Five Seconds of Bigfoot: The North Carolina Video That Went Viral in 2011

On the evening of March 22, 2011, two people were driving along Golden Valley Church Road in Rutherford County, North Carolina, when something appeared at the edge of the road. Thomas Byers, a Shelby-area man, said it was an enormous, brown-haired creature walking upright. His friend, Carolyn Wright, was there with him.

Byers stopped, pulled out a pocket camera, and recorded what became one of the strangest little viral videos of that year.

Four or five seconds. A blurry figure crossing a country road. And more than a million people watching within days.

Even if you've never believed in Bigfoot for a minute, what happened next is a wonderful piece of North Carolina history. A local newspaper interviewed the witnesses. A university zoologist examined the video. National networks picked up the story. And the supposed creature already had a name familiar to people in the foothills: Knobby.

Byers and Wright hadn't set out to film a Sasquatch. According to The Shelby Star's March 24 reporting, they were headed toward an old church graveyard, hoping to investigate possible paranormal activity. The hills nearby were undergoing a prescribed burn, and Byers told the newspaper he had been watching wildlife move through the area as the fire pushed animals out of the brush.

That was when the figure appeared. Byers described a stocky animal weighing perhaps 300 pounds, covered with brown fur, and standing roughly six or seven feet tall. He said it came out of a field, moved through roadside briars, and crossed the pavement before disappearing uphill into the woods.

He also claimed it turned toward him and snarled. He thought he had been standing only about 15 to 20 feet away. And, in a detail repeated by reporters all over the country, he said it smelled like roadkill mixed with a skunk.

Imagine seeing something that startling beside a country road, then watching it vanish before you even get a decent picture. That's what Byers said happened. But when the little clip went online, millions of people would get their own chance to decide what the camera had actually captured.

The surviving 2011 video is genuinely tiny—one archival mirror lists it at four seconds, though contemporary news coverage generally called it five. It shows an indistinct upright figure crossing a road; the image is so blurry that very little detail can be checked.

I suggest watching it once, then watching it again without reading the claims first. Can you actually make out a face, fur, or unusual proportions? Or do you simply see a human-shaped figure in the blur? That's the question people were arguing about in March 2011, too.

One of the most interesting parts of the story is that The Shelby Star didn't just repeat the tale. Reporter Corey Friedman showed the footage to Dr. James English, a zoology professor at Gardner-Webb University.

English was not convinced. The figure's gait looked human to him. He saw a possible limp in the right leg, rather than the long stride you'd expect from the immense, athletic creature Byers described. Most remarkably, he thought there might be a patch of blue on the lower body that resembled blue jeans.

He was careful about what the poor recording could support. The image was too indistinct to say definitively what the figure was wearing or whether it had hair. But he saw nothing that required an unknown species to explain it.

Another skeptic came from within the Bigfoot world itself. Mike Greene, a North Carolina enthusiast who had spent years looking for Sasquatch, thought the short stride and gait were wrong, too. His assessment of the film was a blunt one: “lousy fake.”

Byers and Wright said they later photographed footprints in a plowed field. Contemporary reporting also repeated Byers' claim that the creature had six toes. But no independently verified track evidence came out of the reporting we found. There was no specimen, no confirmed biological material, and no reliable way to use a four-second blur to establish the existence of an unidentified primate.

That's important. The sighting report was real. The video was real in the sense that Byers published a recording and reporters examined it. But neither fact proves that the blurry figure was Bigfoot.

There was a built-in contradiction, too. Byers insisted he'd been close enough to see a great deal of detail. Viewers of the recording, meanwhile, could scarcely make out the shape. A good eyewitness story isn't necessarily a good identification, especially when what the camera shows and what the witness remembers are so different.

Local reporters immediately connected the new video with an older legend. In the winter of 1978–79, neighbors around Carpenter's Knob in Cleveland County reported a big, hairy figure in the woods. The excitement attracted crowds, newspapers, radio crews, and even a television special. We recently revisited the entire original Knobby story and embedded the surviving 1979 broadcast.

Then in June 2010, Tim Peeler called 911 from near Casar after saying he'd driven a towering, yellowish-haired visitor away from his dogs. Byers' story arrived just nine months later, across the county line in Rutherford County.

But the descriptions weren't the same. Peeler had talked about a nearly ten-foot visitor with yellowish or pale hair. Byers estimated about seven feet and described dark brown fur. Even believers couldn't be sure they were talking about the same supposed creature. And the blurred film certainly didn't settle it.

To me, the most fascinating thing is how one local legend kept finding new lives in completely different kinds of evidence: word of mouth in 1979, a 911 recording in 2010, and an internet video in 2011.

We've been collecting these stories for years. Our Fall 2023 Foothills Digest issue, Ghosties, Witches, Haints & Spirits, includes a “Bigfoot” feature beginning on page 10. The spread below comes directly from that issue. Click it to open the magazine on the correct page and continue reading.

There are more stories in this growing local collection, including two reported Bigfoot sightings near Taylorsville in 2013. One involved a power-line clearing by a cattle pasture. The other occurred near a muscadine vineyard.

I don't think anyone should confuse the popularity of this video with evidence that an unknown ape lives in Rutherford County. The tape is far too poor to support that conclusion, and experts who examined it at the time found reasons for skepticism.

But the moment itself has become part of our regional folklore. Two friends on the way to a cemetery, a prescribed burn in the mountains, an alleged hairy creature moving through the brush, and a little digital camera that made a country-road story travel around the world.

And here's something I would genuinely love to know: Did you see the video when it went viral in 2011? Do you remember what people around Bostic, Golden Valley, Casar, or Shelby were saying at the time? If so, we want to hear from you.

• The Shelby Star, March 24, 2011: “Knobby or his kin?” — detailed original reporting by Corey Friedman, including Byers' eyewitness account and Gardner-Webb's expert analysis.
• ABC News, March 25, 2011 — reporting on the video going viral and the reaction from skeptics.
• Live Science, March 24, 2011 — Benjamin Radford's analysis of the recording's problems.
• Metatube's March 2011 archived “Knobby” clip — a surviving four-second copy associated with Thomas Byers' account.
• Foothills Digest Issue #23, “Bigfoot,” beginning on page 10.

Editorial note: This article reports historical allegations, not a verified sighting of an unidentified animal. The featured photograph is illustrative—not Golden Valley Church Road or the location of the encounter. Photo by Aaron Burden/Unsplash. Video copyright remains with its respective owner or archival host.