Taxi driver who hunted Bigfoot for 10 years dead at 63

Florida, USA — Taxi driver Tim Fasano who was best known for his interest in finding Bigfoot has recently passed away.

Since 2009, the Tampa man logged thousands of hours hiking, photographing, taking first-person videos and setting up trail cameras in the Florida wilderness. He searched in areas such as the Hillsborough Wilderness Preserve, the Ocala National Forest and, his favorite spot, the Green Swamp in Polk County.

According to rumors circulated on the Bigfoot sites, Mr. Fasano allegedly died in the woods from a snake bite. However, his twin brother, Thomas Fasano, said the taxi driver died at home of cardiac arrest and had struggled for years with high blood pressure and his weight.

By the time of his death on Nov. 14, Mr. Fasano already posted more than 1,300 videos of his expeditions on the YouTube channel Florida Sasquatch. Some of them have garnered over 1 million views.

Meanwhile, Mr. Fasano also began documenting his encounters while working as a cabbie for United Cab. On his blog Tampa Taxi Shots, Mr. Fasano posted about passengers who could include strippers or strip club patrons, businessmen who argued with him over fares, “suspects” leaving the emergency room at 2 a.m., “gnomes” (people with no money) and strangers who expected him to know where to buy cocaine. Eventually, his blog skyrocketed in fame, earning it mentions in three newspapers.

He kept his taxi blog going in some form right up through this year. Although in recent years it was mostly a description of the pointlessness (and the alarming decrease of earnings) of driving a cab in the age of Uber.

One of his final posts, he quoted Henry Thoreau — “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” — including the story of a rich guy who’d ordered a taxi, then canceled it after Fasano had driven to the man’s house.

A few years after he started the taxi blog, Mr. Fasano found the thing that truly established his identity on the internet: his hunt for Bigfoot, a.k.a. Sasquatch.

“He firmly believed he was going to find it, and I thought he would,” said Kevin Kehl, one of the taxi driver’s co-workers. “It became his life’s mission to prove its existence.”

“Tim was my favorite part of the Bigfoot community,” Fortean Slip podcast host Christopher York said. “I never once said, ‘He’s going to find Sasquatch,’ but I was supremely entertained every time I watched him.” Mr. York expressed how he considered him the show’s all-time favorite guest. “You didn’t really interview him, you just kind of tried to corral him for a few minutes. Anyone who delved beneath the surface of the Bigfoot community at all knows Tim.”

Mr. Fasano’s friends claimed that he was at his most joyful in the woods.

“He always said the woods and swamps were his friends,” said Thomas Fasano. “He was at peace out there, nobody to argue with, because he could get worked up arguing politics. … And the guy you see in those videos, that’s not an act. That’s the way he was, an entertainer, even since we were kids.”

“More than anything, he enjoyed it,” Charlie Estepp of Ocala Bigfoot Tours said. “It was something that he lived for, and in life, we’ve all got to have that. We didn’t hit it off at first, but we started to talk, and we gained a respect for each other because I saw that (Bigfoot) was where his happiness comes from.”

When news of Mr. Fasano’s death spread among the Bigfoot community, dozens of tributes poured in.

The Bigfoot Guys expressed their “heartfelt thoughts and prayers” on Facebook. Furthermore, The Appalachian Bigfoot and Dogman Research Group posted a photo of Mr. Fasano in his research gear. On enigmaticanomalies.com: “Tim’s passion and perseverance was unsurpassed.” Lastly, Rictor Riolo from Spike TV’s 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty wrote that “he was one of the few Bigfoot personalities that made the subject matter fun.” Stories from CryptozooNews and Sasquatch Chronicles also followed.