Former Ranger Recounts 1969 Bigfoot Encounter and Mysterious Fish Cache

There's a video making the rounds that every serious researcher needs to carve out time for. An 85-year-old retired Ontario ranger named Roy Thibault sat down and told a story he kept locked away for over four decades, and the details in it are the kind that make you stop what you're doing and just listen. Roy spent thirty-five years working the bush of northern Ontario as a conservation officer, starting in 1961 with the old Department of Lands and Forests before it became the Ministry of Natural Resources. He knows that country the way most of us know our own kitchens, and he describes it beautifully in the video, the granite Shield giving way to the flat, soggy Hudson Bay Lowlands, the black spruce standing thin and spaced out like fence pickets, the sphagnum and the drowned tamarack roots. It's worth watching just for the landscape painting alone. But the real meat of the story starts in the summer of 1969, when Roy was running a stretch of the Kwataboahegan River east of the Mattagami. He came around a bend and found roughly two dozen suckers laid out on a flat clay shelf at the waterline, covered with wet moss like a cloth over bread. They had been cleaned, but not with a knife. Every single fish had been opened with a single ragged tear from vent to gill, and in three of them the belly skin had been peeled back and left attached at the head like a rind. You do that with a thumbnail. He wrote it up as a trapper's cache and moved on, but the way those fish had been opened gnawed at him. Two years later he met the trapper, a Cree man named Alvin Wesley, and asked him about it. Alvin told him straight that the cache wasn't his, and when Roy pressed him on whose it was, Alvin gave him a word in Cree that Roy admits he probably got wrong. It meant something like "the one that goes along the riverbank." Not an animal, not a person, not the way Roy was using those words anyway. Alvin told him his own father used to put fish out for them up on the Soweska River when he was young, and by the time the old man was elderly, they didn't need the offering anymore. They just came to the camp and waited by the water. When Roy tried to push for more, Alvin shut him down with a line that has clearly haunted Roy for the rest of his life: "You will see them when they let you." The video goes deeper into the geography that Roy believes set the stage for everything that followed, particularly the Ontario Hydro development along the lower Mattagami in the 1960s. Little Long, Harmon, and Kipling generating stations went in between 1963 and 1966, and along with them came the Adam Creek diversion, a spillway channel that turns into a full river every spring when the headpond above Little Long needs to bleed off floodwater. When the gates close and the channel drains, it leaves pools full of stranded fish, pickerel, pike, suckers, whitefish, and lake sturgeon that can be six feet long and older than the person standing next to them. People have been rescuing those sturgeon and carrying them back to the main river for sixty years. It's a known, argued-over issue in the district. But Roy's point is that for decades, that diversion was also an enormous, reliable buffet sitting out in the middle of the bush for anything with the sense to walk in and help itself. The lower Mattagami watershed has long been a hotspot in Canadian Sasquatch research. Researchers like John Green and the late René Dahinden documented witness reports from the region stretching back decades, and the Algonquin and Cree oral traditions of the area are full of references to large, hair-covered beings that lived along the rivers and took fish. The Mattagami name itself comes from the Cree word for the meeting of waters, and the whole James Bay Lowlands region has a deep cultural memory of these beings that long predates any European contact. What makes Roy's account land so hard is that it isn't folklore filtered through a hundred years of retelling. It's a working conservation officer describing what he found on the ground, and then a Cree elder quietly confirming it as something his family had always known. Roy says he worked out what he believes killed them off in the spring of 1984, sitting in a borrowed office at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay with a lab sheet in his hand and a number on it that, in his words, no living thing in that watershed had any business carrying. He never put it in a report. He never filed it. He put the notebook in a coffee can, slid it into the crawlspace under his house in Smooth Rock Falls, and left it there for forty-two years. He's telling it now because, as he puts it, everyone who could be hurt by it is gone, and the last of them died alone, and he has never been able to leave that alone. The discussion cuts off just as Roy is about to get into the tracks, which is maddening, but there's clearly much more to come in the full video. If you've ever wondered what a working ranger with three and a half decades on the ground actually saw when nobody important was watching, this is the one to sit with. Pour a coffee, settle in, and give it the time it deserves.