Daniel Lockhart & Amari Giles
Scriptor
Wylie E Groves HS
1st Place
Division 3, News Writing
Personality Profile
Social studies teacher Jim Sherman scoured the woodland terrain of the Lost Nation gaming country on a chilly night in February, following a set of abnormally coordinated footprints. He crept down to the ground and eyed a fresh deer corpse, finding strangely large and humanlike bite wounds on the deer’s decaying neck and stomach. With the steep landscape that led to the fallen deer, and the abnormal footprints making a trail down the hill, Sherman knew no human was behind this.
As a cryptozoologist, a scientist who studies creatures and organisms that other scientists do not yet recognize, the primary subject of Sherman’s research is the elusive Bigfoot. Sherman’s meticulous research caught the attention of Matt Moneymaker, the star of Animal Planet’s show “Finding Bigfoot”, and Sherman was featured on an episode of the show’s fourth season. The episode, which was filmed near Houghton Lake, utilized Sherman as a medium for verifying the legitimacy of witnesses, as well as a source for pre-expedition research. Sherman also examined the forests to make sure it was accessible to the show’s cast and crew, and set up the town hall meeting to collect eyewitness accounts.
“This is my second year actually working with Animal Planet; however I’ve been researching with the BFRO, or the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, for over three years,” Sherman said.
As a member of BFRO, Sherman reviews a multitude of Bigfoot accounts, as well as photographs and videos snapped by supposed witnesses of the creature, and investigates ones that he finds especially peculiar.
“Every day we get new reports in through the BFRO’s website. When I heard about the maimed deer, I went out and looked at a possible track near Lost Nations, which is by Hillsdale. It was interesting; it was hard to find a reason for these footprints to have occurred. The footprints looked like a very large person, but the hill was way too steep and marshy,” Sherman said. “I tried to walk down this hill, and I fell, which isn’t abnormal, but it was just tough to do. Then I found a dead deer that was partially consumed. So maybe there’s a homeless person who really likes venison, or a rather large, unrecognized primate using this place as a hunting ground.”
Sherman shares his audio clips and other findings on the BFRO website, which is a public page where Bigfoot enthusiasts such as Sherman share their research. When Sherman led his first expedition, he met a handful of individuals with connections to producers who observed Sherman’s thorough investigative style and believed he could be a valuable contribution to the show. Sherman was asked to initiate a Bigfoot expedition program in Michigan, as, at the time, there was none.
Sherman employed the use of auditory means to capture the unusual sounds he heard.
“I kind of changed the game a little bit, because I brought audio into it. Everyone had always been after pictures and videos, but I had tons of audio recordings, and everyone listened to it and saw that I had some pretty cool stuff,” Sherman said.
After Sherman’s appearance on “Finding Bigfoot”, his investigations caught the attention of Mark Henry, radio show producer of The Edge of the Unknown. In February, Henry asked Sherman to be a key source on his paranormal talk radio station, All 1 Broadcast, or A1B.
“I’m proud to announce that two of BFRO’s finest, Ron Bolles and Jim Sherman, will be on my radio show February 16. Email or call in if you have any questions about Sasquatch,” Henry said before the show, adding his e-mail and telephone lines so that listeners could ask questions.
“The thing that really got me hooked happened right around the year 1990. I was camping in the Upper Peninsula and had three nights of something messing with my tent and walking around my tent and I could’ve sworn at the time that it was a big guy. I thought it was a person who was messing with me and I was up there with my dad and he snored through the whole thing. But what was weird about it was that it occurred basically every night at the same time right after the fire’s gone down and right when my dad started snoring. Then something walked around the tent culminating in something touching the tent. It was an unpleasant experience for me. It was very frightening and it got to the point where I stopped hunting, I stopped hiking, and I skedaddled out of there as soon as I could,” Sherman told Bolles.
Sherman’s interest and soon to be journey in his search for Bigfoot started around the year 1976, when “In Search Of,” which was a TV show hosted by Leonard Nimoy, came out.
“I watched his program on Bigfoot, and it scared me… horribly! And it made it very difficult for me to play in the woods as a kid. But that began my interest in things that really can’t possibly exist,” Sherman said.
Sherman was merely a child when he first saw the television series, and the drive to forgo everything else to find the truth didn’t really occur; however, his interest in the possible existence of creatures like Bigfoot did.
Although Sherman’s interest in helping to find Bigfoot didn’t reemerge for a decades, the show left an indelible mark that lingered into his adult years. Bigfoot soon caught up with him again when he had his own mysterious encounter while camping in the woods.
“I had forgotten about it and grew up, until about 1990 when I had something very strange happen to me while I was camping, involving something that liked to throw things at me from the woods, mess with my tent and walk around my tent late at night. And it freaked me out enough that I wanted to do more research in the subject because I was honestly scared to go in the woods,” Sherman said.
Sherman knew that he would have to go sprawling through the woods for clues. Sherman’s wife and science teacher Cynthia Sherman attested to her husband having been a woodsman and hunter for many years, which made for his expeditions no surprise to her.
“I don’t have any concerns. You know, he’s always been in the woods. That’s who he was before I met him; that’s who he is now. That’s the guy I married. So he’s always been in the woods whether it was hunting or just taking hikes,” Cynthia said.
With an experience traversing woodland terrains, qualified recording & capture equipment, Sherman peruses any location with Bigfoot sightings. Sherman’s collection of equipment includes a parabolic microphone, shotgun microphones, a fine-tuned audio recorder, and long-duration film recording units. Sherman has also manipulated some of his equipment so that he can capture the sounds and sights that suggest a previously unrecognized and large primate.
However, Sherman knows that what people see in alleged Bigfoot photos are not always genuine and may simply be a hoax.
“People have a tendency to take random pictures of the forest and then they see things that don’t exist apart from leaves, but then they send them thinking that they have the newest Patterson Gimlin before which was the famous video of Pattie. But usually almost 100 percent of the time it’s just a leaf, bark, or stump,” Sherman said.
The pictures and sound recordings don’t always disappoint as Sherman’s own image capturing equipment have caught peeks of something bizarre, along with its vocals.
“When BFRO founder Matt Moneymaker heard the howl right after he got into his ghillie suit, I knew that this something genuine. He called me right afterwards and described it, and it was consistent with what he has recorded of possible Bigfoot vocalizations. So we talked about it, and I told him that the Upper Peninsula was the area to be and that was a good spot to hear things because I’ve been there before and heard some strange things,” Sherman said.
Cynthia Sherman said that he does an amazing job of balancing his teaching, research and family. She finds her husband’s field of research interesting and wasn’t surprised when he began his Bigfoot investigations.
“He has a big interest in science. I don’t know if you’ve had him as a teacher, but you know, he talks about animals and their behavior. He knows a lot about what’s going on, and he’s studied animal behavior when he’s deer hunting. I think it’s only human to start to hear sounds or images that are on photography and to start to wonder, ‘What is this?’ and to do more research on it. And there’s always this mysterious, ‘Oh well it could be this.’ Funny ha-ha, but then as you start learning more about it and other people have had those sightings it does kind of make you want to investigate and check things out. Was I startled? No. I think it is human nature and I find it not fascinating but interesting that there could be something out there,” Cynthia said.
As a scientist, Cynthia keeps an open mind about her husband’s research, despite her desire for more empirical data.
“Do I think there’s something out there? Not until I actually have more evidence. Any scientist is open-minded until there’s enough evidence one way or another. So, am I skeptical? Yeah. Am I going to tell him he’s wasting his time? No. I think it’s cool. That’s what research is all about. You can tell a scientist in the lab, ‘You’re wasting your time’, and boom, he found something called DNA. So, it doesn’t faze me,” Cynthia said.
Sherman didn’t just bring his Bigfoot research home but to his teaching too. He tells his students brief tales of his research and shows videos, articles, and even reveals critical information that legitimized his research.
Senior Jordan Yunker will never forget what she learned about keeping an open mind when she took Sherman’s US history class.
“He would always make one or two mentions about Bigfoot in U.S. History class while he was talking but he was just starting off with his Bigfoot research back then. He didn’t just specifically set aside class time or anything to give us a lecture on Bigfoot. But when there was free time available during class, usually at the beginning or end of class, he would tell stories about his research, his daughter, or anything else that came to mind. He’d tell us about times when he took summer trips into the woods with other researchers to record various sounds, run tests on the sounds, and then check their findings against known animal sounds,” Yunker said.
Yunker enjoyed how Sherman not only told stories of his research, but also showed visuals and vocalizations of what could be Bigfoot.
“He showed us the website where they kept stored their audio files and said how they didn’t match with known animals which was pretty cool and a little spooky,” Yunker said. “I also remember Mr. Sherman talking about how he worked behind the scenes for the TV show “Finding Bigfoot”, and I love that he’s now gotten some face time on the show.”
The results of Sherman’s work will continue to be featured on the BFRO official website, BFRO.net. Sherman’s compilation of recordings and research can also be found on his Soundcloud page under the name Jim Sherman.