For Hunters and Fans of Bigfoot, a Philosophical Divide Source: Reuters Is the fabled creature a mere animal? Or a beast with ties to extraterrestrials aboard UFOs?
VANCOUVER, British Columbia - For Sasquatch fans gathered in Vancouver over the weekend, the debate was not over the reality of the large, apelike animal but over its relation to UFOs.
"It's a huge divide," Stephen Harvey, organizer of the International Sasquatch Symposium, said in describing the dispute between the cryptozoology and paranormal wings of Sasquatch studies.
Sasquatch - also known as Bigfoot - is an ordinary flesh-and-blood creature that just happens to have avoided capture, according to the cryptozoologists, or students of hidden animals.
But to believers in the paranormal, or psychic phenomena, Sasquatch is also an "interdimensional" being with strange powers and ties to extraterrestrials aboard UFOs.
Both camps tend to think there must be more than one specimen around. And neither seems worried that no live or dead Sasquatch has been produced for study or that mainstream science considers the idea of such an animal lurking in the forests of North America to be complete nonsense.
"How can you expect a creature that can't build a fire to fly a spaceship?" grumbled Bill Miller of Illinois, one of about 150 people who came to Vancouver to trade the latest reports of sightings and accounts of their personal experiences.
Miller's own brush with Sasquatch took place in northern Minnesota in 1980.
"Who'd have thought it would happen outside of the Pacific Northwest? But it turns out there are a lot of sightings in northern Minnesota," he said.
The legend of a large, hairy creature lurking in the mountains of western Canada and the United States goes back to a time before Europeans settled the continent. The word Sasquatch was derived in the 1920s from tales of the Chehalis Indians in British Columbia.
Stories about Sasquatch and its connection with flying saucers are also staples of supermarket tabloids - a fact that has the cryptozoologists complaining that the paranormals give Sasquatch research a bad name.
"I mean, if you call the police to report a murder and describe what happened and say you saw little green men, how long before the police officer stops taking notes?" Miller asked.
Members of the paranormal wing contend that their opponents' minds are closed and say that is why the cryptozoologists have never been able to produce more than circumstantial evidence - such as alleged footprints - of the creature's existence.
"The way to go is to become more evolved ourselves," argued Jack "Kewaunee" Lapseritis, the author of Psychic Sasquatch and a member of the Self-Mastery Earth Institute in Trout Lake, Washington.
Lapseritis, who reported having had five dealings with Sasquatch in the last seven weeks, contended that since the creature could travel between dimensions of reality and space, it would not be found unless it wanted to be.
So deep is the divide between the two schools of Sasquatch thought that Harvey ended up scheduling their discussion sessions on different days.
"I sort of had to segregate them," he said, alluding to problems at past gatherings.
By Allan Dowd
1999 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.