Hello, I'm Jerry Lustin and was among the guys who found the giant creature in November of 1962. Bill emery has asked me to write a short comment on this site. I have never wrote anything in my life so bare with me.
It was in the early hours of November 9th when me and several other men were working the Dew Ridge area clearing wind falls from the roads in the area. If memory serves me it was 8:30 am or so when we saw what we thought to be a dead bear under a big old growth tree on Dew. As we approached the bear it became plain to us that it was not a bear.
The animal was something in between ape and human in looks only larger than any thing I've seen ever before or since. The animal was laying under the tree face down and dead. We all looked at it and to our surprise this animal had hands and feet not paws. It was covered in a short crop of black hair and obviously not anything ever seen by us before.
We needed a forest service foreman to come to the site right away to look at it because, we were not to remove any fatalities from wind storm damage trees without forest service being on site. We had well understood protocol to go through in case we came across a car with people in it under a tree. Ranger Guy Adams from Cave Junction arrived and took photos from both sides of the tree. Then more people came up to do the same. As the site filled with forest service and unknown people we were directed to cut a 10 section out above the creature for removal.
It was after we removed the tree off the animal that they got branch poles out and turned the animal over onto its back. The animal's eyes ware open and dried blood was all over the mouth and ears of the animal. The eyes were black in color. Teeth were jagged and yellowish. It had breasts on it like a female only dropped and small in shape. It was female of course. Everybody was told to stay away from the animal at this point. By noon a truck had showed up and they used block and tackle to pick the animal up and swing it into the back of the flatbed.
At that point the big wig from Medford came and they told us to leave that road and go to Glary Creek some 5 mile away to work for the rest of the week. They started acting like squirrels to many of us, nervous and snappy. It was three days later when Guy told us that animal was a ape escaped from a home in O'Brien. We knew it was bull, because who keeps a 8 ft ape for a pet. We knew when we uncovered the animal, it wasn't no ape. We didn't know about bigfoot then but thought it was some kind of wild man-gal.
For some time after many stories came out on the animal as to what it was. My brother- in- law took 3 pictures of it and I hope to give copies to Emery if Stan can locate them.
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Thank you, Jerry. How exciting that day must have been. We look forward to the photos. ...Linda Newton-Perry
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