Bigfoot Discovery Museum Event
Posted by: Loren Coleman on May 31st, 2009
Michael Rugg shows off his latest drawings at his Bigfoot Museum in Felton, California. (Dan Coyro/Santa Cruz Sentinel)
The legendary Bigfoot is not a legend after all, and has been seen in remote parts of Santa Cruz County, according to the sponsors of a June 7, 2009, discussion and exhibit on the reality of Bigfoot.
The event will be held at the Bigfoot Discovery Museum located on Highway 9 in Felton, California.
Museum curator Michael Rugg said not only is Bigfoot real, but he himself once saw the primate with his own eyes.
“As a boy, when I was 5 years old I saw Bigfoot,” he said. “My family had a saw mill in Laytonville Humboldt-Mendocino county line. We vacationed and fished on the Eel River. We were camping on a beach and my parents were fixing breakfast, and I wandered off one morning. I came to a sand bar in the river and saw a very large hairy man, completely covered in bushy dark hair, with nothing on but the remnants of a torn shirt hanging off one shoulder. I looked at the hairy man, and he looked at me, and then I heard my parents screaming, Mikey! Mikey where are you?'”
Rugg said he ran to get his parents and return to the site, but Bigfoot was gone.
Called the Bigfoot Discovery Project, the June 7 event will feature a talk by David Paulides, a former police investigator and noted Bigfoot researcher who wrote a book titled Hoopa Project: Bigfoot Encounters in California, focusing on areas in Northern California where the greatest concentrations of alleged Bigfoot activity exist. Many of the witnesses featured in the book are American Indians.
They have signed affidavits testifying to what they saw, he said.
Los Gatos resident David Paulides is photographed at his home holding a plaster impression of what is believed to be a footprint of a Bigfoot on July 13, 2008 in Los Gatos, California. Paulides has written a book on his research of people that have encountered Bigfoot in Northern California. (John Medina/Cupertino Courier)
To add to the professional and investigative nature, a forensic sketch artist who has worked with the FBI was brought in to work with Paulides on his book. Muscle structure, facial features and closeup accounts were sketched in detail. The full-color sketches are in the book.
Paulides was astounded to discover that 90 percent of the sketches looked similar to each other, but do not conform to what Paulides feels is a mainstream depiction of Bigfoot.
“If you’re gonna fabricate an account, you’re going to make it look like what everyone is familiar with,” he said, citing the famous Patterson-Gimlin film footage.
“The consistency can not be argued,” he said. “Most went against the grain of common knowledge.”
Bigfoot allegedly has been seen in wooded areas of Santa Cruz County including the region between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, the northwest side of Loch Lomond, the Nisene Marks Forest along Aptos Creek Road, and the Quail Hollow Sunset Trail area near Felton.
Rugg is also writing a book on the subject of Bigfoot and said much of the information to be presented is based on personal interviews. He described Bigfoot as a large bi-pedal primate, not a missing link as some people wrongly think.
“Missing link is a misused term,” he said. “That’s a link in a chain showing a transition in evolutionary traits between prosimian animals and monkeys.”
Famous film footage taken in 1967 in the Six Rivers National Forest near Crescent City in Northwest California, called the Patterson/Gimlin film, Rugg said shows a genuine Bigfoot, or “Sasquatch” as it is sometimes called. A similar creature called a Yeti has been seen in the Himalayas.
“We even have a tooth that might be from a Bigfoot,” Rugg said.
Rugg, 63, a resident of Felton, was a graphic artist involved in the high-tech industry before retiring and going into Bigfoot research full time. He said the subject often provokes derision and skepticism among disbelievers, but people need to be open minded about the possibility.
“The BDP will add to the dialogue of the impending discovery of Bigfoot by Western science and the general public,” he said. “If anthropologists are right, the only thing separating us from these forest giants is the grid of our culture, our technology.”
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Mike also has a video show where he talks about Bigfoot. Lots of interesting stuff there.
“I came to a sand bar in the river and saw a very large hairy man, completely covered in bushy dark hair, with nothing on but the remnants of a torn shirt hanging off one shoulder.”
Interesting that this is another account which has BF wearing some article of clothing. And considering the state of the shirt mentioned, it seems unlikely that it was worn for any practical reason. That thought generates a whole slew of interesting questions; but we here know that already, I suppose.