Why Are You Interested? Do You Care If ANYONE Else Ever Believes? Do You Care If Anyone Ever Believes If You KNOW They Exist?

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I often wonder why some people are interested in Sasquatch/Bigfoot.  Personally, I had no interest in the subject, or any cryptid subject past seeing "In Search Of" when I was in grade school, or "the Legend Of Boggy Creek" when it played as the second feature at a drive in when I was in high school, and to me it was nothing more than a low budget "Mockumentary".  I played baseball, threw the discus and shot in track, and had a full class load and none of it was on my radar.  I hunted, fished, and did all the outdoor activities we could do in Michigan.  I was born in Arizona, but went to high school in Michigan and lived with my maternal grandparents and even the idea that Sas/BF would even BE in Michigan, let alone Arizona was nonsense to me.

I came back to Arizona, literally the day after I graduated from high school and worked once again for my paternal grandfather on the family ranch and at his Chevron station while I got ready for college at University of Arizona in Tucson.  This was 1985.  College went by, and I went year round and graduated in three years.  I went to work as a police officer and used my vacation time every year to go to Michigan to deer hunt with my maternal grandfather.  On November 13th, 1993 I had a face-to-face encounter.  In one second, I went from 0 to 100 in the "not interested to knowing they exist" scale.  I only ever talked about it with my grandfather because back then my job or anyone associated with it would have thought I was nuts.  Even if they would have believed that I BELIEVED I had an encounter, they would have given me a rubber gun and a plastic badge and stuck me in the evidence room.  So, I kept quiet about it for YEARS and packed it DEEP down in a box in my mind and never thought about it.  But, my relationship with the outdoors had changed.  I still fished, but I didn't hunt in Michigan anymore, I only hunted in Arizona and then only in the desert.  Any time I went to the mountains in northern Arizona and was out of Prescott, Flagstaff, or Show Low...I was uneasy.  I wasn't even uneasy about Sas/BF...I was just finding myself looking behind every tree like I was working a felony warrant, or clearing a building on an active alarm call.

Then all the internet sites and documentaries and all the information became available on the internet and I started following the work of Dr Krantz, Dr Meldrum, Dr Sarmiento, John Green, John Bindernagel, Renee Dahinden, and Thomas Steenburg because they all appealed to my "Just the evidence" cop brain.  I still didn't talk about it though.  I sifted through a LOT of chaff and sensationalism and the "woo" and read all the books I could but STILL didn't talk to anyone about my encounter because I still thought people would think I had stepped out of my mind. 

It was getting bad though, I was starting to have nightmares and almost like a PTS over the encounter.  I had been in lethal force incidents during my career and none of them affected me the way this had.  Finally, I decided I needed to talk to someone so I talked to a counselor who specialized in PTS who was independent of the department.  I hadn't retired yet, so I was still keeping my piehole shut to anyone else.  I did the counseling, went back to Michigan where the encounter happened to face "my own ****", finished law school while I was recovering from a line of duty injury before I retired, and once I retired felt like I had put it behind me.  But still....I didn't talk to anyone about it outside of the counselor I had seen.  It was like..."Okay, dealt with".

Then I heard Kerry Arnold on a podcast talking about his own encounter and it was like he was telling my own story.  The time and place were different, but from an intellectual and emotional perspective...it was almost like a catharsis for me.  The whole phenomena was still generally full of recondite information and speculation and the two ends of the spectrum from the "strictly zoological to the woo" seemed to be having continual clashes over who owned Sasquatch.  Still, I kept my mouth shut until I finally had a talk with Kerry and he and I spent about four hours on the phone and he and I "trauma bonded" over our experiences, but I STILL didn't want to talk about it outside a very, very, very small group.  He hadn't started his own podcast yet and I was retired from the department but was working at a law firm so STILL didn't want to come out of the woods in a public forum.

Kerry encouraged me to put it on paper, so I did and eventually shared it and felt a weight come off my shoulders even though I took a bit of troll heat and then of course was contacted by some people who I thought were more than a little nutty telling me how they were "raising a bigfoot infant" and all sorts of other things that my mind as an "open minded skeptic" without corroborative evidence found hard to....buy into.  But what I did do was start going to places like OR, WA, NorCal, ID, etc where high clusters of sightings had occurred and started hanging out camping with my dogs and just being something to MAYBE attract some curiosity.  I couldn't do a lot of roaming because I have two artificial knees and an artificial hip due to my former career, so being a field researcher was out and hauling my horse across country was impractical.  So, I don't consider myself a researcher, just a curious KNOWER who is at the point where I don't care if anyone believes me, what happened happened, and I don't even care if the "world at large" ever believes or if a specimen is ever taken to "prove" it to mainstream science or to force "da gub'ment" and "big timber and tourism money" to admit it.  

So, that's why I care, or I am interested in new credible evidence...for my own satisfaction and my own continued learning.

Sorry about the long post, you can wake up now and flame away if you want to...but I'm curious....why are YOU interested?