‘I don’t want any trouble’: How I was mistaken for Bigfoot
A plumber from Minneapolis — who claims he has seen Bigfoot — was wearing a homemade suit of raccoon pelts in the woods of North Carolina when a group of Bigfoot hunters mistook him for the legendary beast.
Gawain MacGregor, 36, said he was alone Friday night in McDowell County, northeast of Asheville, when he donned his furry suit to perform a shamanistic ritual.
“This particular night, I heard some sounds and I saw some lights,” MacGregor told The Post. “We were both startled and rather than to say anything, I just turned around and swiftly went back to my tent and went to sleep. They didn’t communicate anything with me and then I saw on the news that they reported seeing a Sasquatch, so I called the cops and gave them the deal.”
That prompted John Bruner of Bigfoot 911 to post on the group’s Facebook page that he spotted the beast during a search with his team, claiming that he saw “details of the creature,” including its face and hair, which was “matted and stringy.”
“The eyes were farther apart than human eyes,” Bruner wrote on the group’s page, according to the Charlotte Observer.
Police in Greenville, South Carolina, then issued a tongue-in-cheek warning on its Facebook page on Tuesday with video from nearby Boone, North Carolina, of another possible Bigfoot sighting from 2015.
“I think we can say with some confidence that proof of Bigfoot still eludes us,” the post read. “If you see Bigfoot, please do not shoot at him/her, as you’ll most likely be wounding a fun-loving and well-intentioned person, sweating in a gorilla costume.”
MacGregor, who claims he’s had Sasquatch encounters in three states, said he has been wearing the suit more than five years and has seen people in wooded areas before, some of whom have asked for pictures. Never before have those encounters led to any type of confrontation or warnings — sarcastic or otherwise — from law enforcement agencies, he said.
“I said, ‘Hey, I’m just letting you know that the story in the news about Sasquatch was me, and just to set the record straight, I don’t want any trouble,’” MacGregor recalled of his discussion with police. “’But I also don’t want any misinformation out there.’ I’m not sure they took me too seriously.”
MacGregor said he’s had encounters with Sasquatch, whom he characterized as an “angel of the forest” rather than a flesh-and-blood animal, in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
“I’ve never communicated with him, I’ve only looked him in the eye,” he said. “I don’t think that Sasquatch is an animal. You have all these sightings and no one has been able to find a body. So, you either have these encounters that aren’t real or there’s a supernatural explanation.”
But Bruner doubled down on his take on the alleged sighting on Thursday, saying there are a “few problems” with MacGregor’s version of events.
“The creature that I saw was 8′ tall with stringy matted hair,” Bruner posted on Facebook. “The gentleman in the picture [doesn’t] appear [to be] tall and is in a suit that appears to have short brown fur.”
The beast that the Bigfoot 911 group saw, according to Bruner, moved in a way that no human could and had no hair on its face, unlike MacGregor’s homemade suit.
“As I said we tracked this creature for over an hour without seeing anything again,” Bruner wrote. “Folks I am not making any money here I do this because I love it, I am trying to solve a mystery for me … and why anybody would say this is beyond me, It makes me question whether I will post further expedition findings on social media.”