If Oregon has a capital of Bigfoot lore, the Blue Mountains around Umatilla may be a contender, with a controversial 1994 video, a set of terrifying screams recorded on the reservation, and a steady stream of searchers still betting they can prove it.
A fresh round of attention came on July 21, 2025, when the Rocky Mountain Sasquatch Organization posted a video titled Umatilla Bigfoot Video Investigation in Blue Mountains, one of several Oregon Bigfoot videos it published that month. Since that video lives on YouTube, this post focuses on the history that makes the region such a magnet.
The 1994 Freeman Footage
Paul Freeman, a Forest Service employee and controversial Bigfoot hunter, said he filmed a Bigfoot walking across a trail in the Umatilla National Forest in 1994. The footage is low resolution, and researchers have argued for years over what it shows. Some even say the figure stops to pick up a juvenile, though the quality never allowed that claim to be settled.
Freeman also brought in many footprint casts, and scientists such as Jeff Meldrum and Grover Krantz considered some of them convincing. Others considered Freeman himself controversial. The video was spoofed in beer ads, which tells you how famous it became. Freeman died in 2003.
The Screams on the Reservation
In late 2012 and early 2013, residents north of the Wildhorse Casino on the Umatilla Indian Reservation began hearing loud shrieks and roars from a brushy swamp at the edge of the Blue Mountains. Reports say the sounds started in November, kept people awake, and that dogs refused to go outside.
Colleen Chance, who worked for the tribal housing authority, recorded the cries on her phone, and the recording reached The Oregonian. Bigfoot researchers jumped in, with Matt Moneymaker insisting it would be Bigfoots, plural. Others suggested foxes, coyotes, or even wolves from the Walla Walla pack. Nobody settled it, and as one later write-up put it, the source of the sounds was never clearly identified.
A Region With Its Own Traditions
Reports about the area also mention a figure called the Umatilla Screamer, described as part of the traditions of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Cayuse peoples. Traditional accounts belong to the communities that hold them, and outside retellings should be read with that in mind.
Today’s Searchers
Scot Violette, who holds a master’s in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, runs Blue Mountain Bigfoot Research and describes his work as scientifically based. His catchphrase is time on target, and he leads what insiders call squatching trips into forest areas well beyond cell service. Travel Oregon reports that dozens of alleged Bigfoot sightings are reported in the Blue Mountains every year.
The Skeptical View
There is still no physical specimen, and the Freeman footage is too low in resolution to settle much. The screams have conventional candidates, since foxes, coyotes, and wolves are all known to live in the area. Even researchers friendly to the idea of Bigfoot have said that audio is poor evidence, because sounds are easy to misattribute and hard to verify.
Yet the Blue Mountains keep producing the same ingredients: remote forest, strange sounds, grainy footage, and people willing to sit in the dark for months. If a Bigfoot population does exist in the Pacific Northwest, this is the sort of country where it would make sense for the stories to cluster.
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