Canada called. We answered.  Sasquatch Syndicate is heading to Calgary.  PodSummit returns October 16–17, 2026, at The GRAND in Calgary, Alberta — Canada's premier podcasting event, built on community and driven by the craft of audio and video storytelling. Two days of conversation, learning, and collaboration among Canada's leading voices and emerging creators. And this year, the Sasquatch Syndicate will be in the room.

We want to say something directly to the Canadian listeners who made this happen, because it matters and it deserves to be said plainly: this invitation exists because of you.

The Sasquatch Syndicate's presence in Western Canada — particularly across Alberta and British Columbia, and deep into the Fraser Valley — has been something we have watched grow organically over the years with a mixture of gratitude and genuine awe. The Fraser Valley, for those who may not know, is Sasquatch country in the most literal sense. The region sits in the shadow of the Coast Mountains, laced with old-growth river corridors and documented encounter history that stretches back generations. The word Sasquatch itself is derived from the Halkomelem language of the Indigenous peoples of that very region. The Fraser Valley did not discover Bigfoot — Bigfoot, in every meaningful cultural sense, comes from there.

So it is perhaps not surprising that the Sasquatch Syndicate's message resonates strongly with listeners across AB and BC. What may be more surprising — and what we find genuinely moving — is how loudly and consistently those listeners have shown up for us. They found the show. They shared it. They wrote to us, talked about us, recommended us to their networks, and over time built a Canadian audience that is one of the most passionate and engaged the Syndicate has. When the opportunity to attend PodSummit came into view, it was that community — those listeners, in those regions, doing what communities do when they actually care about something — that put us in the conversation for an invitation.

PodSummit is not a Bigfoot conference. It is not a paranormal convention. It is not the AlienCon circuit or the International Bigfoot Conference or any of the other environments where the Sasquatch Syndicate has built its live presence over the years. PodSummit is a podcasting event — a gathering of Canada's audio and video storytelling community, from established voices to emerging creators, focused on the craft and the conversation of what it means to build something worth listening to in 2026.

And that is exactly why we belong there.

The Sasquatch Syndicate began as a podcast. Everything we have built — the conferences, the comic, the film work, the expedition documentation, the relationships with Dr. Jeff Meldrum and Derek Randles and the Olympic Project and the broader research community — all of it grew from a microphone and a conviction that the story of Sasquatch research, told seriously and with genuine curiosity, was a story worth telling to anyone willing to listen. Showing up at PodSummit is a return to that foundation. It is the Sasquatch Syndicate sitting down with the storytelling community and talking about what we have learned — about audio, about building an audience, about what it takes to sustain a creative and research project over years of production — in an environment built specifically for those conversations.

Calgary itself is a fitting location for this chapter. The GRAND is exactly the kind of venue that a serious creative event deserves — a space with character, in a city that sits at the edge of the Rocky Mountain front and understands instinctively that the wilderness just beyond its western limits is real, vast, and full of things that haven't been fully catalogued yet. We are going to feel very much at home.

We are also looking forward to the conversations that happen outside the formal programming — the hallway exchanges, the evening discussions, the kind of collaborative thinking that only happens when you put a room full of people who are all building something together and give them two days and a common language. The Canadian podcasting community is one we have admired from a distance and are eager to engage with directly. The crossover between what they are building and what we are building is more significant than it might appear on the surface, and PodSummit is the room where we find out exactly how significant.

To our listeners in Alberta, in British Columbia, across the Fraser Valley, and throughout Canada — thank you. This is your invitation as much as it is ours. You built the audience that built the relationship that earned the seat at the table. We will represent you well in Calgary.

To the PodSummit team — thank you for the invitation and for building something that genuinely serves the Canadian creative community. We are honored to be part of the October 2026 chapter.

If you are going to be in Calgary on October 16–17, come find us. The conversation is always better in person.

We will see you at The GRAND.

By Chanelle Elaine Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

There's a moment at VidCon when you look out across the Anaheim Convention Center floor — tens of thousands of people buzzing in every direction, cameras rolling, creators signing, fans losing their minds, and the whole electricity of the internet somehow folded into a single physical space — and you think: this is exactly where we're supposed to be.

That moment hit us early on Day One. And it didn't stop for three days straight.

Sasquatch Syndicate was at VidCon Anaheim 2025, and we came to play.

YouTube Turns 20.
The Creator World Celebrates. We Show Up.VidCon 2025 was not just any VidCon. Now in its 14th year and part of the FAN EXPO family, this was also YouTube's 20th birthday celebration — and the energy in Anaheim reflected exactly that kind of historic moment. Over 55,000 fans, creators, and industry professionals packed the convention center across three days of creator chaos, cultural moments, and the kind of internet-made-real magic that only VidCon can deliver.

Legends were inducted into VidCon's inaugural Creator Hall of Fame — Rhett & Link, Ian Hecox & Anthony Padilla from Smosh, Hank Green himself, and others whose work shaped what digital content even means today. YouTube's VP of Creator Products took the main stage. Featured creators from across gaming, comedy, beauty, lifestyle, and beyond were everywhere you turned.

And then there was us — the Sasquatch Syndicate, Sherpa Networks banner flying, booth locked and loaded — representing the Pacific Northwest's most beloved mystery to an audience that lives and breathes digital content.
It was a natural fit. More natural than you might think.

The Booth. The Merch. The Moment.
Let's talk about the setup, because we were not playing around.

Our booth on the VidCon show floor was a full experience. We had merchandise that people genuinely stopped and stared at — hats, mugs, shirts, and collectibles that carried the Sasquatch Syndicate brand with the kind of quality that makes people reach for their wallets without being asked twice. The response was immediate. People didn't just walk past — they walked in, picked things up, asked questions, and stayed for the conversation.

Sherpa Networks was right there with us, a partnership that continues to elevate everything we do and opens doors to conversations about production, reach, and where independent content is headed in this industry.

But honestly? The biggest draw at our booth wasn't the merchandise.

It was the photo op with the Sasquatch Syndicate production team.

One by one, then in groups, VidCon attendees stepped in to grab a shot with our crew — all of us in Sasquatch Syndicate black, grinning, and genuinely pumped to be there. Photo ops are nothing new at VidCon. What was new — for many of the people stepping up — was getting their picture taken with the team behind a Bigfoot podcast. The conversations that came out of those moments were some of the best of the entire weekend.

We heard things like:
"Wait, this is actually a real thing?"
"My dad is obsessed with Bigfoot. He is going to lose it when I send him this photo."
"I've literally never thought about this before, but now I want to listen to every episode."

That's the VidCon effect. And it was working exactly the way it was supposed to.

A New Audience — And Why That Matters
Here's something that struck us about VidCon versus other events we've attended: the audience skews young, digital-native, and incredibly platform-savvy. These are people who consume content the way previous generations watched television — constantly, intentionally, and with strong opinions about who deserves their time and attention.
Bringing Bigfoot into that space was a revelation.

Younger audiences who had grown up with YouTube and TikTok and Spotify hadn't necessarily encountered the Sasquatch Syndicate before. Some knew Bigfoot as a meme. Some had seen a clip. Some had no idea the Pacific Northwest has a deep, genuine, decades-long tradition of sightings, research, and witness testimony that goes way beyond pop culture jokes.

When we explained what we actually do — the eyewitness interviews, the on-location research, the community of serious investigators who dedicate their lives to this field — the reaction was consistently the same: genuine intrigue. Not mockery. Not dismissal. Curiosity, interest, and more than a few people immediately pulling out their phones to find us on their preferred platform.

That's an audience we are actively building for. VidCon 2025 gave us a direct line to them.

Learning in the Creator Economy's Biggest Classroom

We didn't just show up to be seen. We showed up to grow.

VidCon runs three distinct tracks — Community, Creator, and Industry — and across all three, the programming at the 2025 event was stacked with insights relevant to where Sasquatch Syndicate is headed. We absorbed conversations about the evolving relationship between brands and independent creators. We listened in on discussions about how digital-native storytelling is breaking down the walls between traditional media and new platforms. We absorbed everything being said about the future of video podcasting, short-form content strategy, audience monetization, and what it actually takes to build a loyal community in a landscape overloaded with noise.

We came away with pages of notes and a sharper sense than ever of how to position our show — and our mission — for the next chapter of what we're building.

What We Gave BackAs always, we weren't just there to take. We were there to contribute.

The Sasquatch Syndicate represents something increasingly rare in the creator economy: a show built entirely on passion for a subject that matters deeply to a real community. We're not chasing trends. We're not pivoting based on what's performing this quarter. We are genuinely committed to the pursuit — to the witnesses, to the research, to the story — and that authenticity resonates in spaces like VidCon in a way that manufactured content simply cannot replicate.

When we talked to other creators, emerging podcasters, and newer voices trying to figure out how to build something that lasts, we shared what we know: find the story that only you can tell, serve the community that only you can serve, and show up for them consistently no matter what the algorithm says today.

That conversation — creator to creator, honest and unfiltered — is one of the most valuable things any event like VidCon makes possible.

Three Days That Changed Our Trajectory
By the time we rolled out of Anaheim on June 21st, we were tired in the best possible way. The kind of tired that comes from three days of being fully present, fully engaged, and fully invested in something bigger than yourself.
VidCon 2025 was a milestone for Sasquatch Syndicate. We found new fans. We deepened existing relationships. We connected with the creator economy at the highest level and walked away with a clearer, more energized vision for where this show goes next.

The production team showed up. The merch sold. The photo ops brought smiles. The conversations were real.
And somewhere out there, a first-time Sasquatch Syndicate listener is halfway through their first episode right now because they grabbed a photo with us on the VidCon floor in Anaheim, California.

That's the whole point.

The search — and the story — continues.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

When you host a podcast about one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in North American history, you learn pretty quickly that the story is only as powerful as the platform carrying it. The creature may roam the forests of the Pacific Northwest, but the podcast lives in the ears of listeners around the world — and if you want to reach more of them, you have to show up where the best in the business go to learn, grow, and connect.

That's exactly why Chuck Geveshausen, host and founder of the Sasquatch Syndicate, and our production team made the trip to Dallas, Texas for Podcast Movement 2025.

And honestly? It was one of the best decisions we've made for this show.

Why Podcast Movement?
Podcast Movement isn't just a conference. It's the conference. Now in its 12th year, PM25 returned to Dallas — where the whole movement began — and once again lived up to its reputation as the world's largest gathering of podcasters and industry professionals. Held at the stunning Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center on the shores of Lake Grapevine, the event brought together thousands of creators, producers, marketers, gear manufacturers, distributors, and media innovators from across the globe under one very large, very impressive roof.

Over four days, attendees had access to more than 100 breakout sessions, panels, workshops, and keynote presentations spread across five or more stages — covering everything from audio production and editing techniques to storytelling, audience growth, monetization strategies, SEO for discoverability, AI in podcasting, video podcasting, branding, and beyond. Whether you're launching your first show or you've been behind the mic for years, Podcast Movement is built to meet you where you are.

For Sasquatch Syndicate, a show with a fiercely dedicated community and a mission bigger than entertainment, this was the place to be.

The Sherpa Networks Connection
It's worth pausing to acknowledge something important: Podcast Movement 2025 was presented by Sherpa Networks, and the partnership between this kind of industry infrastructure and independent creators is exactly what the podcasting world needs more of. Events like this don't happen without serious support, and the quality of content, access, and production at PM25 reflected that backing in every room and on every stage.

As a show that's grown organically — driven by passion for the subject matter rather than corporate backing — being in a room full of people who understand the business and the craft side of what we do was genuinely energizing.

What We Were There to Do (And What We Ended Up Doing)We came in with a dual purpose, and we left having fulfilled both.

On one hand, we were there to represent. Chuck and the production team showed up as practitioners, as believers in the medium, and as advocates for what independent podcasting can accomplish when it's built on a subject that genuinely matters to people. The Sasquatch Syndicate isn't a hobby. It's a platform for eyewitnesses, researchers, enthusiasts, and curious minds — and conferences like Podcast Movement are exactly where you go to make sure that platform keeps growing.

On the other hand, we were there to learn. And learn we did.

The session lineup at PM25 was stacked. We sat in on discussions about production quality and how sound design affects listener retention. We dug into storytelling frameworks — how to structure an episode so that a skeptic who stumbles in at the beginning is a believer by the end. We absorbed everything we could about video podcasting, which is increasingly where the industry is headed, and what that means for a show like ours that relies on atmosphere and authenticity. Sessions on monetization, sponsorship strategy, and audience engagement gave us frameworks we're already putting to work.

But here's the thing that doesn't get talked about enough in event recaps: the hallway conversations. The lunch table discussions. The moments between sessions where you end up next to someone who hosts a completely different kind of show, and somehow you spend forty minutes sharing ideas that end up being more valuable than anything on the official agenda. Podcast Movement is built for that. It's designed so that the networking isn't an afterthought — it's the whole point.

Giving Back: Sharing What We Know
We didn't just show up as students. We showed up as contributors.

The Sasquatch Syndicate has been doing this long enough to have hard-won knowledge about what it takes to build and sustain a community around a niche subject. We know what it's like to create content for an audience that is simultaneously devoted and diverse — longtime Bigfoot researchers sitting alongside curious first-timers who just watched a documentary and want to know more. We know how to walk the line between entertainment and credibility. We know how to make a skeptic feel welcome without compromising the integrity of what we stand for.
That experience is valuable. And at Podcast Movement 2025, we shared it freely.

Whether it was conversations with newer creators trying to figure out how to build loyalty in a fragmented landscape, or discussions with fellow independent podcasters about how to keep going when the algorithm doesn't hand you anything on a silver platter — we were in those conversations, contributing, not just absorbing. That exchange of ideas, peer to peer, is one of the most valuable things any event can facilitate, and PM25 did it beautifully.

Dallas Did Its Part Too
Let's not overlook the setting. The Gaylord Texan is a genuinely spectacular venue — four and a half acres of indoor atriums, world-class dining, and the kind of atmosphere that makes you feel like the trip itself is an investment in the work you're doing. There's something about being in a space that signals "this matters" that puts you in the right headspace to absorb, create, and connect. The PM25 team chose well.

And Texas hospitality? Real. Very real.

What We're Taking Back to the Pacific Northwest
Four days in Dallas left us with full notebooks, new relationships, and a renewed sense of direction for where the Sasquatch Syndicate is headed.

We're thinking bigger about video. We're refining the way we structure our stories. We're more intentional than ever about how we engage our audience between episodes, not just during them. And we're connected to a network of podcasters and industry professionals who understand the craft at a level that's going to make everything we produce better.

Chuck came back fired up. The production team came back full of ideas. And the Sasquatch Syndicate came back with a clearer vision for how to take a show built on the hunt for an 800-pound mystery and turn it into something even more impactful, more produced, and more far-reaching than before.

The Mission Doesn't Change. The Platform Gets Stronger.
​Here's what Podcast Movement 2025 reminded us: the story is everything, but the story needs a vehicle. Bigfoot — the research, the witnesses, the evidence, the culture surrounding the search — is one of the most compelling ongoing narratives in American folklore. The Sasquatch Syndicate exists to tell that story with integrity, passion, and production value that respects both the subject and the audience.

Events like PM25 exist to make sure we're equipped to do that as well as anyone in the industry.

We'll be back. And in the meantime — the search continues.

By Chanelle Elaine Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

There's something almost poetic about Bigfoot showing up at an apple blossom parade.  The Washington State Apple Blossom Festival is one of the oldest, proudest, most beloved traditions in the Pacific Northwest — a celebration of this region's identity, its heritage, its fruit-growing soul, and its people. And the Sasquatch Syndicate? We're about another Pacific Northwest tradition. One that's a little hairier, a little harder to photograph, and considerably more controversial at the dinner table.

But Wenatchee, Washington is our home. This is our state. And when Stemilt — one of the most respected names in Washington agriculture — put their name on the Grand Parade banner for the 107th Apple Blossom Festival, we knew this was exactly where we needed to be.

So we showed up. Trucks, suits, speakers, and all.

The 107th Festival: A Wenatchee Tradition Like No Other
If you've never been to the Washington State Apple Blossom Festival, let us paint you a picture. Every spring since 1920, the Wenatchee Valley transforms into something magical. What began as a single-day celebration has grown into an eleven-day affair encompassing a carnival, golf tournament, food fair, multiple parades, an arts and crafts fair, live entertainment at Memorial Park, and countless other festivities that draw visitors from across the state and beyond.
As the oldest major festival in the state of Washington, Apple Blossom is a family-oriented celebration showcasing the people, heritage, and fruit industry of the region — and it shows. Walking through Wenatchee during festival week, you feel the weight of over a century of community pride in every marching band, every float, every face lining the streets.

The 107th Stemilt Grand Parade kicked off at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 3rd, with a cannon blast echoing across the valley like a starter pistol for the most glorious day of the Wenatchee year. The route launched from Triangle Park, wound down Orondo, turned left on Wenatchee Avenue, and ended at Seventh Street — approximately a mile and a half of cheering crowds, marching bands, floats, and fanfare.

And somewhere in that parade, sandwiched between the royalty queens and the high school marching bands, there was a very large, very hairy creature walking down the middle of the street at five miles per hour — flanked by two very serious research vehicles.

Enter the Sasquatch Syndicate. The Sasquatch Syndicate came prepared.
Our two research vehicles — the Toyota Tundra and the Chevy HHR — were outfitted and rolling, representing the organization proudly as we joined one of Washington State's most storied parades. But the real star of the show was neither truck.

It was Dawayne Zazeski. In full Bigfoot regalia.

Dawayne walked the entire parade route — all approximately two miles of it, at the stately pace of five miles per hour — dressed head to toe as the very creature our organization exists to research and document. And while we had the distinct advantage of air conditioning inside the vehicles, Dawayne had... none of that. What he had was a full fur suit, the enthusiasm of a true believer, and enough determination to power through the whole route despite the kind of internal heat situation that can only be described as a personal rain forest.

In fairness, the weather cooperated — it was cooler than it could have been, and we are deeply grateful to the Pacific Northwest climate for that small mercy. Dawayne is less convinced. He emerged from that costume at the finish line looking like he'd just completed a marathon inside a sauna. A heroic, magnificent, deeply committed marathon.

He earned every round of applause he got. And he got a lot of them.

The Loudspeaker That Changed Everything
Here's the detail that took the whole thing to another level: we ran a loudspeaker broadcasting authentic Washington State Sasquatch calls along the entire route.

If you've never heard a genuine Sasquatch vocalization played at parade volume through downtown Wenatchee, Washington while a man in a Bigfoot suit waves at children — we genuinely cannot recommend it highly enough as a life experience.

The reaction from the crowd was immediate and unforgettable. People who had been pleasantly watching the parade go by suddenly snapped to attention. Heads turned. Eyes widened. Kids grabbed their parents' arms. And then — when they saw Dawayne lumbering down the street in character, massive and magnificent against the backdrop of the Cascade Mountains — they absolutely lost it in the best possible way.

The calls, the costume, the trucks — together it created this immersive, totally unexpected moment in the middle of a traditional community parade that made people feel something. Curiosity. Excitement. Delight. And for a few of them, maybe just a tiny flicker of what if?  That's what we're here for.

The Kids. The High Fives. The Chaos.  We have to talk about the kids.
Children, it turns out, have exactly zero fear of a friendly Bigfoot walking toward them at a parade. If anything, they interpreted Dawayne's appearance as an open invitation.   As he made his way down the route, kids kept breaking from the crowd — arms outstretched, running in for high fives like Dawayne was a beloved mascot rather than a cryptid of disputed existence. The screams of excitement. The little legs sprinting. The parents simultaneously alarmed and delighted. It was pure, unfiltered joy, and it encapsulated everything we love about bringing this kind of energy to a family event.  Dawayne, to his enormous credit, delivered every single high five. Every one. In a full fur suit. At two miles. In the parade.

This man is a legend. Possibly more than one kind.

Why Apple Blossom Mattered for Sasquatch Syndicate
There are events where you go to reach a new audience, and there are events where you go to come home. The Washington State Apple Blossom Festival was both.

This is our state. These are our mountains. The forests that Sasquatch Syndicate researchers comb through for evidence of Pacific Northwest cryptids are the same forests that frame the Wenatchee skyline during festival week. There is no more fitting place for us to plant our flag and say: we are a Washington organization, we take this seriously, and we want you to share your stories with us.

Chuck Geveshausen and the Sasquatch Syndicate team were out there to do exactly that — promote the cause, engage the community, and remind the people of our home state that the search is real, it's ongoing, and it belongs to all of us.

The reception was extraordinary. Festival goers who stopped to talk were genuinely curious. Longtime residents of the Wenatchee Valley — surrounded by some of the most Bigfoot-adjacent wilderness in the entire country — had stories. Personal stories. Experiences passed down through families. Moments from hunting trips and camping nights that they hadn't talked about publicly in years.

Stemilt's Grand Parade gave us a platform, and the community gave us something back: connection, conversation, and confirmation that the Pacific Northwest is very much still paying attention to what moves through its forests at night.

The Sasquatch Came to Town — and the Town Was Ready
The Apple Blossom Festival offered everything from carnival rides to a beer garden, live music on the GESA Credit Union Entertainment Stage, an arts and crafts fair, and food vendors from across the region — and through all of it, the Sasquatch Syndicate was there, waving our flag and carrying the cause into the heart of Washington State.

We marched in one of the most beloved parades in the Pacific Northwest. We played Sasquatch calls loud enough for the whole valley to hear. We put a man in a Bigfoot suit through a genuinely heroic physical ordeal in service of the mission. And we connected with Wenatchee in a way that felt authentic, fun, and deeply right.

This is home. The mountains are ours. The forests are ours. And Bigfoot — whatever he is, wherever he roams — belongs to this land and to the people who live on it.

We'll be back.
​
The search continues.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Nobody tells you that being a filmmaker from the Pacific Northwest who has spent years chasing Bigfoot through old-growth forests is surprisingly good preparation for navigating London.  Both involve moving through large, ancient environments where the atmosphere is thick, the terrain is unfamiliar, and something extraordinary could appear around any corner. Both reward patience, curiosity, and a genuine willingness to be surprised. And in both cases, you are almost certainly underdressed for the weather.

Chuck Geveshausen, host and founder of the Sasquatch Syndicate, and the full Sherpa Networks production crew crossed the Atlantic Ocean on Delta to attend the 68th BFI London Film Festival — twelve days of world-class cinema, director conversations, short film programs, industry access, and storytelling craft at the highest level the medium has to offer.

It was one of the most valuable professional experiences any of us had ever had. It also involved a near-catastrophic encounter with British food, a desperate citywide search for ice cubes, and the moment Indian cuisine became the unanimous hero of the entire trip.

Oh — and Sherpa Networks? London loved them. But we'll get to that.

Seattle to Heathrow: Delta Carries the Crew Across the Pond
The Pacific Northwest to London is not a short flight. Delta got us there, and somewhere over the North Atlantic — probably around the point where Greenland appears out the left window like a reminder that the world is very large — the significance of what we were doing started to settle in.

A Bigfoot podcast and production company from Washington State was heading to one of the most prestigious film festivals on the planet. The Sherpa Networks crew — the same team that produces, films, edits, and helps bring other creators' visions to life — was about to walk into rooms full of international filmmakers, distributors, directors, and industry professionals from 79 countries.

The imposter syndrome was real. The excitement was considerably realer.

We landed at Heathrow and checked into the Marriott — exactly the right call after a transatlantic red-eye. Comfortable, professional, close enough to breathe before the city demanded our full attention. The beds were excellent. The rest was earned. And the following morning, London was waiting.

A Day to Breathe: Boddingtons, Big Ben, and the First Warning Sign
Before the festival opened in earnest, we gave ourselves a day of recovery and acclimatization. Not racing between landmarks with a guidebook — just walking, absorbing, letting the enormity of the city work on us at a pace we could actually process.

London is not subtle. It does not ease you in. It simply is — ancient and enormous in every direction, operating at full volume whether you're ready or not.
We found a proper pub. Chuck ordered a Boddington's — cold, draft, cream-topped, the way it is meant to be served — and for a glorious forty-five minutes, every single thing was right with the world.
Then someone ordered the fish and chips.

The Pea Situation: A Crisis in Several Acts

We need to talk about the peas.  British cuisine is a proud tradition with a rich history, and we say everything that follows with complete respect for the culture: Chuck Geveshausen does not like peas. This is not a casual preference. This is not a mild dietary quirk that can be managed with polite workarounds. This is a deeply held, firmly established, non-negotiable position that Chuck has maintained his entire life and sees absolutely no reason to revisit on foreign soil.

England, as it happens, is extremely committed to peas. Mushy peas specifically — the kind that arrive alongside fish and chips not as a polite garnish but as a warm, enthusiastic, default component of the plate that takes up significant real estate and radiates confidence about being there.

Chuck was not prepared for the mushy peas. Nobody on the team had adequately warned him. They appeared next to his fish and chips like they owned the table, and the expression on Chuck's face was — cinematically speaking — a masterpiece of controlled alarm and quiet personal betrayal.

• The shepherd's pie also had peas in it.
• The pot pie had peas.
• Several soups in London, it emerged, had a pea-related agenda.

There was a diplomatic moment at the pub where it was gently suggested that Chuck could simply eat around the peas. He considered this for a moment. He declined. He set the plate to one side with the calm, final energy of a man who has made a decision and is fully at peace with it.

The Boddington's, however, remained exceptional throughout. No peas in the Boddington's. Full marks.

Ice: An InvestigationHere is something they do not include in travel guides to the United Kingdom: ice is considered a specialty item rather than a standard component of a cold beverage.

In Washington State, ice is automatic. You sit down, a drink arrives, the drink has ice, nobody discusses it because that is simply how beverages work and everyone understands this. In London — discovered with increasing frequency across multiple days, meals, and establishments — ice is something you specifically request, may receive two to three cubes of, and will occasionally be regarded with a look of mild curiosity for wanting at all.

The team adapted with reasonable grace. We drank things at whatever temperature they arrived. We did not complain to staff. We did, however, discuss the ice situation among ourselves at a frequency that, in retrospect, was probably slightly disproportionate to its actual geopolitical importance.

It's the small things. Especially when you're very far from home and your dinner has mushy peas in it.

Indian Food: The Hero of This Story
On the second evening, someone proposed Indian food and that person was Chuck recalling he and Lyle Blackburn talking about Indian Food in London, on an old podcast.

This was, without question, the single best idea generated by any member of the Sasquatch Syndicate or Sherpa Networks crew during the entire trip. Given that the trip included attending one of the world's great film festivals, this is not a statement we make lightly.

London's Indian cuisine is extraordinary. This is well-established and thoroughly deserved — the curry houses and Indian restaurants of the UK represent one of the finest culinary traditions anywhere in the world, and sitting down to a proper curry dinner — warm, deeply spiced, richly layered, and completely, wonderfully free of mushy peas — was the moment the whole trip clicked into place.

Cold drinks managed to a satisfactory level. Naan bread arriving in quantities that satisfied. Chuck genuinely content with his plate for the first time since Heathrow. The crew looked at each other across the table and collectively exhaled.
This. This was going to work.

Indian food carried us through the rest of London with full stomachs, restored morale, and an appreciation for the British South Asian culinary tradition that we will be talking about for years. We went back more than once. We are not ashamed of this. We recommend it to everyone.

Sherpa Networks in London:
"Everyone Needs a Sherpa"Now — here is the part of the trip that genuinely surprised us, in the best possible way.
The Sasquatch Syndicate team travels with Sherpa Networks — our production company and the creative engine behind the show, the shoots, the editing, and the media infrastructure that makes everything we do actually work. Sherpa Networks (sherpanetworks.com) exists on a simple and powerful premise: every creator, every filmmaker, every production needs a guide. Someone to help navigate the terrain. Someone who knows the mountain.

We brought Sherpa Networks cards to London without enormous expectations about what would happen with them. We were attending a film festival, not running a sales operation. We were there to learn.

What we didn't fully anticipate was how the name, the logo, and the concept would land in a room full of international filmmakers.

Everywhere we went at the BFI — in the industry hub at Picturehouse Central, in the lobby conversations at BFI Southbank, in the Q&A sessions and hallway exchanges and dinner conversations that are the real connective tissue of any great festival — the moment Sherpa Networks came up, people leaned in. Independent filmmakers from the UK, Europe, and beyond who are trying to navigate distribution, production support, content strategy, and the increasingly complex landscape of getting their work seen and funded.

The cards went out. The conversations happened. The leads came in.
Sherpa Networks walked away from London with genuine new connections — filmmakers and creators who need exactly what Sherpa offers, who found us in the last place any of us expected to find new business: a London film festival where we'd gone purely to grow as storytellers.

Those leads were significant. They helped justify the trip financially in a way that transformed what could have been a purely educational investment into something that also moved the business forward. That's the Sherpa model in action: show up to help, be genuinely useful, and the work follows.

Everyone needs a Sherpa. London agreed.

The Festival: Where the Real Work Happened
Rested, fed, newly connected, and operating with a clarity that only a great curry dinner can provide, the team stepped fully into the 68th BFI London Film Festival — and the scale of it hit immediately.

The festival welcomed more than 815 international and UK filmmakers, immersive artists, and series creatives to present their work across London. The program featured 253 works — features, shorts, series, and immersive pieces — from 79 countries in 63 languages, with 39 world premieres and 12 international premieres across twelve days. It was, by every measure, a full global celebration of the moving image at its highest level, and we were inside it.

The primary home was BFI Southbank on the Thames — the London Eye visible from the entrance in a way that feels almost aggressively cinematic, like the city itself is trying to be in the shot. Screenings spread across Curzon Soho, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Royal Festival Hall, and partner venues through the city.

Steve McQueen's Blitz opened the festival on October 9th, starring Saoirse Ronan in a World War II story of stunning scope and intimacy — an immediate statement of intent about what the next twelve days would offer. Andrea Arnold's Bird, built almost entirely from first-time actors, showed what raw truth in the hands of a masterful director can produce. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in We Live in Time delivered emotional precision that made us examine every scene we'd ever filmed and ask whether we'd found the truth in it.

The short film programs were among the most instructive sessions of the entire festival. Shorts are where filmmakers solve hard problems with no margin and no guarantee of audience. The craft required to deliver a complete, emotionally resonant story in ten to fifteen minutes is exceptional — and watching filmmaker after filmmaker pull it off across multiple programs gave us more practical creative insight than almost anything else we experienced. As a production team that works in episodic audio and video storytelling, the lessons from those short film sessions were directly applicable to everything we make.

Director Q&As and production-focused panels gave us something even rarer: honest, candid conversations about process. How scenes get shaped. What gets cut and why. How filmmakers maintain creative integrity while navigating budget reality. How you carry someone else's true story with the responsibility it deserves. In the BFI environment — with industry audiences and serious film critics in the room — nobody is giving polished press junket answers. They're talking straight. And we were there taking notes.

What We Brought HomeHere is the honest reflection that every serious creative professional owes themselves after attending something like the BFI London Film Festival: you come home different. Not in a vague, motivational-quote way. In a specific, practical, sit-down-and-rethink-your-workflow way.

We came back thinking differently about structure. About pacing. About the relationship between sound and emotional truth — which matters enormously for a production team that builds atmosphere out of audio. About the difference between a story that is delivered and a story that is felt.

The Sasquatch Syndicate tells true stories — witness accounts, field research, the genuine human emotion of encountering something you cannot explain. That is documentary territory. It requires the same discipline, the same structural clarity, and the same commitment to earned emotional response that the world's best documentary filmmakers bring to their work. Watching those filmmakers at BFI — understanding how they build trust with subjects, how they handle the responsibility of carrying someone else's truth — sharpened instincts we didn't even fully know we had.

Sherpa Networks came home with new clients, new relationships, and a clearer sense of how the company's services resonate with the independent filmmaking community globally.

The team came home full — on curry, on knowledge, on the specific satisfaction of having shown up somewhere extraordinary and made it count.

Thank You, London. Mostly
To the BFI and every filmmaker who made the 68th London Film Festival what it was — thank you. What you built across those twelve days reminded us why storytelling matters and raised the standard for everything we're going to make next.

• To the Sherpa Networks crew — you showed up, you represented, and London noticed. That's everything.
• To Delta Airlines — dependable. Appreciated. No complaints.
• To the Marriott Heathrow — exactly what we needed exactly when we needed it.
• To the Boddington's draft — a genuine highlight. Truly no notes whatsoever.
• To the Indian restaurants of London — you are heroes. Unambiguous, unconditional heroes. The Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks owe you a debt that can only be repaid in return visits and enthusiastic word of mouth to every American filmmaker we know who is heading your direction.
• To British cuisine broadly — we respect you. We understand you. Mushy peas are simply not for us and we have made complete peace with that.
• To whoever manages the ice supply across London's hospitality industry — we would like to revisit this topic. Thoughtfully. With evidence.

The search — for Bigfoot, for great stories, for new clients, and apparently for a properly iced beverage — continues.

Sasquatch Syndicate is a Washington State-based podcast and nonprofit dedicated to Bigfoot research and eyewitness outreach across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Find us wherever you stream podcasts.

Sherpa Networks is the production company behind Sasquatch Syndicate, providing guided media solutions for creators, filmmakers, and brands. Learn more at https://www.sherpanetworks.com.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

There's something that happens when a Pacific Northwest Bigfoot nonprofit decides to pack its cameras, hop a plane, and fully immerse itself in the largest Bigfoot festival on the East Coast. Logistics happen. Connections happen. And if you do it right — gold happens.

This is the story of how the Sasquatch Syndicate crossed the entire country — from our home base in Washington State to the rolling green hills of Fletcher, North Carolina — to attend, observe, film, and gather the kind of raw, authentic, face-to-face witness content that you simply cannot manufacture from a recording studio. It's the story of Alaska Airlines boarding passes, National rental car keys, production gear shipped ahead via UPS, and the remarkable people who made every mile worth every single cent.

We didn't have a booth this time. We had something better: front-row seats, incognito disguises, sunglasses, microphones, and an open invitation to absorb the greatest gathering of Bigfoot believers on the East Coast.  Next time, we'll have a booth. But this time, we got exactly what we came for.  Buckle up. It's a long way from Seattle to the Blue Ridge.

The Logistics: Getting the Gear to the MountainsRunning a production trip across the country is a different kind of undertaking than running a booth. Instead of merchandise and displays, we were moving camera equipment, audio gear, interview setups, and all the production infrastructure needed to capture high-quality content in an unpredictable, live festival environment.

Our solution, as always: get it there before we do. UPS handled the advance shipment of production gear to Fletcher so that when the team stepped off the plane in North Carolina, we weren't wrestling heavy cases through baggage claim and praying nothing got rattled in transit. Having the gear waiting on arrival meant we could focus immediately on what we came to do — engage, explore, and capture.

Alaska Airlines carried us across the continent, and there's something quietly powerful about flying from the Pacific Northwest — the very epicenter of the modern Bigfoot legend — toward Appalachia, where a completely different but equally deep tradition of Sasquatch sightings and creature encounters has been documented for generations. Two halves of the same country. Two halves of the same mystery. The Sasquatch Syndicate was about to stand at the intersection of both.

National rental cars got us on the ground and moving through some of the most jaw-dropping scenery any of us had ever driven through. The Blue Ridge Mountains are not subtle. They don't ease you in. They just show up — ancient, enormous, and green in a way that the Pacific Northwest would recognize as kin. Every drive to a meal, every route to and from the WNC AG Center in Fletcher, came wrapped in a landscape that reminded us exactly why Bigfoot sightings in this part of the country are so easy to believe.

Stops Along the Way: Meeting Familiar Voices in Person
One of the quiet gifts of a cross-country production trip is the opportunity to do something you simply cannot do from a podcast studio: show up in person for people who have been part of the Sasquatch Syndicate journey from a distance.

Past guests. Researchers we'd interviewed remotely. Witnesses whose accounts had stayed with us long after the recording ended but whose handshakes we'd never had. The road to Fletcher gave us the chance to change that.
There is something irreplaceable about sitting across a table from someone whose voice you know well but whose presence you're experiencing for the first time. It grounds the work. It makes real what can feel abstract when you're communicating through microphones and digital files. Those stops — brief as some of them were — added a dimension to this trip that no session inside the AG Center could have provided on its own. We arrived in Fletcher already fuller than when we left Seattle.

The Festival: The East Coast's Biggest Bigfoot Weekend
The WNC Bigfoot Festival is the creation of John Bruner and the Bigfoot 911 team — a nonprofit that has spent years genuinely, methodically, and passionately exploring the mountains of Western North Carolina in pursuit of Sasquatch. After several close encounters in those ancient Blue Ridge forests, they were inspired to build something for the entire community: believers, skeptics, serious researchers, curious families, and everyone in between.

What began as a local gathering has grown into the largest Bigfoot-themed festival on the East Coast, and the 2024 edition — held at the WNC AG Center in Fletcher across May 17–19 — was a testament to just how far this movement has come.

The festival kicked off Friday evening, May 17th, with the inaugural Bigfoot Jam at The Box Factory — a night of live local music at 29 Logan Street that set exactly the right tone for the weekend ahead. Energy high, community together, Appalachian darkness falling soft over the mountains outside.

Opening ceremonies on Saturday morning were memorable. Marion Mayor Steve Little presented the Bigfoot 911 team with an official proclamation naming Bigfoot the official animal of Marion, NC. We will simply note that this is a sentence that now exists in the world, and every single person in that building was happier for it. The crowd responded accordingly.

Over 165 vendor booths filled the space with Bigfoot-themed art, research materials, handmade crafts, books, gear, and merchandise from creators and investigators across the country. Two food vendor courts kept thousands of attendees fueled. Live music from the Main Stage sustained the festival energy from open to close. And the legendary Flavors on Main Bigfoot Calling Contest — where randomly selected competitors unleashed their best Sasquatch vocalizations for crowd approval and eternal bragging rights — delivered the kind of joyful, completely sincere spectacle that only this community can produce.

The Presenters: Learning From the Best in the Field
For a production team that came to listen and document, the speaker lineup at WNC 2024 was a genuine masterclass.
John Bruner — festival founder, Bigfoot 911 leader, and the man whose backyard is the Blue Ridge Sasquatch corridor — anchored the event with the kind of regional authority and firsthand experience that cannot be faked or studied from afar. Hearing him speak about what he has encountered in those mountains, and why he built this festival, set the entire tone for how we approached the weekend.

Author Margaret Langley, known for her paranormal research and writing including Haunted Broughton, expanded the conversation beautifully beyond traditional cryptozoology into the folklore, documented history, and cultural strangeness surrounding Bigfoot and related phenomena across the Southeast. Her sessions were a reminder that the mystery has real depth — historically rooted, well-documented depth.

Paranormal Roadtripper
Zach Bales brought kinetic energy and a road-tested perspective on chasing the unexplained across the American landscape that resonated deeply with a team that had just done the same thing to get here. The NC Squatch Watchers delivered hyper-regional expertise on Carolinas sighting patterns, terrain, and investigation methodology that you genuinely cannot find anywhere else. And the BFRO — the Bigfoot Field Research Organization — represented the systematic, evidence-based documentation approach that has anchored credibility in this field for decades.

To every presenter who gave their time, their research, and their stories at WNC 2024: the Sasquatch Syndicate is sincerely grateful. The witnesses who find courage in your sessions, the newcomers who discover for the first time that this is serious inquiry, the longtime researchers who feel affirmed by your commitment — all of that matters. Thank you.

The Witnesses: The Real Reason We Made the Trip
Here's the part that doesn't fit neatly into a festival recap but is the entire reason the Sasquatch Syndicate crossed the country with cameras and audio gear: the witnesses.

WNC 2024 drew thousands of attendees, and among them — as always at events like this — were real people carrying real experiences. People who had seen something in those Blue Ridge forests that they couldn't explain and hadn't spoken about publicly. People who had waited years for a room where they could talk freely without being dismissed or laughed at. People whose accounts were detailed, consistent, and quietly extraordinary in the way that credible witness testimony always is when you give it the space it deserves.

We listened. We filmed. We asked careful questions and gave people room to tell their stories fully and on their own terms. The content captured at WNC 2024 is heading into upcoming Sasquatch Syndicate episodes, and we can say with confidence: it is extraordinary. The Southeast has its own Sasquatch story to tell, and it is every bit as compelling as the Pacific Northwest narrative we grew up with.

That is what we came for. And we got it.

The Road Home: Full Cards, Full Notebooks, Full Hearts
Then came the trip back — and anyone who has done production travel knows this particular flavor of exhausted satisfaction. Storage cards full of footage. Notebooks packed with contact information and follow-up reminders. Gear cased back up for the return UPS shipment. National cars returned. Alaska Airlines carrying a very tired, very fulfilled team back across the continent toward home.

The drive to the airport had the same Blue Ridge scenery on the way out that it had on the way in. It hits a little differently when you know you're leaving. There's a reason people come back to Western North Carolina — the mountains get into you. We understood that a little better on the return flight than we had on the way in.

We landed back in Washington with more than we left with. Not just footage and interview recordings — though there was plenty of that. But connections, context, perspective, and a much deeper appreciation for how broad and how serious the Bigfoot research community is from coast to coast.

Next Time: We'll Have a Booth
We want to be honest about what this trip was: a reconnaissance mission as much as a production trip. We went to WNC 2024 to experience the event firsthand, understand the community, document witness accounts, and build the relationships that will carry Sasquatch Syndicate forward into future years.   Had Chuck been there we would've been spotted for sure so I just personally wanted to thank the production team for attending with an open mind so they can experience the movement.

Mission thoroughly accomplished.
Next time the Sasquatch Syndicate comes to the WNC Bigfoot Festival — and there will absolutely be a next time — we will be set up and ready with a full presence. A booth. Merchandise. Research materials. The whole operation, done right for the community this event deserves.

Because now we know exactly what WNC is. Now we know what it deserves. And we intend to show up for it accordingly.

Thank You, WNC
To John Bruner and the entire Bigfoot 911 team — thank you for building something the community genuinely needed and delivering it year after year with heart, passion, and real professionalism. The WNC Bigfoot Festival is one of a kind, and spending a weekend inside it was a genuine privilege.

To the presenters who shared their research and their time — your work is the backbone of this field and we left sharper because of you.

To the past guests and friends who made time for us along the road to Fletcher — those in-person moments meant more than any blog post can properly express.

And to every witness who sat down with us at WNC 2024 and shared their story openly and honestly — thank you. Your experiences are the foundation of everything we do. We heard you. We took you seriously. And your accounts will be treated with the full respect they deserve when they reach our audience.

We crossed the entire country to be in that room with you. It was worth every mile.

The search continues.

BELIEVE

​By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Welcome, dear friends. And Merry Christmas — in the language of a country that, for one of our own, was never entirely foreign.   This is the story of how the Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks crossed the Atlantic Ocean in December, landed in the heart of Germany, and brought Bigfoot — arguably the most Pacific Northwest creature imaginable — to one of Europe's premier pop culture events, surrounded by Christmas markets, glühwein, centuries of history, and a family homecoming that made every leg of the journey deeply personal.

It is also the story of a man who nearly had to change his name to succeed in American media — and refused.

But we'll get to that.

The Man Called Geveshausen
Before we talk about Stuttgart, we need to talk about Chuck.

Charles Geveshausen or Karl Geveshausen, Charles is Karl in German, is not a name that slides quietly through an American casting sheet or a Hollywood production roster. It is a name that announces itself. A name that carries old country weight, that rolls off German tongues with comfort and authority, and that — in the post-World War II American media landscape of the early 1980s — created friction that was, frankly, unfair and infuriating.

Chuck grew up German-American in a cultural moment when that identity carried baggage that had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with the sins of a generation he had no part in. He pursued a career in media. He was good at it. And more than once, he was told — directly or indirectly — that perhaps a name like Geveshausen might benefit from some... smoothing. An alias. Something less Germanic. Something that wouldn't raise eyebrows in certain rooms.
​
Chuck said no.

He said it then and he has been saying it ever since, because he understood something important: a name is not just a label. It is lineage. It is the people who carried it before you, the land they came from, the village that gave rise to them. To erase it for the comfort of others is to erase yourself.

That stubbornness — that quiet, firm insistence on being exactly who he is — is the same quality that drives him into forests at night looking for a creature most people don't believe exists. Chuck Geveshausen does not take the easy road. He takes the one that means something.

And in December 2023, that road led him home.

Condor to Frankfurt: Earning Alaska Miles at 35,000 Feet
The Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks crew departed Seattle on Condor Airlines — a practical and satisfying choice for anyone who wants to accumulate Alaska Airlines miles while crossing the Atlantic, which we highly recommend. Condor flies SEA to FRA and the arrangement works beautifully for Pacific Northwest travelers. File that tip away.

Frankfurt Airport landed us at one of the great transit hubs of Europe — and more specifically, at the Frankfurt Airport Marriott, which is connected directly to the terminal and is one of the finest airport hotels any of us have encountered anywhere in the world. The breakfast buffet deserves specific mention: honey in varieties that would make a beekeeper weep with joy, meats arranged with Germanic precision, beet juice dark and earthy and somehow exactly right for the cold December morning, and the general sense that Europe takes breakfast seriously in a way that puts the American grab-and-go bagel to complete shame.

We ate well. We rested. We adjusted to the time zone with the help of good food and a bed that understood its purpose.

The following morning, we caught the Deutsche Bahn train directly from Frankfurt Airport to Stuttgart — smooth, punctual, efficient in the way that European rail never stops being slightly miraculous to American travelers. Germany slid past the windows in December gray and winter brown, punctuated by the occasional half-timbered building or church spire that reminded you that this is a very, very old place you're passing through.

Stuttgart arrived. The Messe was waiting.

Messe Stuttgart: Bigfoot Enters the Building
Comic Con Stuttgart — the CCON, as the Germans know it — is no small affair. Since its founding in 2016 at the Landesmesse Stuttgart, it has grown into one of Europe's leading pop culture conventions, drawing 50,000 attendees and filling the massive exhibition halls with the full spectrum of fan culture: comics, film, cosplay, gaming, celebrity guests, workshops, Star Wars universes, Ghostbusters chapters, cosplay parades, and the collective joy of a community that celebrates being exactly who they are without apology.

Sound familiar?

The 2023 edition featured celebrity guests including the legendary Ian McDiarmid — Emperor Palpatine himself — alongside James and Oliver Phelps (the Weasley twins), Spencer Wilding, Lauren Mary Kim, and others drawing fans from across Germany and Europe. The halls were decorated for Christmas. The German winter light filtered through. And somewhere in Hall 4, next to heroes from galaxies far, far away, the Sasquatch Syndicate set up shop.

Photo ops. Autograph sessions. Merchandise. And questions — so many questions — from curious German fans who had discovered us through a channel none of us had anticipated quite as strongly as it arrived.

The Cartoon Pilot that was popular in Germany
Here's the thing about Bigfoot in Germany: there is no native Bigfoot tradition. Germany has the Black Forest, it has fairy tales, it has centuries of folklore about things that move in the dark — but a large bipedal primate wandering the Schwarzwald was not, historically, a major cultural preoccupation.

Which is exactly why, when the Sasquatch Syndicate comic and cartoon project began making its rounds — a hero team concept built around a squad of investigators pursuing the legend, cryptozoology meets comic book adventure — the German fan community responded with a level of enthusiasm that genuinely caught us off guard.

The cartoon went viral in Germany before it had achieved equivalent traction back home in the United States.

Germans, it turns out, love a well-constructed hero team narrative. They love the investigative procedural angle. They love the aesthetic of the Pacific Northwest — the forests, the mountains, the scale of the American wilderness that reads as almost mythological from Europe. And they love the sheer novelty of a legitimate cryptid investigation presented with seriousness, craft, and just enough humor to make it approachable.

At the booth, the cartoon was a conversation starter that never stopped starting conversations. Fans who had never heard of Bigfoot outside of vague American pop culture references found themselves genuinely intrigued by the concept of a hero squad built around real research methodology. Artists and comic enthusiasts examined the print work with a critical eye and approved of what they found. People wanted to know where they could follow the story.

For Sherpa Networks — managing production, media strategy, and the infrastructure behind the Sasquatch Syndicate's growing European footprint — the weekend was a proof of concept that the brand has legs (very large legs, admittedly) far beyond the Pacific Northwest.

Chuck Fielding Questions in German: A Masterclass in Smiling Through It :)

Let's address the linguistic reality of the weekend with the honesty it deserves.

Chuck Geveshausen speaks German the way a person speaks a language they grew up around but have not used fluently in some time — which is to say: with heart, with effort, with occasional grammatical detours that the ear of a native speaker notices but politely overlooks, and with a warmth that more than compensates for any rustiness in conjugation.

His last name announced him before he said a word. German fans looked at his badge, looked at him, and something in their expression shifted — a recognition, a welcome, a sense of oh, one of us, or near enough. That matters in ways that are difficult to fully articulate to someone who has never experienced it. Being German-named in a German room, even after decades in America, is a different kind of homecoming than simply visiting a foreign country.

The questions came in German. Chuck fielded them with a combination of actual German, strategic smiling, and the universal language of enthusiasm about your subject matter. The Sherpa Networks crew flanked him, nodded supportively, and managed the moments where the conversation outpaced available vocabulary with the diplomatic grace of a team that has been in tight spots before.

Smiles, it turned out, are the great translator. You can get remarkably far on sincerity, a good-natured laugh, and a willingness to meet people exactly where they are.

Sherpa Networks in Europe: Here to HelpThe "Sherpa is here to help" angle — which has driven so much of the company's success in the United States — resonated with European and specifically German filmmakers and content creators at CCON in ways that felt like the beginning of something real.

Germany has a robust creative community and a media landscape that, as Chuck knows from personal experience, has historically operated with certain gatekeeping dynamics that make it difficult for independent voices to find their footing. German creators working in digital content, short film, podcasting, and independent production face many of the same challenges their American counterparts do — and they responded to the Sherpa Networks model with genuine interest.

Cards went out. Conversations went deep.
The same "everyone needs a Sherpa" message that had resonated in London at the BFI found a new and enthusiastic audience in Stuttgart. As a Washington State organization expanding into European markets, the Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks are, to put it honestly, a monster out of water in Europe — but a very friendly, very capable monster that is learning the terrain quickly.

No Bigfoot in Germany? Perhaps. But there is certainly an audience for great storytelling. And Sherpa is here to help tell it.

After the Con: A Family Homecoming Begins
The convention wrapped. The booth came down. And then the trip became something else entirely.

Chuck headed south from Stuttgart toward Fridingen — a small town in Baden-Württemberg south of Stuttgart, tucked into the upper Danube valley, where family waited. The cousins. The familiar faces from a family tree that stretches back generations into this land. For the crew, it was a brief parting with our leader — watching him navigate toward something deeply personal while we prepared for the next chapter of the adventure he had generously planned for us before departing.

That next chapter was Lake Konstanz. And it was extraordinary.

Lake Konstanz: Glühwein, Christmas Markets, and the Lady Who Holds the Pope
The Bodensee — Lake Constance — in December is something that deserves to be on every traveler's list. The water is cold and ancient and impossibly still in places. The Christmas markets that ring the lake are everything you've heard about German Weihnachtsmärkte and then some: candlelight on cobblestones, the smell of roasted almonds and cinnamon, glühwein steaming in ceramic mugs that you feel through your gloves before you even take a sip.

We wandered. We drank glühwein. We made use of a German interpreter for the moments that required more precision than our collective language skills could manage. We ate things we couldn't fully identify but which were warm and correct for the moment. We talked to strangers and probably understood forty percent of what they said and nodded appropriately at the rest.

And then we found her.

Standing at the entrance to Konstanz harbor, nine meters tall, rotating slowly on her pedestal, is one of the most extraordinary public art installations any of us had ever encountered: the Imperia.

Erected in 1993 by sculptor Peter Lenk — secretly, on private railway company property, before the city could object — Imperia is a voluptuous, boldly rendered courtesan holding two small, naked, hapless-looking men in her outstretched hands. One wears a papal tiara. The other wears an imperial crown. Both look, to be kind about it, diminished.

She rotates once every four minutes, ensuring that everyone — on land and on the lake — gets a complete view.

The story she tells reaches back to the Council of Constance, 1414 to 1418, when the Catholic Church gathered here to resolve its crisis of having three simultaneous popes. The city swelled with thousands of clergy, princes, cardinals, and hangers-on. Contemporary chronicles noted the simultaneous presence of extraordinary numbers of women providing companionship to the attendants of this most holy council. History is not subtle.

Balzac later immortalized the scene in a satirical story, La Belle Impéria, in which the courtesan Imperia holds power over all the men who claim to hold power over the world. Lenk brought that story to life in nine meters of rotating concrete. The two naked men she holds represent Pope Martin V and Emperor Sigismund — powerful beyond measure, and yet entirely at her mercy.

The city initially objected. Then accepted. Then declared it a cultural monument in 2024.

We stood beneath her in the December cold, glühwein in hand, and laughed the way you laugh when history delivers something so perfectly absurd and so deeply true that there's nothing else to do.

Chuck, we're told, had a version of this explanation ready for family members when he later joined them. It went over well.

Chuck's Journey: Nürnberg, Oldenburg, and a Hamlet Called Geveshausen
While the crew made its way back toward Frankfurt for the return flight, Chuck's journey continued north — through Germany, through Christmas and family, through the geography of his own name.

Nürnberg at Christmas. One of the most famous Christkindlesmarkt in the world — a tradition going back to 1628, golden and glowing in the old city center beneath the Kaiserburg castle. If you can only attend one German Christmas market in your lifetime, many people argue it should be this one. Chuck made the pilgrimage.

Then north to Oldenburg — in Niedersachsen, his family's home region. The Low German flat country, different in character from the mountain drama of the south. Older in a quieter way. The kind of place where families have been in the same general area for so long that the landscape itself feels personal.

And somewhere in that region — in that web of Low German hamlets and farmsteads and place names that have been accumulating for a thousand years — there is a hamlet called Geveshausen.

In German toponymy, the suffix -hausen is ancient — it means settlement, homestead, the place where people dwelled. German place names ending in -hausen dot the landscape of central and northern Germany, each one a record of a family or a founder or a local lord who built something there long enough ago that the settlement took their name. Geveshausen. The settlement of the Geve family. The home place. A hamlet so small it exists mostly as a name on older maps and in family memory — but a name that carries the same root as the man standing in a Bigfoot booth in Stuttgart, fielding questions in rusty German about cryptids from the Pacific Northwest.

Chuck visited. He stood in a place that shares his name. We imagine that moment requires no embellishment from us.
His son was with him for part of the journey — and Chuck, being the kind of man who believes in understanding where you come from, took him to Bremerhaven on the North Sea coast. Because that is where the ships left from. The vessels that carried German families across the Atlantic to America in the great waves of nineteenth and twentieth century emigration. The harbor that swallowed them whole and delivered them, after weeks at sea, to a new country that would not always welcome their names.

His son stood at that harbor and understood something about the family story that no classroom could have delivered.

The Autobahn: A Brief but Important Digression

We would be remiss if we did not mention the Autobahn.

For those unfamiliar: sections of the German Autobahn have no speed limit. This is a documented fact of German law. There are advisory speeds, and there are stretches of unrestricted highway where the only meaningful limit is the courage of the driver and the engineering tolerances of the vehicle.

Chuck, it should be noted, is a man who goes into dark forests alone at night looking for an eight-foot cryptid. He is not, by disposition, a person who is easily discouraged by risk.
​
He drove a Mercedes on the Autobahn at speeds that he has described, diplomatically, as enthusiastic. He has also mentioned that the tires began to exhibit what engineers call harmonic vibration and what everyone else calls wobbling, at a point in the velocity spectrum that suggested perhaps the conversation between the car and the road had reached a natural conclusion.

He slowed down. He arrived safely. He tells this story with a grin that suggests he does not fully regret it.

The Pacific Northwest produces a particular kind of person: someone comfortable with uncertainty, unbothered by extremes, and inclined to find out what happens when you push a little further than common sense recommends. This appears to be a quality that crosses well with the German half of his heritage.

What Germany Gave UsWe landed back in Seattle with Alaska miles accumulated, notebooks fuller than expected, Sherpa Networks European connections established, and a cartoon property that — somewhat improbably — had found its warmest early audience in a country where Bigfoot has no native mythology.

Chuck came home with something harder to quantify. A reconnection with the people and the place that shaped the name he refused to give up. A son who now understands, viscerally, where that name came from and what it cost to keep it in a country that sometimes made keeping it difficult.

He stood in a hamlet that shares his family name. He drove a Mercedes too fast on a highway that permits such things. He drank glühwein beneath a rotating courtesan who holds a pope and an emperor in her hands and finds both of them wanting.

Not a bad December for a man from Oldenburg by way of Washington State.

Danke, Deutschland
To the fans at Comic Con Stuttgart 2023 who brought their curiosity, their enthusiasm, and their questions to our booth — vielen Dank. You embraced something from the other side of the world with warmth and genuine interest, and the Sasquatch Syndicate will not forget it.

To the German filmmakers and creators who connected with Sherpa Networks — we are here, we are expanding, and we are genuinely glad to help. That's what Sherpas do.

• To the Christmas markets of Lake Konstanz — you are exactly what the world needed in December, and glühwein is a technology that deserves global adoption.
• To Imperia, still slowly turning in the Konstanz harbor — you are an eight-hundred-year-old inside joke about the gap between the powerful and the righteous, and you are magnificent.
• To the Autobahn — we respect you. We also learned from you.
• And to Chuck: thank you for bringing us to the country that made you. For showing us the hamlet with your name. For refusing, all those years ago, to become someone else.
• Frohe Weihnachten. Die Suche geht weiter.

Merry Christmas. The search continues.

BELIEVE

​By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Every great run has a last chapter. The trick is not knowing it's the last one while you're living it — and then looking back later and being grateful you showed up fully, without holding anything back, for every single moment of it.
AlienCon 2023 in Pasadena was that chapter for the Sasquatch Syndicate.

Five conferences across the years. One brutal pandemic gap that nearly ended the event entirely — and came close to ending a lot of things we all cared about. A community of truth-seekers, stargazers, researchers, skeptics, believers, and beautiful weirdos who gathered year after year in the name of the unexplained. And then, quietly, the circuit closed. The History Channel and the Ancient Aliens team took the event regional, and the full AlienCon experience — the one with the vendor halls and the Artist Alley and the panels and the photo ops and the specific electricity of ten thousand open-minded people all in the same building at the same time — came to an end.

We were there for the finale. We brought everything we had.

And we brought Dawayne Zazeski — who had absolutely no idea what was about to happen to him.

Getting There: Alaska Airlines, Burbank, and the Sheraton
Alaska Airlines flew the Sasquatch Syndicate crew from Seattle down to Burbank — the right call for a California event, efficient and comfortable and exactly the kind of travel that gets you where you're going without drama. The Sheraton was home base for the weekend: solid, well-located, the kind of hotel that keeps the operation running smoothly so you can focus your energy on the floor.

Setup day came first. The booth doesn't build itself, and getting into the Pasadena Convention Center a day early to lay everything out — displays, merchandise, research materials, banners that have traveled with us to more events than we can count — is the unglamorous scaffolding that makes everything else possible. The team moved through it with the practiced efficiency of people who have done this enough times to have opinions about the optimal order of operations.

By the time the doors opened on March 4th, we were ready. More than ready. Five conferences into this relationship with AlienCon and its community, we felt at home in that space the way you feel at home in a place that has given you good things repeatedly over the years.

What AlienCon Was — And Why We'll Miss It
Before we talk about the weekend itself, it's worth taking a moment to explain what AlienCon actually was to anyone who never had the privilege of attending one.

Created by A+E Networks in partnership with Prometheus Entertainment — the production company behind Ancient Aliens on the History Channel — AlienCon was precisely what it sounds like and also considerably more than that. Yes, it was a convention for people who believe in, research, or are simply fascinated by extraterrestrial life, UAPs, ancient astronaut theory, cryptids, and the full spectrum of phenomena that the mainstream prefers to keep at arm's length.

But it was also something rarer: a room where those conversations were treated seriously. Where investigators and journalists who had devoted careers to documenting the unexplained stood on stages and shared findings that the six o'clock news would never run. Where witnesses could speak without apology. Where curiosity was not a liability but the entire point.

The 2023 edition marked the first full return to in-person format since 2019, before COVID had shut everything down and tested the resilience of every event in this space. A+E brought back the full experience — panel discussions, original programming, autograph and photo sessions, exclusive merchandise, and over 100 vendors ranging from authors and aura readers to crystals, custom apparel, and more. The speaker lineup included Giorgio Tsoukalos, investigative journalist George Knapp, former Defense Intelligence Officer Jay Stratton, and best-selling author Erich von Däniken, among others.

It was, in every sense, the band back together for one more show.

We knew it. The community knew it. And everyone showed up accordingly.

George Knapp: A Conversation Worth Every Second
If you spend any time at all in the world of unexplained phenomena — whether you come at it from the UFO angle, the cryptid angle, the paranormal angle, or any of the dozens of fascinating lanes that feed into this broader highway of inquiry — you know the name George Knapp.

The chief investigative reporter for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, Knapp has been recognized with Edward R. Murrow Awards, two Peabody Awards, and 24 Pacific Southwest Regional Emmy Awards. He is widely credited with bringing UFO conspiracy theorist Bob Lazar to prominence in 1989, catapulting Area 51 into the public consciousness in a way that has never fully receded. He has spent decades investigating what others dismiss, documented what others won't touch, and maintained journalistic credibility through it all with a rigor that commands respect even from people who disagree with his conclusions.

When the Sasquatch Syndicate got time with George Knapp at AlienCon 2023, we used every minute of it wisely.
We thanked him. Genuinely, from the floor up, we thanked him — because what George Knapp has done for this field over forty years has made it possible for organizations like ours to exist with credibility. He normalized the conversation. He proved that serious journalism and serious inquiry into the unexplained are not mutually exclusive. He showed that the public deserves to have these stories told well, and he has told them better than almost anyone.

George received the gratitude with the easy grace of someone who has heard a lot of things in a lot of rooms and doesn't require applause for doing what he believes is right. That quality — the groundedness, the lack of ego about work that deserves enormous ego — is part of what makes him such a remarkable figure in this community.

The Sasquatch Syndicate is better for having had that conversation. We carry it forward.

Jeremy Corbell: Filmmaker to Filmmaker
Jeremy Corbell occupies a fascinating place in the universe of unexplained phenomena content creators — and we mean that as the highest possible compliment.

Corbell is an American contemporary artist, filmmaker, and ufologist who gained prominence by producing documentary films and podcasts on UAPs, most notably his 2018 documentary Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers, which premiered on Netflix in 2019. He came to filmmaking sideways — through martial arts, through illness, through a camera pointed at someone who then, as he describes it, simply spilled the beans. He has described his filmmaking origin as accidental: "I wasn't a filmmaker, never studied film. It was a way for me to talk with people and try to understand this conundrum."

That origin story resonates deeply with anyone who has come to storytelling through passion for a subject rather than through formal training. The Sasquatch Syndicate was not built in a film school. It was built in forests, at witness kitchen tables, in podcast studios cobbled together from determination and whatever equipment was affordable at the time. You follow the story first and figure out the craft as you go.

Jeremy understood that immediately. The conversation between him and Chuck about the filmmaker's journey — how you find your subject, how your subject finds you, how you earn trust from people who have kept secrets for years — was one of the most energizing exchanges of the entire weekend. Two people from completely different corners of the unexplained universe, discovering that the methodology is the same: show up, listen harder than you talk, and never stop believing that the story matters.

The Weaponized podcast he co-hosts with George Knapp has become essential listening for anyone serious about the UAP conversation. We told him so. We meant it.

David Childress: Books, Bigfoot, and a Shared Corner of the Map
David Childress has been writing about the unexplained since before most of our current audience was born — and his work on Bigfoot specifically gave the Sasquatch Syndicate plenty of material for a conversation that could have gone on for hours and was limited only by the competing demands of a very busy convention floor.

Childress brings a global perspective to cryptid research that few others can match — the idea that Bigfoot-type creatures appear in the folklore and witness accounts of cultures on every inhabited continent, that the Pacific Northwest phenomenon is not an isolated American curiosity but one thread in a very old and very wide tapestry of human encounters with something that doesn't fit the approved zoological catalog. That framework resonates with everything the Sasquatch Syndicate believes about the importance of taking witness testimony seriously across cultural boundaries.

We talked books. We talked evidence. We talked about the specific quality of accounts from people who have no cultural incentive to fabricate a story and every social incentive to stay quiet about what they saw. And we walked away from that conversation with new reading material and a sharper sense of why the global context of Bigfoot research matters.

Ken Gerhart: Fellow Traveler, Fellow Researcher
The unexplained research community is large and getting larger — but it is also, in its serious core, a relatively small world. You run into the same committed investigators at event after event, each of you working your corner of the map, and when you cross paths the conversation picks up wherever it left off.

Ken Gerhart of Alaska Triangle knows his corner of the map in a way that commands genuine respect. The Alaska Triangle is arguably the most compelling and least fully explored Bigfoot territory in North America — vast, remote, documented with encounters that go back generations of indigenous testimony, and still producing new accounts with remarkable regularity. The sheer scale of the wilderness available for something to remain undiscovered in Alaska puts even the Pacific Northwest forests to shame.

Running into Ken at AlienCon 2023 was one of those moments that reminded us how good this community is when it's operating at its best. Different followings, different geographies, same mission: take the witnesses seriously, document carefully, and push the conversation forward with integrity.

The Sasquatch Syndicate booth may have drawn the larger crowd — we're not going to pretend otherwise — but the conversation with Ken was exactly the kind of peer exchange that makes events like AlienCon worth attending beyond the fan interactions. We need each other. This field is better when serious researchers compare notes.

Monty: When the Seeds You Plant Come Back Grow
In 2018, at an earlier AlienCon, a boy named Monty came to the Sasquatch Syndicate booth with his father.

He was a kid. The kind of kid who asks questions that are too specific and too thoughtful for his age, who has clearly spent time thinking about something that most people around him aren't taking seriously. He was curious about the research. He wanted to know about the methodology. He had probably already watched every available piece of Sasquatch content he could find and was ready for the next level of conversation.

We gave it to him. Because that's what you do when a kid shows up ready to be taken seriously.

Five years later, at AlienCon 2023, Monty came back.

He was not a kid anymore. He was a young man — older, taller, more formed, carrying the kind of quiet confidence that comes from spending years thinking seriously about something most people dismiss. He found the booth. He found Chuck. And the recognition on both sides of that reunion was one of the most genuinely moving moments of the entire weekend.

This is why you show up. Not just for the established fans, not just for the peers and the fellow researchers and the celebrity guests — but for the twelve-year-old who wanders up to a booth at a convention and has their curiosity met with respect instead of condescension. You have no idea what you're planting. You find out five years later when they come back.

Monty, if you're reading this: you're exactly the reason the Sasquatch Syndicate exists.

Dawayne Zazeski's First Event: A Hazing Story for the Ages

Now. We have to talk about Dawayne.

Dawayne Zazeski came to the Sasquatch Syndicate during COVID the way a lot of unexpected things arrive during COVID — sideways, without a clear invitation, through a conversation that started with something like "can you help with this" and ended with a life pivot neither party fully anticipated.

Chuck reached out. Dawayne came aboard. And somewhere in the middle of a global pandemic, while the world was mostly standing still, Dawayne found himself in what he has described, accurately, as a situation he did not entirely plan for. His own summary of the experience captures it perfectly: "What am I even doing here? Why me?"

The honest answer, which Chuck knows and Dawayne has since come to understand, is: because you're exactly right for it. The right person for this kind of work is not always the one who seeks it out loudest. Sometimes it's the one who gets pulled in sideways and discovers, once they're in it, that it fits.

But Dawayne had not yet fully discovered that at AlienCon 2023. AlienCon 2023 was where the discovery happened. Publicly. In front of a large crowd. With cameras.

It started with the booth. Dawayne was experiencing his first event from the other side of the table — not as an attendee, not as a fan navigating the floor, but as a member of the Sasquatch Syndicate team responsible for engaging with visitors, answering questions, representing the organization, and generally performing the role of someone who knows what they're doing.

He was doing fine. The crowds were great. The fans were warm and generous and full of genuine curiosity. Dawayne was finding his footing.  He was recognized in a way he had not been before - the expert.   The Co-Host from the Sasquatch Syndicate Youtube Show, by a fan literally wanting the baseball hat that Dawayne was wearing right off of his sweaty head.   Dawayne obliged and even signed an autograph with his now famous DZ Signature, and obliged the fan of the Youtube Channel the photo op.  Dawayne had arrived, but he was just getting started.  

And then the media showed up.

When the local television stations arrived — cameras up, microphones live, lights cutting through the convention floor — Chuck made a decision with the calm efficiency of a man who has been waiting for exactly this moment.

He turned to Dawayne, gestured toward the cameras with the casual confidence of someone handing off a baton they've been carrying long enough, and stepped aside. Not a little aside. A go get 'em aside. Center stage on the main floor, under the full neon glow of AlienCon 2023, Dawayne Zazeski found himself blinking into a camera lens wondering how exactly this had become his life.

Chuck found a nearby seat. Settled in. Crossed his arms. And wore the expression of a senior who has just handed the freshman the microphone and is absolutely not going to intervene under any circumstances.

What happened next surprised everyone — except Chuck, who had known all along.

Dawayne handled it. Not just handled it — owned it. He found the words before the nerves could find him. He found the camera like he'd been looking for it his whole life. He found that rare, uncoachable quality that no media training in the world can manufacture: the steady, genuine conviction of someone who actually believes what they're saying. And then — because Dawayne is Dawayne — he made the news crew laugh.

The quick wit landed. The comedic timing was effortless. The local news team, who had arrived expecting a standard convention interview, found themselves in stitches on the floor of the Pasadena Convention Center while a man they'd never heard of thirty minutes ago held the room like he'd been doing this for years.

Chuck, satisfied in the way that only a mentor witnessing a precisely predicted outcome can be satisfied, quietly excused himself to the concession stand. He got a soda. He deserved it. He had seen this coming from a mile away and said nothing, which is the highest form of faith one person can place in another.
​
Welcome to the Syndicate Dawayne. Chuck called it.

Then came Star Magazine from the UK.
If local television is the warm-up, an international publication is the main stage. The questions were different. The format was different. The sense of oh this is a thing that will be read by people in another country was palpable.

Chuck observed from what could charitably be called a supportive distance and what Dawayne might characterize as standing far enough away to have plausible deniability while watching someone figure it out.

Dawayne figured it out.  

The interview went well. The questions were answered. The Sasquatch Syndicate was represented with the warmth, credibility, and genuine conviction that it deserved. And afterward, when the cameras were packed up and the notebooks were closed, Dawayne looked at Chuck with the expression of a person who has just completed a rite of passage and is not entirely sure whether to be grateful, annoyed or relieved.  

All the above, probably. All is the right answer.

Welcome to the band, Dawayne. You earned it. The mic is yours.

The Artist Alley Advantage
One of the particular pleasures of AlienCon 2023 was the Artist Alley — a dedicated section of the convention floor where creators, illustrators, and makers set up alongside the main vendor area.

The Sasquatch Syndicate used this to strategic advantage. With presence on both sides of the conference — the main booth and the Artist Alley positioning — we could catch different streams of traffic, engage different types of attendees, and give the team space to breathe while keeping the brand active across more of the floor. It worked beautifully. The cross-pollination between the comic and cartoon work we're developing and the more traditional research-and-merchandise side of our presence gave visitors a fuller picture of what Sasquatch Syndicate actually is — not just an investigation organization, but a creative property with an expanding universe.

The conversations that started at the Artist Alley end of things were a different quality than the ones at the main booth — more focused on the creative process, the hero-team narrative structure, the visual language of the work. Both were valuable. Together they made for a fuller, richer weekend of engagement than any single table could have produced.

The Hugs. The Stories. The Familiar Faces.
Here is the thing about a community that has been gathering around the same organization for five years across multiple conferences: it starts to feel like a family reunion.

The fans who came back. The people who told us they'd listened to every episode. The witnesses who found us at an earlier AlienCon and had been waiting for a chance to tell us what happened in the years since. The couples who had met at AlienCon events and came back to the booth to introduce us to each other. The parents who brought their kids because the kid had discovered the show and needed to see it was real.

Hugs were exchanged. Stories were shared. Some of those stories went directly into the research files. Others just went into the heart, the way experiences do when they remind you that the work you're doing has found the people it was meant to find.

That is what AlienCon gave the Sasquatch Syndicate over five conferences: a community. Not just a platform, not just exposure, but actual human connection with people who care about the same questions we care about and trust us to pursue them with integrity.

A Letter to the History Channel and Ancient AliensWe want to say this clearly and publicly, because it deserves to be said clearly and publicly:

Thank you, History Channel. Thank you, Ancient Aliens. Thank you to the producers, the talent, the production teams, and the event organizers who believed in the Sasquatch Syndicate enough to welcome us into the AlienCon family across five conferences and multiple years.

You gave us a stage. You gave us a community. You gave us the credibility that comes from being part of a platform that takes these questions seriously at scale. And you gave us, perhaps most valuably, the opportunity to stand in a room full of people who were already primed to hear what we had to say and to discover that the conversation about Bigfoot and the conversation about the broader unexplained are not separate conversations — they are the same one.
We remain committed supporters of everything Ancient Aliens and the History Channel does in this space. If you ever need the Sasquatch Syndicate — for content, for consultation, for programming that explores the intersection of cryptid research and the broader universe of unexplained phenomena — we are there. Unreservedly and enthusiastically, we are there.

The circuit may have closed. The community hasn't.

Goodbye, AlienCon. We'll Carry You Forward.
To every fan, every fellow researcher, every witness who found their way to the Sasquatch Syndicate booth across five AlienCon events — we love you. This community is not an abstract concept to us. It is made of specific faces, specific conversations, specific moments of recognition that have accumulated over years into something we did not expect to build and are profoundly grateful to have.

To the AlienCon community that may be finding us for the first time through wherever the regional events have taken you: welcome. The booth may not always be in a convention hall, but the Sasquatch Syndicate is always here. The podcast is here. The research is here. The mission is very much still here.

And to Dawayne: you did great. Chuck saw every second of it, from a comfortable observational distance. He was proud. He just wasn't going to tell you that immediately because where's the fun in that.

The search continues. The community remains.

Sasquatch Syndicate is a Washington State-based podcast and nonprofit dedicated to Bigfoot research, eyewitness outreach, and the pursuit of the Pacific Northwest's greatest mystery. Find us wherever you stream podcasts and follow us for upcoming events and episodes.

A special thank you to the History Channel, Ancient Aliens, and the entire AlienCon family for five extraordinary years. You have our committed support always.

BELIEVE 

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Let's be transparent right from the top — because the Sasquatch Syndicate has never been in the business of telling you what you want to hear when the truth is more interesting.

Heroes Convention 2022 was not our biggest crowd moment. It was not the triumphant, banner-waving, fans-lined-around-the-building debut of the Sasquatch Syndicate comic series that the most optimistic version of our pre-trip imagination had sketched out on the whiteboard. On the Chuck Geveshausen Completely Honest Convention Experience Scale, we're going to call it a five out of ten — decent, productive, educational, and worth every single bit of what we invested in it.

Just maybe not in the way we originally planned.

Here's what happened when a Pacific Northwest Bigfoot podcast and production team took their brand-new comic series to one of the oldest, most comics-serious conventions in America, staffed a booth that looked genuinely excellent, moved some merch, and discovered — completely unexpectedly — that the most valuable education of the weekend was going to come from the artists, writers, and storyboarders who were there for the craft and not the celebrity.

This is the story of a humbling weekend that became a launchpad. And those are almost always the best kind.

Heroes Convention: Forty Years of Comics First
Before we talk about what happened to us, it's worth understanding exactly what we walked into — because HeroesCon is not a general pop culture convention that happens to have a comics section. It is, as it has been since Shelton Drum founded it in Charlotte in 1982, a convention organized around comics almost to the exclusion of everything else.

No TV stars. No movie celebrities. No video game tournaments eating up real estate that could go to ink-on-paper storytellers. HeroesCon is comics, comics creators, comics artists, comics writers, comics retailers, and the fans who love them — pure and focused and completely unapologetic about what it is. After two years of COVID cancellations that left a noticeable gap in the community, the Fantastic 40th Anniversary show in June 2022 came back with energy and attendance to match: 50,000 persons attending, filling the Charlotte Convention Center with the specific electricity of people who are genuinely, deeply glad to be back in the same room together.

The guest list was built, as it always is at HeroesCon, almost entirely on creative reputation rather than Hollywood adjacency. Comic legends. Eisner Award winners. Inkers, writers, colorists, pencilers — the actual machinery of the art form, showing up in person and accessible to fans who wanted to talk craft rather than snap a selfie with someone from a streaming show.

This is the room we walked into with our Sasquatch Syndicate comic series, our merchandise, our booth, and our enthusiasm. And this is where the education began.

The Booth: Looked Great. We Did Okay.
The setup was solid. We're not going to understate that part — the Sasquatch Syndicate booth at HeroesCon 2022 was visually strong, well-organized, and represented the comic and the brand with the quality both deserved. The cartoon character lineup was on display, the comic series front and center, merchandise arranged in a way that invited engagement rather than just passive glancing.

The traffic was decent. The merch moved at a rate that justified the exercise. People stopped, looked, asked questions, picked things up, and — crucially — discovered for what was, for many of them, the first time that Bigfoot had a comic series. That moment of discovery — the slight double-take, the wait, this is actually a thing expression — was one we'd see repeatedly across the weekend and would come to understand as exactly the kind of reaction that plants seeds even when it doesn't immediately convert to a sale.

But let's be clear: the lines were not around the block. The crowd volume at our booth was not what we'd seen at AlienCon, where the audience came pre-loaded with enthusiasm for anything unexplained. HeroesCon attendees came for comics they already knew, creators they already followed, art styles they already loved. A Bigfoot investigation podcast with a new comic series was an unknown quantity in that room — and unknown quantities at a deeply comics-savvy convention require a different kind of conversation than the one we were practiced at having.

We were better at the mic than the Artist Alley. And HeroesCon was very much an Artist Alley kind of room. That gap between what we were and what the room wanted was not a failure. It was data. Very useful, very honest, very productive data delivered over three days by 50,000 people who knew exactly what they liked.

The Unexpected Education: When the Artists Started Talking
Here is where HeroesCon 2022 transformed from a decent-but-not-spectacular event into something genuinely invaluable.  The conversation we had not anticipated — the one that snuck up on us across the weekend and kept getting richer the more we leaned into it — was the conversation with the creative professionals. The storyboarders. The artists. The writers. The people who make comics for a living and were at HeroesCon because this is their world, their community, their annual gathering of peers.

When those people came to our booth — and they did, with the particular kind of curiosity that creative professionals bring to anything that is trying to do something they haven't seen before — the conversation was entirely different from anything we were used to having on a convention floor.

They were not asking about Bigfoot evidence. They were not sharing witness accounts. They were not debating the Patterson-Gimlin film.

They were looking at the character design and asking about the visual language choices. They were examining the storyboard structure and talking about pacing. They were thinking about the hero team dynamic and suggesting narrative frameworks we hadn't considered. They were engaging with the comic as a comic — as a piece of sequential art with its own internal logic, its own visual grammar, its own creative problems to solve.

And in doing so, they taught us things about our own project that we didn't know we needed to know.

The storyboarder who spent twenty minutes at the booth dissecting how the panel transitions worked — or didn't — and offering specific technical suggestions about how to carry momentum from one page to the next. The writer who asked about the character motivations behind the hero team and pushed back productively on the mythology structure in ways that made the whole concept stronger. The artist who looked at the character lineup, pointed at specific design elements, and said this works, this doesn't quite work yet, here's why with the direct honesty that only someone who has solved these problems themselves can offer.
​
We came to HeroesCon with a comic. We left with a much better understanding of what our comic needed to become.  That is not a five-out-of-ten outcome dressed up as a ten. That is genuinely what happened. The crowd volume was middling. The creative education was exceptional. Both things are true simultaneously and neither cancels the other out.

About the Art, Not the Mic
This was the core lesson of HeroesCon 2022, and we want to say it plainly because it shaped everything we did with the comic afterward:

The Sasquatch Syndicate built its identity behind the microphone. The podcast, the interviews, the witness testimonies, the research conversations — all of it lives in the audio space, in the spoken word, in Chuck's ability to draw a story out of someone and let it breathe. That's the core product and it's a very good one.

But a comic is not a podcast. A comic is a visual medium with its own demands, its own craft requirements, its own community of practitioners who have spent careers thinking about how sequential art works. Walking into HeroesCon and expecting the comic to be received the same way a podcast appearance is received was like showing up to a jazz festival with a country album — not wrong, not bad, just requiring a translation layer that we hadn't fully built yet.

HeroesCon forced us to build that layer. It forced us to engage with the comic as a comic rather than as a podcast with pictures attached. And the creative professionals who wandered over and asked hard questions about the art did us an enormous favor by treating our project seriously enough to critique it honestly.

The mic is Chuck's home. The page is a different territory. HeroesCon 2022 was the weekend we learned to respect the difference.

Opening Doors: The Convention Circuit Expands
Here is where the five-out-of-ten weekend reveals its actual value on the ledger.

The conversations at HeroesCon — with convention staff, with fellow exhibitors, with the broader community of people who move through the comic convention circuit — opened doors that the Sasquatch Syndicate had not previously had access to. Other conventions became aware of us. Interest came from event organizers who had seen the concept and could see its potential even if the HeroesCon crowd hadn't fully warmed to it yet.

The comic itself, by existing and being present and being visible at one of the most respected conventions in the country, earned a kind of credibility that comes only from showing up in the right rooms and doing the work. Not a home run. Not a sellout crowd. But a legitimate at-bat at a very serious stadium, and a contact that kept the ball in play.
That is the long game of convention touring, and HeroesCon was an important early chapter in it. The Sasquatch Syndicate message — that there's a Bigfoot story to tell that works in comics, in animation, in a hero team format that brings new audiences to the research — had been planted in a community that knows how to evaluate those stories. Some of those seeds are still growing.

What Charlotte Gave Us
Charlotte itself was a fine host — a real city with real food and real character, the kind of place that the convention circuit sometimes overlooks because it isn't New York or San Diego but has its own particular energy that rewards the people who pay attention to it.

The Charlotte Convention Center handled 50,000 people returning to HeroesCon after two pandemic years with the organized efficiency of an event that has been doing this since 1982 and knew how to gear back up. The first anniversary show back after COVID always carries extra weight — the relief of being together again, the slightly raw enthusiasm of people who went without this thing they love for too long — and the Fantastic 40th had that quality in every corner of the floor.

Being part of that return, even from a booth that was finding its footing in unfamiliar territory, felt like the right thing to do. You show up. You participate. You contribute to the energy of the room even when the room's energy isn't entirely pointed at you. That's what the convention circuit requires and it's what we gave.

The Honest Scorecard
We promised honesty at the top and we're going to close with it.

Heroes Convention 2022 was not Sasquatch Syndicate's biggest hit. The crowd reception at the booth was solid but not spectacular — a five out of ten moment in a run that has included some genuine tens. The comic had not yet found its full comic convention voice, and HeroesCon's audience was sophisticated enough to notice that gap and not fill it with politeness.

What it was: the most productive creative education we received in a single weekend from people who knew what they were talking about. A market research exercise conducted by 50,000 comics experts who gave us honest signals about what the project needed. A foot in the door of a convention circuit that would go on to give the Sasquatch Syndicate opportunities the AlienCon world alone couldn't have provided. And a reminder that sometimes the most valuable weekend is the one where you learn the most rather than sell the most.

The cartoon got better because of HeroesCon.  The comic idea got sharper.
The next convention floor we walked onto, we knew things we hadn't known in Charlotte.

That's a win. It just took a minute to look like one.    We won't sugar coat it though we were a fish out of water in a big Sea.   We will rethink our strategy on this going forward.​

The story — on the page, behind the mic, and everywhere in between — continues.

By Chanelle Elaine Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Another cancelled stamp. Another date that was going to mean something and now means something different.
Bigfoot Days in Estes Park, Colorado — scheduled for Sunday, April 18th, 2021 at the Estes Park Events Complex — has been cancelled, and we wanted to come to you directly with an update and with some thoughts about where the Sasquatch Syndicate goes from here.

When the Town of Estes Park reached out about Bigfoot Days, we said yes immediately. Of course we did. After the year that 2020 was — Emerald City Comic Con cancelled, the entire conference circuit dark, the booths and the autograph lines and the community conversations that sustain this organization simply gone — the idea of a free, family-friendly outdoor event in one of the most beautiful settings in the Rocky Mountains, with live music and food and vendors and the kind of open-air format that felt genuinely possible in a world still finding its post-pandemic footing, was exactly the kind of lifeline we needed. Estes Park is a Town Signature Event with full municipal backing. The concept was strong. The location was extraordinary. The Sasquatch Syndicate's name was on the flyer alongside the Rocky Mountain skyline and we were genuinely excited about what it could become.

And then it was cancelled.

We are not going to pretend this one didn't land differently than the others. It did. Because Bigfoot Days was not just another conference slot — it was the signal we had been waiting for that the path back to live events was finally opening up. Instead, that stamp across the flyer tells us the path is still longer and more uncertain than any of us hoped when we were telling ourselves that 2021 would be the year things returned to normal.

They have not returned to normal. And the Sasquatch Syndicate has to be clear with itself, and with you, about what that means going forward.

The conference circuit was never just where we went to shake hands and take photos and sell merchandise — though we loved every second of all of that. It was a primary engine of the funding and momentum that kept this organization running. AlienCon, the International Bigfoot Conference, Rose City, Emerald City, the Sasquatch Summit — those events fueled the Syndicate in ways that went far beyond weekend booth revenue. They generated relationships, media attention, creative feedback, community investment, and the kind of organizational energy that is very hard to manufacture in its absence. When they went dark, a significant part of what powered this organization went dark with them.

We cannot wait for the world to give us back something it may not return to us in the same form. That is not a sustainable posture, and it is not who the Sasquatch Syndicate is. We did not build this organization by waiting for conditions to be perfect. We built it by moving forward under imperfect conditions and figuring it out as we went.
So that is what we are doing.

The honest reality is that 2020 forced something the Sasquatch Syndicate had been building toward anyway — a serious shift into video and digital media. When the conference floors went dark and the merchandise events dried up, we turned the cameras on ourselves and started learning. And learning is exactly the right word for where we are. Video production is a different discipline than podcast production, different from a conference booth, different from everything the Syndicate had built its public identity around from 2016 through 2019. The curve is real. The learning is ongoing. There have been moments of genuine progress and moments of genuine humility, and we have experienced both in roughly equal measure over the past year.

What we can tell you is that we have not stopped. The video work that began in 2020 — raw, imperfect, and built on the same passion and commitment that launched the podcast — is continuing into 2021 and beyond. We are learning the medium. We are getting better at it. The Sasquatch Syndicate YouTube presence is growing, the content is evolving, and every episode we produce teaches us something we didn't know when we started. That is how this organization has always operated — show up, do the work, get better, keep going.

The broader strategic shift is also underway. The live conference model — the booths, the merchandise events, the floor presence that defined so much of our public identity — is stepping back while we build the organizational infrastructure that does not require a convention center to function. That means accelerating the development of the cartoon and comic concepts that have been in progress since those early Emerald City appearances when we first put sketch ideas in front of a pop culture audience and watched them respond. It means investing in digital and broadcast in ways that can reach this community regardless of whether any of us can get on a plane and set up a table. It means building something that survives the next disruption because it is not dependent on any single model of how we connect with you.

This is not a retreat. It is a recalibration. The Sasquatch Syndicate has spent five years building one of the most recognizable brands in this research space — from a podcast with a speaking slot at AlienCon Santa Clara to an organization that brought Bob Gimlin to Pasadena, introduced him to Erich von Däniken at dinner, put Dr. Jeff Meldrum in front of a sold-out Dallas convention center, earned a conversation with the New York Times, and documented a 17x9-inch impression in the deep woods of the Olympic Peninsula that was verified by two of the most credentialed names in the field. That is not the record of an organization that folds when the conference circuit goes quiet. It is the record of an organization that finds another way.

We are finding another way.

To the Town of Estes Park and everyone who worked to make Bigfoot Days a reality — thank you. The Rocky Mountains deserve a great Bigfoot event, and we genuinely hope that day still comes. To every fan who saw our name on that flyer and started making plans — we are sorry the circumstances made this impossible. To everyone who has supported this organization through two years of cancellations, pivots, and uncertainty — your patience and your loyalty are not taken for granted. Not for a single day.

The Syndicate is still here. Still working. Still learning. The direction is changing, but the mission is not.
More soon.
​
By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

To our Sasquatch Syndicate family, our friends in Seattle, and everyone who was planning to find us at the Washington State Convention Center this year — we owe you an update, and we want to come to you directly.
Emerald City Comic Con 2020 has been cancelled.

We know. We feel it too.

This was not a decision anyone made lightly. ReedPop and the ECCC team did everything in their power to make 2020 work — first postponing from the original March 12–15 dates to a rescheduled August window, exploring every possible path to get nearly 100,000 fans, exhibitors, artists, and community members back into the Washington State Convention Center in some form. In the end, with COVID-19 cases rising in King County and Washington State still navigating the earliest and most uncertain phases of reopening, the call to cancel was not just the right one — it was the only one. We support it fully, and we have nothing but respect for the ECCC team and everything they tried to do to save this event for their community.

For us, the cancellation stings in a particular way. This was going to be our third year at Emerald City Comic Con, and we were coming in with more momentum and more clarity about what the Sasquatch Syndicate brings to a pop culture audience than at any point in our history on this circuit. The first year we learned the room — 95,000 people, our first taste of what it means to represent Bigfoot research inside one of the largest pop culture conventions in the Pacific Northwest, and the education that comes from being thrown into something that big without a roadmap. The second year we applied everything we had learned — a better booth, a sharper visual identity, a Bigfoot costume that stopped people in their tracks, and early sketch concepts for the Sasquatch Syndicate cartoon and comic direction that we put directly in front of a pop culture audience and let them respond to honestly. The feedback we got in that second year shaped the creative direction of the Syndicate in ways we are still building on.

The third year was supposed to be the one where all of that learning became something fully realized. We had our booth confirmed. We had our plans made. We were ready in a way that takes years of showing up to get to. And then March arrived.

We all know what March 2020 brought. The Sasquatch Syndicate is a Pacific Northwest organization. Seattle is our city in the deepest sense — the city whose forests and mountains and coastline form the backdrop of everything this research community is built around. Watching our hometown become one of the earliest and hardest-hit epicenters of a global pandemic, and watching Emerald City Comic Con — one of the great celebrations of Pacific Northwest creative culture — get pulled from the calendar first to summer and then to nowhere, was something that landed differently than a typical event cancellation. It felt personal. Because for us, it was.

The convention circuit has been one of the most vital threads of how the Sasquatch Syndicate connects with its community. AlienCon, the International Bigfoot Conference, Rose City, Emerald City — each event a different audience, a different energy, a different set of conversations that simply cannot happen any other way. There is no digital substitute for standing across a table from a fan who has been listening to the show for three years and finally gets to say what it meant to them in person. There is no podcast episode that replicates the moment someone picks up a Sasquatch figurine, turns it over in their hands, and asks their first real question about what the evidence actually shows. Those moments live on convention floors, and convention floors are closed.

What we want you to know — what we need you to know — is that the Sasquatch Syndicate has not gone quiet just because the world has. The research continues. The podcast continues. The creative development continues. The work of documenting and investigating the evidence that something extraordinary shares this planet with us does not require a convention hall. It requires commitment, and that is the one thing no pandemic can cancel.

We think about the fans who were planning to come to Seattle. The listeners who had their badges ready, their weekend mapped out, their excitement building for months around what was going to be our most polished ECCC appearance yet. That anticipation was real, and losing the chance to meet you this year is a genuine loss that we are not going to minimize by wrapping it in optimism we don't entirely feel right now.

So instead we will say simply: we are sorry. Not for circumstances outside anyone's control — no apology covers a pandemic — but for the disappointment of a moment that was building toward something and got interrupted before it arrived. We feel that interruption too. We were looking forward to Seattle as much as you were.

Emerald City Comic Con will return. When it does, we intend to be there. And when we walk back into that Washington State Convention Center — whenever the world decides it is safe to gather again in the way that events like this require — we will bring everything we have been building in the time between. Every lesson from three years on the convention circuit. Every piece of the cartoon and comic concept still in development. Every bit of the momentum that COVID-19 has paused but has not, and will not, extinguish.

To the ECCC team and ReedPop — thank you for fighting as hard as you did to make 2020 work, and for making the right call when fighting was no longer enough. The community you have built in Seattle is one of the great ones, and it will be waiting when the doors open again.

To our Sasquatch Syndicate community everywhere — stay safe. Stay curious. Keep asking the questions that don't have easy answers. The forests are still out there. The evidence is still accumulating. And we are still here, doing the work, waiting for the day we can bring it back to you in person.

We will see you on the other side of this.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

After Pasadena, we could have coasted. We didn't.   The momentum from AlienCon 2018 was real, it was documented, and it was pointing somewhere worth going. The Sasquatch Syndicate had proven something in California — that Bigfoot research had a genuine and enthusiastic audience inside the Ancient Aliens universe, that the crossover between cryptozoology and ufology was not a stretch but a natural overlap that audiences were hungry for, and that when you put the right people in front of that crowd something remarkable happens. The question heading into 2019 was not whether to keep going. The question was how to go bigger.

AlienCon had its own answer. For 2019 the History Channel and Mischief Management took the event east for the first time, landing at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas — a venue that is exactly what it sounds like: massive, gleaming, unapologetically Texas, and built for events that intend to make an impression. This was AlienCon's first time in Dallas, and the city received it the way Dallas receives most things it decides it likes — enthusiastically and at full volume. The event sold out. The crowds were enormous. The energy inside that convention center on a Saturday in early October 2019 was the kind of thing you feel before you see it.

There was a strategic reality to navigate going in. AlienCon's programming focus for the 2019 cycle had sharpened around UFOs and UAP disclosure — topics that were genuinely accelerating in mainstream awareness that year and that the History Channel was positioned to capitalize on. Bigfoot was not the marquee subject. The Sasquatch Syndicate was placed in the artist and show alley rather than the main floor, a configuration that reflected AlienCon's UFO-forward priorities for the Dallas run. We understood the logic. We also understood that placement on a floor plan and impact on an audience are two entirely different things, and we had no intention of letting one determine the other.

So we played our strongest card.

What Pasadena had confirmed was that within the Ancient Aliens audience UFOs were the primary draw and Bigfoot was a very close second. The overlap was real and it ran deep. People who spent their weekends consuming Ancient Aliens content were the same people who had grown up wondering about the forests of the Pacific Northwest, who had watched the Patterson-Gimlin footage dozens of times and never quite shaken the question. That audience did not need to be converted. They needed a reason to find us. Dr. Jeff Meldrum gave them one.

Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University, author of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, the most credentialed academic voice in Bigfoot research on the planet, and a man with his own established ties to History Channel programming — Dr. Meldrum as a featured special guest at the Sasquatch Syndicate booth was not a minor announcement. It was a statement. And Dallas responded to it exactly the way we hoped. When the doors opened on October 4th and word spread that Dr. Jeff Meldrum was at the Sasquatch Syndicate booth alongside Chuck Geveshausen — signing autographs, taking photos, and engaging with anyone who wanted to talk about footprint morphology, cast analysis, and the science behind the search — the artist alley ceased to be a secondary destination. It became the destination.

The line that formed at our booth was something none of us had fully prepared for. Fans who had been following the Sasquatch Syndicate podcast for months and years finally got to meet Chuck in person — to shake his hand, take a photo, get an autograph, and tell him what the show had meant to them. Those moments are never routine, no matter how many times they happen. Every person who comes through a line like that is bringing something real with them — a story, an encounter of their own, a question they've been sitting with, a simple gratitude for a podcast that made them feel less alone in what they believe. Chuck met every single one of them the same way he always does: with full attention, genuine warmth, and the absolute certainty that the person in front of him matters. Dr. Meldrum, characteristically, brought his own quiet authority to every interaction — patient, precise, and genuinely interested in what fans had to say. The combination of the two of them at the same table was exactly as powerful as we had hoped it would be.

Before the convention floor even opened, the weekend had already started in the best possible way. Giorgio A. Tsoukalos — the face of Ancient Aliens, arguably the most recognizable figure in the entire paranormal research world — sat down with Chuck and the Syndicate crew before the event with his wife Krix. What followed was one of those conversations that has no agenda and no endpoint and is all the better for it. Bigfoot stories, UFO stories, the places where the two worlds intersect and sometimes become indistinguishable from each other — Giorgio is a man of genuine curiosity and genuine warmth, and having that relaxed, unhurried time with him before the doors opened set the tone for everything that followed. Krix was wonderful company and the kind of person who makes you feel like you've known the whole group for years. It was a genuinely great way to start a weekend.

Our booth was placed directly next to Caroline Cory — filmmaker, consciousness researcher, and one of the most thoughtful voices on the AlienCon circuit. Proximity on a convention floor has a way of creating connections that scheduled meetings never quite replicate, and spending time with Caroline across the weekend was one of the unexpected gifts of the Dallas placement. Her work sits at a fascinating intersection of science, consciousness, and the unexplained, and the conversations that flowed between our two booths over three days were exactly the kind of cross-pollination that makes events like AlienCon genuinely valuable beyond the panels and the photo ops.

Richard Dolan — historian, author, and one of the most respected voices in UFO disclosure research — spent time with us at the booth, and what he brought to the conversation was the kind of historical and institutional context that reframes everything else you hear over a convention weekend. Dolan has spent decades documenting the government's relationship with the UFO phenomenon with a rigor and a sourcing discipline that holds up to serious scrutiny. Hearing him talk through that history in a relaxed setting — not a panel, not a presentation, just a conversation at the booth — was genuinely illuminating. The threads between what he researches and what we document in the field are closer than most people realize, and Dallas gave us the space to pull on those threads together.

Nick Pope brought his own dimension to the weekend. Former head of the British Ministry of Defence's UFO desk, author, and one of the most credible official voices on UAP research anywhere in the world — Nick is also, it turns out, excellent company at a hotel bar after a long day on the convention floor. We found ourselves sitting with him over drinks one evening, the kind of conversation that starts with one topic and wanders comfortably through a dozen others before anyone thinks to look at the time. UFO policy, government disclosure, the cultural moment we are all living through as the mainstream world finally begins to take these questions seriously — and inevitably, Bigfoot. Because with Nick Pope, if you give the conversation enough room it always finds its way to the edges of what is known and what remains genuinely unexplained. That is where the best conversations live.

Now — the aluminum foil hat booth. We would be doing this recap a disservice if we didn't address it directly. Somewhere in the vendor hall at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, a booth was doing a brisk and enthusiastic business custom-fitting attendees with aluminum foil hats designed to block government mind control signals. The vendor was not joking. The customers were not joking. The hats were elaborate, personalized, and in some cases genuinely impressive in their construction. This is AlienCon. This is the full spectrum of what happens when you gather every walk of life under one roof around the shared conviction that the official story is incomplete. Sasquatch Syndicate exists in the evidence-based, methodologically rigorous end of this community, and we appreciate that the community is large enough and generous enough to also include the aluminum foil hat booth without anyone batting an eye. That is, honestly, one of the things we love about this world.

The broader AlienCon Dallas lineup was a genuine who's who of the paranormal research world. Beyond the Ancient Aliens constellation of Tsoukalos, Childress, Travis Taylor, Jason Martell, John Brandenburg, Jonathan Young, and Caroline Cory, the event also featured the entire cast of Ghost Hunters and the principals from The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch — giving attendees unprecedented access to one of the most infamous paranormal hotspots on earth. The programming across all three days covered quantum consciousness, ancient megalithic engineering, government UAP investigations, and the possibility of spacetime portals, spread across more than 150 interactive panel discussions in a sold-out convention center humming with the energy of people who are done apologizing for asking big questions.

The time Chuck spent working alongside Dr. Meldrum through the Dallas run extended well beyond the booth and the panels. Over dinners and late evenings at the Aloft Hotel after the convention floor had closed, the two of them logged conversations that Chuck has described as some of the most substantive of his time in this field — discussions about footprint morphology and pressure dynamics, cast analysis and substrate variables, locomotion theory and the proposed ichnotaxon associated with Sasquatch trackways. Dr. Meldrum is, in the truest sense of the word, a teacher. He brought that same rigor and generosity to Dallas that he brings to his laboratory in Pocatello, and the hours spent in those conversations are preserved in the Syndicate archive and reflected in everything the organization has produced since.

What Dallas confirmed, more completely than any previous event, was the philosophical position the Sasquatch Syndicate had been building toward since its earliest days: that cryptozoology, ufology, ancient mysteries, and paranormal research are not separate disciplines operating in isolated silos, but overlapping territories that deserve to be examined together, cross-referenced, and taken seriously as a unified body of human experience that mainstream science has been too slow to engage with. The AlienCon environment was the perfect proving ground for that idea. Researchers, witnesses, skeptics, broadcasters, and fringe theorists occupied the same hallways, the same panels, and the same late-night bar conversations. Sasquatch Syndicate leaned directly into that overlap, and Dallas was the most complete expression of it we had yet managed.

Mischief Management was paying attention. The audience pull developing around the Syndicate's appearances — the lines, the conversations spilling into adjacent aisles, the crossover traffic between the main Ancient Aliens programming and our corner of the show floor — was something the people who produce these events did not miss. What had begun in Santa Clara as a podcast with a speaking slot had become, by Dallas, something the AlienCon production apparatus was actively factoring into its conversations about where the circuit was heading next.

To the AlienCon and Mischief Management teams — thank you for Dallas, for the placement, and for building something that makes these conversations possible. To Dr. Jeff Meldrum — every event with you adds something irreplaceable to this archive. To Giorgio and Krix Tsoukalos — thank you for your time and warmth before the doors opened. To Caroline Cory — the best neighbor on any convention floor we have ever had. To Richard Dolan — the history matters, and so does the conversation. To Nick Pope — some of the best hours of that weekend happened at that bar. To the aluminum foil hat vendor — we respect the craft. And to every fan who found their way to the artist alley, waited in line, and made it the place to be — that is always you. It is always for you.
​
Explore. Question. Believe.

​By Chanelle Elaine Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

The Baltimore Convention Center sits at 1 West Pratt Street, right on the Inner Harbor, one of the great American waterfront settings — old brick, November cold off the Chesapeake, the skyline of a city that has been a port of entry for ideas and people for three hundred years. When the History Channel and Mischief Management chose Baltimore as the site of the first-ever East Coast AlienCon, they chose well. The city received it like a city that had been waiting for exactly this kind of weekend without quite knowing it. The Baltimore Convention Center filled up, the merchandise sold out by midday Saturday, and the panels drew the kind of sustained, packed-room attention that tells you the audience came to engage, not just to spectate.
The Sasquatch Syndicate was there. Dr. Jeff Meldrum was with us. And the East Coast, it turned out, was very ready for both.

Pasadena had been the proof of concept — the demonstration that Bigfoot research had a real and enthusiastic audience inside the Ancient Aliens universe, that the crossover between cryptozoology and ufology was genuine and deep, and that when you put Dr. Meldrum's academic credibility in front of that crowd something specific and irreplaceable happens. Baltimore was the proof that Pasadena was not a California phenomenon. It was everywhere. The East Coast had its own version of that audience — slightly more policy-aware, more conversant with the disclosure conversation that was accelerating through official channels, more likely to have come from Washington D.C. or Philadelphia or up the Amtrak corridor from New York — and they found us at the booth with the same questions, the same enthusiasm, and the same fundamental curiosity about what the physical evidence in the forests of the Pacific Northwest actually shows.

The lines that formed at the Sasquatch Syndicate booth were something. Chuck and Dr. Meldrum working the table together across three days — autographs, photo ops, conversations that ranged from footprint morphology to the broader question of what science owes the subject of Sasquatch in terms of serious institutional attention — drew people who had come to Baltimore for Ancient Aliens and found themselves staying for Bigfoot. That conversion is not accidental. It is the result of putting the right people in front of the right audience with the right framing, and Baltimore proved it worked just as well on the Eastern Seaboard as it had in Southern California.

The broader AlienCon Baltimore guest constellation was one of the strongest the circuit had assembled. Giorgio A. Tsoukalos anchored the Ancient Aliens programming with the energy and genuine enthusiasm he brings to every room he walks into — a man who has been having the ancient astronaut conversation for decades and has not lost an ounce of his investment in it. Erich von Däniken, at 83 still the intellectual foundation upon which the entire AlienCon universe rests, was present for a golden anniversary forum marking fifty years since Chariots of the Gods changed the way an entire generation thought about human origins. Standing in the same building as the man who wrote that book, five months after we had introduced him to Bob Gimlin over dinner at Del Frisco's in Pasadena, had a particular resonance that was not lost on any of us.

Richard Dolan brought the rigor and the historical depth that had made him one of the most compelling voices at our Dallas booth the following year — here in Baltimore, a year earlier, those conversations were happening for the first time, and they were just as illuminating. His documentation of the government's relationship with the UFO phenomenon, built over decades of archival research and sourced with the care of an academic historian, reframes everything else you hear at an event like this. Sitting with Richard Dolan and talking about the intersection of disclosure and cryptozoology — the ways in which the institutional suppression of UAP information and the institutional dismissal of Sasquatch evidence share a common cultural root — was one of those conversations that keeps giving long after the convention floor has closed.

Nick Pope, sharp and generous as ever, brought his Ministry of Defence perspective to Baltimore just as he would bring it to Dallas the following October. David Childress brought the encyclopedic breadth of archaeological and historical research that makes him one of the most reliably engaging people on the AlienCon circuit. Caroline Cory, whose consciousness research and group regression sessions had become signature AlienCon programming, occupied the space between science and the unexplained with the thoughtful rigor she brings to everything. On the celebrity side, Jenna Coleman of Doctor Who and Michael Dorn and Robert Picardo of the various Star Trek franchises brought their own particular constituencies into the convention center — science fiction fans who crossed paths with the ancient astronaut and cryptozoological communities and found, often to their surprise, that the overlap was more natural than they had expected.

The evenings in Baltimore had their own quality. The Inner Harbor in November is not a summer destination — it is a working waterfront in the grip of autumn cold, a setting that drives good conversations indoors and keeps them going longer than they might elsewhere. Dinners ran long. The backroom conversations that are the real currency of any AlienCon weekend — the ones that happen after the panels and the autograph sessions, in the hotel lobby and the restaurant booths and the quieter corners of the convention center — were particularly rich in Baltimore. The East Coast universe of researchers, journalists, broadcasters, and investigators who showed up for this event was different in texture from the California crowd, and the three days of cross-pollination that resulted were some of the most substantive the Syndicate had experienced on the circuit.

Chuck was in his element from the first hour to the last. Three full days of meeting fans, hearing stories, engaging with the research community, and doing the work that the Sasquatch Syndicate was built to do — taking the question of Sasquatch evidence seriously, presenting it seriously, and finding the overlap with every other unexplained phenomenon in the same room without apologizing for any of it. Dr. Meldrum matched him with the patient, precise authority of someone who has spent three decades doing exactly this and knows the value of every individual conversation.

Baltimore was the East Coast debut. It would not be the last time we came this direction. The evidence that the AlienCon audience — regardless of geography — was ready for the bridge the Sasquatch Syndicate was building between cryptozoology, ufology, and the broader universe of the unexplained was now documented on both coasts. The circuit was working. The momentum was real. And Dallas, eleven months away, was already taking shape in our thinking.

To the AlienCon and Mischief Management teams — thank you for bringing this to the East Coast and for making room for us in it from the beginning. To Dr. Jeff Meldrum — Baltimore was another chapter worth keeping. To Giorgio, Erich, Richard, Nick, Caroline, David, and the entire constellation that made this weekend what it was — thank you for the conversations, the generosity, and the community you have built around the questions that matter. To Jenna Coleman, Michael Dorn, and Robert Picardo — it is always a pleasure to share a convention floor with people who understand what it means to inhabit a universe that is larger and stranger than the one we are handed by default. And to every fan who found the Sasquatch Syndicate booth in Baltimore and stood in that line — you are always the reason.

Explore. Question. Believe.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Rose City Comic Con is something special. Founded right here in the Pacific Northwest by Ron and Paula Brister, RCCC has grown from a scrappy one-day event into one of the premier comic conventions on the West Coast — and it has done it while maintaining something larger conventions sometimes lose along the way: a genuine soul. Portland's creative community runs deep, and it shows in every corner of the Oregon Convention Center during RCCC weekend. The cosplay is inventive and occasionally extraordinary. The artist alley is one of the largest on the West Coast. The energy is unmistakably Pacific Northwest — warm, weird, and completely welcoming.

The Sasquatch Syndicate was invited as a nonprofit exhibitor, and that invitation meant the world to us. Having our booth provided by the event was an incredible gesture of support from the Rose City Comic Con team, and it's one we don't take lightly. To the organizers — Ron Brister and everyone who made our participation possible — thank you. Genuinely. Providing that space to a Bigfoot research nonprofit says something about who you are and what you believe this community is for. We showed up ready to make it count.

The Booth
This was a different booth than the one we'd been running at Bigfoot-specific conferences. Rose City Comic Con demanded a pop culture presence, and we brought one. Sasquatch Syndicate figurines and collectibles shared table space with our full merchandise lineup — apparel, hats, mugs, podcast promotions, the works. The figurines were a particular hit. There is something about a well-made Sasquatch figure that stops people mid-stride regardless of how familiar they are with the research side of this world. One moment they're on their way to the Doctor Who autograph line, and the next they're holding a Sasquatch figure asking where Bigfoot has been sighted near Portland. That's the magic of the right object on the right table.

We also brought something we were genuinely excited to get feedback on: early sketch concepts for the Sasquatch Syndicate cartoon and print direction. Getting those ideas in front of a pop culture convention crowd — people who live and breathe comic art and animation — was invaluable. Convention audiences don't sugarcoat. They tell you what they think immediately and completely, and the feedback we received over three days pushed our creative development in directions that internal conversations never quite reach. Every reaction, every suggestion, every "have you considered this?" was fuel. We came away from Rose City with a significantly clearer picture of where the cartoon and comic concept is heading, and that clarity was worth the trip on its own.

Sunday With Wes Germer - Sasquatch Chronicles
One week after crossing paths with Wes Germer of Sasquatch Chronicles at the International Bigfoot Conference in Kennewick, we invited him to come spend Sunday with us at the booth. Sasquatch Chronicles is based out of the Vancouver, Washington area, which puts Portland squarely in home territory — and having Wes come down to hang with the Syndicate crew for the day was exactly as good as it sounds.

We cracked open some beers, settled in, and just spent real time together. Two weeks in a row with Wes was an added bonus we hadn't anticipated and thoroughly appreciated. Getting that extended time to hear more about his journey — how he built Sasquatch Chronicles into one of the most listened-to Bigfoot podcasts in the world, what the early days looked like, what he's learned about this community over years of doing this — was genuinely valuable. Chuck continues to build the Sasquatch Syndicate project with all that entails, and sitting across from someone who has already traveled a significant portion of that road and is willing to share what he found along the way is something you don't take for granted. Wes is a great guy. Easy company, generous with his time, and a genuine pleasure to spend a Sunday afternoon with.

Tombstone at Rose City — A Gift for Wes from us and the Bigfoot Community
Anyone who listens to Sasquatch Chronicles knows that Wes Germer is a devoted fan of the 1993 film Tombstone. The poker quotes, the Doc Holliday references, the general deep appreciation for that particular piece of cinematic history — it's woven into the fabric of the show. So when we found out that Rose City Comic Con 2018 had Michael Biehn — Johnny Ringo himself — and Martin Kove in the building, we didn't hesitate for a second. We got Wes the ticket and a VIP photo op with the Tombstone cast. Our treat.

Watching someone who quotes that film the way Wes does get to stand next to the man who played Johnny Ringo — the ice-cold antagonist to Val Kilmer's legendary Doc Holliday — was one of those convention moments that transcends the convention entirely. It became a memory. The kind you tell people about. We were glad we could make it happen, and from the look on Wes's face, we're pretty sure he was too.  

The Convention, The City, The Community
The broader RCCC 2018 guest lineup was exceptional — David Tennant, Karl Urban, Michael Rooker, Ralph Macchio, Billy Zabka, the Star Trek: TNG reunion of Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, and Gates McFadden, and many more filling the Oregon Convention Center with the kind of energy that keeps Portland hotel rooms booked solid all weekend. We stayed at the Portland Marriott downtown and rode the MAX Light Rail to and from the convention each day — a genuinely pleasant way to move through a city that has figured out some things others are still working on.

The final night cosplay event was something we hadn't fully anticipated and fully stayed for. If you've never seen a Pacific Northwest crowd in full costume celebrating at the end of a convention weekend, it's an experience that's hard to describe and easy to remember.

Throughout the weekend the Bigfoot community showed up for us in the way it always does — curious, enthusiastic, and full of stories. New faces discovered the Syndicate. Familiar ones stopped to catch up. Every conversation added something, and we left Portland with more momentum on the creative side of this project than we'd arrived with.

To the Rose City Comic Con team — thank you for the invitation, the booth, and making us feel like a genuine part of this event. To Wes Germer — two weekends in a row and we'd do it again without a second thought. To Michael Biehn and Martin Kove — thank you for making a Sunday in Portland unforgettable for a fellow podcaster who really loves that movie. And to every member of the Bigfoot community who came out to find us at the Oregon Convention Center — this is always for you.
​
We'll see you out there.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Year three. We know this room.  Walking into the Three Rivers Convention Center in Kennewick for the third consecutive year carries a completely different feeling than that first time. The nerves are long gone. The learning curve is behind us. What remains is something better — the easy confidence of a team that belongs here, surrounded by a community that knows it. By 2018, the International Bigfoot Conference had become one of the true anchors of the Sasquatch Syndicate calendar, and pulling into that parking lot on the Columbia River felt exactly like it should: like coming back to something we love.

Russell Accord has built something genuinely special in eastern Washington. The IBC's philosophy — evidence-based, open-minded, big enough to hold both the scientific and the experiential wings of this field under one roof without apology — is exactly the kind of environment where the Sasquatch Syndicate thrives. Three years in, that alignment feels as natural as breathing, and the event itself keeps getting sharper, larger, and more essential to this community with every passing year.

The booth was dialed in. By year three you know what works, what draws people in, what keeps them there. Merchandise, podcast promotions, autographs, photos — the operation ran smoothly and the response from the community was as strong as we've ever seen it. Returning listeners found us like old friends. New faces discovered the Syndicate for the first time and stayed long enough to become regulars before the weekend was out. Families, researchers, enthusiasts, skeptics, true believers — the IBC draws the full spectrum, and more than a few of the faces coming through our booth this year were ones we recognized from the year before. That's what happens when you keep showing up. The community grows with you.

Our neighbors on the floor made this year even more memorable. Right next to us was none other than Travis Walton — the man whose 1975 abduction experience in the Arizona White Mountains became one of the most documented and debated cases in UFO history, and whose story was immortalized in the film Fire in the Sky. We had crossed paths with Travis previously at AlienCon, so seeing him set up in the adjacent booth felt like running into a familiar face in the best possible way. The proximity made for some fascinating cross-pollination of audiences throughout the weekend — Bigfoot enthusiasts wandering over to hear Travis's story, UFO researchers finding their way to our cast displays, and more than a few attendees who were deeply invested in both worlds simultaneously. In this community, that overlap is more common than people outside it might expect, and having Travis right there beside us added a dimension to the weekend that we hadn't anticipated and thoroughly enjoyed.

Now — the people.

Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University and the foremost academic authority on Sasquatch physical evidence, has become a genuine friend and collaborator to the Syndicate. What began at a previous IBC as a chance encounter over a banner that needed hanging has grown into a professional relationship we value deeply. At this point, seeing Jeff at the conference feels like catching up with a colleague who always has something worth saying — and there were several conversations worth having this weekend.

Cliff Barackman remains one of the most enjoyable presences on the entire conference circuit. Sharp, funny, deeply knowledgeable, and completely approachable no matter how many times you've shared a room. Cliff has that rare quality of making every conversation feel like the first one, and the fans who get time with him at IBC always walk away better for it.

Wes Germer of Sasquatch Chronicles was one of the weekend's most memorable encounters, and not just because of the hoodies. Wes is a pioneer in this space — Sasquatch Chronicles built one of the largest and most loyal audiences in the Bigfoot podcast world through authenticity, consistency, and a profound respect for the witnesses who trust the platform with their stories. Chuck and Wes sat down together for a real conversation — not a formal interview, just two people who love this subject comparing notes on what the journey actually looks like from the inside. They swapped hoodies. The fans who saw it loved every second of it, and rightly so. This wasn't two shows competing for the same audience — it was two people from the same community, doing the same work from different angles, acknowledging each other's place in it. Chuck is building the Sasquatch Syndicate project with everything that entails. Wes has already built something remarkable and was generous enough to share what that road looks like. The hoodie swap was a small gesture. What it represented was anything but.

Derek Randles of the Olympic Project is, at this point, a valued and familiar presence in the Syndicate's world. Conference conversations have grown into a genuine working relationship over the years, and the chance to spend time with Derek at IBC is always an opportunity to go deeper on the most rigorous field investigation operation in the Pacific Northwest. There is always something new happening in Derek's territory, and he is always worth listening to.

And anchoring the entire weekend, as he does every year with extraordinary grace, was the legendary Bob Gimlin — the man who rode into Bluff Creek on October 20th, 1967 alongside Roger Patterson and came back with 59 seconds of 16mm film that has never been conclusively debunked in over fifty years. Spending time in Bob Gimlin's orbit never loses its weight. The humility with which he carries one of the most extraordinary experiences in American outdoor history is genuinely moving, and the room goes appropriately quiet when he speaks. Some things don't get old. Bob Gimlin is one of them.

The Film Festival programming continued to showcase the best documentary work being produced in this field — advance screenings, new perspectives, production quality that climbs every year. The IBC Film Festival has become one of the genuinely exciting components of the weekend, and 2018 continued that trajectory.

We took somewhere north of a hundred photos over the course of the conference. Familiar faces from previous years, new listeners finding the booth for the first time, researchers and speakers and community members who make this event what it is. Every conversation, every story shared across the booth table, every person who said "I've been following you since the beginning" — we heard every one of you, and we are grateful for every one of you.

Sunday came too soon — and for us, it came even sooner than planned. Fires in the region forced an early departure before the final day's programming concluded, which was genuinely one of the harder calls we've had to make at a conference. Leaving the IBC before it's over is not something we do lightly. But the road home demanded it, and we said our goodbyes knowing we'd be back.

We always come back.

To Russell Acord and the entire IBC team — thank you for what you continue to build in Kennewick. Three years in, it only keeps getting better, and that doesn't happen without real dedication to this community. To Travis Walton, for being the best neighbor on the conference floor — it was a genuine pleasure to share the space with you. To Wes Germer, for the conversation and the hoodie — the Syndicate family appreciates you more than we probably said out loud. And to everyone who came through that booth over three days — you are the reason this is worth doing.

The Pacific Northwest is Sasquatch country. Kennewick, where the Columbia bends and the high desert meets the river, is as good a place as any to gather and remind each other of that fact.

We'll see you out there.

​​​By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

There are events you attend. And then there are events you survive — not because anything went wrong, but because everything went so spectacularly, overwhelmingly, magnificently right that by Sunday evening you are operating on adrenaline, conviction, and the memory of something you know you will be talking about for the rest of your life. AlienCon Pasadena 2018 was the latter. Every single second of it. Let me back up. 

Where It Started — Santa Clara 2016 
To understand what Pasadena meant, you have to understand what came before it. The inaugural AlienCon in Santa Clara, California — produced by HISTORY, A+E Networks, the Ancient Aliens organization, Cosmic-Con, and Famous Monsters of Filmland — took place at the Santa Clara Convention Center over Halloween weekend, October 28–30, 2016. Sasquatch Syndicate took the Friday evening Bigfoot speaking slot to a packed house of roughly 150 attendees, opening for the late, great investigative journalist Jim Marrs of Crossfire and Alien Agenda fame. We shared the weekend with Giorgio Tsoukalos, the late Erich von Däniken, David Childress, Linda Moulton Howe, Nick Pope, and George Noory of Coast to Coast AM. It was a smashing success. And it planted a seed. So when AlienCon moved south for its Pasadena edition in June 2018, we didn't just show up. We showed up big. 

Going Big — Bob Gimlin Comes to AlienCon 
The Sasquatch Syndicate attended Pasadena with a full crew, operating as part of the Mischief Management production era and arriving with a plan that went well beyond a booth and some merchandise. Working alongside Jeff Byers of Creatureplica and Russell Acord — founder of the International Bigfoot Conference and Bob Gimlin's handler — we brought Bob Gimlin himself to AlienCon as our special guest. Read that again. Bob Gimlin. At AlienCon. At the Sasquatch Syndicate booth. The man who rode into Bluff Creek on October 20th, 1967 alongside Roger Patterson. The man who came back with 59 seconds of 16mm film that has never been conclusively debunked in over fifty years.

The living legend of the Patterson-Gimlin film, standing at our booth, greeting fans, signing autographs, taking photos — in a convention center packed with somewhere between 45,000 and 55,000 people who had come to Pasadena to explore the unexplained. It was, to use the only accurate word available: a sensation. The moment word spread through the convention floor that Bob Gimlin was at the Sasquatch Syndicate booth, something shifted in the energy of the entire event. People who had been moving purposefully toward panels and photo ops suddenly changed direction. Lines formed. Crowds gathered. Fans who had grown up watching the Patterson-Gimlin film, who had spent decades wondering about those 59 seconds of footage, found themselves standing a few feet away from one of the two men who were actually there.

The reactions were extraordinary — tears, disbelief, reverence, joy. Grown adults who had followed this subject their entire lives meeting Bob Gimlin for the first time and simply not knowing what to say. Chuck handled it with the grace and warmth he always brings to these moments. Bob, as he always does, carried the weight of history with humility and patience and genuine appreciation for every single person who came to the booth. The combination of the two of them together — Chuck's energy and Bob's gravitas — was magnetic in a way that drew people in and kept them there. I watched it happen in real time. It was something. 

The Prediction — Russell Acord and the Intuitive 
Now. This is the part of the weekend I have to tell you about carefully, because it is not the kind of story you can adequately prepare people for. On the first day of the event, Russell Acord — founder of the International Bigfoot Conference, researcher, author, and the man who had made Bob Gimlin's appearance at our booth possible — walked up to the Sasquatch Syndicate area. As he stepped out onto the convention floor, a psychic intuitive stopped him. She looked at him and told him something big was going to happen to him. Russell paused. He looked at Chuck with an expression I can only describe as someone who has just seen something they didn't expect to see and isn't entirely sure what to do with it. Chuck said, "What did she say?" Russell told him. None of us knew what to make of it in that moment.

You're at AlienCon, surrounded by fifty thousand people exploring the outer edges of human experience, and a psychic intuitive stops the founder of the International Bigfoot Conference on the convention floor and delivers a message. You log it. You move on. You don't forget it. What we know now, looking back, is that Russell Acord went on to Expedition Bigfoot — the Travel Channel series that brought his name and his work to a national television audience and introduced an entirely new generation to serious Sasquatch field investigation. Was it a result of that moment on the floor in Pasadena? Was it Russell's hard work, his decades of commitment to this research, his credibility and his relationships in the field? Was something genuinely in the air that weekend in Southern California? We may never know. But something was set in motion in that convention center. Of that, I have no doubt whatsoever. Does Chuck have the Midas touch? Some believe so. I've seen enough at this point to keep an open mind. 

The Interviews — New York Times, Ideate TV, and the Full Circus 
If the booth and Bob Gimlin's presence weren't enough to fill a weekend's worth of stories, the media attention that descended on the Sasquatch Syndicate at AlienCon Pasadena certainly was. Chuck was pulled aside for an interview with the New York Times. The New York Times. If you want a single data point that tells you how far the Sasquatch Syndicate had come from a podcast launched on passion and conviction, that is your data point. The most widely read newspaper in the United States wanted to talk to Chuck Geveshausen about Bigfoot research, about the community, about what brings fifty thousand people to a convention center in Pasadena, California to explore questions that mainstream culture still largely treats as a punchline.

Chuck gave them the conversation it deserved — serious, articulate, grounded, and fully representative of what this organization stands for. Bob Gimlin was interviewed by Ideate TV, adding another chapter to the extraordinary media record of a man who has been telling his story for over fifty years and never once wavered in how he tells it. The volume of requests — interviews, photo ops, conversations, panel appearances — across the three days was genuinely staggering. A full crew running at full capacity from the moment the doors opened to the moment they closed, every day, for three days straight. The kind of exhaustion that only comes from doing something you completely love at maximum intensity. 

The Dinner — Del Frisco's, Pasadena
Some evenings exist outside the normal flow of time. They happen, and even while they're happening you know they belong to a different category than regular life. Dinner at Del Frisco's in Pasadena on Saturday evening was one of those.

Del Frisco's is the right room for a moment that deserves to be marked properly. White tablecloths. Serious steaks. The kind of lighting and atmosphere that tells everyone at the table that what's happening here matters. We brought Bob Gimlin. And across the table, we introduced him to Erich von Däniken.

Let that land for a moment.

Erich von Däniken — the Swiss author whose 1968 masterwork Chariots of the Gods proposed that extraterrestrials had visited Earth in antiquity, sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages, and permanently altered the way an entire generation of human beings thought about our origins and our place in the universe. The man whose ideas launched a cultural conversation that is still happening, still expanding, and still provoking exactly the kind of questions that events like AlienCon exist to explore.

And sitting across from him: Bob Gimlin. The man who rode into Bluff Creek, Northern California on October 20th, 1967 alongside Roger Patterson. The man who watched something walk across that riverbed and has never once changed his account of what he saw. The man whose 59 seconds of 16mm film remains the most analyzed, most debated, most scrutinized piece of alleged cryptid evidence in human history — and has never been conclusively debunked.

Two men who changed the conversation. Two legends of the unexplained. Meeting for the first time. Over dinner. In Pasadena. Because the Sasquatch Syndicate put them in the same room.

Chuck made the introduction. The conversation that followed was everything you would hope it would be — warm, curious, genuine, two people who have spent their lives asking questions that the mainstream world is only slowly catching up to, finding in each other a kind of mutual recognition that doesn't require explanation. Von Däniken listening to Bob. Bob listening to von Däniken. The rest of us at that table trying to absorb the fact that this was actually happening.

There are things you do in this work that you know will matter. Research trips and cast collections and podcast episodes and conference booths — all of it matters, all of it builds something. And then there are singular moments that exist on a different level entirely. Moments that no planning fully accounts for and no recap fully captures.  The night Bob Gimlin met Erich von Däniken at Del Frisco's in Pasadena, California, is one of those moments. The Sasquatch Syndicate was there. We made it happen. And we will never forget a single second of it.

The Weekend — AlienCon at Its Best 
The broader AlienCon experience in Pasadena was everything the History Channel and Mischief Management had built toward. Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, the late Erich von Däniken, David Childress, Nick Pope, and the full Ancient Aliens constellation were present, filling panels and signing autographs for a community that treats these names with the kind of reverence usually reserved for rock stars. The programming was dense, genuinely thought-provoking, and spread across a convention center humming with the energy of tens of thousands of people who are done apologizing for asking big questions. 

FanCons.com 
And then there was dinner. On one of the evenings, the Sasquatch Syndicate crew took Bob Gimlin to Del Frisco's in Pasadena for dinner. If you know Del Frisco's, you know it's the right place for a moment that deserves to be marked properly — white tablecloths, serious steaks, the kind of room where a conversation feels like it has weight. And the conversation that evening had more weight than most. We introduced Bob Gimlin to the late Erich von Däniken. 

The author of Chariots of the Gods — the man whose 1968 book proposed that extraterrestrials had visited Earth in antiquity and sold tens of millions of copies in the process, fundamentally changing how an entire generation thought about human history — sitting across from the man who was there at Bluff Creek in 1967 when something walked in front of a 16mm camera and into history. Two men whose work sits at the intersection of the unexplained. Two legends of their respective fields, meeting for the first time over dinner at Del Frisco's in Pasadena, California, with the Sasquatch Syndicate at the table. 

We made that happen and sitting there watching it unfold, I thought: this is what this organization is capable of when it operates at its full potential. Not just research. Not just podcasting. Not just conferences and booths and merchandise. Moments. Genuine, unrepeatable, historic moments that put the right people in the same room and let something remarkable happen. 

What It All Meant 
AlienCon Pasadena 2018 was the second time we attended this event and the first time we truly understood what we were capable of bringing to it. We came in 2016 as a podcast with a speaking slot. We came in 2018 as an organization with a special guest, a crew, a media presence, and a dinner reservation at Del Frisco's. The thousands of Sasquatch Syndicate fans who came through that booth over three days — who waited in line to meet Bob Gimlin, who stopped to talk to Chuck, who picked up merchandise and took photos and shared their own stories of encounters in forests from Washington to Florida — they are the reason any of this exists. Every single one of them. Bob Gimlin, at well over eighty years old, stood at that booth and gave every fan who came through the same generous, patient, gracious version of himself.

That kind of character doesn't develop at a convention. It's who someone is. And being the organization that brought Bob Gimlin to AlienCon — that gave fifty thousand people the chance to meet him in that setting — is something we will always be proud of. Russell Acord stood on the convention floor while a psychic told him something big was coming. He looked at Chuck like he'd seen a ghost. We still think about that. The New York Times came to talk about Bigfoot. We gave them the best conversation we knew how to have. 

The late Erich von Däniken and Bob Gimlin met at dinner. The Sasquatch Syndicate introduced them. Some weekends write themselves. This one wrote itself in ink that doesn't wash out. To the AlienCon and Mischief Management teams — thank you for what you built and for making room for us in it. To Bob Gimlin — it is always an honor. To Russell Acord — whatever that intuitive set in motion, we were glad to be there when it started. To every fan who came to that booth in Pasadena — you made it everything it was. 

Expand, Explore. Engage. Question. Believe.

​By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Nothing quite prepares you for 95,000 people descending on your hometown in full cosplay. We're talking floor-to-ceiling stormtroopers, Groot impersonators who somehow managed to get their foam armor through a revolving door, and enough Marvel characters to stage a genuine Avengers assembly in the lobby. Emerald City Comicon 2018 was a spectacle unlike anything most people ever step into — and right in the thick of it, with a significantly improved booth and a whole lot of lessons learned from the year before, was the Sasquatch Syndicate.

We came back. And this time, we came prepared.

Our Washington State nonprofit had one mission in 2017: show up, learn the room, and figure out what Sasquatch Syndicate looks like inside a pop culture convention. Mission accomplished — and the education was invaluable. What we learned was simple: ECCC is a visual universe, and a podcast without a visual identity is a whisper in a very loud room. So for 2018 we fixed that.

The booth was better. Sharper. More intentional. And we brought a secret weapon: a full Bigfoot costume. An actual human being inside a full sasquatch suit, standing at the booth, greeting attendees, posing for photos, and stopping foot traffic cold. Because if there is one thing that will make 95,000 cosplayers stop mid-stride in a convention hall, it is a genuinely good Bigfoot costume operated with commitment and enthusiasm. It worked magnificently.

We also brought something we were genuinely excited about — early sketch concepts for a Sasquatch Syndicate cartoon and print direction. One of the big questions we wanted answered was whether the visual world we were imagining for the Syndicate resonated with a pop culture audience. So we put the sketches in front of people and asked for real, unfiltered feedback. Convention crowds do not sugarcoat. They tell you exactly what they think, within about four seconds, and that kind of raw audience response is worth more than a year of internal debate. The feedback was enormously helpful and pointed us in directions we hadn't fully considered.

The Booth That Stopped People in Their Tracks

From the moment the doors opened, the booth became a destination. The pro bono area of ECCC is a fantastic, community-driven corner of the convention floor where nonprofits and local organizations share space alongside some of the most dedicated fan communities on the planet. For Sasquatch Syndicate, it was the right stage — and in year two, we knew how to use it.

Chuck Geveshausen was in his element from the first hour. Chuck has this infectious energy when it comes to talking about Bigfoot — the kind of enthusiasm that makes a skeptic lean in and say "okay, tell me more." And tell them he did. Hundreds of people filtered through that booth over four days, and Chuck greeted every single one of them with the same fire he'd have had on day one. The Bigfoot suit didn't hurt either.

We have to give a massive shoutout to Josh — you know who you are — for helping us carve out the time to actually breathe, step out onto the floor, and experience the convention between shifts. Without Josh holding things down, we might never have made it past our own table. He made sure Chuck and the team got to enjoy the magic happening all around them, and that meant everything.

95,000 Fans and Most of Them Had an Opinion About Bigfoot

Here's what you need to understand about Comicon crowds: these are people who deeply, fiercely love things. They drive from Oregon and British Columbia and fly in from across the country and around the world because pop culture matters to them. So when they walked past a Bigfoot booth with an actual sasquatch standing in front of it, they didn't shrug and keep walking — they engaged.

We met eyewitnesses. Legitimate, emotional, credible people who pulled us aside and shared their encounters in hushed, serious tones. We met lifelong enthusiasts who recognized our material and lit up like it was Christmas morning. We did autograph signings, poster signings, and photo ops that drew genuine crowds. We talked shop with fans of every Bigfoot-related show on television — people who had spent years watching, theorizing, and believing.

The convention featured incredible celebrity guests throughout the weekend. David Tennant brought Doctor Who fans out in droves. Christopher Lloyd and Tom Wilson had Back to the Future fans lined up around the building. The energy across the entire floor was extraordinary — and the energy at our table was its own kind of electric.

The Moment That Changed Everything: Our International Visitors

This is the part of the weekend that will never be forgotten.

Emerald City Comicon draws an international crowd. Seattle is a hub city, a gateway to Asia-Pacific, home to massive tech companies with global workforces. So we had visitors from Japan, South Korea, and Canada stopping by the booth — and their reaction to the Bigfoot costume, to the research, to the concept of a real ongoing investigation into an unknown Pacific Northwest creature, was something none of us were prepared for.

Several visitors — particularly from Korea and Japan — approached with genuine curiosity and a single question: "Is this a comic? Is Bigfoot like... Godzilla?"

Once Chuck started walking them through the witness accounts, the history, the cultural significance of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest — eyes went wide. Phones came out. Questions were flying. A few visitors who had wandered over for a quick look ended up staying for twenty, thirty minutes. One group from Japan was so enthusiastic that they extended an invitation — they wanted us to come to Japan, to attend and speak at a conference.

We were deeply honored. Genuinely. And we were devastated that our schedule was already locked. But the fact that a weekend at a Seattle comic convention could plant a Bigfoot seed in the minds of international visitors and potentially open doors to the Asia-Pacific community — that is the kind of thing that reminds you why this work matters.

A Hometown Weekend We Won't Forget
Seattle is our city. The Pacific Northwest is our backyard, our territory, the land where the legend lives. There was something profoundly right about being at Emerald City Comicon — in our own Washington State Convention Center — surrounded by the energy of people who love a great story, and telling them the greatest story our region has to offer.

Chuck Geveshausen poured his heart into every conversation at that booth. The Sasquatch Syndicate showed up as a proud Washington State nonprofit, with a better booth, a sasquatch in costume, and sketch concepts in hand — and walked away with new connections, new believers, real creative feedback, and a memory bank that will last a lifetime.
To the thousands of fans who stopped by — thank you. To the eyewitnesses who trusted us with your stories — we hear you and we believe you. To our international guests who discovered Bigfoot for the first time under the lights of a Seattle comic convention — welcome to the search.

And to Josh: thank you for making sure we actually got to live the moment, not just work through it.

​By Chanelle Elaine Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Ocean Shores in November is exactly what it sounds like. The Pacific is cold and close, the sky comes down low over the coast, the firs are dark against the grey, and somewhere in the Great Hall of the Quinault Beach Resort and Casino, a few hundred people who have been waiting all year for this weekend are finding their seats. This is the Sasquatch Summit. This is home territory. And the Sasquatch Syndicate was grateful to be back.

The fifth annual Sasquatch Summit — November 17th through 19th, 2017 — was everything the Quinault Beach Resort has come to represent for this community: warm, welcoming, professionally organized, and set in one of the most naturally appropriate locations on the Pacific Coast for a conference dedicated to the Pacific Northwest's most enduring mystery. Johnny Manson and his team have built something genuinely rare here. In a field that can sometimes feel fragmented, the Sasquatch Summit is the conference that pulls everyone together — science-based researchers and paranormal theorists, veteran investigators and first-time attendees, skeptics and true believers — and gives all of them a room where the conversation can happen without anyone having to defend why they showed up.

That philosophy was evident from the first moment Friday evening, when the Great Hall opened for vendors and the meet-and-greet that kicks off the Summit weekend. The energy in that room was immediate. People who had driven from across the Pacific Northwest, and from considerably further, arrived with the specific enthusiasm of a community that does not get enough weekends like this one. By the time the evening's audio analysis lecture and Witness Town Hall were underway, the room was full in the way that only happens when the subject genuinely matters to the people in the chairs.
The speaker lineup for 2017 was one of the strongest the Sasquatch Summit had assembled. Thomas Sewid — Native American commercial fisherman and lifelong Sasquatch researcher whose knowledge of the British Columbia coastal region and its encounter history is among the most grounded and culturally rooted perspectives in the entire field — was one of the keynote presenters, and his combination of traditional ecological knowledge and firsthand experience gave the weekend a depth that purely academic presentations cannot replicate. Scott Taylor of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization brought the methodological rigor that makes the BFRO's field investigation work worth paying attention to. Cindy Dosen addressed hair analysis — one of the more technically demanding areas of physical evidence evaluation and one that rarely gets the detailed treatment it deserves at a public conference. David Ellis brought his expertise in audio analyzation, a discipline that has produced some of the most compelling and debated evidence in the Sasquatch research catalogue.

Derek Randles of the Olympic Project — a man the Sasquatch Syndicate has come to know well and respect deeply — presented with the authority of someone who has spent more hours in the Olympic Peninsula terrain than perhaps anyone alive, building a field investigation operation that remains the gold standard for rigorous, location-specific research in the Pacific Northwest. Mike Paterson of Sasquatch Ontario brought the eastern Canadian perspective that reminds the American-dominant Bigfoot research community that this phenomenon has no national borders. And Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University and the foremost academic voice in Sasquatch research anywhere in the world, was present — as he so often is when the conversation is serious — to anchor the scientific framework of the weekend's discussions.

Saturday opened with a tribal blessing — a tradition at the Sasquatch Summit that grounds the entire event in the Indigenous cultural context that predates every researcher and every conference by generations. The name Sasquatch itself comes from the Halkomelem language of the Coast Salish peoples, and beginning the main conference day with a recognition of that lineage is one of the things that separates the Summit from events that treat the subject as purely a modern pop culture phenomenon. The day moved through studies, Q&A sessions, evidence presentations, and the kind of open conversation that only happens when the speakers are accessible and the audience is genuinely engaged. Sunday's small-group workshops — capped at fifteen attendees per session and covering themed research topics in rotating hour-long intervals — sold out in advance as they consistently do, and represented the most intensive learning opportunity the weekend offered.

For the Sasquatch Syndicate, the three days were a full immersion in everything this community is at its best. The booth was active from the first evening through the final workshop. Photo ops, conversations, discussions that started at the merch table and moved to the hallway and then continued over dinner — the kind of organic, sustained engagement that conference weekends make possible and that no podcast episode can fully replicate. The fans and listeners who stopped by to say hello, share their own encounter accounts, ask about the show's direction, or simply shake a hand and take a photo — every one of those interactions is the reason the Sasquatch Syndicate exists. Every single one. The Summit gives us a chance to remember that in the most direct and human way possible, and we are always better for it.

The Quinault Beach Resort and Casino deserves its own paragraph of gratitude, because the venue is not incidental to what makes the Sasquatch Summit work. The Great Hall is a proper event space in a proper resort setting — comfortable, well-staffed, and managed with the hospitality that makes a three-day conference feel like a weekend retreat rather than an endurance exercise. The accommodations are excellent. The on-site dining is real. The Pacific Coast setting — an easy ninety minutes from Olympia, the Washington coast stretching in both directions with the kind of raw, weather-beaten beauty that reminds you exactly what kind of country this is — is the right backdrop for the right conference. The Quinault Beach Resort takes this event seriously, and it shows in every detail of how the weekend is hosted. We are grateful for every room, every meal, and every night spent on the coast in their care.

To Johnny Manson and the entire Sasquatch Summit team — thank you. What you have built in Ocean Shores since 2013 is something this community needed and continues to need. The philosophy of the Summit — broad, inclusive, evidence-respecting, community-first — is the philosophy that keeps this field honest and keeps the conversation productive. You ran out of chairs in 2016. The Summit keeps growing because it keeps earning it. That does not happen by accident. It happens because the people running it love the subject and love the community in equal measure, and it shows every November.
To Grays Harbor County and Ocean Shores — thank you for being Sasquatch country in every sense. The history here, the sightings database, the culture, the landscape, the Indigenous knowledge that precedes all of it — there is no better place for a conference like this, and no better community to host it.

Research. Share. Believe.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Let me just say this right up front: if you have never attended a Bigfoot conference, the Team Squatchin USA Bigfoot University at the Baymont Inn & Suites in Bremerton, Washington is an absolutely magnificent place to start. And if you have attended every Bigfoot conference on the circuit and think you've seen it all — Bremerton will find a way to surprise you. Trust me on that.

April 22nd through the 24th, 2017. Three days. The Kitsap Peninsula. A hotel conference room that somehow contained more genuine enthusiasm, more wild ideas, more heart, and more pure unfiltered love for this subject than most venues three times its size. Chuck, Paul, and the Sasquatch Syndicate team rolled in ready for a great weekend — and Bremerton delivered in every possible direction.

Team Squatchin USA, for those unfamiliar, operates under a philosophy that is distinct from the more traditionally science-driven corners of the Bigfoot research world. Their focus is habituation — the patient, respectful practice of building coexistence with Sasquatch rather than pursuing or proving them. Patience. Respect. Observation. Coexistence. Those four words were literally on the chalkboard in the Bigfoot University branding, and they weren't just marketing copy. They represented the genuine worldview of the people in that room, and it made for a community unlike any other in this field. You could feel it the moment you walked through the doors.

The speakers brought a fascinating range of perspectives across the three days — habituation researchers, witness testimony, field investigators, theorists covering everything from wildlife ecology to the far more expansive questions about what Sasquatch actually is and how it moves through the world. The conversation at Team Squatchin USA conferences has never been one-dimensional, and 2017 was no exception. You heard orthodox flesh-and-blood field research in the same hallway where someone was earnestly discussing interdimensional travel and forest portals. We cover that entire spectrum on the Syndicate, and we felt completely at home.

Now. We need to talk about the Sasquatch scanner.

We are still not entirely sure what to call it. Someone — a genuinely brilliant, clearly dedicated, absolutely committed individual — brought a homemade device to the conference that defied easy categorization. It appeared to be a combination of a radar station, a robot, and a washing machine, assembled with what we can only describe as extraordinary conviction and an impressive quantity of copper wire. It had dials. It had an antenna array. It emitted sounds. Whether it was designed to detect Sasquatch, communicate with Sasquatch, or simply intimidate Sasquatch into revealing itself, the inventor was willing to walk any interested party through the full technical specifications at considerable length. We were interested. We got the full briefing. We have no idea if it works. We hope it does. It was the most charismatic piece of equipment we have ever encountered at a conference table, and that is saying something because we have seen a lot of conference tables.

This is what we love about the Bigfoot community. Somewhere between the peer-reviewed academic research and the homemade Sasquatch-detecting appliances is a genuine, wide-open, intellectually alive conversation that you simply cannot have anywhere else. The willingness to entertain every theory, to take every experience seriously, to build a contraption in your garage and drive it to a hotel in Bremerton on the off chance that it might help — that spirit is something to be celebrated, not condescended to. We celebrate it.

The attendees at Bigfoot University 2017 came from all over the country. We met people from the deep South, from the Midwest, from the East Coast, from corners of the Pacific Northwest we'd never heard of. Every single one of them had a story. Many of them had multiple stories. And almost all of them, at some point over the three days, found their way to the Sasquatch Syndicate booth, where Chuck and Paul were doing what they do best — listening, talking, laughing, and connecting with the community that makes all of this worthwhile.

The photos we took that weekend. The conversations that spilled from the conference rooms into the hallways and the lobby and the parking lot under the Kitsap Peninsula sky. The moment someone walked past our booth carrying what appeared to be a Sasquatch call device fashioned from PVC pipe and sheer determination. The late-night discussions that wandered from track morphology to forest acoustics to the deeply personal question of what it actually means to believe something the rest of the world thinks is impossible.

This is the community. This is why we do what we do.

We want to take a moment to thank the organizers at Team Squatchin USA for everything they put into making Bigfoot University happen. Running a conference is not a small undertaking — the logistics, the speakers, the venue, the programming, the sheer organizational effort required to pull three days of this together — it takes real dedication and real love for the subject. You felt that love in every corner of the Baymont that weekend, and we are grateful to have been a part of it. The Bigfoot research community is better for having events like this, and better for having people willing to do the work to make them happen.

We'll be carrying memories from Bremerton for a long time. Some of them involving the scanner.

Learn. Share. Connect. Believe. — that's the Team Squatchin USA motto, and after a weekend like that one, we'd say they're living it.

See you out there.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Emerald City Comicon 2017 was one of the most exhilarating, humbling, educational, occasionally overwhelming, and ultimately unforgettable experiences we have had as an organization. It was also, in the most affectionate way possible, a beautiful lesson in knowing your lane — and then figuring out how to build a much, much cooler version of your lane for next time.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's set the scene.

March 2nd through the 5th, 2017. The Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle — one of the great convention venues in the country, sitting right in the heart of a city that has always had a complicated and deeply personal relationship with the Pacific Northwest's most famous unconfirmed resident. Bigfoot is Seattle lore. Bigfoot is Washington State lore. The sasquatch is practically on the state flag in spirit if not in law, and the moment you mention the subject to anyone who has spent time in the forests west of the Cascades, you get a reaction. Eyes light up. Stories come out. People who would never describe themselves as believers start telling you about the thing their uncle saw in the Cascades in 1987 and never really talked about after.

We knew this. We felt confident that the cultural overlap between a Pacific Northwest Bigfoot research podcast and the Pacific Northwest's largest pop culture convention was real and significant. We were right about that. What we perhaps did not fully anticipate was the sheer, extraordinary, sensory-overloading scale of what Emerald City Comicon actually is.

Ninety-five thousand people. Four days. One convention center. Ninety-five thousand people dressed as every character from every universe ever committed to page, screen, or imagination, moving through multiple floors of exhibits, panels, celebrity signings, gaming halls, and vendor tables with the collective energy of a very friendly, very enthusiastic, extremely costumed tidal wave. Batman walked past our booth. Then three more Batmans. A highly accurate Chewbacca. An entire family dressed as the cast of a cartoon we didn't recognize but deeply respected. A woman in a full Iron Man suit who appeared to have actual hydraulics. It was magnificent and it was a lot and it was happening continuously for four days straight.

Eventbrite
And there, somewhere in the magnificent chaos, was the Sasquatch Syndicate booth. Chuck and the team, representing a nonprofit Bigfoot research podcast, flanked by artists and comic creators and cosplay photographers and merchandise vendors who had, to put it diplomatically, a slightly more immediately legible visual identity than we did.

Here is what we learned: Emerald City Comicon is a universe built around visual storytelling. Comics. Art. Costumes. Characters. Things you can see and recognize in an instant from thirty feet away in a crowd of ten thousand people. The Sasquatch Syndicate — which is genuinely great radio, genuinely great research, and a genuinely incredible community — is, at its core, an audio experience. Walking into ECCC without a comic book, without an artist, without a costumed character, without something that communicates the entire premise in a single glance, is like showing up to a film festival with a podcast. The content is great. The medium doesn't translate in quite the same way.

This is not a complaint. This is a gift. Because now we know exactly what we're building toward.

Because here's the thing about Emerald City Comicon — the people who attended, the ones who stopped at our booth, the ones who heard "Bigfoot podcast" and immediately said "wait, tell me everything" — they were our people. Pacific Northwesterners who grew up with sasquatch as part of the landscape. Cosplayers who thought a Bigfoot costume was an inspired life choice. Kids who wanted to know if Bigfoot was real and parents who didn't want to be the ones to answer. Researchers and enthusiasts and curious skeptics and true believers who found our booth in the middle of ninety-five thousand people and stayed for twenty minutes talking about track morphology and the Olympic Peninsula and what the old-growth forests of Washington State are hiding.

The local lore runs deep in this city. Seattle knows. Washington knows. You don't have to convince anyone here that the wilderness is real, that the forests are vast, that there is more out there than anyone has catalogued. You just have to meet them where they are.

And next time, we are absolutely meeting them where they are.

Here is the plan — and we are putting it in writing because accountability matters. Next time the Sasquatch Syndicate goes to Emerald City Comicon, we are arriving with Bigfoot costumes. Full suits. Multiple team members in character. We are building a booth that looks like the Pacific Northwest wilderness — and yes, we are talking about a volcano. Maybe a miniature Mount St. Helens. Maybe some old-growth signage. Maybe fog machine. We are making the visual identity of this organization impossible to miss from the other side of a convention hall floor, because the content and the community we have built deserve a stage that matches them.

We had an absolute blast. We met incredible people, had conversations we won't forget, and came home with a clarity of vision about what the Sasquatch Syndicate's presence at a pop culture convention can and should look like when we do it right.

ECCC, we'll be back. And next time, you'll see us coming from a lot further away.

To the organizers of Emerald City Comicon — thank you for the invitation and the opportunity. To the ninety-five thousand attendees who filled that convention center with enough creative energy to power the entire city — thank you for reminding us that the audience for wonder is enormous, and that it's right here, in our own backyard.
​
We are already designing the volcano.

​By Chanelle Elaine Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

The fourth annual Sasquatch Summit at the Quinault Beach Resort and Casino in Ocean Shores, Washington on November 18th and 19th, 2016 was everything we hoped it would be and then some. If you were there, you know. If you weren't — put it on your list for next year, because this event is unlike anything else in the Bigfoot research world.

Founded by local radio host Johnny Manson, the Sasquatch Summit has built a well-deserved reputation for bringing together the full spectrum of Sasquatch research under one roof — science-based investigators, paranormal theorists, witness testimony, audio analysis, field researchers, and everyone in between. It's one of the few conferences that doesn't ask you to pick a side. It just puts the evidence in front of you and lets you make up your own mind. That philosophy aligns perfectly with what we try to do at Sasquatch Syndicate, and it's one of the reasons we were so glad to be there.

We set up our booth in the vendor hall and had an incredible time meeting all of you. Seriously — the fans and listeners who came by to say hello, share their stories, look through our cast displays, and pick up some Sasquatch Syndicate gear made the whole weekend. The Quinault Beach Resort's Great Hall was packed. The energy in that room was unlike anything you get sitting behind a microphone, and we were reminded once again why we do this. You are the reason. Every single person who stopped by the booth, shook a hand, and said "keep going" — we heard you.

We had our cast displays up, information about the Syndicate and what we've been working on, and plenty of merchandise for those who wanted to take a little piece of the Pacific Northwest home with them. Paul Bruton held down the booth like a champion, and the conversations that happened across that table were exactly what this community is built on.

The speakers and programming across both days were outstanding. Friday kicked off with guest presentations and a Witness Town Hall — one of the best formats in the conference world for raw, unfiltered encounter testimony. Saturday opened with a tribal blessing and moved through everything from track identification and Sasquatch nests to current theories and an open Q&A with all the guest speakers. The range of perspectives on display was a reminder that this field is bigger, deeper, and more serious than the outside world often gives it credit for.

And then there was Les Stroud.

If you've spent any time in this world, you know the name. Survivorman Bigfoot brought a level of credibility and genuine field curiosity to Sasquatch research that resonated far beyond the community. Getting some exclusive time with Les at the Summit was one of the highlights of the weekend for us — and out of those conversations came something we're very excited to share. Les will be joining us for a special Holiday episode of the Sasquatch Syndicate Podcast in December 2016. We sat down, compared notes, talked about what he found out there in the field, and locked it in. Stay tuned — that one is going to be worth the wait.

The Sasquatch Summit continues to grow because Johnny Manson and his team built something that actually serves this community rather than just talking at it. Grays Harbor County is Sasquatch country in every sense of the word — the history, the sightings database, the culture, the landscape. There's no better place for a conference like this, and no better venue than the Quinault Beach Resort. We'll be back.

Thank you to everyone who came out, who stopped by the booth, who shared a story or a theory or just said hello. This community is what makes all of it worthwhile.

We'll see you out there.

​By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Invited by Famous Monsters of Filmland and the Ancient Aliens team, Sasquatch Syndicate joined Giorgio Tsoukalos, George Noory, David Childress Jim Marrs, Linda Moulton Howe, Erich von Daniken and more for the inaugural AlienCon — and opened Friday night to a packed house of 150 Bigfoot believers.

There are weekends that pass quietly, and there are weekends that feel like the universe winked at you. AlienCon 2016 was very much the second kind.

When the History Channel, A+E Networks, the Ancient Aliens production team, Cosmic-Con, and the legendary Famous Monsters of Filmland announced they were joining forces to launch the first-ever AlienCon at the Santa Clara Convention Center over Halloween weekend, they promised something the convention world had never quite seen — a three-day immersive gathering of researchers, scientists, skeptics, true believers, cosplayers, podcasters, paranormal investigators, and full-tilt fans of the unexplained. What they delivered was a sold-out, electric, slightly haunted celebration of every "what if" that has ever kept a human being awake at night.

And right in the middle of it all — booth lights blazing, plaster cast tracks on display, podcast mics warm and ready — was Sasquatch Syndicate.

Why a Bigfoot Group at an Alien Convention?
The question got asked a lot during the weekend, usually by someone holding a glow-stick cocktail and a freshly autographed Erich von Daniken book. The answer is more obvious than it sounds.

AlienCon was never strictly about extraterrestrials. It was built, from day one, as a tent for the unexplained — a meeting point for cryptids, contactees, ancient mysteries, lost civilizations, monster movies, and high-strangeness research of every flavor. Famous Monsters of Filmland, one of the founding partners of the convention, had championed Bigfoot since the days of Forrest J Ackerman and the original Patterson-Gimlin frame. Ancient Aliens, in its own way, had spent years asking whether Sasquatch fit somewhere on the same map as megalithic ruins and Nazca geoglyphs.

So when the invitation came, courtesy of the Famous Monsters team and the Ancient Aliens organizers, to bring Sasquatch Syndicate into the lineup for the inaugural AlienCon, it wasn't a stretch. It was a perfect fit.

"The minute they reached out, we knew this was the right room," said John Ferguson, Business Development Officer for Sasquatch Syndicate. "Famous Monsters of Filmland and the Ancient Aliens crew understood something that a lot of conventions miss — these subjects belong together. Cryptozoology, ufology, ancient mysteries, the paranormal — they all live in the same neighborhood. They invited us specifically because Sasquatch fit perfectly with what they were building over Halloween weekend."

A Friday Night the Syndicate Won't Forget
The official speaking engagement happened Friday evening, and to put it gently — the room was stuffed. Roughly 150 attendees packed the hall to hear Sasquatch Syndicate founder and host Chuck Geveshausen take the stage to talk about the legend of Bigfoot, the science behind the search, and the work the Syndicate is doing to bring credibility, community, and genuine research to a field too often dismissed as folklore.

Chuck did what Chuck does. He worked the room. He told the stories. He laid out the data. He talked about the Syndicate's nonprofit mission to support legitimate Sasquatch research, the ongoing podcast that has become a meeting ground for witnesses and investigators, and the long-running argument that this animal — whatever it turns out to be — deserves to be studied, not laughed at. There were laughs. There were chills. There were the kind of long, attentive silences a speaker only gets when the audience is leaning in.

And then came the kicker. The slot immediately following Chuck's talk that evening belonged to none other than the late, great Jim Marrs — the legendary investigative journalist whose work on the JFK assassination ("Crossfire," the basis for Oliver Stone's "JFK") and on UFO history ("Alien Agenda") made him one of the most influential voices in alternative research for four decades. To open the night for Jim Marrs was, by any measure, a genuine honor.
"Standing on that stage Friday night, looking out at 150 people who came to hear about Bigfoot, and knowing Jim Marrs was up next — that was a moment," Ferguson said. "It was amazing to see the enthusiasm. People weren't there to be polite. They were there because they cared. They had questions. They had stories. They had encounters they'd never told anyone before. That energy is what this whole thing is about."

The Lineup — A Who's Who of the Unexplained
AlienCon 2016 read like a fever dream of every late-night radio show and cable documentary you've ever loved.
Giorgio A. Tsoukalos — yes, the hair, the man, the meme — anchored the weekend as the face of Ancient Aliens. He was joined on the main stage by his Ancient Aliens co-stars and contributors, including David Childress, the indefatigable explorer and author of the Lost Cities series, and investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe, whose decades of work on cattle mutilations, crop circles, and government UFO disclosure made her one of the weekend's biggest draws.
Coast to Coast AM host George Noory moderated panels and held court in a way only George can, turning Q&A sessions into the kind of intimate, slightly conspiratorial conversations his overnight listeners have come to love.
Author and researcher Erich von Daniken — the man who started the entire ancient astronaut conversation with "Chariots of the Gods?" back in 1968 — made a rare appearance and was treated by the crowd like the elder statesman he is.

The late Jim Marrs, as mentioned, brought his Friday night fire on JFK, the deep state, and the UFO question. Travel Channel and Ancient Aliens contributor Nick Pope, the former British Ministry of Defence UFO desk officer, walked attendees through the realities of government-level investigation. And the Famous Monsters of Filmland contingent brought a heavy dose of classic creature-feature spirit to the proceedings, complete with screenings, panels, and a costume contest that turned the convention floor into something out of a Forrest Ackerman scrapbook.
Add to that a packed schedule of breakout panels, a vendor floor crammed with researchers, authors, artists, and investigators, an exhibition of UFO photographs and artifacts, screenings of classic and new content, and an after-hours scene that turned every hotel bar within a mile of the convention center into a debate club — and you have AlienCon 2016.

Coffee, Laughs, and Tales From the Other Side

One of the moments the Sasquatch Syndicate team will be telling for the rest of their lives happened off-stage, away from the cameras.

Saturday morning, somewhere between panels, George Noory and Chuck Geveshausen ended up at the same coffee setup. What started as a polite hello turned into a long, easy conversation about long nights, strange callers, weird woods, and the kind of stories you only really tell other people who have heard them too.
"Sharing coffee and laughs with George Noory, swapping tales from the other side — that's not something you put on a business card," Ferguson said. "But moments like that are why we do this. George has heard everything. Chuck has heard a lot of it himself, just from a different angle. Watching them trade stories was a reminder that this whole field is really one big conversation, and we're all just trying to figure it out together."

Key Takeaways
A few things became unmistakably clear over the course of the weekend.

The audience for serious cryptid and paranormal research is not a fringe. It is a community, and it is enormous. A Friday-night Bigfoot talk pulling 150 people in a building also hosting Giorgio Tsoukalos, Linda Moulton Howe, Erich von Daniken, and George Noory is not a fluke. It is a signal.

The walls between fields are coming down. UFO researchers wanted to talk about Sasquatch. Bigfoot researchers wanted to ask Nick Pope about military radar data. Ancient Aliens fans were lining up at the Sasquatch Syndicate booth with tracks, photos, and stories from their own backyards. The siloing of the unexplained is ending, and AlienCon proved it.

Famous Monsters of Filmland and the Ancient Aliens organizers got it right. By inviting Sasquatch Syndicate into the founding AlienCon lineup, they signaled that cryptozoology belongs at the same table as ufology, ancient mysteries, and classic monster culture. Halloween weekend is the right time. Sasquatch is the right subject. And a packed room of 150 enthusiasts is the right proof.

Sasquatch Syndicate is going to be busy. The booth conversations alone generated more leads, witness contacts, and research collaborations than any single event the organization had attended to date.

Looking Forward

AlienCon 2016 was the first of its kind. It will not be the last. The Sasquatch Syndicate team left Santa Clara on Sunday night with hoarse voices, full notebooks, a stack of new business cards from researchers across half a dozen disciplines, and a renewed sense of why this work matters.

"This is the beginning of something," Ferguson said. "Famous Monsters of Filmland and Ancient Aliens didn't just throw a convention. They built a meeting place for everyone who has ever looked up at the sky, or out into the woods, and wondered. Sasquatch Syndicate is proud to have been part of the first one. We will absolutely be part of the next one."

For Sasquatch Syndicate — the Washington State nonprofit dedicated to advancing the research and discovery of Sasquatch — AlienCon 2016 was more than a convention appearance. It was a homecoming for a subject that has lived too long on the margins, and a reminder that when 150 people sit down on a Friday night in late October to hear about Bigfoot, the legend isn't fading. It's growing.

Halloween weekend will never be the same.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

Team Squatchin' USA's Bigfoot University rolled into the Baymont Inn & Suites in Bremerton, Washington over the weekend of April 22–24, 2016, and Sasquatch Syndicate was on the floor, behind the mic, and at the dinner table — proudly representing one of Washington's premier Bigfoot broadcast shows out of Seattle.

​If you want to know where the heart of Bigfoot research lives in this country, you don't have to look much further than a hotel ballroom on the Kitsap Peninsula in late April. That's where Dr. Matthew Johnson — "Dr. J" to anyone who's spent five minutes around him — and his Team Squatchin' USA crew set up shop for Bigfoot University 2016, a three-day deep-dive into the research, the encounters, the controversy, and the long, patient work of trying to understand the most famous unverified species on the continent.

Sasquatch Syndicate was there from the first cup of coffee on Friday morning to the last handshake on Sunday afternoon. We came down from Seattle with mics, cameras, business cards, and a simple mission — promote the podcast, promote the cause, and meet as many of the men and women doing this work as we possibly could.
We did all three. And then some.

Why Sasquatch Syndicate Showed Up
Sasquatch Syndicate is a Washington State nonprofit and broadcast podcast based in Seattle, hosted by Chuck Geveshausen, dedicated to promoting the research and discovery of Sasquatch with credibility, community, and respect for the witnesses. Bigfoot University is, in many ways, exactly the kind of room we were built for — not a cosplay convention, not a sideshow, but a working gathering of researchers, witnesses, and serious enthusiasts who actually go out into the woods.

"This was a no-brainer for us," said John Ferguson, Business Development Officer for Sasquatch Syndicate. "Dr. Johnson and Team Squatchin' USA put together exactly the kind of weekend our audience cares about. Real researchers. Real witnesses. Bob Gimlin sitting twelve feet from you. We came down from Seattle to shake every hand we could and to remind people that there's a Pacific Northwest broadcast — Sasquatch Syndicate — that takes their stories seriously."

The Host: Team Squatchin' USA and Dr. Matthew Johnson
Anyone who has spent any time inside the Bigfoot research community knows Dr. Matthew Johnson. The Oregon-based clinical psychologist became one of the most discussed figures in the field after his 2000 Oregon Caves encounter, and over the years he's built Team Squatchin' USA into one of the most active habituation and interaction research groups in the country. The Grub, Gulp, and Gab Gathering — his monthly meetup for witnesses and researchers in Western Washington — has become a kind of clearinghouse for fresh reports out of the Olympic Peninsula and beyond.

Bigfoot University was Dr. J's vision of bringing that same energy to a full weekend conference: a friendly, no-attitude, Pacific Northwest setting where people who actually go into the woods could trade notes with people who actually want to hear about it.

The Baymont Inn & Suites in Bremerton turned out to be the right room for it. Easy ferry ride from Seattle. Walking distance to a dozen places to grab a beer and keep the conversation going. And just enough quiet, classic Northwest gloom outside the windows to remind everyone exactly why we care about this subject.

The Speakers and Guests
The lineup was a real reflection of where the field actually lives — long-time researchers, working investigators, witnesses willing to go on record, and one very, very famous gentleman from Yakima.   Dr. Matthew Johnson anchored the weekend, walking the audience through his own ongoing interaction research and the philosophy that Team Squatchin' USA brings to the work — patience, presence, and respect for whatever it is that's looking back through the trees.

Thom Powell — author of The Locals and Edges of Science, longtime Oregon educator, and one of the genuinely thoughtful voices in the field — gave the kind of talk that has people pulling their notebooks out. Thom has been arguing for years that the Sasquatch question lives at the edge of biology, anthropology, and something stranger, and his sessions never fail to give the audience a fresh way to look at the data.

Thom Cantrall, the kind of warm, story-rich researcher every conference needs, brought decades of fieldwork and good humor to his time on stage. (When his planned slides mysteriously refused to cooperate, he did what any good Bigfooter does — pivoted, told the stories, and won the room.)  Barb Shupe of Squatchin' with Barb, joined by her four-legged research partner Gabby, brought one of the friendliest and most accessible talks of the weekend — a reminder that good fieldwork doesn't have to come wrapped in jargon to be valuable.

And then, of course, there was Bob Gimlin.

A Few Minutes With Bob Gimlin
There is no name in this field that lands the way Bob Gimlin's does. The man who, alongside Roger Patterson, captured 59.5 seconds of 16mm Kodachrome film at Bluff Creek on October 20, 1967 — film that has been argued over, analyzed, defended, and attacked for nearly six decades — is the closest thing the Bigfoot world has to a living legend, and he carries it with about as much humility as a person can.

Bob worked the conference the way Bob works every conference — quietly, kindly, and with an open chair next to him for anyone who wanted to talk. The Sasquatch Syndicate team was lucky enough to spend real time with him over the weekend.

"Visiting with Bob Gimlin is one of those things you don't take for granted," Ferguson said. "He's gracious. He's funny. He still answers the same questions he's been answering for fifty years like it's the first time he's heard them. To sit with him at Dr. Johnson's event, in our home state, talking about the work — that's a memory that's not going anywhere."

The Vendor Floor and the Real Community
One of the things that made Bigfoot University 2016 different from the bigger circuit conferences was the floor itself. This wasn't a wall of t-shirt printers and novelty booths. The Baymont's vendor area was packed with researchers, authors, plaster casters, audio analysts, regional research groups, and witnesses who had simply driven across the Cascades or down from the Olympics to share what they'd seen.

The Sasquatch Syndicate booth ran nonstop. Chuck Geveshausen, host of Sasquatch Syndicate, recorded interviews, traded contact info with fellow researchers, and welcomed a steady line of attendees who wanted to share their own stories on the record. The podcast picked up new witnesses, new collaborators, and a renewed sense of how big the Pacific Northwest research community actually is when it gets in the same building.

"We came down from Seattle to put a face on the show," Ferguson said. "What we left with was a stack of new contacts, new witness leads, and a real reminder that the Pacific Northwest is the center of gravity for this subject. Sasquatch Syndicate is proud to broadcast out of Seattle, and weekends like this one are why we do it."

Key Takeaways
A few things were unmistakable by the time the lights came up Sunday afternoon.  The Pacific Northwest community is alive and well. Anyone who thinks Bigfoot research is fading hasn't been to Bremerton. The Baymont was full, the talks were packed, and the side conversations in the lobby and the parking lot ran late into the night.

Team Squatchin' USA built the right kind of room. Dr. Matthew Johnson and his crew didn't put on a spectacle — they put on a working conference. Researchers got to be researchers. Witnesses got to be heard. The skeptics in the room got their fair shot too. That's a hard balance, and Bigfoot University pulled it off.

Bob Gimlin is still the heart of this field. Watching him patiently work the room — never above anyone, never tired of the question — is a lesson in how to carry a legacy.

Sasquatch Syndicate found its people. The Bremerton weekend confirmed something we already suspected — that the audience for a serious, respectful, Seattle-based Sasquatch broadcast is bigger than even we knew, and it's hungry for content that treats the subject and the witnesses with respect.

Looking Forward
Sasquatch Syndicate left the Baymont with hoarse voices, full notebooks, and a whole lot of new friends. We thanked Dr. J. We thanked Bob. We thanked every single attendee who stopped by the booth to tell us they listen, or to ask how they can be part of the work.

"This is exactly the room we want to be in," Ferguson said. "Team Squatchin' USA, Dr. Matthew Johnson, Bob Gimlin, Thom Powell, Barb Shupe, Thom Cantrall, and a Pacific Northwest audience that actually cares. Sasquatch Syndicate is going to keep showing up, keep broadcasting out of Seattle, and keep telling these stories the way they deserve to be told. Bigfoot University 2016 wasn't a one-off for us. It was the start of a long conversation."

For Sasquatch Syndicate — Washington's home for serious Sasquatch broadcasting, podcasting from Seattle — Bigfoot University at the Baymont Inn & Suites in Bremerton wasn't just an event we attended. It was a homecoming.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.

The Sasquatch Syndicate project begins.   Host Chuck Geveshausen brings three decades of marketing, broadcast, and documentary instincts — sharpened from Omaha to Hollywood to the ICA in London — to a new Washington State nonprofit dedicated to telling the Sasquatch story the way it deserves to be told.

There are launches, and there are launches that feel like the right thing happening at the right time. April 20, 2016 was the second kind.

That was the day Sasquatch Syndicate officially went live — a Washington State nonprofit, a Seattle-based broadcast podcast, a documentary framework, and the formal beginning of a decade-long project our host Chuck Geveshausen had been quietly preparing his whole life for. By a coincidence none of us could have engineered if we tried, April 20, 2016 was also the opening day of Frames of Representation, the ICA's inaugural documentary film festival in London — the same room, the same week, where Chuck spent two days pitching producers, directors, and documentary storytellers on what was about to become Sasquatch Syndicate. Same day. Same idea. Different sides of the world.

You could call it luck. We prefer to call it timing.

The Long Road From Omaha
To understand why Sasquatch Syndicate exists, you have to understand who Chuck Geveshausen is. And to understand that, you have to start in Omaha, Nebraska.

Chuck came up through one of the great American direct-marketing houses — WATS Marketing of America. WATS, based in Omaha through the 1980s, was one of the largest and most influential telemarketing and direct-response companies in the country in its era, the kind of shop where a young marketing publicist learned how to sell something that didn't fit on a store shelf — a subscription, an idea, a feeling, a mystery. For Chuck, that meant working on campaigns that would shape an entire generation's relationship with the unexplained.

The biggest of those campaigns was Time Life Books: Mysteries of the Unknown. If you owned a television set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you saw those commercials. They ran on TNN, Nick at Nite, MTV, VH-1, TNT, and any cable channel that took ad dollars in the late-night and overnight blocks. Skeptics and believers, Aleister Crowley and the Nazca Lines, the catchphrase "Read the book." The campaign ran from roughly 1987 through 1991, became one of the most decorated direct-response advertising efforts of its decade, and turned Mysteries of the Unknown into Time-Life's biggest-selling book series ever — 33 volumes covering UFOs, hauntings, mysterious creatures, ancient wisdom, and the entire weird and wonderful periphery of human experience.

Chuck wasn't just adjacent to that work. He was inside it — promoting books and shows on the paranormal, learning how to make late-night television move product, and absorbing, almost by osmosis, the lesson that people are absolutely starving for stories about the unexplained when those stories are told well.

He also worked on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom — yes, that Wild Kingdom, the iconic wildlife documentary television show co-hosted by Marlin Perkins and the late, great Jim Fowler. Chuck did film and audio production work on the property, and for a young marketing professional with a head full of his father's deep-woods stories and a memory full of In Search Of… reruns narrated by Leonard Nimoy, getting to work alongside Jim Fowler was the dream. Jim was the real deal. He had four Emmys, decades on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and a love of wildlife that was utterly contagious. Working in his orbit, Chuck learned something he would carry forever — that the camera, the microphone, and the patient field researcher are the most powerful trio in storytelling.

The Pacific Northwest Calls
In 1992, Chuck moved to the Pacific Northwest. There are people who move to Washington for the coffee, the music, the scenery, or the tech. Chuck moved here and discovered something else — that he had moved into the epicenter of one of the great unanswered questions in North American natural history.

He was already primed for it. As a kid he had watched In Search Of… and listened, wide-eyed, to his father's stories from years spent in deep woods — the kinds of stories every serious outdoorsman eventually has if they're honest about what they've heard out there. The Pacific Northwest didn't introduce Chuck to Sasquatch. It introduced Chuck to the woods that Sasquatch lives in.

And then the woods spoke for themselves.

Chuck and longtime friend and eventual Sasquatch Syndicate co-host Paul Bruton are fishing partners — the kind of fishing partners who go where the cell signal doesn't, who set up before sunrise, and who know what the forest is supposed to sound like when it's behaving normally. On more than one trip, in more than one part of this state, things did not behave normally. Sounds that don't have an obvious source. Movement at the edge of the treeline. The unmistakable feeling — and any honest outdoorsman will tell you this feeling is real — of being watched by something that does not want to be seen.

Those experiences hit Chuck the way they have hit so many other Pacific Northwest residents. They didn't make him a fanatic. They made him curious — professionally, methodically, journalistically curious. Curious in the same way the Time-Life campaign had taught him to be: take the subject seriously, take the audience seriously, and tell the story the way it deserves to be told.

The Derek Randles Influence
Chuck found a kindred experience — and a major influence — in the encounter Derek Randles described from the Olympic National Park in 1985. Derek, co-founder of the Olympic Project, was on a backpacking trip with friends, headed to a backcountry meadow some thirteen or fourteen miles from the trailhead. They made camp halfway in. A loud crash in the distance. Then rocks, softball-sized, hurled toward them through the trees. And finally, on the ridge they'd just come down, an eight-foot figure that, in Derek's own words, looked like a giant ape-man.

The detail that stuck with Chuck — and this is the detail every researcher in this field eventually fixates on — is that something with an opposable thumb was throwing those rocks. Not an animal pawing at the underbrush. Something that threw. Derek's account, calm and credible and never once turned into a sales pitch, has shaped the modern Pacific Northwest research community as much as any single witness story since Patterson and Gimlin.

Chuck heard echoes of it in his own woods. He started to wonder what it would look like to bring real broadcast and documentary tools — the WATS Marketing instincts, the Wild Kingdom discipline, the Mysteries of the Unknown late-night reach — to the Sasquatch question. Not to sensationalize it. To do the opposite. To finally give the subject the production value, the research framework, and the respect for witnesses that it has been waiting on for sixty years.

Swap Talk on 1340 KTOX — The Phone Lines Light Up
The catalyst for what would become Sasquatch Syndicate happened, fittingly, on live radio.

Chuck and Paul appeared on a late-night talk show called Swap Talk on 1340 KTOX out of Needles, CA. Three hours of overnight radio is a long time. One night, the conversation ran dry around the back end of the show, and they turned to producer Mark Fargo with a simple question — what else can we talk about?

Somebody, almost casually, threw out Bigfoot.  The phone lines lit up like a Christmas tree.

Anyone who has worked late-night talk radio will tell you what that means. It means the audience has been waiting — not just to hear the topic discussed, but to call in and tell their own story. Witnesses. Hunters. Fishermen. Hikers. Truckers driving the Olympic Loop at three in the morning. The stories came in faster than they could field them. Three hours wasn't enough. Six hours wouldn't have been enough.

Chuck and Paul walked out of the studio that night with two clear realizations. First, the audience for serious Sasquatch broadcast was massive and underserved. Second, between the two of them — Chuck the marketing publicist and Paul the broadcast partner — they actually had the toolkit to do something about it.

That night, in essence, was the seed. Sasquatch Syndicate, the broadcast, the documentary framework, the Washington State nonprofit, the Seattle-based show — all of it grew from those Swap Talk phone lines.

March 2016 — The Nonprofit, By Design
In March 2016, Sasquatch Syndicate was formally incorporated as a Washington State nonprofit. The choice was deliberate, and it was Chuck's call.

The Sasquatch field has a money problem. Not a lack-of-money problem — an influence-of-money problem. Too many shows, too many "researchers," and too many for-profit operations have shaped their conclusions around what sells. Chuck did not want Sasquatch Syndicate to be that. By organizing as a nonprofit from day one, the Syndicate took the financial angle off the table. The mission could lead. Witnesses could trust the broadcast. Researchers could collaborate without wondering who was getting paid for what. And the work — the immersion in the community, the documentation of encounters, the patient assembly of a long-form documentary framework — could be the point, instead of the byproduct.

The first podcast episode dropped in early April 2016, before Chuck got on a plane to London. The Syndicate was already live and broadcasting when he walked into the ICA.

ICA London — Frames of Representation, Two Days That Mattered
The ICA — the Institute of Contemporary Arts — sits on The Mall in London, a few hundred feet from Buckingham Palace, in a building that has been a home for radical art, cinema, and ideas since 1947. On April 20, 2016, the ICA launched the inaugural edition of Frames of Representation, an eight-day festival curated by Nico Marzano and Luke W. Moody and built around the theme of "New Periphery" — cinema, and especially documentary cinema, as a tool for bringing marginalized stories, communities, and ideas to the center of the conversation.

The 2016 program was a heavyweight lineup of new documentary visions: Pietro Marcello's Lost and Beautiful, Zhao Liang's Behemoth, Betzabé García's Kings of Nowhere, Roberto Minervini's The Other Side as opening night film, six UK premieres, a master class in editing from Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch, and panel after panel of conversation about what documentary cinema is allowed to be.

Chuck spent two days in that building.

He pitched. He listened. He pitched some more. He sat through panels with international documentary directors. He took meetings with producers and storytellers from outside the American Bigfoot bubble — people who had never spent a minute thinking about Sasquatch and had every reason to ask hard questions about why it deserved a serious documentary framework.

He came home with answers.

The Frames of Representation framework — documentary cinema as a vehicle for the periphery, for the under-told, for the dismissed — turned out to be exactly the right intellectual scaffolding for what Sasquatch Syndicate was trying to do. The Sasquatch story is the periphery story. It's the witnesses who have been laughed at. The researchers who have been written off. The communities — Indigenous, rural, Pacific Northwest — that have lived with this knowledge for centuries while the mainstream looked away. Walter Murch's editing master class. The discussions of fiction-versus-nonfiction borders. The international filmmakers operating outside the studio system. All of it pointed in the same direction.

Chuck flew home from London with a ten-year project clarified in his head.
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"ICA was the testing ground," Chuck has said about that week. "Two days in London with people who make their living telling difficult stories — and they didn't laugh at this one. They asked good questions. They pushed back. They sharpened the pitch. By the time I left The Mall, I knew what the next decade looked like."

Straight From London to Bigfoot University
Chuck didn't catch his breath. He didn't even fully unpack.

The weekend after Frames of Representation wrapped, the Sasquatch Syndicate team was on the ground at Bigfoot University at the Baymont Inn & Suites in Bremerton, hosted by Dr. Matthew Johnson and Team Squatchin' USA. Dr. J — a clinical psychologist who came to Sasquatch from the paranormal end of the conversation, and whose Oregon Caves encounter is one of the most discussed firsthand accounts in the modern field — became Sasquatch Syndicate's first featured guest.

That sequencing was deliberate. Chuck went straight from a London documentary festival arguing for the legitimacy of peripheral cinema to a Bremerton conference platforming a researcher many in the mainstream Bigfoot community had argued about for years. The point was the point. Sasquatch Syndicate was going to be the broadcast that takes the whole field seriously — flesh-and-blood researchers, paranormal-leaning researchers, witnesses, scientists, skeptics, all of it — and lets the audience make up its own mind.

Bob Gimlin was at Bremerton that weekend. So was Thom Powell. So was Barb Shupe. So was Thom Cantrall. And so was the Pacific Northwest research community, in force, ready to hear what Sasquatch Syndicate was going to be.

Why This Matters — And Why We're Saying Thank You to the ICA
Sasquatch Syndicate launched on April 20, 2016 because the time was right and because Chuck Geveshausen had spent thirty years getting ready for it. WATS Marketing in Omaha taught him how to reach an audience. Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown taught him that the audience for the unexplained is enormous and patient and loyal. Wild Kingdom and Jim Fowler taught him how to honor a subject. The Pacific Northwest taught him that the subject is real, or at least that the witnesses are. Swap Talk on 1340 KTOX and producer Mark Fargo taught him that the moment you give people permission to talk about Sasquatch on the air, the lines never stop ringing. Derek Randles taught him what credibility looks like. Paul Bruton taught him what a good co-host and a good fishing partner look like. And the ICA in London, on the very day Sasquatch Syndicate was born, taught him that documentary cinema has room for stories like this one — that the periphery is the point, not the problem.

Sasquatch Syndicate is a Washington State nonprofit, broadcasting out of Seattle, hosted by Chuck Geveshausen, co-hosted by Paul Bruton, dedicated to a ten-year project of media production, documentary work, and community-driven research into the legend, the witnesses, and the woods.

We thank the ICA for the invitation, the conversations, and the motivation to take this to the next level over the next decade. We thank Frames of Representation for proving, in the same week we launched, that documentary cinema is hungry for exactly this kind of story. We thank Dr. Matthew Johnson and Team Squatchin' USA for being the first stop on the road. We thank Derek Randles and the Olympic Project for setting the standard. We thank Paul Bruton for staying in the boat. We thank the Swap Talk audience for lighting up the phone lines.

And most of all, we thank the witnesses — the men and women who have seen something in the woods of this state and trusted us enough to say so on the record.

The next decade starts now.

BELIEVE

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.