She pores over the Internet, looking for people who have Bigfoot stories. She is searching for a lost newspaper clipping about an alleged dead monkey'' discovered in an Aurora swamp in the 1960s. Sometimes it seems like we've reached a point in our social evolution where we assume we know everything. But what society knows'' about Bigfoot could be stored in a shot glass. There have been more than 700 Bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest, but nobody's ever hit one with a logging truck.
Some people swear they've found Sasquatch hair samples, but the DNA evidence is inconclusive.
The proof'' of Bigfoot's existence is primarily built on hearsay, a bunch of weird footprints, and 952 frames of 16 millimeter film that were shot by a stuntman named Roger Patterson in 1967. Though the film has never been exposed as an absolute hoax, it has been widely discredited. Still, the hunt for information continues. The torch is being carried by cryptozoologists such as Loren Coleman, the conference's keynote speaker. Coleman lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches college courses in sociology, anthropology and documentary filmmaking.