Hear Me, Oh Sasquatch: The Man Who Was Mistaken For Bigfoot — OK Whatever

He shared photographs and details of the creature on his Facebook group Bigfoot 911— “I turned on my headlamp and saw a large bipedal animal covered in hair,” he wrote — and the news spread like wildfire. By the next morning, media sites like Fox News and Daily Mail had reported on the sighting, and the search term “bigfootNC” was trending on Twitter.

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But then, one day later, another surprise was revealed. What Bruner had seen wasn’t a Bigfoot after all. In fact, it was just a plumber from Minneapolis wearing a homemade raccoon fur suit.

Gawain MacGregor, 36, had been performing a “shamanic” ritual that Friday night in the woods when Bruner and his team caught sight of him. After seeing a picture of himself in the news, MacGregor called the cops to confess it was him, “just to set the record straight,” he later told the New York Post.

The police in Greenfield, S.C., later made a Facebook post warning the public not to shoot at Bigfoot if they catch sight of him.

“Proof of Bigfoot still eludes us,” they wrote. “You’ll most likely be wounding a fun-loving and well-intentioned person, sweating in a gorilla costume.”

Over the next few weeks, interest in the purported Bigfoot sighting died down, and most people forgot about the mysterious man in the forest in the strange outfit. But we didn’t.