Media Article # 193
Article submitted by John Moore (John_Moore@BFRO.net)
Article prepared and posted by Matthew Moneymaker

Tuesday, February 12, 1980

By John Harrington Standard-Examiner Staff
Ogden Standard-Examiner

SOUTH WEBER-This small community is buzzing - quietly - today about one of those things that makes most people crinkle their browns and crack skeptical smiles: a possible visit last week by the elusive creature known to most as Bigfoot. The beast was sighted by at least two people. Its possible tracks were found by a Standard-Examiner reporter and an employee from the Standard-Examiner's composing room on Monday. I am the reporter and, though I would have been the last to believe any of this, I've never seen tracks like these before!

The sightings came a few days apart over a week ago. First, a South Weber woman, Pauline Markham, reported seeing Bigfoot on the ridge above this valley community on Sunday, Feb. 3. The creature was reportedly coming down the ridge above the brush line toward the Davis-Weber Canal about 2:30 p.m.

Then, about 12:20 a.m. Feb. 4, Ronald Smith was arriving home from work. He got out of his truck and walked back to his pasture on South Weber Road and "heard something out in the field." What he heard and later saw, he now believes is Bigfoot. "I was going back to feed the horse and he wouldn't come to the fence. I started out there to feed him and I heard, crunch, crunch, it was something walking on two legs through the snow. Since only the horse is out there, I thought it might have been some kids getting into something," Smith said. "I looked out there, it was moonlit, and I saw this dark figure walking across the pasture. I thought it was a high school kid trying to get away before I saw him. I didn't think of how big it was." Smith continued, "I saw it walk into some trees. The horse wasn't scared, but it was acting a little funny and looking over that way. Then I heard the screams. They were unlike anything I've ever heard. "They sounded like a cougar, but only with alot of volume. They were just different. I got out of there and into the house," Smith said.

"My wife was telling me to get a gun or a camera, but it only lasted seconds. It screamed four times when I was outside and three more times after I got inside. I told my wife, 'I think it's Bigfoot out there' and I was sort of kidding, but those screams were unbelievable. Smith said if the beast hadn't screamed, he would have passed off the figure in the moonlight as a "kid in the pasture."

Smith went into the field the next day to look for tracks and said he found marks about six feet apart that looked like it was something with toes, but that the horse had trampled the tracks throughout the night. He also said he thought his horse was "acting funny" for several days and he feels that could have been an indication that the Bigfoot was aroung [sic] for some time.

Pauline Markham told Standard-Examiner employee Jay Barker, who saw Bigfoot in the High Uinta Mountains along with another man and five other people in 1977, that she had a clear look at the "big, black creature" coming down the ridge in broad daylight.

Jay Barker and I spent Monday afternoon searching for tracks along the canal banks near the area of the Markham sighting. We were ready to call it a day when a line of tracks became visible in the unmelted snow along the dirt road next to the canal. They measured over 15 inches, had clear markings of toes and appeared to be human, with one exception: the bottom of the feet must have had pads. They were also made by something unusually heavy. The tracks were about four-feet apart and next to them appeared a smaller set of identical tracks. Some tracks wear clearly defined and preserved in ice. They were totally different than any of the human tracks made by boot prints. They were prints of a large, toed and padded barefeet. We tracked them until the snow ran out, but I had seen enough.

In an odd footnote to this, about the time Mrs. Markham spotted the beast, a South Weber man's five-year-old horse was so frightened by something, it ran through two barbed-wire fences and dropped dead in South Weber Road.

Jay Barker, who has been pursuing the Bigfoot since his first encounter, believes it has returned to the mountains with its young, possibly to the headwaters of the Weber River, where it has been sighted before.

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