I was patrolling with my partner about 3:00am in the morning on a Tuesday. We have a lot of motion detectors, etc. in the area near the river to detect people crossing into the United States.
When one of the alarms goes off, we get dispatched over to it so we can round up any people we find out there. It's not so bad this time of year, but a lot of people have been dying of dehydration in the desert, so we've started with a quicker response time. But that's beside the point.
An alarm went off around 3am, and since my partner and I were closest to it, we got dispatched out there to have a look. We had our lights off and drove up there pretty quiet, you never know if you're going up against an armed coyote (trafficker) or not. Anyway, I was driving and using night vision goggles, when about 70 yards off I saw what I thought was the biggest Mexican I've ever seen! I hit my halogen spotlights and my partner nearly jumped out of his seat! I took off the goggles and saw a large, extremely hairy creature take off running into the bushes. We knew then we weren't after an illegal. We gave chase for a minute or two, but he kept dodging out of the spotlights and eventually made off into the hills into terrain we couldn't access.
My partner and I didn't know whether we should file a report or anything, so we went back and talked to our CO. He got kind of nervous and said for us to wait. After a couple hours some guys from the government, not wearing any uniforms or insignia, came to visit us. They told us that we hadn't seen anything unusual and it was probably someone in a coat or in disguise or a shaggy coat and asked us not to talk about it.
We said OK, but what we saw was not a human. Someone wearing that much clothing, if it was clothing, couldn't have moved that fast. And most people outside the NBA just aren't that tall, either.
In the past week or so, I've casually mentioned this to other officers here. Some look at me like I'm crazy, but a few have told me about similar experiences that they've been afraid to report. Apparently, these creatures set off the alarms every now and then. Our guess is that they're coming out of the hills to get water from the river. They don't do it so much because of the highway, but they still come. Also, a couple of the officers say that they've picked up illegals who saw creatures like this coming back from the river.
Sighting in Novemeber of 2002 near Yuma, Arizona.
