OGDEN, Utah - While on a hike near his home in Ogden, Utah, Todd May felt himself drawn toward something. "I would go out there often and find things, fossils, rocks. I looked around for about half an hour, then I saw it."
What May saw was a 75-pound object he claims is the fossilized head of a Bigfoot. The Bigfoot, known to some as Sasquatch, is a fabled apelike creature that has been spotted hundreds of time in the Northwestern United States.
Living in a hot spot for Bigfoot sightings, May said he had been interested in the mythological creature all his life.
In the past few years, he claims to have seen at least two different creatures that he believes are Bigfoots.
"The first time I saw one I was startled, it looked like an ape from the zoo," he said. The creature appeared out of nowhere and then ran off a few seconds after the man and creature made eye contact — he says.
After the first spotting of a Bigfoot, May had started visiting the Ogden Canyon area more, hoping for another glimpse.
He would visit a hot springs in the area and often felt someone — or something — pegging him with rocks.
"I just thought it was kids, but then my friend was playing her flute outside and had a couple of witnesses who saw the Bigfoot," May said.
"The red-furred one was a lot bigger and it spooked me more," May said of the second creature he spotted about a year later.
It was night and May was hiking through the wilderness with a flashlight.
"I heard across the river someone say, 'Oh, my God! It's a monster!'" He flashed his light around and the beam fell upon the face of an 8- to 10-foot tall red-furred apelike creature, he said. It was about 20 feet away, he estimates, it stared at him then slowly walked off.
A couple months later, May was in the same area and spotted what appeared to be a handprint on top of a rounded surface. He dug the large object out of the surrounding dirt and saw a familiar face.
"It had the same facial structure as the creatures I had seen," he said.
Since finding the object in 2013, May said he's had hundreds of people weigh in on their opinion about his finding.
"There's haters out there, other Bigfoot enthusiasts that don't like that I found something first," May said. People have noted the opinion of a Utah professor when the story first appeared who said the object was just a rock. "But that professor just saw the picture that was in the paper, he never saw it in person. When you actually see it, you can't help but see that it's a face," May said.
Midwestern State University Assistant Professor Jesse Carlucci, Kimball School of Geoscience, said after viewing the object is, without a doubt, just a highly weathered rock.
"Often, the natural fractures or joints in the rock are sites of increased weathering (chemical breakdown of the rock, as they interact with rainwater), where you have these types of depressions form. It's not Bigfoot!" he said.
Fossil skulls, the professor said, are extremely fragile, and are made of bone, which has a different texture and composition than a rock like this.
May is still on the road with his Bigfoot finding, hoping to get the word out to whoever will listen that the world is more mysterious than we could ever know. He stopped by the Times Record News unannounced Thursday morning, one head on his shoulders and another in a storage bin.
"I don't know where I'm going next, but people need to see this and know Bigfoots are real and they out there," May said.
