I Saw Something That's Not Supposed To Be Real...

Sasquatch The Legend presents an exclusive interview with Bigfoot experiencer Rich Germeau.

Rich Germeau

A four-second-long experience was all it took to shake a man to his core, to shatter his most fundamental beliefs and make him reevaluate everything he thought he knew. 

It all began on an ordinary summer evening in La Push, a tiny town on the Quileute Indian Reservation, nestled in the rainforest on Olympic Peninsula on the far northwest coast of Washington State. La Push Tribal Police Officer Rich Germeau was driving to work in his patrol car. As he drove past Second Beach toward the Lonesome Creek Fish Hatchery, his thoughts turned to the work day to come. He was scheduled for a swing shift that evening, but it didn’t feel like evening yet. It had been a beautiful day, and the warm, July sun cast a golden light from the West, illuminating the trees and thick brush on the edge of the highway. 

Photo: Second Beach, La Push by Gerstavo Gerdel

As Germeau started to come down the hill toward Lonesome Creek, something popped right out of the brush. It was “a big, humanoid thing, all one brownish color…it took three to four elegant steps, gliding across the road, came to the very edge of the creek and disappeared…it only took about four seconds,” Germeau explains.

Area of first sighting, La Push, Washington

“It was good lighting, perfect daylight, so I got a real good look at it…it never looked at me…it moved swiftly and just went right through the brush,” he continues. “I knew there was something not right here. I kept trying to categorize it into something I could understand, like a big person with a sweatshirt with a hood on, but it didn’t move like a person. I knew what it was—I knew, but I didn’t want to believe it,” Germeau recalls.

“My heart started beating really quickly…it was a life-changing moment, just immediately. I saw this thing that’s not supposed to be real, but it is real! I felt betrayed, like why wasn’t I told about this? Why was this kept from me? And what else has been kept from us?” Germeau asks. 

As a former marine and a law enforcement professional, Germeau was a trained observer and accustomed to quickly making accurate assessments about details such as size, distance, time frame, etc. He knew what he had seen was not human, was at least eight feet tall and that it had crossed the entire highway, seemingly without any effort at all, in just a few steps. 

Would anyone believe his story, if he told people what he had seen? Germeau believed in telling the truth, so he told a few people about his experience. Some were quiet, some immediately began to make fun of him, and some took him aside to tell him, in confidence, of strange encounters that they, too, had had in the forest, of extra-large footprints they’d seen, of growls and tree knocks, of dark shapes in the woods, of unnatural feelings of dread and fear coming on them, seemingly out of nowhere. 

Forest scene, Olympic Peninsula (author photo)

The thing Germeau had seen was just so big that he could not get it out of his mind. “I was thinking about it like a police officer, doing a threat assessment,” he says. “They have immense size, high intelligence, they’re a master of their environment, they’re so big and strong and fast and they could just grab you and break all the bones in your neck in one movement if they wanted to.”  

He began to avoid some of the activities he’d always loved, like hiking into remote areas to fish for steelhead. “Now that I knew they were there, I kept wondering how many times I’d been watched when I was out there by myself,” Germeau explains. He continued to think, more and more, about Bigfoot and about what it all meant. 

Germeau in Olympic Peninsula forest

Germeau became friends with several others who had experienced encounters with Bigfoot and started to spend much of his free time documenting evidence of the beings. He set up wildlife camera traps in multiple locations throughout the Olympic Peninsula to try to capture a Bigfoot on tape. He spent months and years trying to get evidence on tape, but there seemed to be something preventing this from happening. He could not manage to get video of a Bigfoot, no matter how hard he tried. 

 As he puzzled over this one day, he had a second encounter with a Bigfoot while trying to open a wildlife camera that he had set up on a tree months before. He saw a massive bipedal creature in the shadow under a tree, watching him, staring at him as he fumbled with a key. He felt that the Bigfoot was trying to tell him that it was disgusted with his activities, that it disapproved of his attempts to capture it on video, and that it wanted him to stop. It was sending him a message, and he heard it, loud and clear. 

Germeau points toward the area on Harstine Island where he saw a Bigfoot

Based on his own experiences and those told to him by many others, Germeau came to believe that Bigfoot has powers and abilities that we humans don’t have and that they may somehow have the ability to send messages to people, to influence emotions and to even manipulate time and space.

“What are these beings?” Germeau mused. “They’re here, they’re living here, eating here, pooping here, having babies here…but they also seem to somehow not be ruled by the same rules of time and space as we are….they can disappear, they can move at an unnatural speed and silently, they can project infrasound into people…what is the answer to all this? Maybe they’re somehow able to move between dimensions…we just don’t know what they’re doing here or why they’re doing it or what they want.” 

Forest scene, Harstine Island

Germeau continues to try to learn as much as he can about Bigfoot/Sasquatch, and to share what he has learned with others. He has been invited to share his experiences and opinions in many settings, from podcasts such as "Sasquatch Chronicles" to television programs such as "Expedition Bigfoot" to documentary films such as "A Flash of Beauty."

Rich Germeau

“I don’t take money for any of this because I want to be free to say exactly what I want to say. I want to show people that there’s much more than meets the eye. It’s not just about Bigfoot. A lot of things are strange and don’t match up with the narrative that you’re told…human beings are trapped, in a way, trapped in our beliefs, but we have the capability to be so much more,” maintains Germeau. 

Rich Germeau will be a featured speaker at the second annual Forks Sasquatch Days in Forks, Washington, Memorial Day Weekend, May 26-28, 2023. For tickets, visit https://sasquatchthelegend.com/pages/2023-forks-sasquatch-days

by Christina Hebert

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