A U.S. Army veteran turned Sasquatch hunter opens up about his terrifying encounter with “Bigfoot” while camping along a deserted forest road.
Electrician Kelly Stolp, 45, has been searching for a Sasquatch since hearing one scream four summers ago in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
Stolp is an avid outdoorsman from Montana. He has encountered many wild animals, but he has never been so impressed by what he saw on the evening of July 17, 2020.
He was camping with his two sons and nephew, along with an old army buddy, Mike Palagi, and his fiancée, when they experienced what he calls “the founding incident.”
Stolp said it was around 3 a.m. when they were woken up by the yeti-like scream. “It sounded like a washboard sound, like a brat-tat-tat, but it was so guttural,” he said. Oregon Alive.
A US Army veteran turned Sasquatch hunter has opened up about his terrifying encounter with ‘Bigfoot’ while camping along a deserted forest road
Kelly Stolp, 45, has been searching for a Sasquatch since hearing one scream four summers ago in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest
“I don’t know if I thought about Sasquatch,” he added. “I thought about fear.”
Stolp grabbed his shotgun and shouted to his fellow campers. But they had drunk a bottle of Pendleton whiskey and did not wake up immediately.
The next night, around the same time, the experience repeated itself.
“The next night, let’s say I left Pendleton,” Palagi, 38, told Oregon Live. “So I heard the croaking. It seemed to be higher up, not on the ground.”
Palagi’s fiancée, Olivia Corbin, also said she heard the sound. “It sounded like it was running past our heads,” she said. “Really heavy on our feet. We could feel the ground moving as it ran past the tent.”
The two army veterans came out of the tent to scout the area and Palagi admitted they were “scared to death.”
“It’s very, very dark, but you could still hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It wasn’t a quadruped. It was a bipedal thing,” he told Oregon Live.
And then it disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Stolp said he told the incident only to his wife and a small group of close friends because he didn’t want people to think he was crazy.
One of his confidants was 31-year-old Tanner Hoskins, who wanted to get to the bottom of the mysterious experience.
In August 2020, they returned to the site of the sighting, but the Bigfoot did not return.
Electrician Kelly Stolp, 45, has been searching for a Sasquatch since hearing one scream four summers ago in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest (pictured), Washington
Tanner Hoskins, 31, joined his friend Stolp’s search for Bigfoot after the grisly sighting in 2020
Determined to learn more, Hoskins launched a website called Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search to gather more information.
“We started getting reports almost immediately,” Hoskins told Oregon Live.
A deputy sheriff reported hearing an identical brat-tat-tat sound near Saddle Mountain in northwestern Oregon, while another camper said he saw a furry bipedal creature outside Vernonia.
The website was flooded with over 100 reports of alien images and sounds.
“It brought magic back into my life in a way,” Stolp said of the 2020 meeting that sparked their quest.
“The mystery came back, because it didn’t exist before. It’s like I’m a kid again.”
Washington, with 713 all-time sightings, leads the country with the most Bigfoot reports, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. California was second with 461 and Florida was third with 339.