Jeffrey Gonzalez points to the area of his truck window where he believes a bigfoot-type creature left forensic evidence sometime between May 30 and June 1, 2011.
Yesterday afternoon, I attended the Sanger Paranormal Society press conference in Fresno, California with friend and journalist Skylaire Alfvegren. Spokesman Jeffrey Gonzalez and his team announced that they had acquired “potentially the most convincing evidence of Bigfoot since the Patterson film of 1967.”
Gonzalez told this story: From May 27th to 29th of this year, he and five others camped in an area of the Sierra Nevada mountains that they identified as active in the past for apparent bigfoot activity. Nothing notable happened during the camping trip. A storm of rain and snow began on the night of the 28th. By 2AM the group were concerned that they would be stranded if they remained in the area. Everyone piled into two cars and left. The next day, Gonzalez realized that his laptop was still in his stranded truck. On the way back to retrieve the truck and computer the group noticed felled trees and logs blocking the remote dirt road.
As Gonzalez approached his truck, he noticed dirt and smears on the driver’s side window. It appeared that something had left the marks while peering into the cab. He drove the truck down to an area where there was cel coverage and phoned Mickey Burrow, a local forensic examiner and paranormal investigator.
Burrow met Gonzalez in the foothills and took pictures of the markings on the window. At the conference, Burrow (while admitting that he is not a biologist or zoologist) offered the opinion that the apparent nose and lip marks did not seem to match those of a bear or mountain lion. Samples of the marks were taken for later analysis. Gonzalez later had the window removed for safe storage. He has not washed the truck since the incident, almost a month ago.
The group made a plea for donations, leads, or services to perform DNA testing on the samples. Some reports indicate that the entire conference was a ploy to make money, but the local news had to pin Burrow down on a figure: “I guess five thousand would be enough” he said. It seems that if the Sanger group were going after the big score, they would have gone about things differently.
My impression is that Gonzalez and his group are sincere in their convictions. The videos, photos, and other evidence presented at the event are debatable and probably unconvincing to most. If they can get their samples tested by at least two labs and the results agree, perhaps their claims can be at least partially verified.
