Tracker Ivan Marx's Decade-Long Pursuit of Bigfoot Evidence

There's something undeniably compelling about a seasoned tracker who spent a decade of his life chasing down leads on Sasquatch, and that's exactly what this documentary delivers. Found over on the Absolute Mysteries YouTube channel, this film follows Ivan Marx, a professional tracker whose resume reads like something out of an old western — government work, federal game warden duties, and tracking renegade predators across some of the most rugged terrain in North America. What makes Ivan's story stand out from the usual campfire tales is his background. This is a man who knew animal tracks the way the FBI knows fingerprints. He didn't come to the Sasquatch question as a true believer — he came as a skeptic who got dragged into the mystery whether he liked it or not. The journey starts in Kodiak, Alaska, where ranchers were paying $5,000 bounties on supposed cattle-killing bears. Ivan quickly discovered the cattle were dying of malnutrition from waterlogged grass, not predation. But while there, a rancher casually mentioned that Bigfoot was the real culprit. Ivan dismissed it as hogwash — until his brother-in-law took him to see something that would change his mind. In what the Indigenous peoples called the land of petrified wood, Ivan was shown ancient petroglyphs carved into rock depicting a creature with oversized hands and feet. The drawings were estimated to be 700 years old and told stories of beings the local tribes called "stickmen" who would come in the night and steal children. The village had been abandoned out of fear. This kind of corroboration between multiple Indigenous traditions — from the Eskimos calling them Bushman to the Kovville Indians using the name Sasquatch — is something researchers have noted for decades. Different tribes, separated by vast distances, all carrying similar stories passed down through generations. Then came the physical evidence. While tracking a mountain lion, Ivan stumbled upon tracks that were 18 inches long, 6.5 inches across the ball of the foot, with a 52-inch stride — nearly double that of an average human. The depth suggested a 500-pound animal. Hair samples were sent to a lab and couldn't be matched to any known creature in the database. For anyone familiar with the Patterson-Gimlin film footage or the countless track casts housed by researchers like Dr. Jeff Meldrum, this kind of unexplained physical evidence is exactly the type of thing that keeps the investigation alive. One of the most chilling moments comes when Ivan describes finding a 600-pound bear lying dead with its neck broken — clearly killed by something with tremendous strength. A bear that size standing eight feet tall doesn't just fall over. The documentary follows Ivan through dead end after dead end — Jackson Hole, Wyoming where tracks turned out to be from a coyote, the Redwoods where he searched tree caves finding nothing, the Oregon coast where fishermen crowded out any chance of a sighting. It's a reminder of how frustrating Sasquatch research can be. You can spend months on a lead and come up empty. But the payoff comes in Bossburg, Washington — a location that should ring a bell for anyone familiar with Sasquatch history. Bossburg is famous in the research community for the 1969 "Bossburg incident" involving the so-called Cripplefoot tracks, a series of deformed footprints that have been debated by researchers for decades. Ivan describes finally coming face to face with the creature there — describing the domed head, the thick dark fur designed to blend into the night, everything matching the descriptions collected from hundreds of witnesses over the years. This is worth carving out some time to watch. Ivan Marx isn't some weekend hiker with a shaky camera — he's a professional tracker who reluctantly became one of the most dedicated Sasquatch investigators of his era. His story captures something essential about this whole phenomenon: the way it keeps finding people who never intended to look for it.