I receive emails all the time telling me that at such and such a place in a certain episode of Finding Bigfoot, there’s an upright figure that can be seen walking on two legs behind me or another cast member. This is usually a true observation, but there’s nothing to be alarmed about. In every case that has been brought to my attention, those upright figures have turned out to be another member of the Finding Bigfoot production team.
Finding Bigfoot is a team effort, but the audience only gets to see four members of that team, namely the cast. Beyond Bobo, Matt, Ranae, and me, there are up to a dozen or more people that are employed on each episode. There is an executive producer, supervising producer, advance field producer, field producer, story producer, two or more production assistants, a local fixer, a bigfoot fixer, two camera operators, a sound technician, and a tech manager.
That’s a lot of people out there making the episodes happen. With that many folks around, it’s almost inevitable that every once in a while one of them accidentally gets caught on camera in the wrong place at the wrong time. It doesn’t help that when there is an interview of a cast member being filmed (when one of us looks towards the camera and they edit in snippets of what we say along with the action), there is usually another cast member being interviewed not far away. The crew members are often running tapes, batteries, water, and other things to various locations, and sometimes wander into frame while the camera is rolling.
On night investigations, the crew is cut down dramatically. There are usually just two cast members, a producer, and a cameraman. Sometimes the sound technician is on the team as well, but not always. Even then, crew members sometimes get into frame, especially in the backpack camera’s field of view.
So, if you catch a glimpse of an upright figure in the woods behind one of us in the woods during an episode of Finding Bigfoot, good for you. You clearly have a great eye. However, it is almost positively another member of the extended Finding Bigfoot family.
Another instance of this has been popping up from a more recent expedition to the east side of Mount Hood in Oregon. Several viewers have spied figures under the trees as I walk by a treeline around the 40 minute mark in the episode (see the photo above). Those figures are the other cast members trying to stay out of site of the helicopter that is filming me! It seems that (most likely) Bobo was standing a bit further out from behind the trees than he thought!
Oh well, we all make mistakes…