Back in the 1970s when Big Foot was all the rage, my Dad worked with a guy who was obsessed with Big Foot and was part of some goofy club that was sure there were Big Foots moving about the woods of Western Pennsylvania. He would talk about his "hunts" with this group and how they were sure they were going to find a Big Foot before long. He kept inviting my Dad to go with them since my Dad was an avid hunter, but he thought they were nothing but loons so he always declined.
Then one weekend this guy told my Dad they were going to a spot where we hunted a lot to do their search, and my Dad asked me to get this old piece of brown shag carpet out of the garage and put it in our Monaco wagon. Then he asked me to get some of my stash of smoke bombs and off we went to the woods. We placed the carpet in a tree about ten yards from the trail, and had a rope tied to it so we could pull it to the ground. I didn't know why he wanted my smoke bombs, but then he told me this guy had told him how one of the signs of a Big Foot being around was a smell like sulfur, and those smoke bombs were about pure sulfur.
So it gets dark, and we're sitting in the woods, and we see flashlights and this gang of about 20 Big Foot hunters comes down the trail making so much noise nothing wild would stick around. My Dad starts lighting smoke bombs and we can tell when the smell reaches the group because they all start chattering about it. We light a few more to get the smell really strong, and now they're starting to get a little panicky. Then as they get near our position, we watch their flashlight beams and wait for one of them to land on the brown carpet in the tree, and when one does my Dad yanks the rope. The carpet falls to the ground with a loud thud, the hunters see it moving, and all of them starts hauling *** back up the trail screaming for their lives! We go out to the trail and there's food, cameras, flashlights, and other stuff laying where the intrepid hunters dropped them when they took off.
We rolled up the carpet, took it back to the car, and went home laughing ourselves silly.
Comes Monday morning, and my Dad's co-worker comes in with the most fantastic story of encountering a Big Foot you ever heard of. It took all the will my Dad had not to bust out laughing as he heard the story of the stealthy hunt through the woods, how they snuck up on the beast, and would have got pictures but it was too dark. Good times... good times.
