The Fontana Monster Sightings of 66’
August 1966. Two teenagers rushed into the sheriff’s office in Fontana, California to report their close encounter with a strange creature.
Jerri Lou Mendenhall, 16, told officers that she and her friend had been driving along a dirt road just north of town when a creature suddenly came out of the bushes and attacked their car.
The creature reached through the driver’s window and tried to grab Mendenhall. She quickly hit the accelerator and rushed away, but not before a hairy hand brushed against her. The girl showed officers a set of scratches on her neck that she claimed to have received from the monster’s large, human like hand.
The witnesses described the beast as being at least eight feet tall and ‘like a gorilla on its hind legs.”
The two teens were in a hysterical state and described their encounter in detail. Regardless of their excited condition, deputies at the sheriff’s office laughed the matter off and made fun of the pair. One official asked Mendenhall:
“I suppose next you will be telling me that the monster was dressed in a pink bikini and you will expect me to believe that too?”
Angered by the officer’s attitude, Mendenhall retorted “sure, it was wearing a pink bikini!”
Still in a rather distraught state, the two teenagers left the sheriff’s office, trying their best to ignore the laughter of the people sworn to protect and serve.
Perhaps the officers could be forgiven. After all, such reports were at the least unusual and officials may have had reason to suspect a prank. Fontana was still a small community at the time. The area was very rural until World War II when a steel mill came to town. Additional growth followed in the decades following the mill’s arrival.
The city lies in San Bernardino County, nestled against the San Bernardino Mountains. The Santa Ana River lies to the east so fresh water is close at hand. In the 1960s, the area was of course much less developed than it is now. Was it a suitable environment for a monster?
A Los Angeles newspaper got wind of Mendenhall’s account and, unfortunately, misquoted the pink bikini comment, attributing it to her. The result was yet another poke at the event and the two teens.
While Mendenhall’s initial report of a monster attack wasn’t taken very seriously, there was more to the story. A number of other teens in the area also reported having encounters with a large, hairy creature on the local lover’s lane.
While area law enforcement continued to insist there was nothing to the tales, at least one officer admitted, off the record, that he had found a huge, four toed footprint at the scene. Wary of ridicule perhaps, he didn’t report the finding.
Several papers ran stories about the Fontana creature. The San Bernardino Sun-Telegram ran reports about the monster and included numerous witness statements in their articles.
The Ontario Daily Report informed readers that the beast was hanging out near the old Fontana dragstrip between Foothill Boulevard and Base Line Road. According to paper, the creature was “a horrible monster with a hairy body, long hands, and claws dripping with slime.”
At the end of August, there was an impromptu hunt for the monster. According to a story in the Daily Report, Sheriff’s deputies were called out to reports of shots fired around the old racetrack. Arriving on the scene, they found four teenage boys with a pair of rifles. The boys were “combing the bushes and shooting at everything that moved.”
The young men were reportedly determined to find the local monster and bring it down once and for all. Officers confiscated the firearms and sent the boys on their way.
By September 3rd, the hunt for the monster was becoming more serious. A 21-year-old Marine, home on leave from Vietnam, set out one night to track the beast down. He quickly abandoned his mission when he realized how many excited teenagers were running around with guns.
Maybe the hordes of teens roaming the woods with firearms scared the monster off. Whatever the case, excitement over the monster died down as quickly as it had arisen.
Was a monster really wandering around Fontana in 1966?
While many people tried to play the accounts off as wild stories concocted by teenagers, questions remain. What about the scratches received by Jerri Mendenhall? And what about the track find made by an officer of the law?
I previously wrote about the Fontana monster scare, and the article resulted in several readers recalling the incidents:
Reader Larry Lesh noted:
“I remember it and grew up in Southern Cal and know this area. I had a creepy encounter of my own north of Highland Ave in the wash at age nine.”
Another reader named Sandra commented:
“I knew someone who saw the thing. Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of them.”
Finally, George J. added:
“I lived not too far from the area and remember the stories. These people were seeing a bigfoot, no doubt about it!”
Monster or hoax? In modern times, reports of Bigfoot still come from San Bernardino County, so perhaps the Fontana monster is lurking in the hills even today.