A conference attendee wears a Bigfoot costume at the Season’s Lodge in Nashville.
Picture this: You’re surrounded by acres of woods with only trees in sight for miles in every direction when you hear an unexplainable noise, or discover a larger-than-life footprint — what happens next?
Something big was afoot at Indiana’s inaugural Bigfoot Conference, held at the Seasons Lodge in Nashville to answer questions and share stories of experiences with Sasquatch, better known as Bigfoot.
The conference opened with a community forum of around 200 people on Sept. 27 where CEO of the Indiana Bigfoot Research Organization LeRoy Nail and panelists Greg Yost, also known as ‘Squatchman’, Ernie Pack, Marc DeWerth, Charlie Raymond and Amy Blue introduced themselves and their background in Bigfoot research.
Nail shared that he did not start believing that Bigfoot lived in Indiana until he was in his 50s. He said he asked a friend who was a Bigfoot researcher to take him into the woods of Morgan and Monroe counties to search and they saw footprints while exploring.
“I walked out of those woods that day and went ‘he brought us here, what makes me believe that’s real, he brought us to this spot’,” Nail said. “You always have to think about that.”
Since then, reports of Bigfoot have been made in all areas of the state, including within the loop of Interstate 465 in Indianapolis, Nail said. On the Indiana Bigfoot Research Organization’s website, there have been four reports of sightings in Brown County from 1980 to 2015.
Audience members asked the panelists questions about Bigfoot’s appearance, growl and stature — do not get them started on his smell.
According to Nail, Bigfoot is not necessarily a 12-foot looming beast, nor is he a giant ape. According to the researchers, Bigfoot can be around 7 feet tall with a deep, rattling growl that resembles a belch.
Many of the audience members and panelists claimed that Bigfoot saved them from dark times in their lives.
“One of these nights I was out there and Bigfoot literally walked into my life and gave me a whole bunch more to worry about than the regular trivial stuff that everyone goes through, so I thought, ‘I am going to find out who they are, what they are, where they come from,’” Yost said. “This was the night time, and I didn’t get a good look at it, but I saw his arm from his fingers to his elbow wrapped around a tree and had long black hair, so I knew from that point on that this Bigfoot thing is real and I was going to get to the bottom of it.”
Yost has taken people, including Nail, into the woods “squatching,” or searching for Bigfoot, leading some to refer to him as “the Sasquatch whisperer.”
He told a story about an area in Clark State Forest — “that’s where I see Bigfoots at” — when he and the group were heading back to his Jeep to drive to the campsite and saw a series of yellow lights below them. When they looked down, he said, they saw a group of Sasquatches of all different sizes staring back at them.
“They all had amber eyes, like the old Christmas lights on the candles, the amber yellow lights,” Yost said. “Every one of them had those eyes and they were looking at my Jeep and they were lighting my Jeep up with their eyes. They were so bright. I can assure you there was not light or reflection but something down there with glowing eyes. You could see them clear as a bell … We were almost 50 feet from them when we saw this big light almost the size of a locomotive coming up from the woods, we thought it was a car at first. There was no car or noise on the road, it was lights going through the valley, trees, putting off no shadows, the brightest, purest light you would ever see.
“We’re about 25 feet from them, really close, you can see the outlines of everything on them and they all take off down the hill through that light. You could hear them running down the hill. … There were fingerprints and smears all over my Jeep. They were all around my Jeep just like we had seen up on the hill. They were touching it, looking at it, ever since that day there is not a day that goes by that I do not think about what we saw up there that night and what went down. What was that light, was it a UFO or God? That’s what really changed my life, thinking there was more to it than what is in front of the eyes.”
Once the panelists shared their stories, they opened up the floor to the community to share their encounters. People traveled from all over the state to tell the group about the time they saw a footprint, eyeshine or heard unexplainable rumblings.
One attendee, Susan Mehok, shared her experience about becoming obsessed with Sasquatch in 2019, watching videos and any media she could find about them. She also described a psychic reading she experienced.
“She channels the Sasquatch, she’s a medium, and he asked me if I would be interested in having one of his people connected with me, guiding me,” Mehok said. “I said ‘yes,’ I was very excited about this. About two weeks past my psychic reading, I started watching the cameras on my house and I started noticing this mist going across the cameras on my back porch. I couldn’t explain what the mist was … I kept watching the cameras and felt like I needed to get into this white mist more so I slowed down the videos. In one of them, I could see what looked like an eye shine, so I started screen-shotting the video until I realized I had a male Sasquatch standing right behind my back porch looking directly up at my camera.
“That’s where my story begins. I have developed a telepathic relationship with the Sasquatch since 2019, the one standing on my porch is my guide. His name is Kesh, his family has been in contact with me, and I have been in contact with Sasquatch from many different places.”
Audience members asked Mehok about where Sasquatches come from and why they continue to hide from humans. She explained that while they might be anywhere, Sasquatch originally were star people and interdimensional beings that can come and go as they please. “They don’t live in the same realm that we live in; we’re much lower frequency.”
Their ultimate goal is to bring like-minded individuals together to bring them into higher consciousness, Mehok said.
“They don’t like war or violence, they want us to be healthier,” Mehok said. “Honest to God, these that I am working with are of the highest love that you can imagine, unconditional love. They will heal you of ailments you didn’t know you had.”
On Sept. 28, panelists Adam Davies, Raymond, DeWerth, Blue, Yost, Ernie, Denise Pack and Nail shared more of their stories and personal findings with a sold-out room of 300 attendees, according to Nail.
“The majority of all my time is in the woods, that’s the first time our organization has done a conference, that’s not our normal thing,” Nail said. “Our group has someone in the woods every week, we go out in the different ones. I may not make it to the woods every weekend. I would say I make it two or three weekends out of the month at least, other individuals in our group are always out. We’ve always got people out there picking up different stuff from around the state.”
Next year’s Indiana Bigfoot Conference is on the books for Sept. 26 and 27 at the Season’s Lodge. Tickets will not be available until early next year. More information will be posted at indianabigfootconference.com.
