The Legend of the Yucca Man
The Yucca man is one of the most disputed mysteries in California today. For a long time, this yellowish figure has been spotted throughout the Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California since 1973. Some say it’s Joshua Tree’s very own bigfoot, others claim it’s a spectre roaming the dry plains of the national park. Ofcourse, this could just be a hoax, but then a simple hoax has attracted the attention of both the FBI and the CIA.
The First Sightings
The first sighting of the Yucca man was reported in 1971, it came from a man who was dead set against anything paranormal. An on-duty Marine guard at the nearby military base of Twentynine Palms was found later in the same area with his rifle bent in half. He was in shock so to draw any information out of him was near impossible, but he did manage to inform his fellow officers that a huge man had come out of the shrub and towards him. He raised his rifle and ordered the man to halt but as he drew closer, he realised the man was covered in hair. The figure then moved too quickly for the man to react, he took the rifle from the Marine, bent it in half and then knocked the officer out.
Both the FBI and the CIA immediately begun an investigation. There have been at least two other sightings of similar figures in the same night. One agent reported a figure being 12ft tall with a smaller figure alongside. Hikers in the area also reported there dogs going mad and barking at a strange presence in the area. In the same year, there were also numerous reports from a lot of the Joshua Park employees.
The Reports Continue
The reports of the Yucca man continued to come in, one, especially in 1979, came from an elderly couple. They claimed their car was stopped one night by a large hairy man near the Condominium in Desert Hot Springs. They said that he stepped out from behind a yucca bush and stood over the front of their car. They described him and being monumental, with a chest the size of a refrigerator, its arms dangling below its knees. It had long tan hair and an angry expression. It stopped in front of the car, looked at those inside and then vanished into the night.
Later evidence would be found in the form of 17 footprints that the creature had left behind. He would be seen on two separate occasions in two nearby areas. The footprints were a foot and a half long and six feet apart… Bigfoot fanatics would later stake out the area but find nothing else.
The Yucca Man Photo
Later on, towards the 1990’s the legend began to fade… Until a rock climber returned from a camping trip in Joshua Tree and he found something in his photographs later on, something that would shock the world. The campsite had been near a kind of cave, an ideal location for such a creature to live and he snapped a photo of the trail to his camp, he captured the figure above and created a new uproar in the paranormal community. The Yucca Man is here !!!
The Yucca man could easily be an urban legend, a training exercise for the marines, a paranormal creature, something that travels between dimensions, or simply a huge and hairy homeless man. We will only find out when man has developed sufficient technology to detect such creatures and then, just maybe, we can begin to understand them.
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