Sasquatch

If I could get it off here.

There you go.

This is what people claim they saw,

you know, when they see a Bigfoot.

Gimlin and Roger asked me if I'd wear the suit, you know,

and promised me to give me a thousand bucks, you know,

for 10 minutes work. What the heck?

That's kinda the way that we got,

you know, mixed up in the Bigfoot thing.

But they said you can't tell anybody anything.

Nothing. No. Nothing.

I said, "Okay, I won't."

So, for 35 years, I kept it, you know.

I denied it that was me,

and I denied it, you know, all those years.

"Well, we know it was you."

"No, you know, you're full of beans."

I put my legs in

and then I put my arms in and then I stood up,

and they zipped it up, and then the head went on last.

I walked across there and it only took one shot

of me going across there.

It was hot, you know. I was afraid of getting shot,

by, you know, a hunter or something out there with a rifle.

For people to say, "Well, it had to be somebody in a suit" and stuff,

I said, "That just... ".

I could tell if there was somebody in a suit.

There was no such thing.

I could just see everything moving

underneath the hair and the muscle and.

"Have him look at my right hip."

I had my jeans on. It was my wallet.

He knows it was me.

Bob Heironimus is not a very big guy.

He probably only stands about five-foot-nine or -ten.

Come to find out, well, you know,

in the last, years,

he just lives down the road from me a ways.

He's my neighbor, but, um, I still wave at him

when I go by and.

He won't speak to me or...

Or he drives by, he won't look at me and...

What?

Yeah, he has waved a few times, but he won't look this way.

The film footage actually speaks for itself.

Not knowing sometimes does create

a doubt if there is such a thing.

If somebody comes up to me and says,

"Well, that was fake," I'll just say, "Well,

so be it."

You know?

"If you can prove it, then prove it."

I'd been chasing this crazy fucking story

I heard in the fall of 1993

about a Sasquatch

tearing three guys apart on a cannabis farm

in Mendocino County.

And after weeks of trying, finally got a hit

on somebody that had heard the story.

This guy Razor, he keyed in on, "Yeah, that rings a bell."

And he had two critical pieces of new information.

One was the three guys that were killed were Mexicans

and two,

that the location was not only Mendocino County

but specifically Spy Rock Road.

Now, private investigator that I hired

kinda disappeared for a couple weeks,

and then he just came across with this text

that was like, A, saying that he quit

and B, like,

you are venturing into dangerous territory with this investigation.

He won't return my phone calls. He won't return my texts.

He won't answer my emails.

Like, nothing.

Hello.

Hey, man, this is David Holthouse.

I don't know what your schedule's looking like

next few weeks, you know, a month out, something like that

but if, is there anyway we could knock around a bit

together up in Mendo?

Yeah. Yeah.

The next step is to find out

what was going on with Mexicans working on dope farms

in Mendocino County.

What kind of shit was going on at Spy Rock Road in the early '90s?

You look at local news coverage going back decades,

you know, stabbing on Spy Rock, shooting on Spy Rock,

murder on Spy Rock.

Spy Rock. Spy Rock. Spy Rock.

Tell me about Spy Rock Road

and what makes it different

than other areas in Humboldt or Mendocino.

Well, it's a... I mean, back then especially,

you're pretty cut off, you know.

So you go up there and make a commitment to grow,

you're not gonna be coming down

every couple of days to get something.

You go up the mountain a little ways

and it's the Hells Angels controls that part of the mountain.

So it's a rough and tumble mountain.

It's a mountain where there's always been rumors

that why everyone else was getting robbed and home invasions,

it didn't go on up there.

Because it was protected in a way by the locals.

It was one of those areas where there was a potential

for a heightened amount of violence.

It wasn't the first time I heard someone got killed up there.

It's not that hard to grow cannabis.

But to... finish it

and to protect it while it's growing

that starts to add elements

of, danger and skill

that are necessary to, like, pull it off.

I mean, you had to control your farm,

you had to control your area.

You know? If you can't instill respect from your neighbor,

you... then you gotta instill fear in them.

Early '90s, it's like full-on militarization

of the war on drugs, right?

Was it like being occupied by...

Yeah, I mean, there would be armored personnel vehicles,

you know, and

I mean, I, I remember the word eradication was

the word that they used the most back then.

They, they were hell-bent on eradicating the cannabis plant.

It was like you were,

you were trying to be a farmer in a war zone.

The interdiction efforts by the DEA and CAMP

put a lot of pressure on the community,

and so there's a lot of community trauma

that's been, just layered

over the years.

Before I got to the Emerald Triangle in 1993,

I had this vision of it being

this sort of dope-growing peaceful utopia.

I didn't know the reality of the place,

which was that

they were all carrying guns.

All these Back to the Land hippies,

these guys were all armed.

Heavily armed in a lot of cases.

You know, listening to The Grateful Dead

but packing an AR-15.

And then

there were the booby traps.

One of the jobs on the farm

was to check, maintain, and install booby traps.

Okay.

And we visited a couple other farms

to help string fishhooks on fishing line about eye level

around cannabis patches.

They also were setting small-game traps

and installing motion sensors around the perimeter.

This was the era of CAMP and Operation Green Sweep.

The DEA had made weed

a top priority in the war on drugs.

So paranoia was running high.

Um, for those who don't know, what was CAMP?

CA... CAMP stood for the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting.

And it was a multi-agency task force that was developed in 1982,

to eradicate marijuana in California.

In the same Northern California hills

where the giant redwoods have grown for centuries

are now hidden patch after patch of marijuana plants,

known here as Humboldt Gold. America's most potent

and profitable variety of the illegal drug.

This week, law enforcement authorities have moved into Humboldt County

in a major raid to begin chopping down and clearing out

the clandestine croplands.

The first time I heard about CAMP

was when I saw helicopters landing

in the meadow of the school, where our kids went to school.

That was my first experience,

hearing that whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp,

which is terrifying.

They shake the whole hillside.

They were in full combat regalia with automatic rifles,

hanging off the side of it, just staring back at me.

Sometimes the soldiers would come down the rope ladders

and just demolish everything.

They would just go from one farm to the next.

Your whole year could be wiped out in the space of an afternoon,

and that's what happened to a lot of people.

Welcome to the Emerald Triangle.

The war on drugs disturbs me.

It seems wrong to me that the government can go to war

against its own citizens.

One drug agent said using the military

to go after gardens planted by a bunch of aging hippies

is like using a Howitzer to kill a gnat.

You've got these people in armored helicopter gunships, you know.

They're hanging out, you know, with their automatic weapons, you know.

It's like don't hit a bump, you know, and nail my wife and kids.

Some friends of mine were chased out of their house

and across the meadow,

carrying their baby in their arms, by a helicopter.

Their attitude has been we can do anything we want.

If people happen to live in an area

where marijuana is being grown, they don't have rights.

I don't know what motivated the camp officers