Art by Natalie Dee

A man from Lancaster, Texas, spent December 13, 2010, Monday night in a nature preserve 75 miles east of Dallas trying to lure Bigfoot to his black Toyota sedan, police say.

Mineola Police Capt. Jack Newman responded to a trespassing call December 14, 2010, Tuesday morning to find the man camped out in his car along the Sabine River, with bait on the roof of the car he said was meant to draw the Texas Sasquatch out of hiding.

“He had some pieces of orange and a piece of steak and some nuts right on the top of his car,” Newman says. Next to a tree about 20 yards away, he says, the man had scattered a few more orange pieces. “I don’t know if he’d been trying to coax him over to the car or what.”

The individual has not been identified. This handsome Texan researcher with a Bigfoot cast is merely used for illustrative purposes.

“He’d heard something about Bigfoot down around the Sabine River,” Newman says, though as far as he knows, the biggest wildlife draws around the preserve are deer and wild hogs. Fanning the flames of mystery, Newman says he can’t release the name of the man, who he says left the scene when asked. “He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be in there,” Newman says.

A report from KMOO radio in Mineola, though, says there have been fresh rumors of a Bigfoot sighting on private property near the preserve. One possible explanation, theorized The Dallas Observer, was that the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy held its annual conference in nearby Tyler in late October 2010, though as Noah Bailey pointed out after hearing me on the phone this afternoon, Mineola has been a hotbed of Sasquatch activity for years.

Buster Green, a Mineola Nature Preserve caretaker who works for the city, says he spotted the man Tuesday morning and spoke to the would-be hunter briefly before calling police. “He was rolled up there sleeping in his vehicle when I come by,” he says. Green says the man had a camera in his car; KMOO reports he was otherwise unarmed. “He said he’d come down here on kind of a whim,” Green says.

“He was a big boy. He’s over six-foot, 230-ish,” Green says. “He didn’t need nothing to be hunting Bigfoot. He could’ve gone down there with just a switch,” The Dallas Observer.