Big Foot sightings in Santa Cruz discussion set
Felton — 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 discussion and exhibit on the reality of Bigfoot.
The event will be held at the Bigfoot Discovery Museum located on Highway 9 in Felton.
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 “The 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.
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.”
Source: santacruzsentinel
Tags: Big Foot Sightings, bigfoot, bigfoot discovery museum, cruz county bigfoot discussion, Cryptids, crypto zoology, cryptozoology, Legendary Bigfoot, sasquatch
October 21st, 2009 at 5:18 pm
this letters to mr.rugg it makes my hair stand up on the back of my neck to here your story of your sighting in laytoville.the reason why is my dad is 60 years old and lived in laytonville about the same time . back then he said he lived in stone canyon an old saw mill where workers lived and worked. he was about 7,8 years old thene he says.me and my family has lived in mendocino county all of our lives, worked in the logging industery ,saw mills,hunt and fish all over this land know just about every back road,tree and rock around here.ive been in these woods all my life and never seen a big foot or anything like it .but i believe my dads story hes told me when i was a kid,and told grandkids and other family members over the years.never was talk about until now.it sounds close to your story.my dad says what happened was him and a friend was playing up behind the mill and they ran up on a hairy looking man my dad sayed it had red eyes like it was up all night and hairy grey looking color arms hung down.he sayed it looked like a grey squrrel color,it had blood on its face.they ran around this rock back to the house and mill.they told my grandpa,my dads dadand some other mill workers.they went up on the hill to see what my dad and his friend seen and it was gone.the adults just said it was probally an old miser/hermitleft it at that.this is an honest story,and i believe my dad after all these years.