Serious Bigfoot sightings only, please.
Loren Coleman announced Thursday that the Animal Planet reality TV show “Finding Bigfoot” is coming to Maine to shoot an episode in April. He has put out a call for people who have had sightings to come to the show’s town hall meeting.
Coleman is hosting it at his International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland.
“Finding Bigfoot” follows a team of three believers and a skeptic as they tromp through the woods, camp, tree-knock and call, trying to find any evidence of the elusive cryptid. This is the four-year-old show’s first visit to Maine.
“Maine is so large and so beautiful and there have been sightings, especially around Mount Katahdin,” Coleman said. “I just don’t understand why they haven’t come here yet — better late than never.”
People who contact him claiming to have had sightings or encounters will be screened in advance and only eyewitnesses deemed credible will be invited to the town hall taping. He’d like to gather a group of 25 or so.
“I’m already getting, ‘I’m from Massachusetts and I have two daughters in New Hampshire and we’re really interested in Bigfoot, could you get us a ticket to the meeting?'” he said. No. “It’s not helpful.”
The format for “Finding Bigfoot” is to open with a town hall meeting in which the team from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization — Matt Moneymaker, Cliff Barackman, James “Bobo” Fay and skeptic Renae Holland — listens to locals’ stories. They pick a handful of locations to visit with eyewitnesses, typically followed by an overnight investigation.
Coleman said he’s trying to keep sightings to within roughly two hours of Portland, stretching up to Bangor and Rangeley.
The run-ins don’t have to be recent.
“The Durham gorilla (sightings), which were near the Brunswick/Durham town line, that whole series occurred in 1973,” Coleman said. “If there’s any old eye witnesses who want to come forward, that would be great.”
Coleman said he’s well-aware that the call for sightings might bring out hoaxers, and he hopes to catch those people in the screening process.
“There’s always going to be a situation where people will try to say they had a sighting just to get into the room, either to embarrass ‘Finding Bigfoot’ or looking for their own attention,” he said.
The show will spend about a week filming in Maine.
“I don’t think they’ll be exactly ready for how much snow might still be on the ground,” Coleman said. “They’ve been all kinds of places, even to the Himalayas. They’ll actually maybe use the snow to look for footprints.”
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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