Gino Meekis said he is surprised by how many people still believe in the Sasquatch.
The 39-year-old Sioux Lookout resident is still trying to process what he recorded in the woods 45 kilometres outside the Northern Ontario community.
On Oct. 3 he was grouse hunting with his wife Joanne and grandson when a strange howl caught their attention when they were nearing their vehicle.
His wife pulled out her cell phone to record, and admittedly he said he was not interested.
“I wasn’t even going to record until I saw my wife pick up her phone,” Meekis said, who moved back to his hometown Sioux Lookout in 2014 after living in Sandy Lake for a time. “As soon as she pulled her phone out, I pulled my phone out because she looked scared. I just started being interested in the noise.”
They first posted the video to Facebook and it received 300 thousand views within the first few days. The Meekis family also posted the videos to YouTube, but they weren’t discovered immediately.
The over two-minute-long video features a strange howling. The sound can be compared to a cross between a hound dog’s baying and an orangutan’s guttural calls. The sounds are also similar to those Alert Bay, B.C. video in 2015.
“I never heard a dog like that,” Meekis said. “I’ve heard a hound dog before, but nothing (comes) close to that.”
During their walk, they did not notice anyone else around. There is a nearby sandpit where a tractor used to be parked, but that was about a kilometre away from where they were situated.
Bigfoot sightings have occurred across North America and are not localized to British Columbia. Sasquatch sightings are nothing new in Northern Ontario. There have been organizations dedicated to collecting experiences, such as Ontario Sasquatch and Mike Paterson’s YouTube channel, Sasquatch Ontario. Park naturalist Roger LaFontaine has been researching the elusive hominid for two decades.“I never heard a dog like that. I’ve heard a hound dog before, but nothing (comes) close to that.”
This isn’t the first time Meekis has crossed paths with the creature. Allegedly, he had an encounter in June where he was overcome by a foul odour.
“I was fishing maybe five kilometres away from where I heard that noise,” he recalled. I smelt this awful thing that kept getting stronger and stronger. I could hear something coming closer to me.
“I packed up and left. I was telling my mom, and she said, ‘You probably smelled a sasquatch’.”
As for his feelings about the sasquatch, Meekis is mum.
“I still don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “I think I’m still kind of skeptical. I was skeptical before.”
Photo courtesy Google Maps