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By Hal McKenzie
Gorillas have Diane Fossey, chimpanzees have Jane Goodall, and that elusive primate known as bigfoot or sasquatch has Mary Green of Algood, Tenn. Green, who proudly bills herself the "Tennessee Bigfoot Lady," is author of the book 50 years with Bigfoot: Tennessee Chronicles of Coexistence.
According to the book, deep in the mountains of east Tennessee the Carter family has been giving food and shelter to bigfoot since about 1947. It started when farmer Robert Carter Sr. found and took in an injured male juvenile, keeping him in his barn until the young one's parents, making loud calls, trashed the building to get him out.
Over the years that young bigfoot, whom Carter called "his fox" so as not to alarm his relatives and neighbors, kept up a relationship with Carter and his family which continues today after Carter's death in 1996. Physical evidence of the bigfoots' presence includes hair samples, scat, footprints and an eviscerated calf, photos of which are posted on Green's website.
Green says she obtained DNA samples that are now being processed. In a recent e-mail to this writer, she writes, "we are still continuing with the DNA testing and have some preliminary results in. We will not have the complete results for a few months yet for as you well know, it takes a lot of expense, time, and expertise to do this type of testing with controls. After the full results are completed there will be a scientific paper presented on the results."
Carter's granddaughter, Janice Carter Coy, has continued the family tradition of feeding the creatures, "but the bigfoot there have not been seen as frequently lately due to the summer season. Janice fed them every day last winter and they continued to come up to eat what she put out for them up until late spring 2003. Now there is an abundant food supply so there is no need for them to come in until late fall again for supplemental food. I'm certain the bigfoot survive without this, but those on the farm have been habituated to feedings and humans," she said.
Neighbors also continue to report sightings, which Coy is collecting. "The young female believed to be the daughter of the old male Fox has a young one now," believed to be 3-4 months old. "She has run a close neighbor, a young man with a chain saw, away when he attempted to cut wood on his property. She came running from out of the woods and chased him away," she wrote.
Neighbors also continue to report their cattle killed and eviscerated in the same fashion as one
photographed by bigfoot researcher David Mann this summer.
"Janice and I will be speaking at Eric Altman's PA conference in September. Here's the link to his web site. For more information on the speakers and details about the conference, check the Fifth Annual East Coast Conference link."
Green says bigfoot evidence is also still being found in Overton County, Tenn., where she has been carrying on research for many years. She said Sherry Lee Malin, who spoke at the Alternate Realities Conference in Roan Mountain, Tenn., in June had some contact with bigfoot in the county. "Several times she has been out on an all night investigations and had rocks thrown or rolled at her feet in the dark from an unknown creature, and seeing as how this is what Bigfoot loves to do, we are certain this is what is occurring."
Coy originally contacted Green, who was already known in bigfoot research circles, by e-mail. She wrote that when she was seven years old, she literally ran into a bigfoot when picking blackberries with Carter, whom she called Papaw. "All of a sudden I ran into this Bigfoot's knee area. Smack! It backed up a few steps and turned toward me. I was frozen stiff. …. I must have made some type of sound at some point because Papaw came to me. Papaw got in front of me and just stared at it at first then started talking to it like he did to the young spooked horses he owned and trained at the time. It did move off after a time and looked back at us the whole time until it disappeared from sight behind some trees."
A year later, she observed Carter feeding table scraps to the bigfoot. The bigfoot also took to sleeping under a trailer on the property. "We had to keep putting up the underpinning and taping up one of the heating vent ducts every day for the winter of 1995. Once it was still there when I went under to place the vent back up. I got Papaw to come out and get it out from under the trailer that day."
When Carter fell ill with the cancer that killed him in 1996, Fox left a dent in the top of the trailer. "I think Bigfoot was looking for Papaw to feed it as this was winter and cold and it may have even missed him," she said.
David Mann took two trips to the Carter farm to try and obtain thermal video of the creature at night, but failed. In a brief report posted to the media in Oregon, Mann writes: "bigfoots will not tolerate having a camera pulled on them, and they definitely will not pose or stand out in the open. They may be hand-fed but they are not tame. They always remain wary and hidden," compounded by their nocturnal habits.
"They do have bigfoots all over that place. It is the real deal. No, I did not see one or get any video. My timing was bad; also I probably set up too slow on my first trip, just after sunset, and missed my only opportunity to catch action at the feed bucket.
"On my second trip, they had completely left the farm and gone off raiding the neighborhood 3 days before I got there. One neighbor was missing milk cows, another could not find some of his goats. Mainly what I saw on the farm were huge tracks in the red mud, scores of old and new twisted cedars, and a hayloft full of grizzly-sized or gorilla-sized scat. They call that the poop barn. It smells like it has long been abandoned to bigfoots."
Although he didn't get his photos, one of the creatures left him a "gift." On his first trip, "there was a freshly killed calf lying in the woodlot where I was camped, minus its liver. My stomach could almost feel how its abdomen was ripped open, the guts neatly scooped and set aside, the liver drawn quietly and bloodlessly out and carried away in a huge paw. Must have done it just before dawn, when I was snoring. Considering where they left it, this calf seemed meant for me."
Copies of the book 50 years with Bigfoot: Tennessee Chronicles of Coexistence are still available and can be ordered by clicking here.
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