Thom Powell Week: Peer Review

This week we celebrate Thom Powell, the contemporary researcher and author of the Bigfoot Research book, "The Locals". On November 3rd he will be speaking at an event sponsored by the Oregon Sasquatch Symposium and University of Oregon. There are rumors he will provide a peak of his new book, "Shady Neighbors"

We like to say, "How your peers say what they say, says a lot about what they are saying about you." Then we sit in the lotus position and ponder the infinite reflection of emptiness.

Joking aside, we find it insightful when we read what Cliff Barackman has to say about Thom Powell. As Bigfoot researchers they are peers in the community, both have slightly different approaches, but, in the end, the same goal.

We know if your visiting us you've already been to Cliff's blog, but please visit his site today he has breaking news on the TV show he did with Bob Saget.

Without Further Ado here is one of our favorite post

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2009
Trying Something New by Cliff Barackman

I was invited to the woods this past week by Thom Powell, author of the excellent book The Locals (scroll down to see the book). Thom thinks outside of the box when it comes to bigfoot research, and his intelligent ideas are always refreshing and fun. Hanging out with him is never dull, and he nearly always has something great up his sleeve. This idea would prove to be in a direction I had never gone.

For this excursion, Thom explained that while most bigfooters seem interested in call blasting or playing rather disagreeable sounds into the woods to lure in bigfoots, he wanted to play something totally unoffensive, pleasant, and multi-cultural (quite the understatement when considering the intended audience). He chose the song "Smaointe" by the artist Enya.

To further entice the creatures' curiosity, he picked lavender, rosemary, and even sunflowers from his own garden to leave out in conspicuous locations near the camp as gifts for the bigfoots. Again, Thom was looking to leave something that would be interesting to them in ways other than food might be. The herbs made my car smell great, so maybe he's onto something.

Thom Powell placing a "gift" of garden herbs on a large stone.

We travelled into Mount Hood National Forest to a camp at the end of a logging road. The camp was near a talus slope overlooking a spring. The rocky hillside was perfect for blasting the recordings since it would reflect the sound outward rather than absorb the sound, as happens with trees.

Thom left the "gifts" on prominent rock piles near camp. We explored the area and set up our gear utilizing what little daylight we had left. I brought out my "big guns" for this trip, since it was only to be a few hours (I had to work the next day). I brought my 500 watt Yamaha PA system which pumps sound through two speakers with crystal clarity. I set the speakers up with them angled outwards by perhaps 45 degrees in order to create a "big" sound, which can be more important than being just loud.

Thom setting up the sound system.

Shortly after sunset, we let the diatonic sounds of Enya echo through the countryside. When the six-minute song ended, we started it over again. In fact, we played nothing but that one song for nearly a half hour.

I don't own any Enya music, but she's a talented musician and very good at what she does. It was not hard to allow her majestic music to add to the moment of watching the last shades of pink and purple play in the wisps of clouds over the Cascades to the west. It was downright lovely. Of course, by the fourth or fifth time through the song, most of the magic was lost...

I only wish a photograph could capture the loveliness...

While no bigfoot activity was noticed that night, that does not mean that Thom's experiment was a failure. Thom knows that this is a long-term game plan. He will do this same activity again. He wants the local bigfoots to recognize him by his sounds and his efforts. He hopes that by trying benevolent means to lure the locals in, he will be recognized as benevolent himself.

In Thom's words, he is not striving to prove these things are real, he's striving for understanding. An advanced thought, to be sure.

What I'd like to suggest to the reader is that everyone should be out there repeatedly trying their own ideas. Sure, learn from those with experience, but as a bigfooter one should try to think about new ways to grab the critters' attention. More importantly, put those ideas to the test. In fact, test those ideas many times before writing them off as not working. You might get an interesting visit one night, but if you don't, maybe there was no bigfoot nearby at all.

Either way, enjoy the woods, and try something new. We're not getting very far with traditional thinking, so let's start thinking outside of the box. Way outside...

Oh, and one last thing. Share your results with other bigfooters so they can try the same methods. They might be able to confirm your findings, and perhaps add to them. That's science, after all. Not sharing your data is, well, like not having any data at all.

Cliff Barackman enjoying a sunset while bigfooting.

SRC: http://northamericanbigfoot.blogspot.com/2009/08/trying-something-new.html

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
November 3rd Event
Thom Powell Week: To true believers, Bigfoot lives
Thom Powell Week: The Contemporary Researcher

EXTERNAL LINKS
Thom Powell's book the Locals
Cliff Barackman talks about the Chehalis Project, investigated by Thom Powell

Thom Powell Week: The Contemporary Researcher

We are celebrating Thom Powell Week He will be speaking at an engagement sponsored by Oregon Sasquatch Symposium and University of Oregon on November 3rd.

In 2004 the first edition of this work, Meet the Sasquatch, accompanied a sasquatch exhibit at the Vancouver Museum, British Columbia, Canada. In that same year, it won the Anomalist Book of the Year Award in the category of best illustrated book. General feedback and comments from numerous researchers, together with new findings, indicated that the work should not be simply reprinted. As a result, it has been updated, with a considerable amount of new material added, and has now become Know the Sasquatch/Bigfoot. For this new edition, Chris Murphy again consulted many major sasquatch/bigfoot researchers, scientists, and others. The information provided is the latest available, and again is highly authoritative.

We were fortunate to get a copy of this exclusive and extensive book about the Sasquatch; as much about the creature as it is about those that investigate. We literally read all 300 pages cover to cover in one night. One of the chapters covers none other than Thom Powell. Below we have a short excerpt from that chapter.

THOM POWELL: THE CONTEMPORARY RESEARCHER.
Thom Powell is best known as author of The Locals, an entertaining and informative book that presents some of the stranger, even "paranormal," aspects of the Sasquatch phenomenon. The book has been acclaimed for providing fresh information, fresh perspectives, and being well-written. Conventional scientists, of course, have no patience with even a hint of paranormalism, so Thom has had to "ride that tide," like many others who have reported findings in that connection.

Thom's interest in the Sasquatch began as a skeptical science teacher, searching for local examples of pseudoscience that he could use in his middle school science lessons. Thom did not take the whole Sasquatch matter seriously until he moved from downtown Portland to outlying Clackamas County, Oregon, in 1988. There he met neighbors who reported Sasquatch sightings in the immediate vicinity. In an effort to debunk those sighting claims, Thom got to know local Sasquatch researchers such as Joe Beelart and Frank Kaneaster, who had track casts and other evidence to share.

Thom's interest in photography led to an interest in deploying remote wildlife cameras (camera traps) in an attempt to resolve his questions about the validity of the whole Sasquatch issue. In the late 1990s, this initiative led to involvement in Ray Crowe's local organization, the Western Bigfoot Society, and Matt Moneymaker's fledgling Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO). At about this time, the BFRO was making organizational changes, and Thom soon became the regional director for the Pacific Northwest.

As he continued to pursue his interest in camera systems, Thom was overwhelmed with BFRO sightings to investigate, and as a matter of necessity, he steadily added regional investigators including Jeff Lemley, Leroy Fish, Rick Noll, and Allan Terry.

In 2000, this group collaborated on the BFRO's Skookum Expedition. The expedition was actually organized to support an Australian film crew that was producing a segment for a cable TV series on cryptids called Animal X On the advice of Joe Beelart and Henry Franzoni, Thom took the expedition to the Skookum Meadows area of Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Due to an extraordinary set of circumstances, the well-known Skoopkum Cast was produced (see: Chapter 8, section: The Skookum Cast), Which became not only a valuable item of sasquatch evidence, but also the first completed chapter of what would eventually become Thom’s book.

You May Also Like
November 3rd Event
Cryptomundo's Review of The Locals

EXTERNAL LINKS
Know the Sasquatch Book
Thom Powell's book the Locals

Thom Powell Week: To true believers, Bigfoot lives

We Are kicking off Thom Powell Week. That's right! We are dedicating a whole week to Thom Powell.

Many of you may know him as author of "The Locals" We are doing this to help promote an event co-sponsored by the Oregon Bigfoot Symposium and the University of Oregon at 7 p.m. Nov. 3 in the UO Living Learning Center’s South Building. Tomorrow we will have a full bio of the man, until then, keeping with our pulse on breaking news, we thought we would launch THOM POWELL WEEK with an article just released today by columnist Bob Welch of the Registered Guard.

To true believers, Bigfoot lives

BY BOB WELCH
Register-Guard Columnist
Appeared in print: Sunday, Oct 17, 2010

LEABURG — Outside Ike’s Pizza, a half moon tints the thin clouds above the McKenzie River in a touch of mystery. It is just after 8 p.m. last Thursday. The restaurant is closed.

Inside, sweat trickles down the semi-bald head of a 40-something man who is telling of his encounter in Northern California five years ago.

“Please don’t put my name in the paper,” he says. “I have kids who go to school up here. But he looked like the old King Kong. I call it ‘bug-eye gorilla.’ I ran away, then built the biggest campfire I’ve ever built. Haven’t been camping since.”

Behind the man, on the wood-paneled wall, a drawing of a Sasquatch-like creature — “Enoch” — shares face time with the chinook salmon over the fireplace.

Ike’s owner Dave Starck hands the man a paper towel to wipe off the sweat, then turns to me.

“This is what happens to people who’ve had encounters,” says Starck, whose on-display plaster casts of supposed Sasquatch prints fan the creature’s flames. “One customer took one look at that poster and said, ‘That nose was pressed up against my window when I was a kid.’ Another woman was so shaken by it she went back outside. We had to deliver her pizza to her out there.”

The film crew from England is expected shortly. For now, I feel like an agnostic who’s stumbled into a church of tried-and-true believers.

Why here? Why now? Why me?

Because much as I’d like to just make fun of this Bigfoot stuff, I can’t — even though when the guy says the Sasquatch had “matted sideburns,” I confess I think of some Bigfoot/Elvis incarnation.

Instead, when I hear of this gathering of eye witnesses at the McKenzie’s unofficial Bigfoot headquarters, Ike’s — and a five-man film crew from England’s Diverse Bristol (“Men vs. Wild”) film company arriving to capture it — I head upstream like a spawning salmon.

I arrive just before 6 p.m. The film crew is to arrive at 6:30 p.m.

As I wait, I ask Toby Johnson, 35, the organizer of last summer’s Oregon Sasquatch Symposium in Eugene, why he got involved in the movement. Above the greasy remains of a small pepperoni, he hands me his cell phone with a photo of what appears to be a very large footprint.

“Saw this print five years ago, in the hills near Thurs ton, while hiking with my son,” he says.

Like the folks in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” drawn to the Devil’s Tower, he followed the urge. “It awoke the child in me again,” he says. “There’s this mystery that could be true.”

But going public invites ridicule. “Suddenly, you’re grouped in with these banjo-picking ‘Deliverance’ types,” he says.

Still, that didn’t stop him from organizing the symposium or an upcoming lecture by Bigfoot author Thom Powell, an event co-sponsored by the Oregon Bigfoot Symposium and the University of Oregon at 7 p.m. Nov. 3 in the UO Living Learning Center’s South Building.

The handful of people here tonight all seem to believe. I hear of guys driving dark roads and suddenly seeing Sasquatch come out of the woods along a highway and into their headlights. Of recent footage supposedly taken by a river guide near the McKenzie River’s Fish Ladder Rapids, between Olallie and Paradise campgrounds, that appears to show a Bigfoot-like creature. (See YouTube footage on my blog at www.registerguard.com/blogs.) And of John Bull’s four encounters over three decades in areas south and east of Cottage Grove.

“At least 8 feet tall and 300 pounds,” says Bull, 42 and a chef’s assistant at a Eugene retirement center. “Smelled like a bear that had gone through a garbage can and laid out in the sun all day.”

Once, he and a few other Boy Scouts had sneaked away from Sharps Creek Campground for a few beers late one night. There it was, only 15 yards away, he says.

“I remember thinking I don’t wanna look. I did. His head turned and he looked over his shoulder at us, but never broke stride.”

As someone who spends time in the woods, I prefer a more lighthearted version, say, the Bigfoot in the Jack Link’s Beef Jerky commercials. But the witnesses clearly see beyond the humor veil.

“I’m a pretty good judge of character,” Johnson says, “but when someone wells up in tears or you see the hair of their arms stand up … . They want it to be a bear or something else, but they can’t shake the fact that it walked on two legs and had fingers and eyes like us.”

By nearly 8:30, I’m convinced that it’s a hoax — the film crew, that is — and am ready to leave. But suddenly in walk five Brits and Jim Stuckey, a hunting-show guide — think a Canadian Crocodile Dundee — who’s auditioning to host a new “strange encounters” show for which this is to be the pilot episode.

I watch the filming. Hear more stories. Then get in my car and head home through the darkness, glancing more than usual into the woods along the way.

Do you believe in Bigfoot? E-mail me at bob.welch@registerguard.com.

Source: The Registered-Guard

Other Thom Powell Links
November 3rd Event
Cryptomundo's Review of The Locals
Cliff Barackman talks about the Chehalis Project, investigated by Thom Powell