Lone Star Bigfoot Hunter
Ken Gerhard is 90% sure there’s a Bigfoot out there somewhere and probably in Texas.
An author, cryptozoologist, TV cohost, and guest lecturer by trade, this San Antonio resident travels the Lone Star State and the world (the Amazon jungle, Galapagos Islands, and Machu Pichu just to name a few) searching for the as yet undiscovered by science such as Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, and gigantic winged creatures. “My father was a scientist and an outdoorsman. I spent a lot of my growing up going camping and fishing with him. He always instilled a sense of science in me,” Gerhard recalls, explaining how his unique career came about. “I was always interested in monsters and animals and remember seeing a show about Bigfoot when I was about eight years old and I was hooked.” Gerhard applied what his father had instilled in him and started researching what he was interested in. “I hit the library and read every book on Bigfoot I could.”
Gerhard’s mother also had an active role in developing his career path. “My mother was a travel agent and I got to go on these fabulous vacations with her. When I was 15, we went to Loch Ness in Scotland. That was my first real research,” Gerhard laughs. “I had a little movie camera and I interviewed people, asking if they’d seen the monster. Plus I got to fish the loch.”
No, he didn’t catch Nessie.
Music took up most of Gerhard’s young adult years but his interest in cryptids remained strong. “About 20 years ago I started to get burned out on music and that’s right when the Internet was starting out. I found the Southern Texas Cryptid Conference mentioned online and I went to that and met some Bigfoot researchers. These were experienced outdoorsmen and hunters that saw something or had an experience afield they couldn’t explain.” Gerhard befriended these people and others he met at similar conferences. This led to Gerhard assisting with in-the-field research and expeditions into the wild. An expedition to Cottonwood Lake in Decatur, Texas brought Gerhard one of his best encounters.
“There had been a lot of sightings [Bigfoot] in the area. We were hiking around the lake. Just at sundown we heard something grunting at us through 40 yards of thick brush. This thing was very loud and to me it sounded like a primate.” Efforts to find whatever it was by dark failed. “That night we drove out onto the levee. We shined a light down to where we had seen this thing and we saw some eye shine. There were two eyes and they were very high off the ground.” Seeing this, Gerhard decided to call out to the unknown with a megaphone.
The unknown called back with the same grunts that it had used earlier.
The next morning Gerhard and his fellow researchers inspected the area where the unknown had been to find deep but not very detailed bipedal tracks and a pile of large turtle shells that had been ripped in half and were free from flesh. “There’s really nothing that could have ripped those huge shells in half like a pistachio nut,” Gerhard assures me. “The culmination of all the evidence that night to me was the most convincing I’ve ever encountered. I was like, there’s got to be something to this. This is not my imagination. This is not a known animal. This is not someone trying to play a trick on me.”
Despite encounters such as this and the multitude of proof in the form of eyewitness accounts, tracks, structures, and more, Gerhard admits that he’s not 100% sure that Bigfoot exist.
“I’ve never actually seen one,” Gerhard chuckles. “So I’m only 90% sure they exists.”
This piece first appeared in the Fredericksburg Standard.
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