But there's certainly something weird with the FBI, because if you try and FOIA the FBI report on the Dennis Martin case, even to this day, and we're talking 40 years later now, they still send you an entirely redacted report, which is really odd.
(00:48:12)
Wow. Because I don't understand what there could be to hide anymore.
Right. Most people involved with this case are dead now.
Right. So it makes you think that they know something and they're hiding it.
Definitely Bigfoot. You know, I really believe that Bigfoot had something to do with this case. I thought this was like, you know, I thought we had him.
All right. Okay, we're going to touch on that later. I'm not going to let that one go.
(00:48:41)
But there's another researcher who looked into this case, and his name is Michael Bouchard. He came out with a book a couple years ago called Forever Searching Lost in the Smoky Mountains. And he's a former, I think he actually still is a current police officer in Connecticut, and a detective, and in his free time, he likes to write books about cold cases.
He came out with this book about Dennis Martin, and it is just the most detailed investigation I've ever seen on the case.
(00:49:17)
And, you know, I thought when I was researching this that I had, you know, maybe found some things other people hadn't and then I discovered his book and I was like, oh, this guy has found all this stuff out before I did.
(00:49:31)
And he just hasn't gotten much press about it.
Which is interesting because, you know, this case has become really popular in terms of missing persons cases and missing 411 cases. This is what a lot of people would consider to be a keystone case, you know, like a pretty big deal.
But the most important thing that Michael Bouchard did in his book was that he was able to find Harold Key, the man who saw perhaps Bigfoot or whatever it was in the woods.
(00:50:05)
And interview him in 2016. So he was actually able to get the full story.
And Mr. Key told him that he didn't see a Bigfoot or a wild man, that he saw what appeared to be a disheveled man, a sweaty guy who just came out of the bushes.
He was covered in leaves. And he stated that before he went into the woods that day, he walked by a white car and it was parked right on the road.
(00:50:32)
And as he went in, that's when he encountered the guy just rushing through the brush.
And he said the guy went to the road, got in the car and drove off at a high rate of speed.
And he said he looked to his wife during this time and he said, that guy's up to something.
And they continued on in the woods after that odd incident.
(00:50:53)
And he says he heard a scream and he said it sounded like a child screaming the word help.
And he couldn't tell where it was coming from. And so he couldn't go look.
But that's what he heard. And he told the FBI that. I think it was two days after the incident.
And he cleared some additional things up because in the original newspaper article, it says that the kids said they saw a bear.
(00:51:21)
And Michael Bouchard interviewed Harold Key's children and they told him that none of the kids actually saw anything.
That they were back on the trail playing and they were not really paying attention to what was going on.
And Harold Key was ahead of the rest of the family.
So he was the only witness to anybody in this case.
And, you know, when I heard about this, that was like groundbreaking to me because this is a case that I thought, you know, it was a Bigfoot case or a wild man case for a long time.
(00:51:53)
And to hear those new details, I was like, wow, I don't ever hear anybody talking about this.
Yeah. Why not? And I kept doing some digging when I was making my video.
And I actually found a newspaper article from 1969 that no one ever talks about if they've ever seen it, where it's an interview with Mr. Key. And he confirms that same story. He says, I saw a white car before going into the woods.
(00:52:26)
And then I saw a man in the woods and he got into the car and drove off.
(00:52:31)
So you have him telling the same story in 1969 and then again in 2016. And bringing this to the people that are interested in missing persons cases was something I just kind of felt like it needed to be done.
Yeah. Because, I mean, as much as I want to believe in anything, whether it be a cryptid or a pair of wild people, I can't do it at the expense of evidence to the contrary.
(00:53:07)
Right. And so learning these things completely changed my opinion about the case.
You know, we learned some other things, too, from Michael Bouchard. He interviewed the family of Jim Reich, the FBI agent, confirmed for everyone that he didn't kill himself because of this case.
He had some personal demons he was dealing with. Bouchard didn't reveal what those were in his book, but he just confirms that it was not a factor.
(00:53:38)
Obviously, the thing we get to is, well, if it wasn't, what did this man have to do with anything and where's Dennis Martin?
Yeah. And in my opinion, we only have... there's two real options. Either that man that Harold Key saw in Rowan's Creek has something to do with the incident and we're not sure what, or Dwight McCarter, who, again, was a ranger who did a lot of searching in this case.
(00:54:13)
Yeah. He has a theory that is also interesting and it doesn't get around enough. He's done a lot of interviews and podcasts and things like that over the years.
And recently he was on one and he was discussing this and he was discussing how he thought he smelled a dead body, basically, when he was searching back in 1969 along the West Prong Trail and that he wanted to go investigate it, but his superiors told him not to.
(00:54:48)
They told him the area had already been searched and there was nothing down there. And Dwight McCarter, in his interview, is very insistent that he knows what a dead body smells like. And he felt certain that the kid was down on, or Dennis was down on West Prong, which is a trail in the area.
And he was kind of a new ranger at the time, so he didn't have the confidence to challenge his superiors and they just didn't search that area.
(00:55:14)
Wow. And in 1985, McCarter says that an illegal ginseng harvester, because ginseng is in the Smoky Mountains, you're not supposed to harvest it, but people do illegally.
Who knew?
Right. And so this guy comes up to McCarter and tells him, in 1985, that back in the early 70s, he was picking ginseng in the area, in this area called Big Hollow, specifically, which is right next to West Prong, kind of right in the vicinity where McCarter says he smelled a body.
(00:55:50)
And he says he came upon skeletal remains buried in the ground and they were a child's remains.
Oh, man.
And he didn't take it to the police at the time because he was doing illegal ginseng harvesting, thought he would get in trouble for it.
(00:56:05)
Couldn't just, like, say, hey, I was going for a walk in the woods.
It's ridiculous, really. Yeah. And once McCarter heard this in 85, he got together a team and they went out there and tried to search the area. But you're talking 15 years later now.
And he said the ground was just covered in a layer. And if there was anything there, they weren't going to find it.
(00:56:24)
Yeah. It would have been... I don't know if they took cadaver dogs on that search, but it would have been... I mean, who knows, ultimately, the validity of that ginseng harvester story, but it's possible the case could have been solved by him if he had come forward earlier or if they had done a more thorough search.
Because as far as I'm aware, they haven't searched that area again since the mid 80s. Oh, wow.
(00:56:53)
Yeah. So in my opinion, in this case, it seems like Dennis Martin may have been abducted by someone.
Yeah. We don't know who exactly. It may have been that guy that Mr. Key saw. But on the other hand, you have this story of this Dwight McCarter's time. Maybe he got away and got lost and died from exposure.
You know, there's still a lot of unanswered questions, but all my research I did on this case, like I said, changed my mind completely.
(00:57:28)
Yeah. Because I started out as thinking, oh, there might be a cryptid involved in this case or a wild man. And I couldn't find any evidence for that. In the end, we take into account all the more modern information that's available out there.
Yeah. And I know I just talked your ear off about this.
No, that's amazing. It's interesting.
You know, it's a very complex case, as you can tell. And we're over 40 years and we're still learning stuff today.
(00:58:00)
Yeah. It seems like there was a lot of opportunities, kind of missed opportunities in the case, too. You know, where the ranger, I smelled this and the guy, the ginseng picker, the harvester, you know, saw the skeletal remains.
