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| Stacy Brown Jr. sitting on evidence of a possible train crossing. (photo: Stacy Brown Jr.) |
"I don't see that I have any competition...the rest of [bigfooters] are a bunch of glorified campers." --Stacy Brown Jr.; Winner of $10M Bigfoot Bounty competition
In an article from
How Stuff Works Now, writer Patrick J. Kiger discusses how bigfooters fund their "hobby". The title of the piece is
People Are on the Hunt for Bigfoot. Here's How They're Funding It. The piece could sum it all up with a single quote from Loren Coleman, "People pay out of their own pockets to search for Bigfoot," but that would be too short. The article seems to be more about Stacy Brown Jr. winner of the 10 Million Bigfoot Bounty reality tv competition.
Stacy Brown comes across as confident, some would say cocky and a little disparaging towards his fellow researchers. They said the same thing about Muhammad Ali too and he was able to back up his claims. Can
Stacy Brown Jr. back up his confidence? He has one of the best thermal videos out there. He beat a dozen other people in a reality show competition. He literally spends 6 months out of the year looking for bigfoot in the field. He makes a $100k living looking for bigfoot. You decide.
The excerpt below is the from the
How Stuff Works Now article with just the Stacy Brown Jr. parts.
But there is one exception — a Florida man who's found a way to search for Bigfoot as a full-time job, and to make a decent living at it in the process. It took plenty of entrepreneurial ingenuity and determination, with a healthy amount of luck sprinkled in.
"I don't see that I have any competition," says 31-year-old Stacy Brown, Jr., who describes the rest of Bigfoot's pursuers as "a bunch of glorified campers." Brown notes that he spends up to 180 days a year scouring the woods for evidence of the creature. "I'll go out for 10 days at a time," he says.
Unlike some of his self-financed competitors, Brown also has the best equipment, including a $10,000 thermal imaging device for tracking the creature out in the brush via its own body heat. He's even got an arrangement with a major university to do DNA analysis, whenever he finds some remnant of Bigfoot that can be tested. (Though no major universities are sponsoring their own hunts, some do perform Sasquatch-related work, as Oxford University did in 2014.)
And somehow, Brown actually makes a decent living: between $80,000 and $100,000 a year, he says.
Sasquatch Spotting
Brown has been interested in Bigfoot for almost as long as he can remember. When he was six, he started poking around in the woods near his family's house. But it wasn't until four years ago, at age 27, when he says that he caught a glimpse of the creature one night while on a camping trip, that he knew he'd found his calling.
"I heard something walk up [to the campsite]," says Brown. "It was maybe 15 or 20 feet away. It had a chimp-like face — you got a human nose, wider and flat, and this protrusion around the mouth." The best way to describe the creature, he says, is "like the Beast Man off 'Masters of the Universe,' the old TV show, except that he's got hair up to his cheeks, because Beast Man had an Amish-style beard."
After that eye-opening experience, Brown started spending a lot of time searching for Bigfoot, even switching his job as a supervisor at a cable TV billing facility to 12-hour shifts so that he'd have more time in the woods. To bankroll his expeditions, he even sold his nice truck and bought a "crappy vehicle" to get around in.
But Brown was just scraping by until he became got a chance to compete as a team with his pal David Lauer against other Bigfoot hunters on a cable TV program called "10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty." They didn't land the $10 million grand prize, but they managed to walk away with a $100,000 grant for research, for being the final team left in the competition.
That influx of capital helped, but the notoriety was even better. Brown says that he no longer has to buy the various imaging and parabolic recording gadgetry that hunters need these days, because the manufacturers are willing to give him the stuff in exchange for a chance to be associated with his notoriety.
"We probably have $100,000 worth of equipment," he notes. Additionally, Brown has appeared on other cryptid-related TV shows, earning $2,000 or so per appearance, he says.
Read the full article titled
People Are on the Hunt for Bigfoot. Here's How They're Funding It
Learn more about
Stacy Brown Jr.
