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From the High Desert

A Cultural History of Art Bell

Thumbnail for September 9, 2015: Bigfoot in the Back Yard - Elaine

September 9, 2015: Bigfoot in the Back Yard - Elaine

Sep 9, 2015
2h 16m
Elaine
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell welcomes Elaine, a first-time radio guest from rural East Texas, who shares her extraordinary nine-year experience living alongside a Bigfoot and its offspring on her isolated property. After relocating from Hawaii in late 2006, Elaine noticed rabbits being freed from cages, rocks hitting the house, and a persistent feeling of being watched before a face-to-face encounter with a massive, light-colored creature standing over eight feet tall.

Elaine describes the creature as intelligent and aware, capable of unplugging surveillance cameras, avoiding detection, and distinguishing between familiar and unfamiliar vehicles. Her son Sierra corroborates the sightings, recalling glowing yellow eyes behind a hay bale illuminated by a million-candle-power flashlight. The family has collected audio recordings of screams and vocalizations but has been unable to photograph the elusive being.

Callers share their own Bigfoot encounters from across the country, while Elaine reveals unsettling details including a possible assault by a creature years earlier and her decision to leave food offerings as a gesture of coexistence. She expresses a protective instinct toward the creature despite the constant unease it brings to her daily life.

Key Moments

  1. The face-to-face encounter: Leaning against her pickup at night, the four-foot-eleven Elaine watches an over-eight-foot creature with a huge head, no neck, and long pale hair slowly rise from a crouch ten feet away, stare at her for fifteen seconds, then sprint into the darkness.

  2. Offering food, leaving handprints: After the encounter Elaine sets out three foods on a washing machine; the creature takes the pie. Since then it has marked her property with handprints on cars, broken light bulbs, and scat placed deliberately where she will see it.

  3. Surveillance camera unplugged: Elaine's son rigs a camera on the front gate with an extension cord running from the porch. The cord keeps getting unplugged at night, and the creature never appears on film no matter how Elaine baits the yard.

  4. Yellow eyes behind the hay bale: Tipped off by her aggressive puppy, Elaine and her son shine the million-candlepower light from the porch and catch the creature peeking over a round hay bale, its yellow eyes glowing, then slowly sinking down out of sight.

  5. Death of the friend in the woods: Elaine recounts a friend who confided in her about an earlier rape, then was found naked, cut, and scratched by a forest near her home. A week later the friend killed herself with a shotgun. Elaine believes a Bigfoot assaulted her.