Suquamish, Washington - July 2000

Forest manager David Mills reported seeing a creature in late June. Suquamish police told him there have been several similar reports lately.

As a forestry manager with the Suquamish Indian tribe, Mills knows his way around the woods. So he's positive that what he saw was a sasquatch, a large, mysterious ape-like creature also known as bigfoot. He was checking out some young trees and kept hearing a noise in the woods. But when he'd turn, he wouldn't see anything.

Then the hair on the back of his neck stood up. "I watched this hairy thing on two legs," he said. "It used its left arm to lift up a branch and walked about 50 feet. He turned in my direction and saw I was watching him, and ducked behind a tree." Mills snuck into the tree line and moved closer to the creature. It started screeching and pounding on the back of a tree with what sounded like a rock, he said. He kept trying to get closer, but the sasquatch would make a ruckus every time he took a few steps.

Then he heard the woofing and jaw-smacking he recognized as a bear to his left. As he moved, he realized he'd come within six metres of its cub. The mother bear came out of the brush, but she ignored Mills — an odd move for a bear with a stranger between her and her cub. "Her anger wasn't directed at me, it was...to the right, at the noise it(sasquatch) was making behind the tree," he said.

With two bears and a sasquatch nearby, Mills decided it was time to leave. "I flew down that hill. Then I just hopped in my truck and locked up the gate and left the area." The creature was nearly three metres tall and had black, shiny fur all over its body, Mills said. The screeching sounds it made matched those he's heard of a sasquatch recorded years ago on the Lummi Indian reservation near Bellingham.

It also looked just like the other one he says he saw while working in the Olympics for the National Forest Service in 1995. It was kneeling by a creek when he and another worker came upon it, and it took one look at them and disappeared in two steps. When he reported his June sighting to the police in Suquamish, a village 20 kilometers northwest of Seattle across Puget Sound, an officer said he wasn't the only person to see a sasquatch in the area lately.

When Patrick Julian heard Mills' story, he went to see for himself. Julian is a volunteer field investigator with a group called Bigfoot Central. "David was very credible," Julian said. "


He sees bears back in the woods, he knows the difference between bears and bigfoot." Plus, there was a partial footprint in a muddy patch where Mills said he saw the creature. The track was 18 centimeters wide, which would make the foot about 40 centimeters long, Julian said.

Published © THE PROVINCE Newspaper, British Columbia, Canada - July 14, 2000, article courtesy George Raitt, leeraitt@telus.net

Report taken by Bobbie Short Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 13:33:10