Meet the Super-Serious Sasquatch Chasers of America’s Premier Bigfoot Conference

As luck would have it, one of the largest Bigfoot conferences in the United States is held thirty minutes from the town where I grew up. Each May, Marc DeWerth hosts the Ohio Bigfoot Conference, located in Salt Fork State Park in southeastern Ohio. The area is known for its high level of Bigfoot sightings, as the topography is reportedly ideal for the creature.

I found that people have many different impressions of what Bigfoot is. Some people feel Bigfoot is an alien or a government experiment, but a majority of the more rational sasquatch enthusiasts believe that Bigfoot is a holdover from premodern times, a giant biped that co-evolved with our ancestral forebears. (There is some evidence to suggest that ten foot tall humanoids did at one point walk the earth.) The OBC is like an academic conference in which these ideas can be exchanged.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the ethical debate surrounding the hunt for the creature – some people maintain killing one is the only way to prove they exist, while others strongly feel that the creatures should be respected and left alone. I touched on this in more detail in my original version of the article; a bit was taken out for brevity’s sake.

The article was published in June, 2017, on Narratively, and can be found here.

A guy from the town where I was living at the time stepped in at the last minute and took some amazing photos of the event. His name is Matthew Collins, and his work can be found here.

Info about the Ohio Bigfoot Conference can be found here.