Alma- The Russian Bigfoot.

During the height of Soviet oppression, in Russia, where they were sending millions of their own people and soldiers to the Gulag concentration camps (in the case of the troopers it was usually for the crime of being captured by the enemy), while simultaneously fighting the Nazis, an interesting person was captured by some collective labor peasants. During the October of 1941, outside of Buinaksk in what is modern day Dagestan, A Red Army lieutenant colonel by the name of V. S. Karapetyan was summoned to inspect the prisoner, to determine whether he was a spy, and if his strange appearance was a disguise.

His official translated report (declassified in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union) reads as follows:

“I can still see the creature as it stood before me, naked and bare-footed. And it was doubtlessly a man, because its entire shape was human. The chest back, and shoulders, however were covered with shaggy hair of a dark brown color….

“The man stood absolutely straight with his arms hanging, and his height was above average 180 centimeters [roughly six foot, above average for the people native to this region]. He stood before me like a giant, his mighty chest thrust forward. His fingers were thick, strong, and exceptionally large. On the whole, he was considerably bigger than any of the local inhabitants. His eyes told me nothing. They were dull and empty – the eyes of an animal…

“When kept in a warm room he sweated profusely. While I was there, some water and then some food was brought up to his mouth; and someone offered him a hand, but there was no reaction. I gave the verbal conclusion that this was no disguised person, but a wild creature of some kind.”

The report then follows that while Karapetyan suggested that the creature be returned to the wild, his superior, at the insistence of the political officer attached to the unit, ordered it shot, in case it might be a spy. This also would allow the commander to claim a victory, however hollow, to those who might accuse him of slackness and send him off on a trumped up charge to one of the numerous death camps so popular in Communist Russia.

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The Yeren- The Chinese Bigfoot

     Nearly every culture has a variation on the Bigfoot legend, beginning with the character of Enkidu, the wild man of the woods, who is tamed by Gilgamesh and a holy prostitute.

      The Chinese variation on this legend is alternately called the 野人 –Yeren or Yeh Ren; 神农架野人-The Wildman; or人熊 The Monkey-Man. Most reports seemed to be focused around the mountains and forests in the province of Hubei in Central China. Descriptions of the creature place it as being smaller than its American or even Tibetan brethren.

Yeren Cave, Hubei Province, China

     Probably the best known tale of the Yeren occurred in 1957. During the morning of April 18^th, as the local men were away at their labors, Xu Fudi, a young mother, heard a scream from the family barn. She rushed out and spotted her 6 year old daughter struggling in the grips of a naked humanoid creature. It was roughly about five foot tall, around 88 pounds, with white skin covered in dark brown hair, with a broad chest and sunken in nose. Apart from that, it appeared to me nearly human.

     Xu Fudi grabbed an axe handle and frantically beat on the creature. The sudden attack surprised it, and the yeren sprang into a paddy field to escape. Unfortunately for it, the creature became stuck in the mud, allowing the mother to catch up and continue walloping on it. By this time several other women from the village had arrived and joined in on the beating. Sustaining numerous head wounds, the creature fell over.  Assuming that it was dead, the women  turned to console the little girl when the creature recovered consciousness and started to whimper, tears running from its eyes. The women returned to finish the job, making sure that it was dead by snapping its neck and tearing it to pieces.

     Reportedly a biology teacher from a neighboring village took away the yeren’s hands and feet, carefully preserving them in formaldehyde. It was said that for weeks afterwards mournful grunts and howls could be heard echoing from the nearby hills.

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Bigfoot Sightings Near Blood Mobiles

     In the otherwise peaceful area of Bath, New York a bizarre break-in occurred on the night of July 17^th, 1973. The Red Cross had been collecting blood that day from volunteers at Haverly High, the local high school, but their vehicle experienced a mechanical failure, forcing the group to spend the night in town. The local market offered the workers the use of their freezers to store the collected blood in for the evening, while technicians and nurses stayed at a nearby Howard Johnson's.

   The next morning the store manager arrived at the market to find that the back door had been broken into. Police were called in and discovered that the only articles to have been molested was the containers of blood. Several dozen packets were missing, while the rest of the consignment were thrown about the freezer. The market’s back door had not been picked open, but was savagely beaten in, the handle smashed off with a blunt object. Police suspected this to be the work of teenagers.

    The area had been experiencing severe electrical storms for several weeks, quite out of season for the region, and one such storm had struck on that particular night. Several large tracks were found embedded in a field adjacent to the store. The police ignored them as unrelated to the case, but a towns person later made a plaster mold of one of them. The bare footprint was measured at an incredible 22 inches long and 7 inches wide.

An old chestnut

    This discovery is compounded with a phone call the police received the night of the break in. A local man, Albert Biggs, reported being threatened by a monster when he returned home from a bar. He described it as being at least 8 foot tall, hairy, and naked. The creature, according to Biggs, walked upright and wielded a large club. The monster yelled at Biggs (not in English) and waved its weapon in a threatening manner. Biggs ran into his house and the creature departed. Police dismissed the call as a wild tale from one of the town’s many alcoholics.

    No person was ever arrested in connection with the break-in and eventually the case was shelved. The Red Cross workers collected the remaining donations and left Bath the next day. They have since come back nearly every year, with no re-occurrence of trouble.
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