March 22/23/24 2007 South Central Louisiana Outing

This outing was based in one of our research target areas in south central Louisiana, there were 6 researchers present this weekend. Previous ventures into this area had resulted in finding Teepee type formations (including the one pictured to the right), along with impressions in the ground around the formations that had the appearance of tracks from something very heavy. This was the first time that we used dropboxes designed to record audio from various distances from our call broadcast locations. At this time we only had 2 ready for use on this outing, however, both resulted in some pretty interesting audio. The highlights of which were two close approaches at the recording stations from "something", this something either is or can sound bipedal. On Saturday night we recorded a vocal on one of our dishes that is still being evaluated, it doesn't seem right for an owl and it also doesn't seem to fit a fox. We have listed this recording below for you to listen to, you can also see some comparison work we have done to a female Soprano voice pattern in the form of a spectrograph on the Unidentified Field Vocals page. This vocal along with others that we have recorded over the last couple of years have been cleaned up by the TexLa Group for call blasting purposes. Fans of the History Channel show "MonsterQuest" can hear the cleaned up version of this vocal being call blasted by Rick Noll and the MQ research team in the recently aired "Swamp Stalker" episode.

On Friday night the team wasn't fully assembled in the research area until 23:00hrs, so we left immediately after the last team members arrived and proceeded to the chosen call broadcast point and started the pre-determined program of calls. We spent about 3 hours at this location and other than some movement caused by some unseen small critters we didn't hear anything that could not be identified. On Saturday night 2 team members left and deployed the 2 drop boxes near the Southern end of the research area at 19:30hrs, this area was to be our second call broadcast location if our first location turned out to be quiet. We deployed to our first location at the North end of the research area at 22:00hrs. While the North end of the research area has had historical Bigfoot sightings, we weren't that lucky, the only thing seen was a Turkey with the aid of Gen 2 night vision. We heard something moving nearby on the dishes and when checked out turned out to be an Armadillo. Finally a train came through on the nearby tracks and pretty much drowned out all wildlife. At midnight we made the call to move south.

We arrived at location 2 around 00:30hrs on Sunday morning, we split the group into 2 call blasting posts. On this night we tried something new, we were going to setup 2 call blasters and with the intention of volleying calls back and forth with the hope that this would encourage any nearby animals to join in. After the first set of volleyed calls we had some coyotes respond from SE of our locations when these died down we had another 2 vocals come from due South, this is the recording you will hear below. After reviewing the Drop box recordings we discovered that the recorder that had been placed off of the ATV trail had something make a close approach at 22:23hrs. Our second call blast location was 1/2 mile east of this recorder, we were at the North location at the time of this incident and whatever it was did not respond to our call blasts. On the first recording, the creature makes some type of swishing sound as though cutting the air with a switch, it then pulled on the vine that was holding the dropbox wedged against a tree, or pulled on the box itself. The clinking sound you hear is an above ground pipeline being tapped with something, perhaps a stick. The second close approach happened at a location off of a pipeline clearcut just before 01:00hrs Sunday morning. If you use headphones you should be able to hear this creature running through the large puddle that surrounded this location about 30 seconds before it starts to get close. Near the end you can hear us call blasting in the distance, this occurs just before the visitor crosses back through the water. The distance between the 2 recorders was 1.2 miles, the distance back to the two call blast locations was 1.5 and 2 miles. It is our position that this is unlikely to be human, based on the rather reckless dashing about through the large puddles, we suspect that humans would use a more measured approach to crossing these at 1AM. To listen click the links in the left column below.