Police in Damariscotta, a small coastal town in midcoast Maine, spent the morning of Sept. 7 fielding roughly half a dozen calls about a large, hair-covered figure roaming Main Street. Some callers wondered aloud whether Bigfoot, Sasquatch or a Yeti had wandered into town on the first day of the school year. Officer William Smith tracked the figure down sitting calmly downtown and found, instead of a cryptid, a local man in what the department later called a "very convincing costume."
The sightings clustered around the elementary school during morning drop-off, according to the Boston Globe, which reported that the man was recognized by some residents from a past local television appearance. No arrest was made, since dressing up in a costume and sitting on a public sidewalk broke no law. Several residents, rather than fleeing, stopped to take photographs with him.
A Tongue-in-Cheek Case File
Damariscotta Police Chief Erik Josephson closed the investigation with a Facebook post that quickly spread well beyond the town's roughly 2,000 residents, picked up by television stations across New England and aggregators nationwide.
After a lengthy, exhaustive, and completely serious investigation, members of the Damariscotta Police Department have reached a conclusion: Bigfoot is not real.
Police Chief Erik Josephson, Damariscotta Police Department
Maine has a long, if unscientific, association with Sasquatch lore, and cryptid sightings tend to spike every few years in rural New England towns. This one differed only in how quickly it resolved: within a day, officers had identified the "creature," and the department leaned into the joke rather than downplaying it, posting updates that treated the case with mock seriousness.
No charges are expected, and the man in the costume has not been publicly identified. Damariscotta police say the file is officially closed, though the department's Facebook post has kept the story circulating online for a second week, well past the original incident.
