Sunday Transmission

Sunday again. The good part is mostly behind you and the rest of it is standing in the driveway with its engine running.

Here is a different thing to think about. It happened in North Carolina, about an hour from where a lot of you live, and it involves a candy bar.

Montgomery County logs more Bigfoot reports than any other county in North Carolina. Most of them come out of the Uwharrie — fifty thousand acres of old, worn-down mountain country and second-growth hardwood, threaded with forest roads that mostly go where the loggers used to go.

In 2009 a researcher named Michael Greene set up near a campsite in there. He put a stump in a clearing. He put a candy bar on the stump. He pointed a thermal camera at it and waited.

What he got is one of the most argued-over pieces of footage in the state. A large heat signature steps into frame, reaches for the stump, and moves off through the trees.

Believers point to the anatomy of the heat blob. Skeptics point out that people also have heat signatures. Both are correct, which is the problem.

Eight years later, a research group setting up glow sticks in McDowell County met something large and bipedal in the trees at close range. Solid black face. No visible hair on it. Several long strides and gone.

The Uwharrie doesn't look like much from the car. But it is old country. And it is very good at not being observed.

Somebody sat in the dark in the Uwharrie for hours, watching a candy bar on a stump, on the chance that something would come get it.

Something came and got it.

Tomorrow's going to happen either way. But that clearing is still out there tonight, and nobody's watching it.