AlienCon Pasadena 2018

AlienCon Pasadena 2018

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.