82-Year-Old Trapper Reveals Bigfoot Video Locked in Safety Deposit Box

There's something that's been sitting in a safety deposit box in Williams Lake, British Columbia for nearly four decades, and the man who put it there has finally decided the world needs to see it. A trapper named Glenn Coleman, now 82 years old, recently came forward with 41 seconds of 8mm film and just over two minutes of videotape that he shot himself back in the winter of 1987 on a registered trapline north of the Chilcotin River. What makes this footage different from the usual blurry shapes in the brush is that Glenn is adamant about what the camera captured, and he's spent 38 years deciding whether to say it out loud. Glenn bought his trapline in 1964 from a widow named Alma Grierson for $450 and a rebuilt outboard motor. She ran a line that stretched about 31 miles north to south and 14 miles east to west, climbing from open grassland up into the rolling foothills beneath the Itcha Range. Before handing over the cabin, the barrel stove, six dozen traps, and a hand sleigh, Alma asked him exactly one question: whether he could keep his mouth shut. She also told him not to build anything new on the meadow, though she never explained why. Glenn says it took him more than a decade to understand what she'd been warning him about. For the first four winters on the line, nothing happened. Glenn ran marten, lynx, the odd fisher and wolverine, and saw nothing he couldn't explain. Then in February of 1969, something changed. At the fourth pond of a beaver chain he called "the Ladder," a cubby set had been emptied in a way that didn't match any predator he knew. The marten was gone, the bait was gone, and the trap had been lifted clean off its bed. The chain he'd wired to a green pole had been unwrapped, not broken. What Glenn describes next is the part that makes this story remarkable. For eleven years, a family lived on his trapline. They walked away when a new predator moved into the basin, an animal that came down out of the high ground north of him and killed everything with four legs. They didn't fight it. They got out of its way. And then, in March of that same winter, when Glenn was out of his depth, half frozen, and three miles from any road, the biggest of that family came back across a burn in broad daylight, into the open, and stood between him and whatever was out there. The videotape, Glenn says, shows an animal standing over the opened chest of a bull moose in daylight at about 90 feet. It's on the frame long enough that you can count the ribs through the hide of its flank. He's skinned more than 2,000 animals in his life, and he knew within one second that he was looking at something he had no shelf to put it on. The Chilcotin itself is worth understanding if you want to grasp why a story like this stayed buried for so long. It's a plateau in the middle of British Columbia, west of the Fraser and east of the Coast Mountains, crossed by Highway 20, which leaves Williams Lake and runs west through Riske Creek, Alexis Creek, Chilanko Forks, Tatla Lake, Kleena Kleene, and Anahim Lake before falling off the edge of the world down into Bella Coola. In the 1980s, most of that road was gravel, and you could drive the middle hundred miles on a weekday afternoon and pass four vehicles. North of the highway, between the Chilcotin River and the Itcha Range, there's a piece of plateau bigger than some countries in Europe, with almost nothing on it but lodgepole pine, aspen in the draws, white spruce along the water, and a million potholes and sloughs that the mapmakers gave up on. The Itcha Ilgachuz didn't become a provincial park until 1995, and Ts'yl-os Park down on Chilko Lake came in 1994. Before that, it was Crown land with a couple of guide outfitter territories and a scattering of registered traplines, and not one single ranger. The Chilcotin is Tsilhqot'in country, and has been for as long as anybody can measure. There are communities at Anaham, Redstone, Stone, and out in the Nemiah Valley, along with ranches, some of them very old and very big, and a few hundred white people spread across 200 miles who mostly came in for cattle or timber, or because they wanted to be left alone. It's not a place where strangers ask you questions. If you walked into the Alexis Creek store in 1980 and said you'd seen an 18-inch track in the snow, three men would have looked at their coffee and one would have said the weather was going to turn, and that would have been the end of it. Not because they didn't believe you, because they did. Glenn says the reason he kept the footage locked in a metal drawer had nothing to do with the animal on the film. It had to do with the family that was living on that same country, the ones who walked away when the predator came in, and who came back for him on the one morning he couldn't walk out on his own. The man who gave him permission to tell the story has been dead since 1996, and Glenn says he's telling it now because he's 82 and because silence stopped making sense. This one is worth sitting down and watching all the way through. Glenn Coleman tells his story in order, the way a man tells it when he's not building it as he goes, and the footage he's been guarding for nearly forty years finally has an audience.