Retired BC Surveyor Recounts 1972 Bigfoot Encounter Near Terrace

Posted Wednesday, July 08, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

A retired land surveyor from British Columbia has come forward with one of the most unusual pieces of physical evidence ever associated with a Sasquatch encounter, and the story behind it is just as compelling as the object itself. The account comes from Edith Cormier, who spent 33 years working as a land surveyor for the British Columbia Ministry of Lands before retiring in 1994. What makes her testimony so striking isn't just the encounter she describes—it's the artifact she held in her hands and measured with professional precision. The ring in question measured 14mm across its face, which is fairly standard for a man's wedding band from the mid-20th century. But the interior diameter told a completely different story. At 60mm, with a circumference of approximately 7.5 inches, this ring would have required a finger nearly three times the size of an average large man's. Inside the band were 17 groups of three carefully pressed parallel grooves, spaced with a uniformity that Cormier—a woman who spent her career measuring things to exacting standards—found remarkable. The setting for this discovery was a stretch of spruce timber roughly 18 kilometers north of Terrace, BC, an area that has long been considered significant territory for Sasquatch activity in the Pacific Northwest. Cormier and her field partner Gil Pedneau had been dispatched in September 1972 to run a boundary correction on a piece of crown land adjacent to a privately held trapline property belonging to Vera Macintosh, a 63-year-old widow who had lived alone on the land since her husband's death in 1960. What makes this account resonate isn't just the physical evidence—it's the quiet, methodical way Cormier describes what happened. This isn't someone looking for attention or trying to build a narrative around a fleeting glimpse. This is a professional who spent decades recording what instruments showed rather than what she expected them to show. On their first evening at the property, after a supper of moose stew and a companionable silence around the kitchen table, Cormier and Pedneau witnessed something at the south-facing window that she would carry with her for the rest of her life. Approximately 60 meters away, at the edge of the spruce tree line, there was a mass of darkness—upright, approximately 9 feet tall, and perfectly still for what she estimated was 40 seconds. When Vera Macintosh made a small sound from her chair, the figure moved back into the timber with a deliberateness that felt more like stepping away than fleeing. The detail about Vera's reaction is particularly telling. This was a woman who had lived alone in that bush for over a decade. Her response wasn't fear or surprise—it was acknowledgment. The dog, a blue tick coonhound named Reev, had refused to wander toward the tree line that evening, staying within 10 feet of the nearest person and facing the timber throughout. Pedneau passed away in November of last year at 74, having been the only other living person who knew the full account. Cormier, now 79, has begun recording her story into a recorder she keeps on her kitchen table, between the salt cellar and the butter dish. The Terrace area and the surrounding Skeena region have produced numerous credible reports over the decades, and accounts like Cormier's—coming from trained observers with professional measuring instruments—represent exactly the kind of documentation that researchers have long hoped would surface. The oversized ring, with its precise and deliberate interior markings, raises questions that have no easy answers. This is one of those stories that stays with you. The video itself is worth every minute—Cormier's voice carries the weight of someone who measured something impossible and spent decades deciding whether to speak about it. Definitely worth checking out if you haven't already.