Montana Bigfoot Researcher Shares Frightening Wilderness Encounter and Documentary Journey

A chance encounter at a Montana gift shop led to one of the more fascinating Bigfoot conversations to surface online recently. James Willows, better known as "Buddy," runs the YouTube channel James Willows and has been documenting Sasquatch encounters through his "Incredible Bigfoot" series. In this particular video, he crosses paths with Dr. Charnell Wolverton Sehon of drshell.com, a blogger who covers the supernatural, and the two end up having a spontaneous but rich discussion about the unknown. Willows grew up in Hungry Horse, Montana, and spent much of his youth outdoors, trapping, hunting, and cross-country skiing. He estimates he has walked at least 4,000 miles across the state on his own two legs. For a long time, he was a skeptic. He had never personally seen a Bigfoot track or any physical evidence, and figured the whole thing was just a local myth. That changed after a three-day canoe trip on a remote stretch of the Flathead River. While camped on an island, something started hurling massive rocks into the water around them, creating enormous splashes. Whatever it was seemed intent on scaring them off. Willows has never been able to explain what happened that night, and the experience stuck with him enough to push him toward investigating further. What really shifted his perspective, though, was a conversation with a Native American friend he had hunted with for over 25 years. This friend, Al Moran, told Willows he had seen a Sasquatch right at the Merrill Lake Golf Course in Columbia Falls back in the 1990s. His wife spotted it while golfing, and when Moran went to investigate, he found a huge track in the mud with steam still rising off it in the spring air. Willows knew Moran well enough to trust him completely, and that was the moment he started taking the subject seriously. Since launching his "Incredible Bigfoot" series, Willows has racked up 49 on-camera interviews across multiple states, 12 of them right here in Montana. His channel exploded early on, with his first episode pulling in around 69,000 views and putting him on the map in the Sasquatch community. One of the most compelling pieces of evidence he has come across appears in "Incredible Bigfoot Documentary 3." A woman in Colorado was taking pictures and video with her family when they captured something startling, a crystal-clear image of what appears to be a Sasquatch almost morphing out of a tree. Willows describes the figure as looking remarkably like Gandalf, and the footage gave him genuine goosebumps. That episode pulled in 300,000 views in its first week alone, and even caught the attention of a viewer in Siberia who credited Willows' channel with bringing him to Christianity. The conversation also touched on some of the stranger theories floating around in Sasquatch circles. Willows mentioned a metaphysical gift shop owner near the House of Mystery who claims to have had around 11 sightings on his property, many of which he believes were connected to some kind of extraterrestrial pod activity. Willows himself isn't fully sold on the alien-Sasquatch connection. Out of all 49 interviews he's conducted, none of the witnesses brought up anything like that. Still, he keeps an open mind. One pattern he has noticed, though, is that a large percentage, somewhere around 70%, of the people he interviews identify as Christian. One memorable example was a collegiate football referee from Auburn, Alabama who had two separate sightings. When Willows asked if he was a believer, the man casually mentioned he was also a pastor. This video is worth the watch for anyone interested in how ordinary people, hunters, pastors, referees, and small-town Montanans, are quietly coming forward with experiences that have reshaped how they see the world. Willows comes across as genuine, grounded, and refreshingly honest about his own journey from skeptic to someone who now takes the Sasquatch question very seriously. Check it out and see what you think.