The fall of the house of Blogsquatcher

Ye olde logo

People still ask me why I closed up the Blogsquatcher site -- well gather 'round, friends, for I am fixin' to tell y'all exactly why I did it.

There were many reasons before the Spring of 2010 that I had been contemplating quitting the gig, and I'll list these briefly here, though none of them were the actual reason I closed up shop.  First, keeping that blog was a job and I couldn't make myself stop doing it.  It was a lot more work than you'd think.  For instance, taking an interview and transcribing it often took more than twelve hours of drudge work.  And, friends, I should not have to tell you by now how I hate work..  But once I had started that process, I felt obliged to keep at it.  Turning up the bigfoot news every day took quite a bit of trawling and foraging, too, far beyond the lazy go-where-I-want-to-go browsing I ordinarily do.  None of that is something that you'd wake up and do if you didn't think it was your job.  Yet, as a job, the gig payed very poorly.  As in, absolutely zilch!

A teeny tiny picture of the blog in action.

I had other interests, too, that had to lapse so long as I kept up an active life in the field of bigfootery.  After five years of this, it began to really drag on me.  Remember, I'm a recovering narcissist, so deep down, I think this sort of arrangement is just plain wrong.  But I also believed in the idea of service to others who shared my interests, but not my ability to dig into it.  Until the end, the idea of service won out.  (Take that, narcissism!)

Secondly, the field of sasquatchery, in what might be thought of as its "upper echelon" is full of idiots, cranks, bunglers, SOBs, biyatches, self-aggrandizing pricks -- I could go on, but you get the picture.  The number of people who do not fall into this category could be counted with your fingers and toes.  Fingers and toes, people!  There are thousands of interested folk who do not aspire to the "upper echelon" and most of these are ordinary folk who do not deserve such appellations, and my list is not meant to cast any aspersions upon them.  But on the whole, the "big fish, little pond" of bigfootery is an asshole magnet.  It was downright unpleasant to deal with many of these folk day in and day out.  The conniving douchebaggery in the field was staggering.  If I even attempted to describe to you some of the things that went on, you would not believe me.

Thirdly, the fact that I was involved in bigfoot research was always likely to be an embarrassment to my family if people at their places of employment ever found out.  "Your husband looks for bigfoot?  Why, that must mean you are an idiot since you married him!"  That was one big fear.  So I tried to keep my identity on the down-low.  Some people, however, knew who I was and seemingly delighted in using my name in print, when I had said all along, I don't mind anyone knowing who I am, just don't put it in print.

You'd be amazed how many times you can find "blogsquatcher" and "dbdonlon" right next to each other on certain websites..

Not that it matters, but the narcissist in me seems to believe people should just know how I want to be represented.

Artist's conception of dbdonlon.

But enough of that, let's get to the real reason.  Because it'll really freak you out, man..

In April of last year, I was working on finishing a book I thought I'd title Living Anomaly.  In this book I wanted to go over all the anomalies that appear in bigfoot research, but that had been played down since the end of the 1970s.  I could see that there was a public image of bigfoot that mainstream bigfoot "experts" wanted to convey -- that it was an ordinary creature that lived in certain areas.  But inside the bigfoot world, I could see that most researchers knew a few things that played against that desired public image.

For one thing, bigfoot did not appear to live anywhere.  In other words, there were no locations where the ecological impact of such a large creature in the numbers it would have to have to sustain a population could be detected.  You might find a lone feeding site, a lone bedding site, and maybe a spot where something large had defecated, but the trail would end there.  There would be no further impact to be found on the local ecology.

Indeed there are exceptions to this particular rule -- sometimes a spot is found where a longer habitation seems to have occurred, but even there, you won't find the impact of any quantity of sasquatches, just seemingly that one fellow.

It was like bigfoot came for a little vacation, and went on its way.

Add to this the many stories of bigfoot that included other strange details.  If you followed the Blogsquatcher blog, you know about these now.  There were associations with UFOs, paranormal effects, telepathic communication -- the kind of stuff that only "kooks" believe, you know?

When I got involved in bigfoot research, this had been played down to the extent that it was hard to find the references to it anymore.  You could go back to the 70s and find loads of it, but these references were not placed in any prominence in the current milieu.  You had to go looking for it.  This was one reason why I thought it would be hard to find these kinds of cases in support of a book, so that I really thought it wouldn't be an easy write.  But when I went looking, I was amazed at what I found.  So amazed that I couldn't sit on it.  I blogged it baby.  I blogged the sheiza out of it.  This was in the period between say October of 2009 and April of 2010.

As I went along, I thought to myself, there are a few things I haven't touched on, like "Is bigfoot a demon?"  Because there weren't many stories like that.  But no sooner had I thought it, than I got a phone call and an email that made me sit up and take notice.

The phone call, which morphed into an interview I did with a witness who declared that he knew bigfoot to be a demon, ultimately turned out to be a hoax.  But it was a strange hoax to my mind.

 But first the email.  Shortly after posting the story "When bigfoot gets in your head -- telepathy, dreams and channelers, oh my!" I got an email from someone who could do what we call channeling.  I have always been suspicious of channeling for the simple reason that nobody seems to have ever been able to prove where the channeled information ultimately comes from.  So many times one finds that what is channeled is actually complete bunk, but it captures the attention and keeps one involved while it's going on.  This always seemed like a kind of "honey trap" to me.  You couldn't tell what the ultimate goal was, but it surely wasn't about giving accurate information.

Anyway, this channeler offered to link me up with the bigfoot I had, apparently, been near in Pennsylvania in 2005 or so.  I thought, well, why not?  It might be good for the book.

Now, two things happened during this event that shook me a bit.  The first is that the channeled bigfoot knew things, intimate things about me that the channeler could not have known.  I don't think the channeler could tell you today what that was, because I have never revealed it, and it wouldn't be obvious simply by looking at the transcript.  But the bigfoot had said, seemingly in passing, something that I had thought about for the first time ever earlier that day.  A simple coincidence?  Maybe.  Call me crazy, but I thought that perhaps this was an attempt to show me that this was "legit" in a way only I would be able to recognize.

OK, so there's that.  Creepy, but on its own, not much to go on.  However, during the "conversation" with this bigfoot personage, an offer was made.  Here's a quote from that email:

Put aside for a week, a day, the proving of us and just be with us... ok.. we/I will show you understanding of ways to be with us... it will take you further from the proving things... but you can still play the game... we do want you to be a good researcher and we may in time give you evidence but never to prove it ... but to make you BIG... we do like you... no so much some of them... really.... 

To me, this seems a pretty blatant quid pro quo offer -- if you come into our world, we'll give you some evidence, not to prove it mind you, but to make you a big shot in bigfootery.  I mentioned this to the channeler, and this is what came back:

ok, he says, not BIG but deep, in knowing and understanding...  and being with... and you may be asked to bring forth evidence... yes, asked... ( now I have chills , yikes )

WE WILL CHOOSE WHO BRINGS EVIDENCE... WE WILL CHOOSE WHEN AND WE WILL CHOOSE HOW AND WHO.... 

That started to look creepy to me.  I continued to write back and forth with the channeler in a cordial way, because I'm normally pretty cordial anyway, but I was seriously getting creeped out by this.  I mentioned this in my next email back to the channeler:

One thing for me is, I had something like a near-death experience (which is why my perspective is so different from most bigfoot researchers) and that has brought me into a knowing state, rather than a believing or faith state, about God.  God has been very kind to me all my life, even when I was not being so good.  I would not want to get involved with something that is unknown to us, without knowing for certain that it doesn't bother God.  Now, usually, all I have to do is ask and I get a very clear answer in a dream.  I can always tell a God dream because the answer is simple, elegant, and deep.  I also get dreams from energies who want me to do things I should not do.  I feel that I have to be able to distinguish these energies, and I'm getting better at it, maybe.  But until I thought I got a green light from God, I would not want to do something like this.

It's partly because I thought bigfoot might be an animal, or primitive man being, in other words, wholly physical, that I got involved.  As I've grown to understand that it is some kind of spiritual energy, I've drawn back because I don't know the source of that energy.  I don't get answers when I ask about whether it's alright.  This leads me to believe this is a test for me, and I'm not quite sure how I come down on it.

Of course, I realize that my experiences might have led me to hold beliefs that really aren't true.  I try to reality test things..  I get the strong impression that what you are passing on to me is actually from the source of my dream in the PA woods, which I am glad of.  And he sounds like a nice fellow, but as Shakespeare put it, "a man can smile and smile and be a devil still"..

After this exchange, I did that thing where you ask for a dream.  (I do this quite often anyway.)  This is what I got:

February 22, 2010 

My memory of it begins with me looking at a dark haired, dour looking man who is sitting at a table in a hotel conference room that had been set up for a seminar.  I know that he is a bad guy, and that I have seen him before.  He is out to get someone that I know, who does not know about the danger.  So I watch the dark haired man wrap a poison bomb in his tablecloth, right at the edge, and somehow attach it there.  His purpose is to poison this other fellow (who is male, but not anyone I really know).  I went out and told the other fellow where he put the bomb, and he decided not to go to the seminar.

(As I think about it now, it seems to me that spreading words or “evidence” that were false and led to bad conclusions would be a sort of “poison bomb” from a certain point of view.)

Since my companion didn’t go into the conference room, the man came outside where we were at that time. We saw him first and tackled him.  He fell into a ditch, and coincidentally, the bomb landed right below him so that his mouth was on it.  Later I was in a store with the other fellow, and I did something to the man (I guess this was psychically) to make him unable to speak.  I told my companion about it.  Then I looked out the window and saw that we were up several stories in the air.  Down below, in an alley, were many boxes and several trucks scattered about.  I thought that this was good, because now no one would be able to discover what we’d done.  (I don’t remember why this would have made sense at the time.)  I felt as if we had to be clandestine about what we had done, even though the man was going to use a poison bomb.

Then I went down (?) and saw another person that I knew (and knew to be a bad sort) who was working on a device that would cause people’s shopping carts (?) to go much slower than they should, which he was going to use at a time when people were having to flee for their lives.  I went through the store nervous that I would be discovered.  I saw a group of people that I knew in the middle of the store, talking about a test that they were taking.  I tossed something to one of them, but saw that it was damaged by the toss.  I apologized to the person.  He asked me if I thought any Jets were going to win.  I was confused, because I knew that the Saints had won the Superbowl and the season was over.  But then I realized that he meant in a basketball tournament, where some Jets players were playing for different basketball teams.  I said I supposed that they could if they were on the right team.  I went to my hotel room at this point and turned on the TV to see the tournament, and saw that it had only recently started.

What the.. is the first thing you'd say.  This is a rather dense dream, and I'm not going to unpack it all now.  But the first thing I thought, as I mentioned in the text, was that the "poison bomb" was what had been offered to me.  I mentioned this in my next email:

I think the poison bomb possibly relates to a lie that would be broadcast, as in poison = lie, bomb = spreading it all around.  I take it to mean that our bigfoot friend's offer to make me "BIG" by giving me some evidence to share was an effort to deceive not just me but all kinds of people, since I would have put it on my blog and lots of people trust me.

This was about the end of the line as far as the channeler went, as that person continued to see things in a positive light, while I thought the dream details were pointing fairly clearly to the negative.  I was considering all of this, and how to approach it in the future.  Is there some kind of deception involved in bigfoot research?

At this time I was also reading plenty of strange tales about cryptoterrestrials too, as Mac Tonnies' book had just come out, so such things were in the air, and it was all coming together at me rather quickly.  I conceived that unless one actually sees a bigfoot, which does happen but not so often during what we call "expeditions," when what happens are usually a congruence of strange sounds, branch breaking, and other indications that something is there, but you really cannot say what -- anyway, unless you actually saw one yourself, you would not get enough evidence to show that they existed.  You'd simply have to believe on the basis of the word of others, backed up by the kind of weak evidence that you do find.

This is believing on faith.  This is religion.

It was while I was going over all of this I got that phone call about bigfoot being a demon.  I recorded the call, but when nothing checked out when I tried to verify what was verifiable in his tale, I decided not to transcribe it and run it.  But at that time I also got a strange email titled "That's a demon."

I couldn't make heads or tails of that email.  It seemed to be talking about a video, but I hadn't put up any videos recently.  I wrote back to the fellow asking for clarification, but my email bounced immediately.  This puzzled me so much that I examined the first email more closely.  It turned out the email had been sent in June of 2009, but I had never received it until March of 2010.

A strange synchronicity, no?  As it happens, this sort of thing had happened to me before.  At one time I involved myself in a certain kind of divination, known as dowsing.  It turned out that I was pretty good at it, which I found shocking.  I wondered what the meaning of this was and whether dowsing was something safe to do.  I got several dreams that suggested that, no, it wasn't.  But I kept at it, trying to be safe, whatever that means.. and then I got an email from nobody that said something about demons and dowsing.  I didn't keep that email, but it was downright strange -- it had no information in the "from" file, and was only a title with no text.  It had been mailed to me, so it didn't appear to be a mass spam mailing.

And it came directly after I asked something like, "Gee, if I have a guardian angel and this sort of thing isn't good to do, how about giving me a sign?"

So I wrote that piece on bigfoot as demon with all this in my mind.  And I started looking back at my own history in bigfootery, and I noticed a kind of strange pattern.

My favorite bigfoot story, because it is so near where I live now and where I lived in my youth, is the Mount Vernon Monster story.  As it happened, the fellow who said bigfoot was a demon claimed to have seen the Mount Vernon Monster, and this was the one that convinced him it was a demon.

OK, so far that's just coincidence, or perhaps he designed it that way since it was a hoax.  But as I thought about it, I realized, every time I had been about to quit bigfooting, I got a new bit of information about the Mount Vernon Monster.

I can go back through my files and find them, and see that they came during times when I was really considering hanging it all up.

And then after I finally did quit, guess what I got?  Yep, another bit of information about the Mount Vernon Monster.

So you see, the idea that I had that I was being manipulated had quite a few bits of information backing it up.

I could see the manipulation after the fact, but I could not see what the purpose of it was.  And since, as I said in an email above, people tended to trust me, I could not in good conscience continue while I knew that I was subject to this manipulation.  I didn't know what it was that I was giving you, dear readers.  Perhaps it was the "poison bomb" from the dream?

So I wrote this post to let everyone know I was quitting, and why:

INTO THE SUNSET

There comes a time when all things must change, when our interests transform, and our needs become different.  That time has come for me in respect to this blog.  I have enjoyed the journey that this blog represents, but my friends, I must tell you, it is done. 

In fact, I am now retired from looking for bigfoot in any capacity from here out.  For me, bigfoot has become not less of a mystery since I started looking into it in 2004, but much, much more mysterious.  I despair of actually ever discovering what lies at the bottom of the matter.

But whether or not that is the case, I have exhausted the energy I have to spend upon it.

I leave you with this last thought -- if, as it seems to me, there is something deliberately deceptive about the bigfoot phenomenon, there always remains the possibility that your best interests are not taken into account when you participate in it.

If I look at a squirrel outside my window right now, I am sure that what I'm observing is a squirrel.  I am confident that I am not deceived.  But if I look at a bigfoot, or any other mystery humanoid, I do not know what I am looking at.  Indeed, I am sure that I am being deceived in some way.  It is my intention not to participate in that deception any further, for I recognize that by blogging about it, I am fostering that deception, even if it isn't my wish.

I do not desire to be used by something when I am completely ignorant of the motives, or even the essence of what I'm being used by.

I do not know that investigating bigfoot or other mystery creatures is a harmful exercise, it's just that I don't want to wander around blindly, not knowing who or what I am bumping into, or stepping on (or what I am stepping in!) in a karmic sense.

So there it is, all spelled out, dear readers.  It may seem quite peculiar, even deranged, to many of you. But this was my state of mind, and the events that formed it, at the time I called it quits.

I still don't know what lies at the bottom of the bigfoot phenomenon, but I continue to be of the opinion that there is a deception going on.  So if you want to follow such things, do be careful.