Norseman -
Good topic!
As you know, I'm a knower. One of the most challenging aspects of dealing with that has been my father's ridicule. For a long time, because of his threats of what he'd do to me, I never told my story a second time. It went .. badly. So, ironically, a few years ago I was visiting him. Some of his friends stopped by and the coffee, cigarettes, and yarns started. He told a story I'd never heard. His dad was one of the surveyors who surveyed the White Pass ski area. Dad, though under age, accompanied grandpa. He said they were heading towards work and he looked out the window through a gap in the trees into a snowy field and there was a big stump or rootwad which "looked exactly like bigfoot would have looked if it existed, which it doesn't." He concluded the story by saying that the "stump" wasn't there on the way back. "Huh".
A second piece, ambiguous but intriguing to me, was my great grandfather. That'd be dad's mom's dad. He died when I was 13 or 14. He lived next to us, a few hundred yards up the hill, and I spent a lot of time with him. Grandpa was a very serious man and particularly touchy about his reputation. He'd pulled himself up by his bootstraps and made something of himself putting his siblings through college as well along the way. So why did he have 2 copies of George Haas' Bigfoot Bulletin on the porch essentially inviting people to ridicule him? I suspect he'd seen or experienced something that overrode his cautious protection of his reputation.
MIB