What to do if you see something

Whatever you saw, the evidence decays fast. Tracks fill, light changes, and your memory begins rewriting itself within minutes, which is not a character flaw but a well-documented property of memory. This page is what to do about that. It is written to be useful whether the thing you saw was a sasquatch, a bear, or something you never do identify.

The first ten minutes

1. Stop and write the time down. Time, date, exact location, weather, light. Do it before

anything else, on your phone or on paper. Everything else you remember will be anchored to this and it is the first thing to go.

1. Stay where you are and photograph from where you stood. Not from closer. Your distance

from the subject is a fact worth preserving, and walking toward it destroys the one measurement nobody can reconstruct later.

1. Film, do not photograph. Video with continuous audio captures more, and it timestamps

itself. Hold still and keep it running, even after the subject is gone. Say aloud what you are seeing while you see it. That narration is worth more than the footage.

1. Get a scale reference into the frame. This is the single most valuable thing you can do

and almost nobody does it. Put a person, a pack, a hat or a water bottle in the shot at the same distance. Without a scale reference, a photograph cannot establish size, and size is the entire claim.

1. Do not shout at it, chase it, or throw anything. Large animals are dangerous in

proportion to how cornered they feel, and the overwhelming likelihood is that you are looking at a bear.

What to photograph, in order

• The subject, with scale in frame.
• The subject's immediate surroundings, wide, so the position can be found again.
• Any tracks, each one twice: once with a ruler or a known object beside it, once without.
• The whole trackway from the side, showing the line of travel.
• Where you were standing, looking toward where it was.
• Anything broken, bent, pushed over, or scraped, with scale.

Tracks

If there are tracks, they are the only thing you can bring home. Handle them well.

• Photograph before you touch anything. Casting destroys the original.
• Include a scale in every track photograph. A tape measure, a dollar bill, a phone. A

photograph of a footprint without scale is decoration.

• Measure and write down: length, width at the ball, width at the heel, depth, the distance

between consecutive prints, and whether the trackway is a straight line or staggered.

• Note the substrate. Soft mud exaggerates length and depth substantially. A track in mud

is not comparable to a track in firm sand, and a great deal of bad analysis comes from treating them as though they were.

• Casting: dental stone if you have it, plaster of Paris if you do not. Frame the print with

a strip of cardboard, mix to a heavy-cream consistency, pour gently from a low height onto a spoon or your hand so the stream does not punch the detail out, and leave it a full thirty minutes before lifting. Do not clean it in the field. Let it cure a day and brush it dry.

• Note that fine surface detail on a cast is unreliable. Casting itself can produce

ridge-like artifacts that look like skin texture, which is a documented problem, so treat any apparent dermal detail as a question rather than a finding.

Before you conclude anything

Ask these honestly. They are not an insult, they are what an investigator will ask anyway.

• How far away, really? Pace it out. Estimated distances are usually short by a lot.
• How long did you see it? Count it out loud. Encounters that feel like a minute are often four

seconds.

• What was the light? Below a certain level your color vision is simply not operating.
• Was there anything in the frame to judge size against?
• Could it have been a bear standing up? A bear with mange looks almost nothing like a bear.

This accounts for a very large share of sightings, and there is a statistical argument that it accounts for most of them.

• Is there any chance somebody is having you on?

If the answer to the last few is "no, and I still do not know what it was," that is a perfectly respectable place to end up. "I do not know" is an answer, and it is a much stronger one than a confident identification that does not survive follow-up.

Who to tell

• This site. The report form goes to a person, not a database. Accounts are

published under a first name and last initial, as accounts rather than as evidence.

• The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization takes reports by county and sometimes sends an

investigator. Their database is the largest public one and is listed in the Library.

• Your state wildlife agency, if there is a carcass, a depredation, or anything involving an

animal that might actually be dangerous. They will not investigate a sasquatch report and will say so, but a bear behaving oddly is genuinely their business.

• Nobody at all, if you would rather not. A great many people wait decades, and the reason

is usually the reception they expect. That reception is a real problem in this field and it is not one this site is going to add to.