Jack Hovatter was hunting in the forests on the Fort Gordon Army base near Augusta in the fall of 1979 when he saw a huge footprint that would lead to the biggest shock of his life.''I thought it was two bear tracks, and I didn't know there were bears around here. My son was off to the side and he said, 'No Dad, that's one track.'''Hovatter, who is retired from the military and lives in Augusta, said he kept thinking about the track, so he returned to the area more than a week later to see if he could find what made it. The track was near a thicket that at first Hovatter thought was nearly impenetrable until he located a path leading inside.''I got inside and here that thing came. It's not like it was trying to catch me. It was trying to scare me,'' he said.What Hovatter saw was a bipedal apelike creature covered in thick hair. It was about 10-feet tall or slightly taller. It came within 15 feet of him.''I wanted to turn and run, but I've always heard that with a wild animal that's a bad thing to do. I had a shotgun, but it was too big and too close,'' he said.

''It seems like a 16-gauge shotgun is a powerful weapon until I saw something that big, that close up. It felt like I had a .22.''Hovatter, who backed out of the thicket, said he couldn't believe the animal's size and the width of its shoulders.''I'd seen the film Roger Patterson made (in northern California of a supposed Bigfoot), but I wasn't expecting anything that big,'' he said.

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