Jones first saw a sasquatch while on a hunting trip as a teenager in 1967. "I watched him for almost 40 minutes through a nine-power rifle scope, so I knew it wasn't a bear or any other known creature," he recalls," A herd of elk passed by this animal, which had squatted down in the grass to be unobserved, and the elk never sensed his presence. Then a couple of hunters came on the scene, and they, too, walked within feet of him. After they passed, he moved away so quickly and stealthily that it was hard to believe what I'd seen." Fearing ridicule, Jones told no one about his encounter, not even his father, but the image has remained vivid in his memory. When he discovered the BFRO web site, he decided to share his experience—and to dedicate much of his spare time to the pursuit of Bigfoot. "I went down to New Mexico last year to verify some information from a Jicarilla Apache who had reported a close encounter that he'd had almost two years earlier," says Jones. "We'd gone out to the location to reenact the circumstances he described, and as we were walking back to our car, one of our party spotted a huge creature just yards from her in the brush. I went right in, chasing it up the side of the mountain almost 350 yards. When I finally stopped on a saddle where I could see, he was about 75 feet away, peeking around a tree, staring at me. We looked at each other, eye to eye, for almost a minute, and then he snapped a branch, turned, and disappeared. Since it was getting dark, and I couldn't get anyone to go back in there with me, I waited until the next day and went down with another guide to check for prints. There was nothing good enough to cast, but we could see where he'd scrambled up a 60-foot cliff, tearing away the moss as he climbed."
