Ah, Bigfoot & ME

Photograph by Joseph Citro.

The abbreviation for the State of Maine is “ME.” As fate would have it, Lewiston Sun Journal reporter Kathryn Skelton has a feature article about Maine and Bigfoot today, entitled creatively, “Bigfoot & ME.” It happens to have a large photo of me at the top of one section of the story.

Here’s an excerpt of some of what Skelton writes about in this Saturday’s news article. It contains various things that have only a little to do with the critical examination of Bigfoot sightings in Maine.

Some words are not even worth repeating, so here’s a sampling from the news item. I’ve left out her talk with a certain individual who is trying to come to Maine to get people to pay him for a “Bigfoot” expedition. Also I’ve left out that group’s dubious listings of a few Maine reports gathered as “Loopgaroo” accounts. Come on. We don’t take too wicked kindly to people from California trying to line their pockets with money via our neighbors or even people “from away” looking for Maine Bigfoot.

Dixfield – Tony Martin was digging in a clay bed beside Coos Canyon, rock hounding up the road in Byron, when he pulled a pair of odd-shaped stones from the muck.

Each weighed about 5 pounds, stretched 12 inches long. After a quick dunk in the Swift River, he saw what could pass for curved insteps and blunt heels.

His first thought: petrified Bigfoot tracks.

For the longest time, he didn’t tell anyone, in case the town tried to claim the incredible find.
That was 1975. Martin, now 83, emboldened by time, has shared them with more and more people, stuck to his theory- a Bigfoot walked through Coos Canyon and left prints that filled with mud and pebbles and gradually petrified – and gotten quite used to skeptics.

“A couple weeks ago, I showed my friend from Turner. He said to me, ‘It’s only stones, it’s only rock.'”

Martin smiled in a pitying sort of way.

“No comprehension. Nothing,” he said.

“I say, ‘You ain’t got no imagination, do you?’… Just rocks …”

Mega-Bigfoot?

Bigfoot stories and sightings have circulated here since way before Maine was a state, as far back as 300 years.

“The Micmacs have some of the richest tales,” said cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. He’s got an 8.5-foot, life-size Bigfoot replica on his porch in Portland. (He says it gives the DHL and UPS delivery drivers a fright, but curiously, doesn’t seem to scare the FedEx or U.S. Postal Service workers.)

In Coleman’s just-released, revised “Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation’s Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures,” he offers up a chapter on the “Eastern Bigfoot.”

He’s familiar with sightings in Rangeley and Mt. Katahdin. Coleman’s been talking to a man in Sidney, just above Augusta, who believes he’s found fresh tracks.

“He thinks there’s a migration pattern from the coast to the Sidney area,” Coleman said. Plaster casts of those footprints measure 22 inches from toe to heel. The average Bigfoot track is closer to 16.

“This Bigfoot would be a very, very large Bigfoot,” Coleman said.

Geologist: stones pre-Bigfoot

Tony Martin, the Dixfield rock hound, believes they used to be here.

“I think probably they’re all gone, crazy weather we’ve had,” he said.

Over the years he’s wondered about what do to with his special stones. Martin, a WWII Army veteran who spent 40 years working at the local paper company, joked that he could put them on eBay. Someone would probably snatch them up.

He’d like to donate them to the University of Maine at Farmington, where one of his sons graduated, to have them research the maybe-tracks.

For now, they’re kept in his home in separate plastic grocery bags with a note encouraging anyone who touches them to handle with care.

Based on a photo of Martin’s find, Tom Weddle at the Maine Geological Survey said they’re likely metamorphic rock with mica crystals and a mineral called staurolite, around 400 million years old (pre-Bigfoot or other bipeds).

“We have to burst people’s bubbles now and then,” Weddle said.

“If I were going to be a Bigfoot believer – Bigfoot is a modern critter – I’d be looking for footprints in the mud.”

Like around Sidney? by Kathryn Skelton, “Bigfoot & ME,” Lewiston Sun Journal, May 5, 2007

Another photo from that visit with Joe Citro is featured on the cover of the new edition of Mysterious America.

Loren Coleman 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.

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