A hiker out for a solo walk in rural Onondaga County, New York snapped two photos of a strange figure wading through a remote pond, and now the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization cannot agree on what she caught on camera.
The witness, identified only as K.D. to protect her privacy, was hiking a glacial pond and bog on August 10, 2026 when she noticed movement to her left. What she saw looked, in her own words, like an old man wading through the water. When she got home and looked closely at the photos, she said it looked nothing like any person she had ever seen.
BFRO investigators have since dubbed the figure the “Syracuse Figure,” a nod to the nearby city and to the marshy terrain that gives Syracuse its name. The organization’s founder, Matt Moneymaker, posted the images publicly and said the group is not convinced it is human, though they are not ready to call it a Bigfoot either. What followed was a weeks-long investigation involving a site visit, a recreated photo comparison, and a statistical argument over just how unusual a four-foot-nine adult man would actually be.
What the Witness Saw
K.D. told BFRO investigator Benjamin C. that she arrived at the parking lot around 1 p.m. and had the trail entirely to herself. She walked roughly half a kilometer through forest and marsh to reach the pond’s edge, then began photographing the scenery. As she turned to take in the full view, she noticed the figure wading along the far shoreline, about 240 feet away.
She snapped two photos. In the second, the figure appeared to turn and look directly at her. K.D. said she immediately felt uneasy and started walking back toward the parking lot, passing a family of three on their way in. None of them resembled what she had seen. Once back at her car, she doubled back down a separate access path to check the shoreline again but found no one there, aside from a posted sign warning against wading or swimming in the pond.
It was only later, reviewing the images at home, that K.D. said the figure struck her as inhuman. She showed the photos to a friend, who immediately suspected a Bigfoot and passed them along to researchers.
The Investigation
Six days after the sighting, Benjamin C. met K.D. at the location to attempt a comparison. Using a tripod set at the same height and angle as her original photo, he had K.D. guide him by walkie-talkie to the exact spot where the figure had stood, then photographed himself there for scale. Getting to that spot was not simple. Wading the shoreline route took him roughly ten minutes despite waist-deep mud pockets and submerged branches, and the water itself measured about 26 inches deep just a foot from the bank.
Using his own six-foot height and the diameter of a nearby tree visible in the original photos, the investigator calculated the figure’s height at approximately four feet nine inches. He noted a visible brow ridge in both images, a feature he described as inconsistent with modern human anatomy but frequently reported in Bigfoot sightings. He also pointed to what looked like loose skin on the figure’s chest and torso, suggesting it could instead be wet fur lying flat against the body rather than sagging human skin.
The investigator argued that reaching the sighting location would have been a serious physical challenge for any person, let alone an elderly one, given the thick mud, dense brush, and posted no-wading signs. He ultimately wrote that, in his opinion, the witness photographed something other than a human, while acknowledging the possibility could not be entirely ruled out.
A Skeptical Look
Even the investigators involved were careful not to overstate their conclusions. Moneymaker himself noted there is more than one explanation still on the table and said the BFRO does not believe the figure was a full-grown Bigfoot, since reported sasquatch heights typically run closer to seven feet. A more conservative reading of the photos is simply an older or smaller man who happened to be swimming nude in a hard-to-reach spot, however unlikely the terrain made that scenario seem to the investigator on site.
Photo distortion is also worth weighing here. The images were captured at a distance and then zoomed in significantly, a process that can distort facial features and body proportions in ways that make an ordinary subject look stranger than it is. Nothing about the case has been independently verified beyond the witness account and the BFRO’s own field visit, and the exact location has not been publicly released.
Context and What Comes Next
Small or juvenile Bigfoot sightings are not new to BFRO’s files. The investigator’s report pointed to earlier cases describing similarly light or honey-colored coloring, and even cited a decades-old Idaho report describing what witnesses called a dwarf-sized female sasquatch under five feet tall. Around the same time as the Syracuse sighting, separate reports of unusually small Bigfoot-like figures were also circulating out of Pennsylvania, adding to a small but growing thread of sightings involving smaller than expected creatures rather than the towering giants more commonly described.
Whether the Syracuse Figure turns out to be an elusive juvenile cryptid, an unlucky and camera-shy skinny-dipper, or something else entirely, the case remains open. BFRO has intentionally withheld the exact location, hoping that if the figure is in fact a person, they will come forward and identify themselves using details only they would know.
For now, the photos sit in an unusual middle ground. They are not conclusive enough to prove anything, but the on-site investigation raised enough logistical and anatomical questions that a simple explanation has not quite closed the case either.
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