Did Bigfoot Photo Bomb Michigan Eagle Cam? You Decide

Of course, there’s no proof that Bigfoot exists, except in centuries-old lore, and now, in the collective imagination of the social media crowd, which is abuzz over what looks to be the mythical man-ape creature photo bombing a camera trained on an eagle’s nest in Michigan.

A video that has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube shows a pop-up window of a shadowy bipedal figure lumbering through the woods at the Platte River State Fish Hatchery, pausing briefly at a fallen tree and then leaping out of view.

The video first surfaced on Outdoor Hub, a website operated by Bingham Farms-based Carbon Media Group, which maintains the camera to show eagle nesting to the world in a partnership with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

But is it a Sasquatch? Is it someone dressed in an ape costume? Or is just an ordinary person lost in the woods? Judge for yourself:

“We’ve been extremely fortunate to catch some really awesome footage of eagles in their nest with this camera, and when we saw this Bigfoot type character walking through the woods, we didn’t quite know what to make of it,” the Outdoor Hub reporters said. “However, the footage most likely shows a confused human wandering through the woods and not a cryptid.”

Ed Eisch, the DNR’s fish production manager for the state and the Platte River Hatchery near Beulah, about 30 miles west of Traverse City, also thinks it’s unlikely that Bigfoot was stomping around the woods.

Eisch told the Detroit Free Press that he is “not a big Bigfoot proponent” to begin with, and noted his nephew has honed the “Bigfoot gait impression” to something of an art form. “But I know it wasn’t him,” Eisch told the newspaper.

“Like most videos purported to be Bigfoot, it’s grainy and out of focus — of course, the camera wasn’t set up to be focused on the ground; it was focused on the nest,” Eisch said.

Bigfoot scholar Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, threw more cold water on the notion that Bigfoot made a cameo appearance on the eagle cam.

“It is an interesting video,” he allowed in an interview with the Free Press, “but remains just that, given the lack of scale and detail in the image of the figure.”

It’s unclear when the video was shot, but it was sometime after the eaglets hatched in April. And Twitter has been lighting up over it. Here are a couple of examples:

The video builds on earlier claims of Bigfoot sightings. Last month, a trail camera on the Upper Peninsula caught an image that also fueled speculation that Bigfoot is lurking in Michigan’s deep woods.

The reputed Sasquatch photo turned out to be a bear, though.

Still, scientists like Meldrum don’t discount the idea that Bigfoot is real. In his book, “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science,” Meldrum assembles data from experts across several disciplines to examine the existence of a large, yet undiscovered North American primate.

He doesn’t say conclusively that Bigfoot exists, but said in 2014 when a course factoring Sasquatch into a theory of human evolution was announced at Idaho State that new branches in the human evolutionary tree have changed perceptions in anthropological circles.

• TELL US: Do you think Bigfoot exists — in Michigan, or anywhere in North America? Tell us what you think in the comments.

“Each year it seems like there are more discoveries,” Meldrum told the Idaho State Journal at the time. “The phylogeny is becoming bushier and bushier.”

One of the most famous alleged Bigfoot sightings was in Bluff Creek, California, on Oct. 20, 1967. Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin caught the creature on film in what has been called the “Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot Film.”

Image credit: Carbon Media Group eagle cam