"People who believe in Bigfoot will be trudging through the West Virginia woods in a couple of months hoping for a close encounter with the legendary creature.

Is Bigfoot in the Mountain State?

Bigfoot researcher Stephen Willis found these tracks in rural Texas, just north of Dallas, during an expedition in January 2007. He said the footprints, which he thinks are from a large Sasquatch and its smaller offspring, were quarter-inch-deep impressions in the dirt while he, at 270-pounds, left no tracks. ..
The Mountain State has been picked by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, considered the nation's authority on the search for Sasquatch, as the site of an April expedition.

Based on the number of recent reports by people who claim they've seen the hairy apelike animal in person, Bigfoot experts and devoted believers think there's a good shot they'll find some evidence of its existence in the state.

Among those who'll be scouting backwoods hollers and mountain trails are a couple of folks with longtime West Virginia ties.

Stephen Willis is a retired military officer who grew up in West Virginia and now runs a successful business across the state line in Virginia manufacturing parts for industrial equipment and mining machines.

Pam Lovins works in healthcare administration in Huntington.

They're both well respected in their fields, have a lot of friends and seem to be bright, logical people.

But they acknowledge their hobby - searching for Bigfoot - can be difficult for some people to swallow.

"There's not a lot of funding out there for Bigfoot research, so we do have to have our day jobs," says Lovins, who's in her 40s and lives in Kenova.

Willis, 56, and Lovins are official investigators for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

Founded in 1995 by California attorney Matthew Moneymaker, the group has dozens of volunteer investigators, who by day are scientists, journalists and business owners. In their spare time, they meet with people claiming to have had a Bigfoot encounter and decide the validity of those eyewitness reports.

In the past couple of years, Willis and Lovins have investigated dozens of reported sightings in the Mountain State.

In April, they'll join other Bigfoot researchers for the four-day expedition through the West Virginia wilderness. They'll be looking for footprints and any physical evidence to prove their theory that Bigfoot abounds in places all across the country. And as always, they'll be holding their breath and hoping for a close encounter with the creature.

It will be the second time in the past few years such an expedition has taken place in the West Virginia woods.

In 2006, the organization led a mission over two consecutive weekends in Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties.

Willis, who's been on 14 such expeditions from California to Texas, will head up the search for the first time.

"We choose areas with a history of sightings," he said, careful not to divulge the exact locations of the April trek.

"We can't tell people exactly where we're going before we do this because we don't want people coming in with guns blazing," Willis said. "There are a lot of people who'd like to kill one.

"But we are just out to collect evidence, and if we have a sighting, that's great."

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Willis, 56, is a native of Webster County. He lived in West Virginia until a couple of years ago, when he retired from the U.S. Army and opened up his industrial business near Wytheville, Va. He's getting ready to sell that, and plans to retire with his wife and travel full time, mostly to volunteer with the Bigfoot group.

He said he there's no doubt in his mind that Sasquatch exists.

Growing up, he was accustomed to his grandfathers talking about the weird noises and howls they heard in their rural community, and of running into things in the wild they could not explain.

"They would talk about unknown creatures in the woods that would make these holy whooping kinds of sounds," said Willis, a graduate of Cowen High School in Webster County. "A lot of it was from the early 1900s, when my grandfather was a little kid. They attributed some of the noises to mountain lions, but it always sounded to me like something else."

He distinctly remembers when his interest in Bigfoot piqued. It was 1960 - he was nine - and a report surfaced in a Clarksburg newspaper that a bread truck driver had a Sasquatch encounter. The man said a Bigfoot ran in front of his truck on a rural road on the Webster and Braxton County line.

"It scared him so bad he quit his job on the spot because he was too scared to drive the route," Willis said.

But it's Willis' own experience that makes him a believer.

"Like a lot of people, I've heard a lot of stuff," he said. "As a kid growing up, all the noises associated with Sasquatch I had heard, but you never know what they are.

"When I got involved with the (research organization) and started listening to the sounds and we started talking about this, I had heard them all. And (researchers) said, 'Well, that's because you had a Sasquatch living around you.'"

The closest Willis said he's ever gotten to actually seeing one of the animals was during an expedition last year in California. He was using a thermal imaging system to monitor a patch of wilderness at night, and he says he clearly saw one of the creatures lit up in infrared.

He also has photographs of footprints he found in Texas that he says are unmistakably the tracks of a large Sasquatch and its smaller offspring.

Willis says his wife, Kathryn, saw two adult male Bigfoots walking on a trail during the 2005 West Virginia expedition.

She was on one side of the Greenbrier River and saw them walking up a bank on the opposite side, not far from Watoga State Park.

Lovins, too, said her belief is grounded on evidence she has uncovered and the second-hand stories she's heard from people who've been up close and personal with Bigfoot.