Come and sit by the campfire with me, and I’ll tell you a little story. It’s a story about how I came to be hosting a crazy-sounding panel at an upcoming writer’s convention.
The Writers Cantina is coming up the last weekend of June. This is a convention dedicated to the care, feeding, and education of writers, and part of that includes educating people about things they might want to include in their writing but might not be particularly knowledgable about. It could be firearms, soap making or, spaceships. It could also be things that go bump in the night, so I got a wild hair to do a panel I’m calling “The State of the Weird”. The pitch:
“For writers of fabulist genres, the cultural landscape has changed quite a bit in the last 50 years. Topics once purely "fringe" are becoming more generally accepted. New theories and experts seem to crop up constantly. Depending on when/where your story is set, a sighting of a ghost, UFO or ‘bigfoot’ could be met with either ridicule, skepticism, or a request to file a detailed report. Let's get everybody up to speed.”
I started “getting up to speed” only a few years ago. In October of 2019 I had just finished working as Script Supervisor on an indie film. I had a little money, and some time to kill, and came across an announcement somewhere about a “Sasquatch Summit” being held in a few weeks literally right around the corner from my house. “Bigfoot” was not something I had given much thought to, although I was pretty sure even then that they were real. Here was an opportuntiy to look into the topic, see what kinds of people were interested, and maybe meet some characters I could put into my “interesting people for future writing” file.
It was not what I expected.
Popular media likes to paint bigfoot, UFO, and paranormal experiencers and “researchers” as crackpots and charlatans. I’m sure there are any number of those in the world, but that’s not what I ran into.
The attendees were people just like me. Mostly middle-aged, regular folks with curiosity and questions. First revelation: when one presenter asked how many people in the audience had seen “bigfoot”, about 30% of the hands went up in a crowd of mayby 150. That’s a lot of people. They can’t all be lying or crazy. Like Dr. Michael Heiser once said, “If one person is right, it busts the paradigm.”
Then there was Thom Powell, a science teacher from Portland, with his years of run-ins with these big hairy people. His book “Edges of Science” came home with me and proved to be a real eye-opener.
There was Rich Germeau, the Sheriff’s Deputy, hunter and fisherman, who’d had his world shattered when one of the Forest People walked across the road right in front of his squad car near La Push, WA. Along with the shock of seeing something that wasn’t supposed to be real was a deep feeling of betrayal by county, state, and federal government. “Why are we not told about this stuff?” is something I hear over and over from people like this. Hunters, LEOs, scientists, and soldiers. Foremost in their thoughts about their experience is often this question of “why aren’t they telling people? We deserve to know that there is this ultimate apex predator out there!” It took Germeau several years to get back in the woods after his sighting. Some never go back.
Probably the most dramatic presentation was from Ron Morehead, a retired resteraunteur and adventurer who spent several weeks every summer in the 70s-80s hunting at a remote camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains. His recordings of sasquatch vocalizations gave me literal chills. These are not bears, cougars, or human pranksters. This is next-level evidence.
This conference was not a slate of guys who’d heard something weird in the woods and now went around banging on trees at night. These were serious people with different levels of expertise, putting out their experiences and evidence in a rational, engaging fashion.
I came home from that conference with a couple of books, some business cards, and a hankering to know more. I found YouTube channels, podcasts, and documentaries. I attended another, much bigger, conference a couple of months later that also dealt with UFO phenomena (Ever heard of the Phoenix Lights? I hadn’t), and another branch of “the weird” opened itself to me.
Then Covid hit, and all that associated rigamarole, and conferences were over…for awhile. That was fine. I dug in, read books, absorbed podcasts and YouTube channels, and kept in touch with folks I’d met at those two conferences.
By 2023 I was co-hosting a Bigfoot Conference in Forks, WA with long-time podcaster and experiencer Tobe Johnson. I’ve done more hiking and camping in the past year and a half than I did in the previous two decades. This September (2024) I’ll be co-hosting a different kind of conference, out in the Olympic Rainforest instead of at a convention center. It will be an adventure!
If you’re new to the world of the weird and aren’t sure where to start, here’s my advice. It’s a podcast podcast that’s been running for a few years called Blurry Creatures. I highly recommend it to anybody interested in looking into the reality behind our perceived reality. It’s hosted by two guys who had started out to just do a Bigfoot podcast, but after about four episodes they found that there were so many rabbit trails and tangential topics, that they were going to have to branch out. They bring in top notch guests, and their 80s-themed ads on social media are hilarious.
Full disclosure: they come at the topics from a scriptural/Christian perspective. This doesn’t mean they don’t host guests who have differing world views, but they are up-front about how they interpret data. When they host a new guest, they try to start out by asking them what they think about Bigfoot, since that’s where the show started. This is where the phrase “Bigfoot is the gateway drug” comes from, and it’s not entirely frivolous.
If you’d rather watch a beautifully-produced documentary film, I highly recommend “A Flash of Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed”. This is not some TV show with guys in nods banging on trees in the dark. It’s interviews with people who’ve had extraordinary experiences, and how their encounters changed their lives. Among the interviews are the aforementioned Rich Germeau, Ron Morehead, and Tobe Johnson, plus many others. If you enjoy it, and I think you will, the sequel is “A Flash of Beauty: Paranormal Bigfoot”, and it gets more into the “woo” aspects of these encounters. The second film is free right now on YouTube as I write this.
My biggest takeaway from the past few years is that a lot has changed in recent decades. More and more people are coming forward to share their experiences. The government is declaring that UFOs are real and making a show of soft “disclosure”. New technology is making recording of strange events more common, with more discernment needed to guard against CGI and AI hoaxes. I’m looking forward to talking about all of this next month at the Writers Cantina. Hope to see you there!
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