Wyoming Rancher Reveals 1978 Bigfoot Encounter After 48 Years

There's something about a first-person account from an old rancher that just hits different. I came across this video the other night and ended up watching the whole thing twice. It's a long one, but trust me, you'll want to settle in for this one. The story is told by Roy Coleman, a 78-year-old cattleman from Park County, Wyoming, who finally decided to break his silence about something that happened to him back in October of 1978. He's been sitting on this for 48 years. The only two people who could have backed up his story, his wife Betty and his neighbor Glenn Butler, have both passed on. So now it's just Roy, telling it like it was. The Coleman ranch sits about 14 miles southwest of Meeteetse, on a bench of dry ground that runs from the Greybull River bottom up into the foothills of the Absaroka Range. Roy's grandfather Wallace homesteaded the place back in 1909, and the family has been running cattle on that same ground ever since. By the time Roy took over in 1972, they were running about 600 head of Hereford-Angus cross on ground that climbs from 5,600 feet at the river to nearly 8,000 at the back gate. Above that back gate is the Shoshone National Forest, and above that is country that, as Roy puts it, nobody he knew had ever walked. For anyone familiar with Sasquatch research, the Absaroka Range and the greater Yellowstone ecosystem have long been considered prime territory. The heavy timber, the remote drainages, the elk and deer populations, it all checks the boxes for the kind of habitat these beings are reported to favor. The Shoshone National Forest in particular has been the subject of numerous sighting reports over the decades, and the area around Meeteetse has its own quiet history of encounters that rarely make the news. But what makes Roy's story stand out isn't just where it happened. It's the buildup. For about six weeks before the main event, strange things started happening on the north end of the property. Roy walks through them one by one, and each one is weirder than the last. First, there was a calf. A premature bull calf dropped by one of his heifers in late August. He found it dead the next morning, which wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that it was completely untouched. In late August in Park County, a dead calf on the ground overnight is usually found by coyotes within hours. This one had been dead at least eight or nine hours and not a single thing had touched it. Even stranger, it had been moved about 20 feet from where the heifer had dropped it, and the way it had been placed, legs pointing east, head pointing west, looked, in Roy's words, "arranged, not tossed, not dragged, placed." Then there was the hay bale. One of his 1,000-pound round bales at the bottom of a tight stack in the horse barn had somehow rolled about 10 feet away from where it had been. Roy stood in the doorway with his coffee cup and tried to make sense of it. There was no equipment that had been used, no tracks on the concrete floor, just the marks where the bale had rolled and hay debris. He couldn't think of a single person who could have moved it without equipment, and there was no wind inside a closed barn strong enough to do the job. Then there was Cook. Cook was their eight-year-old border collie, the best cattle dog Roy had ever owned and, as he says, the most sensible animal he had ever known. She had slept on the back porch every night of her life in a wooden crate Roy had made for her. But in mid-September, she stopped going out to the porch. She'd eat her dinner, walk to the back door, look at it, and turn around and walk back into the kitchen. She wanted to be inside. And when Roy would open the back door in the morning to head out to the barn, Cook would come with him, but she'd stay pressed tight against his leg, keeping her eyes fixed on the north end of the property the whole way. She was watching for something specific, and she didn't like what she thought she might see. The horses started acting up too. Through the last week of September, they began coming in from pasture at unusual hours, congregating at the corral gate and standing with their heads over the top rail, ears aimed at the ridge. Roy rode the ridge on September 28th looking for sign, mountain lion, bear, anything that would explain it. He found nothing. No scat, no track, no scrape, no kill site. But the horses stayed uneasy, every morning at the gate, every morning looking north. And then there was Betty. On October 2nd, she came in from bringing in the wash and asked Roy if somebody was putting up a fence up in the high country. She had heard a sound that reminded her of a hammer hitting a post, a series of hits spaced about four seconds apart, coming from up on the ridge. It went on for about half a minute and then stopped. The nearest neighbor in that direction was Glenn Butler, and his operation was two miles the other way. Roy tried to pass it off as an echo from the road. Betty didn't buy it. She stood at the sink looking out the kitchen window at the ridge and said, "Something is going on up there, Roy." And Roy said, "I know." All of this is just the setup. The video goes on to tell what happened on the morning of October 6th, 1978, when Roy went out to check his south fence at 4:20 in the morning and found a baby Sasquatch tangled in the barbed wire. And by first light, its mother was standing 30 yards from his barn door. I won't spoil the rest of it. Roy tells the rest of the story himself, and the way he tells it, with that plain, steady voice of a man who has had nearly half a century to think about every detail, is something you really need to hear for yourself. He talks about the 90 minutes between finding the child and the arrival of the mother, and about a promise he made to himself in the yellow lamplight of his old barn that he has kept every day since. This one stuck with me. There's no monster in it, as Roy says. There's a mother and a child who got caught in wire they didn't understand, and a cattleman who did what any decent man would have done. But the weight of it, the years of silence, the way the strange events stacked up like a warning in the weeks before, it all adds up to something that feels very real and very human. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go find it. It's worth every minute.