Hairy Encounter

July 12, 1969 — In Oroville, California, Charles Jackson and his young son Kevin reported a startling encounter in their backyard. Out of the trees behind their home stepped a towering figure, seven to eight feet tall, covered in gray hair, and, as they later described, apparently female, with visible breasts.

The creature lingered only briefly before darting back into the woods. But the sighting would not be the last. Over the course of that summer, Oroville residents filed a flurry of reports, and the old gold rush town soon gained a new reputation — as Sasquatch central.

At a time when humanity was preparing to set foot on the Moon, locals in Northern California swore that something just as strange was striding through the forests much closer to home.