A retired U.S. Army sergeant who once dismissed Bigfoot as nonsense says a 25-second encounter during a military exercise three decades ago upended everything he thought he knew, and he's watching new reports out of Ohio with keen interest.
Todd Neiss, now the founder and head of the American Primate Conservancy, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends First" that he and three fellow soldiers came face to face with three creatures in the Oregon Coast Range in 1993 while conducting an exercise involving high explosives. The encounter, he said, turned a committed skeptic into a full-time researcher.
His account comes as investigators in Ohio field a fresh wave of reported sightings, eight in March alone, and a local television station reports witnesses have turned up tracks and audio recordings of unexplained howls in the Northeast Ohio woods. Whether you find the claims credible or not, the people making them are not fringe loners. They include military veterans and organized research groups willing to put their names on the record.
Neiss described his 1993 encounter in plain terms. He and three other soldiers were working with high explosives in the Oregon Coast Range when they came upon what he called three creatures whose proportions did not match anything human.
As Fox News Digital reported, Neiss said on air:
"All that changed for me in 1993 while conducting a military exercise in the Oregon Coast Range. Those 25 seconds changed the entire course of my life."
He offered specific physical descriptions. The creatures, he said, ranged between seven and nine feet tall. Their builds did not look human.
"Their silhouette was completely disproportionate in terms of the arm length and even the length of the legs as it pertains to a human torso."
Neiss went further, describing what he observed of their appearance:
"The ones I saw range between seven to nine feet in height. They do tend to have a more human-like face, but obviously just hair-covered, very large, very athletic."
Since that day, Neiss has conducted long-term expeditions in Northern California, Arizona, Alaska, and the Cascade and Blue Mountain ranges. He is no longer a casual observer. He built an organization around the question.
Neiss told Fox News that Ohio ranks fourth in the nation for reported Bigfoot sightings, a claim that may surprise people who associate the phenomenon primarily with the Pacific Northwest. But the Buckeye State has generated enough activity to support multiple independent research groups.
Earlier this year, investigators with the Ohio Squatch Project, assisted by the Bigfoot Society, looked into eight sightings reported in March. The reports were concentrated enough to draw organized field investigation.
Then, on a recent Sunday, Cleveland's FOX 8 reported that witnesses in Northeast Ohio had found what they described as new evidence: tracks on the ground and audio recordings of howls they could not explain. The local report added fresh fuel to a story that had already been building through the spring.
Mike Miller, co-founder of the Ohio Night Stalkers Bigfoot Research Group, offered a theory for the uptick. He suggested a difficult winter may have pushed the alleged creatures into more populated areas, or that they were rearing their young in locations closer to human activity. Neither explanation has been independently verified, but Miller's group has been working the Ohio woods long enough to have a framework for what they observe.
The obvious question, the one skeptics ask first and never stop asking, is why, in an age of trail cameras, drones, and smartphones, no one has produced definitive photographic or video evidence. Neiss addressed it directly.
"They're just a very rare species. It's just the odds of getting one to fall just right through that particular picture zone. It's very, very difficult."
That answer will not satisfy everyone. It is, at minimum, an honest acknowledgment of the gap between what eyewitnesses claim and what technology has confirmed. Neiss did not pretend the evidence was settled. He said the species is rare and hard to capture on camera, a claim that is, by its nature, difficult to disprove or confirm.
No government agency has weighed in on the Ohio reports. No official investigation has been announced. The sightings exist in the space between personal testimony and institutional verification, a space that has defined this subject for decades.
Strip away the cultural baggage around the word "Bigfoot" and what remains is a straightforward set of facts. A retired Army sergeant with no apparent financial motive went on national television and described, in specific detail, what he says he saw during a military exercise thirty-two years ago. Multiple independent groups in Ohio have logged and investigated a cluster of recent reports. A local news station covered witness claims of physical evidence.
None of this constitutes proof. But the people involved are not anonymous internet posters. They are named individuals affiliated with named organizations, making specific claims in public, the kind of testimony that, in any other context, would at least warrant a serious hearing.
The open questions are obvious. What independent verification exists for Neiss' 1993 account beyond his own testimony? What specific locations in Northeast Ohio produced the recent reports? What happened to the tracks and audio recordings FOX 8 described? These are questions that deserve answers, not dismissal.
Neiss has spent three decades and considerable personal effort investigating a question most of polite society refuses to take seriously. He has led expeditions across multiple states and built a research organization from scratch. Whatever one thinks of the underlying claim, that is not the behavior of a man running a con. It is the behavior of a man who saw something he cannot explain and refused to look away.
In a country that spends billions chasing answers to questions far less interesting, a retired sergeant asking people to keep their eyes open in the woods hardly seems like the most unreasonable request on the table.
