Bigfoot Discovery Day in the Santa Cruz Mountains

Creative Commons photo by Infidelic.

Felton, California, is about fifteen minutes north of my old alma mater, UC Santa Cruz. It’s home to the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, which since 2006 has co-hosted the annual Bigfoot Discovery Day with the Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers. This year’s event was on Saturday, and about 50 people attended, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. A barbecue lunch in Felton at the Museum was followed by evening presentations at the Louden Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz.

According to the Sentinel, the event mostly consisted of experiencers relating their stories about Bigfoot; these included Museum founder and curator Michael Rigg, who told his story of encountering Bigfoot as a toddler in 1950.

The encounter, of an encounter with a large, hairy hominid near the Eel River in Humboldt County (about 8 hours to the north of Felton) was related in an earlier Sentinel article. Sez the Sentinel:

Michael Rugg says he was just a toddler when he wandered off alone on a trail while his parents cooked breakfast at their campsite on the river that early summer morning in 1950.

He passed through some brush and emerged onto a sandbar — and that’s when he encountered a bigfoot.

“I looked up into the gaze of a very large man completely covered in bushy dark hair, with nothing on but a rather poorly fitting, torn shirt,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I looked at the hairy man, and he looked at me, then my parents started screaming for me, ‘Mikey, Mikey, where are you?’”

When he returned to the campsite and told them about the encounter, they reassured him that what he’d seen was likely a homeless man.

Er…um, yeah, that’s what I woulda told him, too. But never mind that. The event included “a presentation of evidence — including sound recordings, a large, unidentified tooth and a video clip of an unidentified, bipedal figure — that has been accumulated over the years in communities including Felton, Zayante, Ben Lomond and near the Forest at Nisene Marks in Aptos.”

The Sentinel reported that Placerville resident Colette Alexander “said she saw a bigfoot near the Pocono trail head about a mile from downtown Santa Cruz along the San Lorenzo River in June 1999….She later studied primates at Cabrillo College, but when she tried to tell her professors about it, ‘I got shut down pretty hard. They don’t condone that kind of stuff.'” Alexander’s whole story can be read here.

If you’re kicking yourself for missing this year’s fandango, fret not. More love can be lavished on the Bigfoot Discovery Museum by viewing the Bigfoot Discovery Museum video podcast below:

Possibly related posts: