Tyler Paul, organizer of Saturday’s conference, said he began the New Brunswick Bigfoot Organization two years ago and held its first gathering last year in Sackville.
The goal, he said, is to encourage more people to talk about their personal experiences.
Paul believes his first brush with Bigfoot came last June as he hiked a woodland trail with his family in Elgin, N.B.
“We started hearing this knocking … just this constant, whack, whack, whack, whack,” he said, adding the sounds continued for four or five minutes.
“And I was kind of getting a little freaked out because I had the kids there and everything, and gave my wife a little look like, ‘is it really what I’m hearing?’ We believe that we found an imprint on the ground.”
Suzanne Leger of Shediac, N.B., has reported two encounters. She said the first came when she was about seven or eight and playing with a friend in her backyard when they heard “really, really loud screams.”
“It’s not like an animal, not like a man. And they’re very, very loud and very strong, powerful.”
The second came this February, she said, during a lunchtime stroll down a trail in Grande-Bigue, N.B.’s Cocagne Park. She heard nothing this time, but said she saw three different sets of footprints, some of which featured indentations that looked like claw marks. Leger said they bore no resemblance to imprints made by animals and is convinced a Bigfoot clan was on the move.
“It looked like a family,” she said, noting one set of footprints was larger than the others.
Folklore is filled with centuries worth of suspected Bigfoot sightings, which Leger cites as reason enough to believe her encounters were genuine.
“People aren’t making this stuff up for hundreds of years. There’s something there that we just haven’t seen,” she said.
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It just feels like a lot of people misinterpreting known animal noises they may not be familiar with.
This is the big issue often glossed over by cryptozoologists:
Ryan Willis, founder of the Sasquatch Society at Ontario’s Trent University, co-hosts a tv show on the subject — the second season of ‘Sasquatch University’ will air on Wild TV next month.
While shooting Season 2, crew members enlisted psychics to both help with the hunt and bridge an ideological divide among the community of Bigfoot believers.
“You have some people who think (Bigfoot) are strictly like a flesh and blood animal,” he said. “Other people say they can teleport between different dimensions and things…. A lot of people recommend bringing psychics out to try to connect if there is a chance that they’re on a more interdimensional type of frequency.”
They can only come up with an argument that it is a flesh and blood animal by excluding all the weird encounters on the grounds that they can’t be from a flesh and blood animal. My pointing out such circular reasoning annoyed at least one leading cryptozoologist.