Juneau, Alaska (KINY) – Juneau recently hosted its first-ever Bigfoot Town Hall. An event dedicated to talking about and sharing experiences with the mythical creature of the same name.
Martin Pippin, one of the partners in GatherUp events, the company behind the town hall, says it’s the first time the event took place in Alaska.
“So we started doing Bigfoot events about five years ago and we now currently do two of the largest conferences in the country especially when you get to the one-day conference we did the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot conference in Gatlinburg and we do the great Florida Bigfoot conference now in Ocala Florida”
The town hall was part of a cruise that departed on September 4th and it sold out in early June. Pippin says it’s largely a success.
“We only we only reserved 200 cabins on a Royal Caribbean Quantum of the Seas so that gave us enough room for about foreign people I think we did like 386 because of single riders and whatnot but yeah it was, we were about a 10th of the boat”
Dr. John Robert Alley is an anatomy professor, human biologist, and guest speaker at the town hall. He has been studying Sasquatches since 1968.
(Dr. Alley presented the audience with a photo of an apparent sasquatch leaving the water. Photo credit to Jordan Lewis/KINY)
“Well, I found after 30 years of working with the native population around Ketchikan, that the further you got from big city, concrete and steel, the straighter the goods, the more honest the truth, the more information was shared. Once you get too close to politics, and big, you know, urban culture there’s, there’s a zipper across the mouth for a lot of this. So you wouldn’t necessarily hear plus within any native culture. There’s differences of opinion within every village about this sort of thing and it’s kind of a taboo, especially among Tlingits not so much Haidas and Tsimshians, where you’ve got the k-word and you’ve got some missing words for more normal type average Bigfoot Sasquatch beings that wouldn’t necessarily have all the paranormal connotations that the k-word does.”
(A map of apparent Bigfoot territory in the state. Photo Credit to Jordan Lewis/KINY)
Alley says he’s heard lots of stories throughout his research.
“I’ve seen I’ve seen what’s out there plus I’ve worked with probably every Native group from Oregon or Oregon, up from Northern Oregon up to Prince William Sound. So as a physical therapist or an EMT, and it’s been my pleasure and honor to be part of that, accepted into culture shared, allowed to know a little bit about what beings are in the forest at night and where your salmon is safe to be left out and where it’s not”
