Movie Spotlight: Sasquatch and the Missing Man

Wes Germer hadn't returned to the site since the encounter. Too frightened. He had reported things that didn't match what other witnesses reported: hyper-aggressive displays, unusual movement, coordinated pack behavior. The strangeness, writer and editor Ward Hiney thought, was actually part of why the story seemed credible. If you're going to fabricate a sighting, you'd tell a familiar story. Wes told something else entirely.

Merkel brought his crew to Sunset Falls, Washington, to walk the remote Pacific Northwest logging road with Wes as he told the story in the place it happened. What they found when they got there made the story considerably stranger. Sasquatch and the Missing Man is about what happened next.

The Scene of the Encounter

The old growth timber of the Pacific Northwest creates a particular kind of atmosphere. “To be in the woods there feels very much as if you have stepped into prehistory,” Hiney says. The moss- and pine-rich forest floor mutes the sounds of movement, which makes audible sounds beyond the range of sight considerably more unsettling. Walking the site with Wes in daylight, the crew became more convinced than before that he had experienced something genuine there. He refused to return at night.

The Van That Didn't Move

During the first visit, the crew noticed an abandoned van about a hundred yards from the encounter site. They didn't investigate much then. When they returned a few days later and found it hadn't moved, they looked closer. A receipt on the dash was dated weeks earlier. Signs of a hastily abandoned campsite nearby. Shoes on the road between the camp and Wes' encounter site. At some point, Hiney says, they started asking whether the aggressive sasquatch activity Wes had described and the abandoned camp might actually be related.

They notified authorities. There was, in fact, an open missing person report tied to the location. No body had been found.

The Last Night

The crew returned to the encounter site for one final evening. The vocalizations, knocks, smells, and whistles started coming from the surrounding woods. Joel Thomas, the crew member Hiney describes as most willing to put himself in any strange situation imaginable, volunteered to walk a hundred yards into the dark woods and sit alone. He went.

The crew also spent time with Jon and Sarah Brown of the YouTube channel Salish Sasquatch at their property, where Wes has had his own strange experiences. The thermal image evidence the Browns present in the film is, Hiney says, “pretty stunning.”

The Crew and the Investigation

Merkel assembled a range of perspectives. Joseph Granda came as the producer handling logistics and did not expect to find himself in a situation he struggled to explain. Christian B. Roper, second camera operator, was less skeptical than Granda going in, having had his own prior experiences. Tony Merkel hosts The Confessionals podcast, which has interviewed countless witnesses to strange phenomena, giving him a deep well of comparative material when interpreting what the team observed. Ward Hiney wrote the film and appears in it, describing his own contribution as finding “the throughline in an almost gonzo, experiential adventure.”

What to Know Before You Press Play

Hiney's approach to this kind of investigation is to presume positive intent from witnesses, taking encounters seriously as genuine experiences that may leave real evidence in the world, even when they resist ordinary explanation. “I think it’s nearly preposterous to suggest that every witness to this phenomenon is either lying or mistaken,” he says. His ask for the viewer: “Enter the story with an open mind, allowing the stories and experiences of both the witnesses and our crew to speak for themselves.”

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