Cryptomundo
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Startups are famous for setting big, hairy goals. Carmine “Tom” Biscardi wants to catch Sasquatch—and is planning an initial public offering to fund the hunt.

Mr. Biscardi and his partners hope to raise as much as $3 million by selling stock in Bigfoot Project Investments. They plan to spend the money making movies and selling DVDs, but are also budgeting $113,805 a year for expeditions to find the beast. Among the company’s goals, according to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission: “capture the creature known as Bigfoot.”

Investment advisers caution that this IPO may not be for everyone. For starters, it involves DVDs, a dying technology, said Kathy Boyle, president at Chapin Hill Advisors. Then there is the Sasquatch issue. She reckons only true believers would be interested in such a speculative venture.

“This would be the kind of thing where if you believed in Bigfoot, or you thought there really was a Bigfoot and you actually had some money to burn and wanted to play with this, then go for it,” Ms. Boyle said. A lot of ifs.

It turns out the IPO doesn’t have many fans in the Bigfoot community, either. Purists are chafing at what they see as the crass commercialization of a serious pursuit.

Mr. Biscardi, who has trumpeted a number of Bigfoot sightings and captures that didn’t pan out, is a controversial figure among Bigfoot enthusiasts. In 2008, he held a news conference in Palo Alto, Calif., to detail his examination of what he said was the carcass of a male Bigfoot that checked in at 7 feet 7 inches tall and weighed more than 500 pounds. The Bigfoot, found by two men in Georgia, turned out to be a rubber gorilla costume stuffed with animal parts and outfitted with a set of teeth that may have been bovine in origin.

Asked about the incident, Mr. Biscardi said he had been deceived. But that hasn’t quieted skeptics in the community like Kathy Strain, who said she is astonished the Georgia debacle didn’t put an end to Mr. Biscardi’s pursuit of Bigfoot.

“It just makes it a big joke,” she said.

Ms. Strain has been fascinated with Bigfoot since she was a girl in California and mistook the 1972 documentary style film called “The Legend of Boggy Creek” as real. Now a 46-year-old U.S. Forest Service worker, she wants to bring the rigors of science to Bigfooting.

Mr. Biscardi is well aware of his many detractors and says it comes with the territory of being such a high-profile member of the Bigfoot community.

“When you’re king of the mountain, everybody’s trying to knock you down,” he said.

None of this is the concern of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which explicitly doesn’t worry about things like whether there is in fact a Sasquatch when it vets IPOs.

The SEC said it doesn’t comment on specific companies and filings. But in a 2013 investor bulletin, the agency said its staff “does not evaluate the merits of any IPO or determine whether an investment is appropriate for any investor.” Instead, its efforts are focused on making sure the companies comply with SEC disclosure requirements and accounting rules.

Mr. Biscardi is pursuing the IPO under the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. The JOBS Act is aimed at easing the flow of capital into startups and small businesses and has been used by companies including Twitter Inc. and Potbelly Sandwich Works. The law loosens stock-selling rules for “emerging growth” firms, essentially any venture with less than $1 billion in annual gross revenue.

Bigfoot Project easily qualifies. So far, the company has minimal sales and assets of $6,342, including less than $650 in cash as of the end of October.

The company filed for the IPO in February 2013, amended the proposed offering two months later to designate itself an “emerging growth” company and expects to start trading early this year, according to Mr. Biscardi.