horse with severe pneumonia. “If you do not give me the medications, he perishes tonight,” I said. The vet gave me the vials. I administered the injection to a semi-conscious, 600-pound primate, terrified he would panic and crush me. But Goliath lay there, surrendering to my care. I sat with him for three days until the fever broke. We cheated fate one more time, but as I looked at the deep lines of age around his eyes, I knew time was an enemy we could not hide from forever.

You can be flawless for 30 years, checking every lock and burning every scrap of evidence, but it only takes one single second of distraction to unravel a lifetime of lies. I forgot to latch the secondary gate on the night of July 14th, 2013.

Goliath, restless in the heat, wandered toward the scent of wild blackberries near the road. I woke to the sound of screeching tires and a car horn. I sprinted to the road in a panic to see a sedan speeding away and Goliath standing 10 feet from the asphalt, confused by the noise. I hurried him back inside and locked the gate with trembling hands.

The police never came, but the rumor mill churned the next morning. A local woman told everyone a demon had crossed the road. The circle of trust was cracking. I was getting old. My knees popped, and I could no longer lift the heavy grain sacks. I realized I needed an heir to this secret, or Goliath would simply starve behind a locked door when my heart finally gave out.

I chose my nephew, Ben, a game warden who understood that the law was not always right. I invited him up and walked him to the barn. When Ben saw Goliath sitting there peeling an apple, he nearly fainted. He wanted to call the university, to get protection.

“No,” I said. “The moment you make that call, he becomes a specimen. They will put him in a cage until he fades from stress. That is not protection. That is prison.”

Ben stayed silent, but I’d started a war between his conscience and his curiosity.

Three days later, the black SUVs arrived. They parked just off my property line, silent and imposing. My phone line went silent, and the radio filled with static. They had jammed the signals.

I walked to the barn, and Goliath knew. He was pacing, growling at frequencies I couldn’t hear. “I know,” I whispered to him. “They are here.” It wasn’t one mistake. It was everything. The drone, the heat signature, the antibiotics—data points that flagged us as an anomaly.

The kitchen phone rang, piercing the silence of a line that should have been dead. Agent Miller didn’t knock. He walked in and sat at my table with a folder detailing sightings since the 60s. They knew. They had always known. They just lost track of him in ’85.

“He is not a subject,” I said. “He is a person.”

“To us, he is a biological asset,” Miller replied. “You have 12 hours. At dawn, we take him. If he steps outside, my snipers will neutralize him.”

I went back to the barn. I bolted the doors and dragged a workbench across the threshold—a futile gesture to buy us one last hour of dignity. I took Goliath’s massive hand. “They are coming,” I signed. He made a soft vibrating hum, a sound of comfort. He touched his chest, then mine. Family. He wasn’t afraid for himself. He was saying goodbye.

The silence shattered exactly at 4:00 a.m. A helicopter roared overhead, flooding the yard with blinding light. A voice boomed from a megaphone demanding surrender. Goliath stood up, facing the door like a king. I grabbed my rifle, not to shoot, but to stand with him.

The heavy wooden doors groaned under the impact of a battering ram, and as they swung open, I placed a hand on his arm one last time.

The tranquilizer dart made no sound, but Goliath’s confused sigh as he collapsed broke my heart. “Do not hurt him!” I screamed as they slammed me to the concrete. They swarmed him, netting his limbs, treating him like cargo. He looked at me through the forest of boots, making the soft click for help.

Miller checked the restraints. “Easy. He is worth more than the national debt.”

They wheeled him out. The hydraulic ramp of the containment truck hissed shut, sealing him inside. As the convoy drove away, the silence rushed back, stark and hollow. The barn was empty. The soul of my life was traveling 60 mph down a federal highway.

They forced me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, threatening prison if I spoke. They dropped me off at my ransacked house, believing they had scrubbed the evidence, but they forgot I was a carpenter. I went to the workshop and pried up the false concrete paver I set 20 years ago. Beneath it, in lead-lined boxes, was the truth. Thirty-seven years of logs, 4,000 photos, videotapes of him learning, playing, and grieving. They took the specimen, but I held the story.

I spent the afternoon mailing packages to the New York Times, the Smithsonian, and every independent journalist I could find. I sent them everything. As the sun set, I sat on my porch with a whiskey. The woods were empty, but I smiled. The packages were in the system. The truth was hurtling toward the world, and no agent or sniper could stop it now.

They found him, and tomorrow, so will you. The containment truck has vanished, but the echoes of what lived in that barn will never fade.