Bigfoot sightings are typically associated with remote forests and deep wilderness, not quiet residential streets. But on the night of May 10, 1982, multiple witnesses in the suburban Orange County city of Buena Park reported seeing something they couldn’t explain: a massive, hairy, loud creature estimated to stand about 9 feet tall.

“First we hear a noise, then we all look,” Raymond Hinsley told SFGATE by phone. “... And then a foul odor came by.” Hinsley was 16 at the time, hanging out with his 18-year-old brother and friends in the back of his apartment complex, when the mysterious creature caught their attention about 30 feet away in a drainage ditch.

Hinsley imitated the sound the creature made next, vocalizing a snarling growl into the phone. The manifestation, he recalls, stood upright like a large person. “It got bigger as the roar got louder.”

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He believes it had to have been Bigfoot — or, if he must concede, a bear at the very least. “It was not human at all,” he said.

“It was scary. It was real. Nobody will make me change my mind with it,” he said. “Me and three other guys really seen it, smelled it, heard it. I really think it was the real deal. ... I really believe it to this day.”

Residents of Buena Park, Calif., huddle around drainage outlet in hopes of glimpsing the Buena Foot on May 13, 1982.

Thinking police wouldn’t put much stock in the story, Hinsley’s brother asked an aunt to call authorities, according to an article in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on May 12,1982. The apartment complex’s manager, Frank Missanelli, did too.

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Missanelli initially didn’t believe residents when they started waving him over, he told the paper, but his skepticism faded when he heard a roar “like the dinosaurs in the movies” and smelled something “like hell — worse than a sewer.”  The hairy creature was gone before he could see it, but after grabbing a flashlight, Missanelli said he saw large tracks.

“The prints were huge,” Missanelli recounted to the Herald Examiner. “Frankly, I was a little scared. I’m 67 years old. What if something that big decided it wanted to come into our apartment?”

Chuch Huges, an artist with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, drew this picture of Buena Foot from eyewitness accounts. 

Police were skeptical of the reports, and........

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