Bigfoot museum

[dawn]

Forest of mystery
New Bigfoot museum joins Mystery Spot near Santa Cruz

Christine Delsol, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, August 14, 2005

Felton, Santa Cruz County -- It's hard to explain why I had to go to the Bigfoot museum. It could be all those twilight drives with my grandparents as a child, taking to Northern California's back roads to spot white deer (success rate: 50 percent) and "maybe even Bigfoot" (success rate: zip). Just as likely, it was a reason to drive through the Santa Cruz Mountains on a glorious summer weekend.

Yes, that's the Santa Cruz Mountains, not the Siskiyous or the Trinity Alps. The northern counties are famous for Bigfoot reports, but Michael Rugg, who began researching huge, hairy bipeds after western newspapers ran the first photos of abominable snowman tracks on Mount Everest in 1951, happens to live in Felton. Rugg knew when he decided to turn his former arts and crafts studio into a museum that the area had generated numerous reports of Bigfoot encounters up until the 1980s. When he began working on the museum, he heard of numerous recent sightings -- there was one in Boulder Creek a week before my visit last month.

Sunlight strobed through redwood boughs as we drove past forested mountain panoramas burnished by golden monkey flowers and sprinkled with blooming buckeye. Except for the landscape's tendency to slide onto homes during prolonged rainstorms, these woods don't seem especially mysterious until you consider that the Mystery Spot, whose unexplained phenomena have lured droves of the skeptical and the curious for 55 years, is just 9 country miles from Felton's new Bigfoot Discovery Museum.

The museum's entrance, on Highway 9 across from Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, is a shrine to kitsch, displaying board games, Sasquatch beer and magazines, including the Weekly World News' incomparable headline, "World's First Bigfoot Hooker Tells All!"

The back room is Rugg's domain. In two hours of conversation among the artifacts and books, he came across as a rational, open-minded man who majored in art at Stanford and abandoned a second major in paleoanthropology because he was promised a failing grade if he researched Bigfoot. He has since been a folk artist, dulcimer maker, performer, digital graphic artist and, since last summer, museum curator. While not buying in to the hoaxes, he argues persuasively that a creature found throughout American Indian history and reported by settlers since the early 1800s warrants further investigation.

"Bigfoot was not created by a clever Chinese taxidermist," Rugg says, referring to European naturalists' dismissal when a duckbilled platypus was first presented to them in the late 1700s. His evidence is in the footprint and bone casts, the DNA analyses, the academics who set out to debunk the legends and became believers, the eyewitness reports -- including a Tennessee farm family who says a Bigfoot family has lived on their property since 1947. Of the local sightings, an impressive number come from just up the canyon around Zayante, the first settlement in these mountains.

Most dramatic is a digital analysis of the controversial 1967 Patterson/Gimlin film, shot in Humboldt County, of what appears to be a female Bigfoot with an injured thigh. Though still unaccepted by most mainstream scientists, the enhanced film reveals details of the peculiar gait -- veering out from the hip, calf rising parallel to the ground -- that would seem all but impossible for a man in a gorilla suit. I tried to duplicate the Bigfoot walk and nearly crashed into a glass case of plaster casts.

The museum won't necessarily turn skeptics into believers, but it will give them something new to chew on. It certainly added a different perspective when my boyfriend, Ken, and I retreated for the night to the Felton Crest Inn, in the hills above town.

With redwood branches brushing picture windows on two sides, our room could have been a cave in the woods rather than quarters in an elegant, two- story home. While Ken dozed on the deck, I followed a trail through the trees. Dusk quickly became night in the forest, and I turned back without getting very far up the steep hillside. The most alarming creature I encountered in the waning light was a banana slug.

There was no question of leaving the area without stopping at the Mystery Spot, a 1950s-style roadside attraction where, as the slogan goes, The Laws of Physics Do Not Apply. Within this 150-foot-diameter circle, balls roll uphill and people appear to tilt, grow and shrink.

Following Sean, our wise-cracking guide, up an ostensibly modest hill left me panting and my heartbeat pounding in my ears. I watched six people stand in order, from 6 feet 2 to 5 feet 2, then switch places and appear to be all the same height. Numerous scientific explanations have countered the theories of buried UFOs or asteroids. In 1998, a UC Berkeley psychology professor determined that it's all perceptual illusion, magnified because both the body and the surroundings are tilted.

I think I believe the professor, though I'm not sure how his theory explains all the trees bowing in toward the Mystery Spot.

More important, I don't care. All weekend, these mountains raised cosmic questions that never tease my brain during days filled with commute traffic, housework and unpaid bills. The answers may forever remain a mystery, but I'm confident none of them involve Chinese taxidermists.



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If you go
Getting there

Felton is 1 1/2 hours from San Francisco or Oakland, taking Highway 17 toward Santa Cruz and exiting on Mount Hermon Road. For a slower but more scenic route, take Highway 92 to Skyline Boulevard (Highway 35) south, veering right to Highway 9 at the Big Basin turnoff.

What to do

Bigfoot Discovery Museum, 5497 Highway 9, Felton. (831) 335-4478, www. bigfootdiscoveryproject.com. 1 p.m.-6 p.m. weekdays, 11 a.m. -7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday and closed Tuesdays. Free; donations welcome.

Mystery Spot, 465 Mystery Spot Road, Santa Cruz. (831) 423-8897, www. mysteryspot.com. 9 a.m.-7 p.m. daily. Adults $5; children under 3 free.