JEFFERSON, Texas - It's dark deep in the Piney Woods.

In the stillness, on a moonless night, the silence is suddenly shattered by the dry snap of twigs under the weight of footfalls.

Ponderous steps.

Two feet. Big ones.

A heartbeat - your own - is thudding now, pounding like a tribal drum calling Kong to the gates.

To most of us, it's folklore, tall tales best told beneath the stars, amid the flickering glow and swirling firefly embers of a crackling campfire.

Last year, one supermarket tabloid proclaimed "Bigfoot Baby Found."

What distinguished the account from other Bigfoot hoaxes was the claim that the infant creature had been left, of all places, outside Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch.

But some reasonable people remain believers. Even though tabloid fiction makes them vulnerable to teasing and ridicule, they insist "something" is Out There.

What they have seen and reported, they say, isn't some Halloween prankster wearing a gorilla suit but a giant unclassified primate, curious and watchful, that walks upright and roams the woodlands and creek bottoms, mostly at night. Viewed for only a second or two, and rarely photographed, Bigfoot is as reclusive as Greta Garbo.

Sasquatch, or Skunk Ape, is mostly associated with the Pacific Northwest. However, the creature has been spotted in every state except Hawaii.

Most sightings in Texas occur in the backwoods of East Texas, where folks like the Carlsons live, alone, happily secluded behind "Private Property" and "Keep Out" signs.

Dressed in denim overalls, J.C. Carlson is a mountainous man, almost 7 feet tall, with a mustache and bushy white beard.

His work boots aren't as large as Bigfoot's print, but almost.

J.C., like others, has heard the raspy nocturnal howls. Carlson and his wife are certain that foxes or bobcats didn't steal the 28 chickens from their homestead on Big Cypress Bayou over three nights this summer. They found no carcasses. No trace of blood.

Taking a break from chopping timber, J.C. lit a smoke and leaned against the bed of his red pickup.

"There's somethin' out here besides us," he declared.

Katherine Carlson returned home late one night this spring, headlights splashing across the rutted one-lane dirt road that meanders through thick pine-scented woods. She stopped to open the crossing gate. Usually, her dogs jump out and play. Not this night. Sassy and Wally remained inside the cab.

In the darkness, Carlson encountered an overpowering foul odor.

"It's wasn't a skunk." She knows the smells of the woods.

"Rancid," J.C. said of the stench. "It's like gettin' behind a gut wagon, in the summer."

"Worse," his wife said.

Katherine didn't glimpse a Bigfoot, but in the eerie moonlight she sensed a lurking "presence" that left her speechless.

She figures, why not tell her story? "People already think I'm crazy," she says.

The couple live near the dark waters and moss-draped cypresses of Caddo Lake, where the "B" movie "The Creature From Black Lake" (1976) was filmed. This summer, an alligator living in a slough near the Carlsons' place disappeared. J.C. observed that his cows and goats stopped grazing in the woods at night. They remained huddled near the house, beneath the glow of a mercury vapor light.

"Critters will tell you when somethin' isn't right," J.C. said.

His wife did the only thing she knew to do.

She telephoned Charlie DeVore.

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The Texas Bigfoot Research Center implies a campus, or structure.

There isn't one, at least not yet.

TBRC is a network of about 40 people from all walks of life who are dedicated to finding Sasquatch living in the Lone Star State. The group was founded six years ago by Craig Woolheater, the 45-year-old office manager of his family's plumbing company in Dallas. He claims he saw a grayish-haired Bigfoot walking along a deserted highway in Louisiana one night in 1994.

The group has a Web site (www.texasbigfoot.com) and telephone number (877-529-5550) that greets callers with a recording:

"If you have a sighting to report, please leave a message with your name, number and the best time to return your call."

About 150 Bigfoot sightings are reported each year.

"That doesn't count the jokes, like people who say, `I got raped by Bigfoot,' or those who are way out there, and think it's an extraterrestrial," Woolheater said.

"There are so many credible people who say they have seen the thing. They have absolutely nothing to gain by making up a story. If even one person is telling the truth, there's something out there."

Several times a year, TBRC investigators venture into the forests and conduct field studies, hoping to validate recent sightings. Dressed in commando camouflage, they carry night-vision cameras, listening devices and thermal imaging units. Deer hunters use deer fragrance, and bottled deer urine and deer calls (one is the K'Mere Deer, Model KM 100) to lure the animals. Bigfoot researchers put out pheromone chips designed to entice the great ape.

Late at night, they activate a call blaster, which emits loud recordings of Bigfoot "vocalizations."

Charlie DeVore joined the group after a mysterious incident five years ago when, in Charlie's words, he "had the stink put on me."

Armed with a coon-hunting light, the 65-year-old retiree was walking through the woods near his home late one night, accompanied by five dogs. He felt safe - unthreatened - until the smell engulfed him.

DeVore looked down. His four-legged companions had fled.

"These are dogs that'll attack anything," Charlie said.

Two years later, he attended a meeting of Bigfoot enthusiasts in Jefferson and met several people who described similar incidents.

DeVore now feels certain the smell was that of some yet undocumented species of bipedal hominoid afflicted with a body odor problem no brand of drugstore roll-on or spray deodorant can eliminate.

After Katherine Coleman telephoned DeVore, her neighbor, Charlie and three fellow researchers camped for two nights near the site of the "smelling." They turned on the call blaster. Bigfoot didn't appear, but they heard its cry, and detected movement in the woods.

"You can hear it walk," DeVore said. Charlie tried to re-create the experience, with sound effects.

"Crunch ... (pause) ... Crunch ... It's not a deer. It's not a dog. Or a hog. It's a two-footed somethin'."

Bigfootologists estimate that at least 2,000 Bigfoot live in the United States.

That's six times the population of Bigfoot, Texas, named after William A. "Bigfoot" Wallace, the 19th-century frontiersman and legendary Texas character. Bigfoot, it was said, never told a story he couldn't later improve upon.

The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department requires more than anecdotal evidence before the state agency will take Sasquatch seriously.

"To conclusively prove ... Bigfoot in Texas, we would need an image that included details to show us that it was not a doctored or edited image in any way, or we would want a body itself," said Duane Schlitter, who oversees the TPWD's Nongame and Rare and Endangered Species program.

"The latter would be the extreme, but many doubters will be hard to convince. As a romantic scientist, I would like to be around when and if one is ever found anywhere."

No Bigfoot remains - bones or bodies - have been discovered.

Hunters have never shot and killed one.

Bigfoot, fortunately, hasn't wandered onto a road and been struck by a car, like the Sasquatch character Harry in the movie "Harry and the Hendersons."

Another group, North Texas Skeptics, is, well, skeptical.

"Bigfoot is a great story, and a wonderful bit of folklore. Nothing more," said John Blanton, a Skeptics member. "It's a biological absurdity. Real creatures, unlike the fictional Bigfoot, do not exist alone. They have parents. Their parents have parents and so on. At the very minimum, there has to be a tribe ... Where is the Bigfoot tribe?"

How could supposedly thousands of these critters have eluded captivity and remained hidden from human observation for a century or more?

Doubters say the cultural phenomenon is kept alive by misidentification of known animals, wishful thinking and fabrication of evidence.

DeVore is undaunted, committed. He patrols Big Cypress Bayou alone, paddling his canoe through the shallow, murky waterways. One day, he hopes to get lucky and snap a clear photo of the enigmatic creature.

"I'm not trying to prove anything to the world," he said. "I'm proving it to myself."

Charlie's curiosity far outweighs any fears.

"If it wanted to hurt me," he said, "I'd been dead a long time ago."

The Texas Bigfoot Conference is not like a "Star Trek" convention. Groupies don't show up dressed in costume.

About 500 serious-minded people attended the fifth annual event in October, a two-day seminar that featured lectures by a who's-who of the Bigfoot world. Speakers included field researchers, cryptozoologists (the study of "hidden" animals), a forest archaeologist, a latent fingerprint examiner and an associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, Jeff Meldrum, who delivered an hourlong evaluation of alleged Sasquatch footprints and their inferred functional morphology.

Chris Murphy, author of "Meet the Sasquatch", analyzed the most famous, and controversial Bigfoot evidence. In 1967, the late Roger Patterson shot a 16mm film that captured images of a 7 1/2-foot-tall hairy ape/person striding along a riverbank in Bluff Creek, Calif., near the Oregon border.

It is the Zapruder film for Bigfoot enthusiasts.

Murphy showed the beast in freeze-frames. Even though the authenticity of the film is hotly contested, he concluded that the muscle definition clearly proves this Wooley Booger was the real thing.

"I'm 100 percent convinced," Charlie DeVore said.

So were others who browsed the exhibit tables.

Bigfoot plaster footprint castings. Bigfoot CDs. Bigfoot books, with titles like "Out of the Shadows" and "In Search of Giants." Bigfoot T-shirts.

Meanwhile, deep in the woods, the Carlsons wonder and wait.

"One night we'll find somethin' standing in the road lookin' at us," J.C. Carlson predicted.

His wife said she hopes so.

"I'll say something next time."

Such as ...

"I'll ask who he is, and if I can help him," she said. "I know what it's like to be different in this world."