A CHILLING HAIRY QUERY: IS BIG FOOT LURKING AROUND ALPINE?

By David Harpster, Tribune Staff Writer It’s big. It’s hairy. It’s supposedly living somewhere near Alpine. And Terry Albright is convinced it’s Big Foot.

“There’s something afoot in those hills,” said Albright, co-founder of the Big Foot Research Network, a group formed 20 years ago to investigate sightings of the elusive, legendary creature.

Albright recently visited the rural East County community in an attempt to meet with Richard Baddour, a psychiatrist who claimed a Big Foot was eating apples from his trees. The doctor wasn’t home, but Albright toured the area and talked to several residents who reported hearing weird screams and cries at night “that would make the hair on the back of their neck stand up.”

His conclusion: The 10-foot-tall humanlike animal is indeed wandering about the back country.

That assessment is shared by Baddour, who has general psychiatry offices in downtown San Diego.

“It is true,” he said. “I have seen and heard, and one has seen me. It is very, very serious.”

Baddour would not elaborate further, saying he is writing a book on his experiences.

But Albright, a 40-year-old Los Angeles County resident who says he works as a consultant on movie special effects and props, plans to return to Alpine soon to track the beast.

The swiftly moving Big Foot probably roams a wide area from the Anza-borrego State Park in northeast San Diego County to the Mexican border, he said. Campers, miners and tourists have called his group’s tollfree hot line to report seeing both Big Foot and UFOS in the sprawling desert park, he

added.

“It’s a hotbed for this kind of activity,” Albright said.

Park naturalist Mark Jorgensen scoffs at such a notion, however.

“We get reports of mountain lions every once in a while, but no Big Foot,” Jorgensen said. “I’ve been here 20 years and if there had been footprints or sightings we’d be the first to know about them.

“It just isn’t true.”

Albright argues, though, that most who have seen the creature don’t notify authorities because they’re afraid of being ridiculed. Instead, they often remain silent until they hear of others who’ve had similar experiences, he said.

“We’re up against a laughter curtain,” he said of people who believe Big Foot exists. “We’re basically laughed off by the entire scientific community.

“But ignoring it is like not taking cancer seriously. You can’t discount the number of reports we get. Not all these people are manufacturing stories.”

The network, which publishes a semimonthly newsletter on the subject, has received hundreds of “legitimate calls from qualified observers” from across the country, he added.

“We probably have as much information as anyone out there,” he said.

Albright, whose goal is to film a Big Foot, claims to have seen one in 1975 while driving on a Palmdale highway at 3 a.m. He said he almost struck the creature when it leaped across the roadway.