Bigfoot Hunters Claim New Jersey Breakthrough: What Did They Find?

Things are getting hairy for Bigfoot in New Jersey!

A group of hunters is investigating Sasquatch “sightings” in the Garden State — where the mysterious upright-walking beast has reportedly been seen or heard nearly 80 times.

Though legend has it Sasquatch lives in the Pacific Northwest, The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has listed 79 reported Bigfoot sightings in New Jersey on its website.

Bigfoot researcher Mike Familant said the most recent sighting involved a trail runner in Stokes State Forest who heard eerie “grunting” last fall.

“She was running at dusk and she heard two very loud grunting sounds. She assumed it was a bear and then all of a sudden two full-sized trees began to shake,” Familant told The Post.

Familant and his team also honed in on an unexplainable animal-like sound after mimicking an owl at High Point State Park in northwestern Jersey, Familant said.

“It was three low, sustained moaning howls,” he said. “It was far away but you could tell there was some power to it.” 

“I felt this immediate adrenaline spike because I knew it was something different, and it was something we’d been longing to capture,” he said.

The group recorded the sound in 2019 — but the mystery deepened when an expert determined it had come from outside of the area’s known animal world, said Familant, who documents the sightings on his online series, “In the Shadow of Big Red Eye.”

A military linguist “came back and said it was outside of human vocal range and wasn’t any known animal from northwestern New Jersey,” Familant said.

The forests of Delaware Water Gap and Stokes State Forest are also supposed hotspots for the elusive ape, according to Familant.

New Jersey as a state is ranked fifth in the country for Bigfoot sightings, said Familant.

One reason may be because the Garden State has a good combination of high-trafficked forest trails in wilderness locations that are isolated enough for the supposed creatures to thrive, Familant said.

“You have to have two things to get a Bigfoot sighting; you have to have a person and you have to have a Bigfoot,” he said.

“New Jersey is unique because we have a good mixture of both,” he said. 

Jacob Korbel, an investigator for the research organization, said he was at first a Bigfoot skeptic — until he joined the group on an outing in the Pine Barrens in 2021.

“About 100 yards away in front of us, there’s this whoop response,” Korbel told NJ.com. “And right away, I’m like, that’s nothing that I’ve ever heard before. That’s not an owl, that’s not a coyote, fox.”

“And you could hear it slowly getting closer to our position, like it was coming in to check us out. Like we were almost getting flanked,” he recalled.

Overall, the reported Bigfoot sightings include 18 in Sussex County, 16 in Burlington County and 11 in Ocean County.

Before logging a “sighting” the group uses audio technology to “eliminate every possibility” that it could be another animal, such as a black bear, Familant said.

His ultimate goal is to “protect the species” and solve a mystery that has enthralled him for years, he said.

Despite their research, there is still no irrefutable evidence Bigfoot exists, is elusive or just mythical.

True believers point to everything from footprints to photographs and even DNA from hair as evidence the beast has been stomping around the forests of North America for decades.