CRYPTOLINK: Bigfoot Discovery Museum

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Mike Rugg, Bigfoot expert, museum owner/curator.

Bigfoot Discovery Museum

Felton, California

Michael Rugg lives in Bigfoot country.

True, it's only a half hour from popular Pacific Ocean surf spots, sunny beaches and an amusement pier. A half hour in the other direction lies Silicon Valley. But make no mistake -- Bigfoot lurks among the coastal redwoods and forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Michael Rugg is an expert on the legends, theories, and facts pertaining to the elusive race of hairy bipeds. He operates his Bigfoot Discovery Museum to help visitors examine the evidence with open minds, temporarily away from the sniggers and guffaws of a skeptical world.

Bigfoot Discovery Museum, along forested Rt. 9.

A line of wood carvings of creatures stand outside the museum; the modest structure might be assumed to be one of the area's many crafts shops if it didn't feature a sign with a big green foot on it. The Bigfoot Discovery Museum mixes educational displays and serious evidence with a couple of generations of pop culture exploitation artifacts. In movies and fiction, Bigfoot has often been represented as the most amicable of monsters, a goofy wilderness dweller who avoids human contact.

The museum displays all manner of Bigfoot memorabilia: matchbooks, buttons, lighters, miniatures, and toys. "I Had Bigfoot's Baby" screams the headline on an old Weekly World News.

Glass cases contain skull reproductions, bit and pieces of compelling evidence, a fragment of a Bigfoot tooth, and some greenish, mulchy clump that we guess is sasquatch scat (the museum newsletter mentions bowel movement samples submitted for the all-important DNA testing).