1970’s veteran researcher Mike Dardanos originally from Los Banos, California told me about a story he was given in 1968 that occurred in Calaveras County, California around 1948. This story involved teenagers who were fooling around shooting off their Daisy rifles and Red Rider BB guns near Lake Camanche in Wallace, California. The six of them were led by a former commercial fisherman named Dixon. He was an uncle of one of the boys who took them out to teach them proper rifle etiquette.
During a break for lunch, the 68-year-old Dixon caught wind of a foul smell. At first he thought his thermos had gone rank on him, but smelling again more closely, the coffee was fine. By then the boys smelled the odor in the air and thought it might be a dead animal. Curious as growing boys are, after lunch they took off investigating the smell. Towards the center of the lake on the north side they found a rotting corpse but only some parts of it. What was left of it lay sprawled on the bank with the right half of the pelvis gone.
Toning down Dardanos’ graphic remarks a little, he said, maggots had decimated most of the remaining corpse and the cloud of black flies were thick over a large foot which laid partially rotted and a puffy color white in the water. The left leg and left buttocks were covered in black hair about one to four inches long but nothing else was around the area to be found of the rest of the body. They figured what was left of the male genitalia was probably pulled off and eaten by coyotes. None of them had heard of the abominable snowman, they thought it was probably a local vagrant who lived in the hills.
Dardanos, after hearing the tale of a hair-covered torso, went ahead and made note of a “possible dead Sasquatch found near Lake Camanche,” located west of Campo Seco but south of Camanche Village in Central California around the year 1948.
(Michael Dardanos, 1996)
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