45-Year-Old Army Veteran Recounts Terrifying Encounter With ‘Bigfoot’ While Camping Along Deserted Forest Road… And The Terrifying Sounds The Creature Made

A U.S. Army veteran turned Sasquatch hunter opens up about his terrifying encounter with “Bigfoot” while camping along a deserted forest road.

Kelly Stolp, 45, has been searching for a Sasquatch since he first heard one screaming four summers ago in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

Stolp, an avid outdoorsman and electrician from Montana, was camping with his two sons, nephew, fiancé and old Army buddy Mike Palagi in July 2020 when they experienced what he calls “the founding incident.”

He said he woke up around 3 a.m. to a “raised” yeti-like scream and the sound of a “heavy-footed” creature running past them. “It sounded like a washboard sound, like a brat-tat-tat, but it was so guttural,” Stolp said. Oregon Alive.

The next night, around the same time, the experience repeated itself.

A U.S. Army veteran turned Sasquatch hunter has spoken candidly about his terrifying encounter with “Bigfoot” while camping along a deserted forest road. Pictured is “Bigfoot” as seen in the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Film, which shows a suspected Sasquatch spotted in Bluff Creek, California

Kelly Stolp, 45, has been searching for a Sasquatch since hearing one scream four summers ago in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest

Stolp first heard the suspected Sasquatch on July 17, 2020, when the creature’s screams woke him up.

He grabbed his shotgun and shouted to his campmates, but they had drunk a bottle of Pendleton whiskey and did not wake up immediately. He went out of the tent to look, but found nothing.

“I don’t know if I thought about Sasquatch,” he recalled. “I thought about fear.”

The next night, also around 3 a.m., the creature again let out its terrifying scream, this time waking Stolp and a few of his fellow campers.

“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 noise. “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 encounter 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.