In search of Bigfoot: 'I was so scared...'

By Seth McLaughlin

Dave Downs talks about his adventures tonight at the North Scituate Public Library.

Attleboro — In the early 1970s a shoeless Dave Downs moved along a railroad track about a mile from downtown Sykesville, Md. Trains hadn't been seen down this section of abandoned track for more more than a year, but a modern-day myth had.

Downs was hunting for the hairy behemoth called Bigfoot, which had been spotted in the area a few weeks prior to his arrival from Massachusetts.

The raspy-voiced Downs, who teaches third grade in Rehoboth, had always been intrigued with Bigfoot, UFOs and sea serpents. His hunger for unfamiliar things was borne out of science-fiction stories that his mother read to him when he was a youngster living in greater Boston.

"I always liked things that are unusual," the 57-year-old said. "I was always thrilled by ghost stories as a child."

The stories planted an adventurous seed in Downs, which for more than 10 years would send him across the East Coast prodding for answers to unsolved mysteries.

"We want to have an answer for our questions," Downs said. "It is human to get answers for our questions."

In 1970, Downs started knocking on doors and talking to people who claimed to have seen the elusive Bigfoot, a UFO or other unexplained phenomena.

It was "like interviewing the president or Saddam Hussein, people that are shaping the world today," he said. "I was interviewing people that were seeing flying saucers and the information I was getting maybe would help us understand the phenomenon. I felt like I was doing something for mankind."

This mentality drove Downs to the dilapidated train trestle in the Maryland boondocks where he was taking photographs of a three-toed footprint.

But his photo session was interrupted when a noise started reverberating from the tracks above.

"There was a ca-clunk," he said. "Something was walking across the railroad ties and as I looked up it was like venetian blinds. If you turn them just right you can't see through them, but the light comes through anyway. I could see a shadow that was too big to be a human being. It was a great, big, wide shadow."

Downs's chance to prove the existence of the mythlike Bigfoor was almost within sight. All of his hard work was about to pay off. He had his camera ready.

Then reality set in.

"I'm down there and it just hit me that I was all alone in the middle of nowhere," he said. "This thing was supposed to be able to run faster than a deer. I was totally helpless. I just froze."

Downs says experiences like this could account for numerous sightings from Maine to California.

"I've kind of come to the conclusion that most witnesses aren't making up their stories and most of them aren't kooks," he said. "They are everyday people that notice something unusual that they have never noticed before.

"So, for example if they see a bear, they might say, 'Well, bears don't live around here. Everyone knows that, so it must be a Bigfoot," he said.

And Downs did, indeed, think Bigfoot was nearby.

"I didn't even dare to click the shutter of my camera to take a picture of the shadow," Downs said. "All my life growing up I always said, 'If I ever come across this monster I'll take a picture of it even if it is attacking me, and then they'll find the camera, and I'll be famous because I had taken a picture of the Bigfoot.' But I was so sacred silly that I didn't even dare click it because the click I was afraid would attract it."

However, the shadow wasn't Bigfoot. It was two men searching for train ties to build a wall.

He said if he hadn't seen the men, "I would have thought I saw the shadow of Bigfoot and I'd being telling the story. And I wouldn't be making it up and I wouldn't be lying."

Although Downs says that his investigations and hands-on research has convinced him that Bigfoot and UFOs probably are figments of the imagination or elaborate hoaxes, he still clings to his childhood desire to find answers to the unknown.

"I'm not going to say there is no such animal, but then again I don't know..." he said.

Downs will be sharing more stories about what he has found in his quest for the unknown tonight at 6:30 at the North Scituate Public Library. His presentation will include a slide show and a display of five plaster casts of reputed footprints of Bigfoot and the abominable snowman.

From: Providence Journal, 24 October 2003.