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I am planning to attend the Bigfoot Discovery Day II on August 9 in the Santa Cruz, CA area. I will see if I can get a decent deal on airfare…yeah, right!

I visited the Bigfoot Discovery Project on March 3, 2007 and enjoyed the displays, discussion and fellowship of Mike Rugg, the other members of the museum and the other Bigfooters in attendance that day, John & Montra Freitas, Bob & Kathy Strain, Bart Cutino, Tom Yamarone and others.

Sophie Borazanian/Sentinel
Michael Rugg, the curator and founder of the Big Foot Discovery Museum points to a map with locations of Big Foot sightings in the Santa Cruz area on Wednesday.

Jason Williams said he saw it one night in Ben Lomond.

The 18-year-old was shooting at coyotes with an air rifle from his backyard on Scenic Way when he saw a dark figure — about 7 feet, light brown hair, muscular build, about 400 pounds — walking upright through the bushes behind his house, he said.

“I immediately put out my cigarette and started towards my house,” he said of the February night. “If there was something that big around, I didn’t want to be outside.”

Scared and confused, the teenager called his dad, who called Michael Rugg, a local Bigfoot aficionado and founder of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum.

Rugg firmly believes that a Bigfoot lives in Ben Lomond, and this summer he and other Bigfoot researchers and eye-witnesses will convene to discuss the creature’s existence at Bigfoot Discovery Day II.

Among the presenters are Bigfoot notables Jeff Meldrum, Richard Noll, Kathy Moskowitz Strain and David Paulides.

“Scientists don’t want their names associated with this,” said author Paulides, adding that this makes coming up with proof, aside from personal accounts and muddy footprints, challenging for die-hard believers.

To help authenticate his research, Paulides, author of “The Hoopa Project,” which chronicles three years of Bigfoot research on the Hoopa Indian Reservation near Redwood National Park, had all 45 people interviewed in the book sign affidavits swearing the truth of their testimonies.

But sworn statements are a small step. So far, no DNA has been analyzed, no skeletons have been found, and no live Bigfoots have been studied up close, said Terry Bowyer, professor and chair of the Idaho State University Biology department, where Meldrum is a tenured professor of anatomy.

“Bigfoot research is not viewed horribly favorably by the scientific community,” he said. “But our professors have the academic freedom to study what they wish.”

Bower noted that he studies Bigfoot on his own time, but courses on Bigfoot are not offered at Idaho State.

Despite naysayers, Rugg believes in the legitimacy of the sightings in Santa Cruz County. He has plotted the places where they happened on a giant map of the county inside his Bigfoot museum.

Rugg says there have been 13 sightings and upward of 40 incidents where people heard Bigfoot screams in the past 150 years.

But he said not all reported sightings have been accurate.

“Last year, someone dressed up as Sasquatch and streaked Discovery Day,” he said. A visitor snapped a photo, which came in handy later when Rugg received suspicious e-mails containing blurry photos of a gorilla-like animal cavorting in the brush.

“You can tell it’s Photoshopped,” he said. To double check, he super-imposed the photo of the streaker over the submitted photos and confirmed they were the same person.

Also, Rugg said people often confuse Bigfoot with wildlife.

“Some sightings are more than likely bears,” he said, and people often confuse Bigfoot noises with cougar screams or coyote calls, he added.

As for this winter’s sighting in Ben Lomond, Rugg says it was likely the real deal.

When Rugg arrived on the scene to investigate, the trail was cold. He did, though, find a trail he said was “twice as wide as a normal human’s,” and dead chickens on nearby property that had been plucked with only the breasts eaten.

This was the first incident Rugg has responded to since opening the Bigfoot Discovery Museum four years ago.Melissa Weaver
Sentinel correspondent

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Artifacts, Bigfoot, Bigfoot Report, Conferences, Cryptotourism, Cryptozoology, Evidence, Expedition Reports, Eyewitness Accounts, Folklore, Footprint Evidence, Museums, Photos, Pop Culture, Sasquatch. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.