OntarioSasquatch

Since May of 2004, I have been involved in an active field location in northern Michigan. Members of our research team are from Michigan, Indiana and myself, Pat Barker, from Ontario.

There is a long history of unknown animal activity in the area. The landowner and his family have had sightings since the 1970's (and possibly earlier). There have also been sightings by other people living in the area and incidents involving multiple witnesses. The location is confidential to protect the privacy of the landowner and his family, and team members have signed confidentiality/non-disclosure agreements (NDA's) to that effect.

We have been employing a variety of methods at the field site including baiting, multiple trail camera deployments both when we are present and when we are not on site, stake-outs, and nightly continuous digital sound recording. We keep an hourly journal during each field research trip and make detailed field notes that include weather and temperature conditions, moon phases, other known animal calls and all physical evidence we find. We even note the foods we cook at Base Camp throughout each day. We have created maps based on satellite imagry of the field location, and plot where activity and creature movements seem to be occuring on active nights.

This ongoing field study location has yielded many excellent recordings of vocalizations from "something" that we haven't yet identified. You'll hear several different types of vocalizations in these recordings, sometimes from multiple individuals. Often they include physical interaction with the environment in the form of knocking on trees, branch breaking, and at times severe thrashing of brush.

The recordings consist of screams, whoops, grunts, huffs, hisses, jabbering, very low guttural growling sounds, and on occasion extremely quiet "rumbling". Often, all of these sounds are heard in a short time frame. There are also several incidents of loud branch breaking and tree knocking that occur during the vocalizations.

We have had wildlife biologists as well as ornithologists listen to some of these recordings, and none have come up with a source animal. Two respected university bioacoustics laboratories looked at the recordings and in both cases no matches to known wildlife were found.

While we haven't yet definitively identified the source of the vocalizations, two of our team members have had sightings through night vision of something very tall, dark, and massive in close association with vocal displays. Two other team members had a nighttime sighting, close to the campfire light, without night vision in the summer of 2008. One team member had a daytime sighting in the summer of 2005. And another team member had a recent nighttime sighting in the highbeams of his vehicle in July of 2009.

Still, we are reluctant to state conclusively that the vocalizations are being made by this creature, since we have not yet seen it making these calls. As a team, and down to our last member, we are well known for being skeptical of so-called evidence. This is why we are careful to not make grand statements as to what this phenomena is unless or until we have more solid physical evidence to substantiate any claims.

We are making these recordings public now in the spirit of sharing with fellow researchers and in an effort to learn if others have heard sounds like these. If you have heard similar sounds, either as a field researcher, or as someone who was just camping or otherwise enjoying the outdoors, we hope that you will contact us either at this website, or by using the Contact Us page on The Michigan Recording Project website.

Here is the link : The Michigan Recording Project