23,000 Trail Cameras Recalled After Bigfoot Footage Surfaces

There's a story floating around YouTube right now that's got the whole Bigfoot community buzzing, and honestly, it's one of the most compelling trail camera tales I've come across in a long time. It comes from a channel called Backcountry Mystery Files, and the narrator is a woman named Michelle Dorsy, who spent over a decade working at a trail camera company in Montana. What she has to share about one particular recording is the kind of thing that makes you sit up and pay attention. Michelle ran the returns and repair bench at Tamarak Outdoor Electronics, a company founded by a former elk guide named Frank Sorenson. By 2011, they had 38 employees and had sold tens of thousands of their flagship T9 trail camera, a high-definition model with stereo sound and a powerful infrared flash array of 40 LEDs that could illuminate a deer at 80 feet. It was the best year the company ever had. Then the complaints started rolling in. Bow hunters across the country were reporting the same strange phenomenon. Deer that had been visiting their trails for years suddenly vanished the moment a T9 went up. A woman in Michigan sent footage of a doe feeding peacefully under an apple tree until the camera's flash fired, and the deer bolted like she'd been shot at. By the end of October, Michelle's complaint log had 206 entries. And there was a second category of complaints that gave her pause. Cameras were being found turned around, hanging upside down, or carefully strapped to trees facing the bark. Bears do that sometimes, but these were all T9s, and there were more of them than usual. Here's where it gets really interesting. Michelle brought one of the malfunctioning T9s home to test overnight, and her 14-year-old daughter Amanda walked in from the next room with her hands clamped over her ears. The camera was screaming, she said, a high-pitched whine like a mosquito buzzing right inside her skull. Michelle couldn't hear a thing. Sound familiar? It's the same principle as that old mosquito ringtone teenagers used to set on their phones back in the day, the one only young people could hear because adults lose the upper range of their hearing as they age. A 10-year-old can usually hear up to 20,000 cycles per second, but by 40, most folks can't hear much past 15 or 16,000. Whatever frequency that T9's night flash circuit was emitting, it was right at the edge of adult hearing and well within the range of younger ears. Michelle didn't put it together that night. But something in the remote Yaak Valley, up in the far northwest corner of Montana, was about to put it together for her. On November 14th, a beat-up boot box arrived at her repair bench, taped shut with about a roll of duct tape and addressed in heavy block letters by someone who clearly couldn't see what he was writing. Inside was a T9 still in its strap, a letter on lined notebook paper, and a memory card. The letter was from a 76-year-old man named L. Pruit, who had bought three of these cameras and wanted his money back for all of them. Something kept turning them around to face the tree, he wrote. The first time, he figured it was a bear. But a bear doesn't turn something around careful and leave the strap buckled. The case had four long, evenly spaced scratches down one side. Michelle pulled the card and started reviewing the 612 clips. Most of it was standard Yaak Valley wildlife footage, white-tailed deer, a cow moose with her calf, a pine marten, a black bear, even a grizzly sow with two cubs walking past in broad daylight, which isn't unusual in that part of Montana. Grizzly country has always been grizzly country. But the night clips told a different story. By early October, the deer had completely disappeared from the nighttime footage. The clips that did fire showed empty frames, dark woods lit up gray by the flash with nothing moving. Some had sound. On one clip recorded at 11:40 at night on October 11th, you can hear a long call off in the distance that starts low, swoops up high, and breaks off like a man hollering across a valley, except deeper than any human voice. About ten seconds later, there's an answer from farther off. Then three knocks, loud and hollow, like someone hitting a tree with a baseball bat. On another clip from October 18th, two eyes appear at the very back edge of the flash, maybe 70 feet out. They're glowing white the way eyes do when infrared hits them, side by side, facing the camera, and about seven feet off the ground. They stay there for four seconds, then vanish without anything crossing the frame. Then comes the final clip, recorded at 2:00 in the morning on October 28th. It starts on an empty trail. Then a hand comes into the frame from the left side and fills it. It's a dark hand, so close the camera can't focus on it. You can see the palm, bare with deep creases across it. You can see four fingers, thick as the handle of a hammer, and there's hair on the back of the fingers. The hand takes hold of the camera, and the picture swings sideways fast in a blur of trees. That's the clip that changed everything for Michelle. Because when she finally watched the full 31-second recording, she saw something she hadn't noticed before. A mother walking up to the camera in the dark with her little one stumbling along beside her, crying with both hands clamped over its ears. The mother crouched down, looked straight into the lens, and then reached out, careful as you'd lift a baby bird, and turned the camera around to face the tree. The T9's night flash circuit was emitting a frequency that adults couldn't hear but was painfully loud to younger, more sensitive ears. The deer were fleeing because they could hear it. The Sasquatch family wasn't destroying the camera out of aggression. They were doing what any parent would do. They were silencing something that was hurting their child. By spring of 2012, Tamarak recalled every single T9 they had sold, all 23,000 of them. They told customers it was a battery drain issue, which was technically true. But the real reason lived on a memory card from the Yaak Valley, and Michelle watched that recording more times than she could count during her 11 years at the company. It took her a week to understand what she was seeing, and she needed her 14-year-old daughter to finally explain it to her. Tamarak doesn't really exist anymore. A bigger outdoor company bought them in 2015, folded their cameras into their own line, and shut down the name and website within a year. If you dig around on some of the old hunting forums, you'll still find a few threads where men argue about the Tamarak recall. That's about all that's left. This is one of those stories that stays with you. It's not just about a trail camera malfunction or a corporate cover-up. It's about a mother doing whatever she had to do to protect her young from something that was causing them pain. The Yaak Valley has long been considered one of the most active hotspots in the Pacific Northwest for Sasquatch activity, with researchers like Dr. Robert Pyle having documented extensive reports from the region over the decades. Stories like this one only add to that rich history. If you want to hear Michelle tell it in her own words, the full story is over on the Backcountry Mystery Files channel. Trust me, it's worth every minute.