Beyond the Beyond: The Sierra Sounds – In Search of Sasquatch

Beyond the Beyond: The Sierra Sounds – In Search of Sasquatch

I grew up in Calaveras County, on the west side and in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range in California. It was remote and beautiful, and like many rural areas was full of its own superstitions and legends. Satanic rings with local prominent people, witchcraft being conducted down at the end of long and winding dirt roads, haunted buildings in the historic district of the county seat and more.

We had real life boogeymen. Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, the murderous pair who tortured their victims and videotaped themselves doing it, lived just up the road from where I grew up. I remember chatter on the radio as a kid, and talks of curfews as more and more women went missing with no suspect—or in this case suspects—in sight.

There were other strange occurrences, as well. UFO sightings were aplenty. So frequent, in fact, that the area I grew up in came to represent one corner of what many Ufologists now call Triangle Alley. This is an area in California that is known for having clusters of UFO sightings, particularly those of a black triangular craft that many now refer to as the TR-3B. There was a website in my teens called sonorasightings.com which for a long time had the only known daytime footage of a black triangle on the internet.

And higher up in the Sierra, we would always hear rumblings of large, hairy beings sighted for a fraction of the second in someone’s high beams as whatever it was ran across a dark road at night. A scoutmaster once told me on one of our five-mile hikes, that 20 years before on that exact same trail, he’d come across a dead horse hanging in a tree 20 feet up in the air. If you go to the local store in Strawberry, CA 20 miles north of Sonora, you’ll find a large wooden statue of a Sasquatch and a list of sightings written on the side of the building. We won’t even go into the high number of disappearances in that county.  

Not too far as the crow flies from Strawberry, about 15 miles up a dirt trail only accessible by foot and mule, Ron Moorehead and his friend Al Berry were camping in a small makeshift cabin. They had embarked on a hunting trip that morning and had been warned by the elderly man who made that cabin that while up there, they may experience something… strange. The two men blew the comments off, but were soon going to find out just how serious they should have taken them.

In the middle of the night, the darkness seemed to speak. Low, guttural noises and loud whoops surrounded them. They could hear large crashed around the cabin, and something that sounded too much like a language to be coming from an animal. Frozen with fear, the men headed down the mountain the next morning. But curiosity got the best of them, and on the next trip and on many others, they brought tape recording equipment to try and capture just what they had heard that terrifying first night.

You can listen to what they captured below:

and here:

R. Scott Nelson, a retired Navy cryptologic linguist, analyzed the sounds, focusing on the patterns and vocalizations present in the recordings and comparing them with both animal and human sounds. He reached the conclusion that the vocalizations displayed traits akin to language, such as structured patterns, rhythmic cadences, and phonetic intricacy, and stated that the sounds indicated intentional communication rather than random sounds or noises. The sounds, he concluded, are a language of some sort.

The Sierra Sounds still remain controversial with regard to whether they are authentic or not. Some remain adamant that the “guttural chatter” can be easily reproduced by a human, while others are sure that they are must have been made by something else.

What do you think of the Sierra Sounds?

Message me @beyondthebeyond1 on Instagram.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Eastern Sierra Now. Readers are encouraged to conduct further research and consult with relevant experts or professionals before making any decisions or taking any actions based on the information provided in this article.

–

Catch up on more “Beyond the Beyond” here.

TM Rush