Missouri Man Says a Trail Cam Caught Bigfoot for 47 Minutes — Then He Wiped the Card

Alleged event: the morning of Oct. 9, 2022, on a ridge in Shannon County, Missouri. Public coverage: a Squatchable.com staff piece dated Sept. 1, 2026 — roughly four years later. This is a summary of that retrospective account; there is no surviving file to review.

Forty-seven minutes and thirty-two seconds.

That is how long Floyd Sims says something sat down in front of his Browning trail camera, pulled its knees up, and looked into the lens.

Then he erased it.

The account surfaced in a September 1, 2026 staff piece on Squatchable.com. The morning they are talking about is October 9, 2022. Four years later, a 68-year-old hardware man from Shannon County, Missouri, is still waking up in the hole he punched in his own evidence.

Monstrum Athenaeum has not independently verified Sims, the camera, the card, or the cattle story that put the cameras in the timber. There is no public file to rewind. That is the point of the tale, and it is also the hole you could drive a truck through.

A man who knew that ridge

According to Squatchable, Floyd Sims has lived his entire life just outside Eminence. The family has been on the same ridge since 1922, when his grandfather homesteaded it. He ran Sims Hardware in Eminence for 30 years — a corner store they say had been there since 1931. He closed it in 2015.

If the biography is even half true, this is not a weekend warrior with a new camera and a TikTok account. This is a man who, the write-up claims, knows that county the way most people know their kitchen.

His wife Donna died of cancer in the winter of 2018. They had shared the house 36 years. She left him 47 acres and a quieter life. After the store and after Donna, Squatchable says, the days changed shape. He walked the ridge more. Fixed fence. Cut wood. Sat on the back porch listening to the creek.

Grief is not a credential. It is context. It is also the kind of context a storyteller reaches for when they need you to forgive a man for destroying the only proof.

Hold both thoughts.

Why the cameras were there at all

The cameras were not a midlife cryptozoology hobby, according to the same account.

In September 2019, an old friend — Ray Hullbrook, who runs a cow-calf operation about four miles south — pulled into Floyd's driveway with a problem his veterinarian would not sign. Cattle were coming up injured on a schedule that made no sense: deep parallel gouges along the rib cage, four to six inches long, spaced about two and a half to three inches apart. Same pattern. Every three or four weeks.

The vet, they say, would not assign the marks to any predator she recognized with confidence.

That conversation is what sent Floyd into the timber with cameras. Not a documentary deal. Not a book launch. Cattle. Marks. A neighbor who could not get an answer.

If you hunt this beat, you have heard livestock-mutilation talk before, and you should hear the sirens. That literature is a swamp of hoaxes, scavengers, and people who want a Satanic panic with hooves. Parallel gouges on a rib cage can be a lot of things, including wire, other cattle, and a story that grew in the retelling.

They can also be why a hardware man started watching his own tree line.

October 9, 2022: it sat down

Squatchable's telling of the morning is specific enough to feel like a police report and unverifiable enough to feel like a campfire.

Gray light before sunrise. A figure walks out of the cedar timber on the ridge behind the property. Crosses about 60 yards of open ground. Sits down directly in front of the camera. Not near it. In front of it. The way a person sits when they intend to stay.

It lowered itself with slow care. Pulled its knees toward its chest. Looked straight into the lens.

47 minutes and 32 seconds.

Floyd, they say, watched the footage three times at his kitchen table. By the third pass he had stopped hunting for an explanation and started noticing what he had missed. The figure never looked away for long.

That claimed sit is the central detail of the account; an unseen recording cannot establish the subject’s identity or behavior. A costume in a hurry does not hold a kneel for three-quarters of an hour unless someone is committed to the bit, or unless nobody is in a bit at all.

We cannot watch it. He wiped it.

Two days later, with the neighbor watching

On or about October 11, 2022 — two days after the capture, in Squatchable's sequence — Floyd erased the SD card.

Patty Dunlap, a neighbor they say has been on the adjacent property nearly 40 years, was sitting in a chair across the kitchen table when he did it.

He has not, the story goes, had a night since that he did not wake up thinking about what he erased.

Why wipe it? The write-up asks you not to jump. It offers grief. It offers a man shaken to his core on land that had always made sense. It does not offer a clean motive. People wipe cards because they are scared of ridicule, scared of the thing coming back, scared of a son who already wants them off the ridge. People also wipe cards because the file would not survive a second look.

His son Cody, a civil engineer in Rolla about 90 miles north, has been asking him to move closer to town since Donna died. Floyd has declined, they say, with the same quiet firmness since then.

Believe the regret. Audit the missing file anyway.

The Ozarks will hide whatever you put in them

You need the ground under this story or it is just a sad man and a blank card.

Shannon County sits in Missouri Ozark hill country as wild as the lower 48 quietly gets. The Current River and Jack's Fork pull canoe traffic spring through fall. A mile or two off Highway 19, Squatchable says, the pavement dies and the gravel thins to two ruts. Ridges in long rows: post oak, black oak, shortleaf pine. Cedar-choked hollows. Limestone springs that run cold in August. Karst. Caves. Sinkholes. Creeks that vanish and come back a quarter mile later as springs.

Floyd's place, they claim, backs the Mark Twain National Forest on the north and east. That is a lot of public timber for something large to use as a hallway.

Researchers have called this stretch a hotspot for generations. Settler stories. Dismissed by people who do not live there. Taken seriously by people who do. None of that is a species description. It is habitat talk, and habitat talk is how you explain why a camera on a private ridge might, in theory, catch a face that does not belong in the mammal book.

It is also how you explain why the Ozarks produce a lot of stories and very few files that survive contact with a lab.

The book, the video, the smell of a sequel

Squatchable mentions Floyd has a book coming — The Bigfoot Codeex, a compilation of his research — and points readers at a link in the description of "the original video."

That sentence should change how you sit in your chair.

A wiped card and a forthcoming book can both be true. A man can destroy a file in panic and spend years trying to reconstruct what he saw. A man can also discover that a confession about a destroyed file is a better product than a blurry sit-down that commenters would tear apart.

We are not accusing Sims of a hustle. We are naming the conflict of interest the secondary coverage left on the table. If you sell a book about the thing you erased, the erasure becomes the brand.

The source-linked narration is listed below. It does not authenticate the alleged deleted recording; do not treat a video retelling or a social-media rip as the lost 47 minutes.

What 47 minutes would have meant

Let us be conspiracy-curious for a minute, because that is why you are here.

A continuous trail-cam sit of that length, in gray daylight, facing the lens, would have been one of the most useful behavioral documents in the entire North American file — if the card was real, if the subject was not a person, if the timestamps held. You could have studied weight shift, respiration, attention, whether it understood the camera as an eye.

Instead we have a kitchen-table memory and a neighbor who watched a man press delete.

The people who want this to be a cover-up will say he was told to wipe it. The people who want it to be trauma will say he could not live with a face on his ridge. The people who want it to be content will say the wipe is the hook.

All three theories fit a blank SD card. That is why blank media is a terrible place to build a church.

Grain of salt, Ozark-sized

Possible mundane reads:

• A person in a suit who knew the camera and sat for a stunt.
• A misread of a bear or a human at a distance, later hardened into 47:32 in the retelling.
• No file ever existed in the form described.
• A real odd clip of a known animal, erased because it looked worse than it was.
• A book-and-video package that needs an original sin.

Possible non-mundane read: something that lives the karst and the cedar walked 60 yards of open ground before sunrise, sat down like it had time, and let a hardware man look at it until he could not stand owning the proof.

We are filing the claim. We are not baptizing it.

If you have ever erased something you wish you had kept, you understand the human part. If you have ever been asked to believe a ghost story whose only exhibit is the absence of the exhibit, you understand the rest.

Do not trespass Floyd's ridge, Patty's fence, or the national forest after dark because a blog told you a camera once blinked. A pin is a story. It is not a permit. Cattle injuries go to a vet and a sheriff, not a comment section.

Bottom line

Floyd Sims says that on October 9, 2022, a Bigfoot sat in front of his Shannon County trail camera for 47 minutes and 32 seconds, and that two days later he wiped the card while his neighbor watched. Four years on, the story is circulating again, with a book in the wings and no file in the public record.

If the sit happened, it is one of the cruelest self-owns in this field. If it did not, it is a perfect legend: the evidence was real, and the only man who had it could not bear to keep it.

Watch whatever original package you can authenticate. Do not accept a rip titled "lost 47 minutes" as the thing he deleted. Monstrum Athenaeum will update this page if the raw clip, a hash of the old card, or a named veterinarian's statement on the Hullbrook cattle enters the record.

Until then, the file is a stare you cannot see.

Sources

• Staff summary of Floyd Sims, the Oct. 9, 2022 capture, the 47:32 sit, the SD wipe, the cattle gouges, Ozarks context, and the book mention — Squatchable.com, Sept. 1, 2026, Missouri Man Captures Bigfoot on Trail Camera for 47 Minutes. The coverage embeds An Old Bigfoot Sat Down in Front of My Camera in the Ozarks — I Was Made to Wipe the Whole Card by Bigfoot Hidden Evidence. We confirmed that source reference and its title, not the authenticity of the footage, narrator or encounter.
• Adjacent public-land context (not an endorsement of the sighting) — Mark Twain National Forest, fs.usda.gov/mtnf

---

This article summarizes publicly available claims for news, commentary, and criticism. Descriptions of alleged cryptid activity are attributed to named third-party sources and have not been independently verified by Monstrum Athenaeum unless explicitly stated. Links are provided for attribution and reader verification. Video, images, and lengthy quotations remain the property of their respective owners; we link out rather than republish original media files. MonstrumAthenaeum.org is intended for mature audiences and does not claim scientific confirmation of any cryptid's existence.