Woman brings passion for Bigfoot research to Pittsburgh
Amy Bue knows it sounds a little crazy, and she’s OK with that. Besides, she has a thick skin, she says.
But she’s sure she saw … something.
She was a passenger in a car in 2012 on a rural road in Mahoning County, Ohio, when she gazed out the window and saw about a football field away, a massive and hirsute hominid figure that looked like the mythical Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot.
“I’m a very skeptical person by nature, but this got me interested in it. I thought what else could it be?” Ms. Bue, a Youngstown, Ohio, elementary and middle school special education teacher, said. “It could’ve been a tall man in a suit, a hoax in a Bigfoot suit. But it was definitely something that was alive and it was not a bear. It intrigued me. I started looking into things and found that Ohio has a whole bunch of sightings of Bigfoot.”
Ms. Bue, who describes herself as a Bigfoot “enthusiast and investigator,” will speak on the subject this weekend at the 34th annual Allegheny Outdoor, Sport and Travel Show at the Monroeville Convention Center. Fellow Yeti-ologist Dave Grove also will attend.
“This started as fun. I would go to hear other speakers. Now I find myself doing speaking,” she said.
She has found a large community of Bigfoot devotees around the country and has attended conferences and conventions on the topic led by the Olympic Project in Washington State — a hotbed of Bigfoot activity — with primatologists, biologists, anthropologists and zoologists. She is a member of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and has her own group of enthusiasts called Project Zoobook.
“We might never find anything,” she said, adding that most “sightings” are misidentifications or outright hoaxes, but adding that there are “credible people who swear up and down” of Bigfoot’s existence.
Ms. Bue concedes that some might think of her hobby as frivolous and engaging in fantasy.
“Sometimes people make fun of you,” she said. But she couldn’t care less, as she’s dealt with worse things. She survived a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a recurrence of the disease and has been in full remission for 22 years.
Her hobby combines some of her favorite things: the outdoors, science and a good old-fashioned mystery.
And she’s hardly alone. Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest told centuries-old tales of Sasquatches, and the Bigfoot myth has endured in the modern American context for 60 years, since 1958 when what appeared to be giant humanlike footprints were “discovered” in Northern California. Though later revealed as a hoax, the phenomenon has left a lasting imprint in the popular culture as big as those phony 16inch feet.
Ms. Bue’s own theory is that any potential Big foot type creature that exists may be an as-yet-undiscovered species of North American primate rather than some paranormal creature as others have suggested.
“I’m fascinated by the possibility,” she said. “I’m fascinated by the whole phenomenon. I’ve been in the woods my whole life. My grampa had a hunting cabin in Marionville in the Allegheny National Forest. I like to get out and do stuff. I love being in the forest, hiking, enjoying nature. And the mystery of it all — there is so much science going on.”
Besides, she said, stating the obvious: “It’s Bigfoot, so it’s fun.”