Wildlife Biologist Shares 1972 Bigfoot Encounter After 52 Years

There's something about a firsthand account from a seasoned wildlife biologist that hits differently, and this one stopped me in my tracks. A video surfaced on YouTube featuring an 81-year-old man named Ray Plunkett, who spent 31 years working as a contract wildlife biologist across the Columbia Basin and the eastern Washington shrub-steppe. For 52 years, he held onto a secret about why the proposed Ben Franklin Dam on the Columbia River was never built, and he finally decided to share it. Back in 1972, Ray was 30 years old and working for a small environmental consulting firm out of Richland, Washington. The Army Corps of Engineers had contracted his employer to conduct baseline wildlife surveys along the 51-mile Hanford Reach, the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River in the lower 48 states above Bonneville Dam. The data was needed for the environmental impact statement on the proposed dam, which would have been placed at rivermile 348, right near where the Yakima River joins the Columbia. The dam, if built, would have flooded the greatest remaining Chinook salmon spawning ground on the upper Columbia. Ray and his partner Dale Cooper, a 27-year-old methodical field biologist from Ellensburg, spent six weeks out on that river in September and October of 1972, living in a canvas wall tent in a cottonwood grove, working their way north along the reach in sections. What makes this account so compelling is the setting. The Hanford Reach had been almost completely inaccessible to the public since 1943 when the Manhattan Project cleared the area for a buffer zone around the Hanford nuclear reservation. Thirty years of zero human presence, no hunting pressure, no recreational access, no roads. Just 60-foot basalt cliffs, sage brush, mule deer, coyotes, and silence so deep it had weight to it. The kind of place where anything wanting to remain unseen had decades of uninterrupted practice at doing exactly that. Ray describes the morning the survey was shut down in vivid detail. The site foreman drove his truck right to the water's edge, something you weren't supposed to do, and told them to pack their gear and be at the staging area by noon. No explanation, no paperwork, just that look on a man's face when he's been told something he doesn't want to pass on but has no choice but to pass it on anyway. Four days earlier, Ray and Dale had been working on the gravel bar at the north end of the reach when something came out of the basalt rimrock above them. It stood about 40 feet away, looked at them, looked at the survey stakes they had driven into the salmon reds the week before, and then looked at them again. When it turned and walked back up the talus slope into the shadow of the rimrock, neither man spoke for a long time. They just stood there in the cold Columbia River morning with the smell of sage brush and river water around them and the absolute certainty that they had seen something the project could not survive the disclosure of. The Ben Franklin Dam limped through core feasibility studies for another decade but was never built. The Hanford Reach was eventually protected as the Hanford Reach National Monument in the year 2000, and over 80% of the upper Columbia's remaining wild fall Chinook salmon still spawn there today. Ray mentions there are a dozen official explanations for why that river was never dammed: environmental opposition, salmon fisheries, the Hanford nuclear waste problem (the proposed reservoir would have raised the water table under some of the most contaminated soil in the Western Hemisphere). All of that is true, he says. But at 81 years old, he's done holding back the other reason. This is the kind of story that makes you pause. A credible witness with decades of professional field experience, describing an encounter in terrain that fits everything we know about where Sasquatch tends to avoid human contact. The Hanford Reach in 1972 was essentially a 51-mile corridor of untouched wilderness flanked by cliffs, with no roads, no public access, and three decades of accumulated silence. If there was ever a place where something could live completely undisturbed, that was it. The detail about the survey stakes is particularly interesting. Ray specifically notes that the figure looked at the stakes they had driven into the salmon reds, the markers documenting the spawning grounds that would have been destroyed by the reservoir. Whether you read that as curiosity, recognition, or something more deliberate, it's the kind of detail that sticks with you. The full account is worth sitting down for. Ray's storytelling is unhurried and precise, the way someone who spent decades writing field notes might talk. He paints the Columbia Basin in September with the kind of texture you don't usually get in these accounts, the constant rush of the river filling the canyon wall to wall, the nights so dark the stars above the canyon walls felt close enough to touch, the bologna sandwiches and Olympia beer at 4 p.m. that were just Dale being Dale. It's rare to hear a story like this from someone with Ray's professional background. Wildlife biologists don't typically go public with accounts like this, and the fact that he waited 52 years says something about how certain he was about what he saw.