Post by Joanna on Jan 3, 2015 3:20:19 GMT -5
Bigfoot Search and Icelandic Lake Monster
Loren Coleman’s International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland was named one of Time Magazine’s 10 weirdest museums in the world.
Of Bigfoots and ‘nitwits.’ Ten months ago, Kat McKechnie and Michael Merchant, both of Maine, finished second on Spike TV’s 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty. The reality show sent contestants up and down Mount Adams in Washington state to scare up the best evidence of Bigfoot. They’re still a little sore. “What you saw on the finale didn’t represent everything Mike and I did during that 36-hour hunt,” McKechnie said in an interview last month. “We killed it during those 36 hours. The other team, they forgot their water. They had a really bad time out there.” An audio file and interesting thermal footage should have put them over the edge, she added. They got dinged instead for not working together well. “Did we Bigfoot better than the other team? The answer is we absolutely Bigfooted better than the other team.” Merchant interjected: “You’ve gotta remember, though, it’s TV, Kat.”
Since then, McKechnie has been out looking for ghosts and fund-raising for historic sites in Augusta. And Merchant has resumed the search for Bigfoot and shrugged off requests from the throngs that now want to traipse out in the Maine woods with him.
McKechnie and her husband head Maine Ghost Hunters and its TV show, ZeroLux Paranormal on Maine channel WPME. This fall, they led ghost hunts and raised money for restoration projects at Old Fort Western, the Colonial Theater and Lithgow Public Library in Augusta. “At Fort Western, during one of our hunts, we heard a horse-drawn carriage, the horse clomping outside the door,” she recalled. At the decrepit Colonial Theater, “there’s a report of a little child running around in the balcony area. We asked, ‘Can you holler out your name as loud as you can?’ A little voice screamed something out. It was crazy.”
Merchant, a biologist, kept up his Bigfoot research and tried to go it alone. After 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty aired, “a whole bunch of people pestered me to go into the woods,” he explained. He toyed with the idea of releasing a GPS location for people to meet him, “to weed out the nitwits,” but didn’t want to cause problems for game wardens if these people got lost. According to Merchant: “The majority of people who want to go someplace in the woods to see if there’s something going on, for starters, they’re terrified of the forest. That’s OK, I can deal with that. But the second problem they usually have once they get in there, they want to turn it into a hot-dog-grilling, beer-drinking fest. You would not believe some of the people who show up, and they want to carry their Coleman hammock. I’m like, ‘You’re not going to be able to lug that for two miles, you’d be crippled.’”
Merchant’s big question for the other Bigfoot and monster-hunting shows flooding cable this year is Why aren’t there more deer, raccoons and other wildlife in all their night-vision footage? “If they’re going to go after something super-duper rare, that should be child’s play to sneak up on the known critters,” he related. “I look at these shows and they have no animals whatsoever. It’s a bunch of clowns coming out of a tiny car.”
This said, there’s a chance we’ll see Merchant on TV again. He’ll say no more.
The International Cryptozoology Museum has expanded its gift shop and added more display cases and plans to expand the museum’s reach with a journal debuting this spring and a conference tentatively set for 2016 in Florida. “It’s going to be a real, formal, academic, peer-reviewed journal,” Coleman said. “It’ll really be set up to take scientists’ and researchers’ papers on cryptozoological topics with an orientation toward collections, museums (and) discoveries that have been made in museums. Maybe we’ll highlight the bone of a lake monster that’s up in Sweden, for instance. A French researcher wants to do an article about the giant octopus.”
Next spring, Coleman may also be reaching for his passport. “Apparently, the government of Iceland is very interested in investigating reports of a lake monster up there,” Coleman continued. “A production company has approached me and they want to fly me to Iceland for a week and go out with them as they reinvestigate the reports and try to get to the bottom of it.”
It would be for a government-funded documentary. After seeing footage of the alleged creature, he’s a skeptic. Coleman believes it looks more like garbage bags adrift in the water than anything else – but he is, of course, open-minded – so bring on the search for the Lagarfljotsormurinn monster. “I have to figure out if there’s an English nickname before I go over there,” he said.
Source: Kathryn Skelton, The Lewiston Sun-Journal, December 12, 2014.