Shady Neighbors the Website

Thom Powell has created a website to promote his new book Shady Neighbors. You may know Thom as the acclaimed author of The Locals

The site is a great supplement to his book. Included on the site is an interactive map, called Shady Places. The map highlights locations that inspired the book. If you read the book and reference the map you can find the squatchiest locations in Clackamas County, Oregon. According to Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, Clackamas County has the highest rate of reported sightings.

Best of all you can get signed copies of The Locals and Shady Neighbors from the man himself. The Locals is out of print and Thom only has a few left himself. Buy Thoms books here.

Finally, Thom has some great videos of the moments when they first discovered the body print of the Skookum Cast, as well as the footage of the casting.


Thom plans on continuing to expand his website, share his creative writing process, and intrigue us with his take on the Sasquatch phenomenon. We will keep you posted as updates occur.

Thom Powell Featured in Ethos Magazine

Ethos is a nationally recognized, award-winning student publication.

Our readers pick up Ethos to explore ethical, journalistic story telling, beautiful photography and illustrations, and innovative designs. We embrace diversity in our stories, in our student staff, and in our readership.--Ethos Magazine

They do a great job covering the Sasquatch topic while visiting Thom Powell. Below is a little teaser with a link to the full article on Thom Powell's new site Shady-Neighbors.com (we will cover the new site tomorrow).

Suddenly, Wilson shatters the eerie silence with an agitated spurt of barks. Powell’s flashlight flicks on. Its beam pierces the darkness, scanning the scattered pine trees for a glimpse of what alarmed the dog. A pair of eyeballs hovers in the blackness like a pair of glowing orbs. Powell edges forward to get a closer look. As his flashlight’s radius increases, the fiendish night beast is revealed to be a mere cow.

Powell looks back with a barely discernible, wry grin. “I hear coyotes all the time. There have been wolf sightings, too,” he says in a grave whisper. “Sometimes it takes nerves of steel to be out here. I figure I’ll be OK as long as I can run faster than you.”

For Powell, this is not an ordinary stroll through the woods. These are lands he has traversed hundreds of times with a specific purpose in mind. He is on the prowl for a creature more formidable than a pack of coyotes and more elusive than a wolf: Powell is searching for Sasquatch.

Read the entire feature covering Thom Powell

New Technology: No More Blurry Bigfoot Pictures

Start-up camera maker Lytro promises that before the end of the year you will be taking pictures without worrying about focusing. This camera uses "light field capture" technology, which records various aspects of a light ray such as color, intensity, and direction. In other words, everything captured in the camera's view will be in focus, you will actually be able to go back to the picture later and pic the area you want to be in focus. No more Blurry Bigfoot!

You can see a demonstration in the video below.

Want to know how this works? Below is the science behind the camera.

The Science Inside

The team at Lytro is completing the job of a century’s worth of theory and exploration about light fields. Lytro’s engineers and scientists have taken light fields out of the lab – miniaturizing a roomful of cameras tethered to a supercomputer and making it fit in your pocket

Light Field Defined
What is the light field?

The light field is a core concept in imaging science, representing fundamentally more powerful data than in regular photographs. The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it’s all the light rays in a scene. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field.

Light Field Capture
How does a light field camera capture the light rays?

Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.

Light Field Processing
How do light field cameras make use of the additional information?

By substituting powerful software for many of the internal parts of regular cameras, light field processing introduces new capabilities that were never before possible. Sophisticated algorithms use the full light field to unleash new ways to make and view pictures.

Relying on software rather than components can improve performance, from increased speed of picture taking to the potential for capturing better pictures in low light. It also creates new opportunities to innovate on camera lenses, controls and design.

Picture Capabilities
How are light field pictures different?

The way we communicate visually is evolving rapidly, and people’s expectations are changing in lockstep. Light field cameras offer astonishing capabilities. They allow both the picture taker and the viewer to focus pictures after they’re snapped, shift their perspective of the scene, and even switch seamlessly between 2D and 3D views. With these amazing capabilities, pictures become immersive, interactive visual stories that were never before possible – they become living pictures.

Take a Deeper Dive
Want to learn more? Check out the Lytro Blog. Want to learn a lot more? Read our CEO’s dissertation.