August 27, 1997By Neva Chonin
ERIC BECKJORD , 49, has been gathering information on the paranormal for 21 years. The fruits of his toil are now on display in his UFO, Bigfoot, and Loch Ness Monster Museum, which he proudly touts as the "home of the real X-Files." By Beckjord's estimate, the North Beach museum has seen some 3,500 paying oglers wander through its doors since moving operations from L.A. nine months ago. Bay Guardian: Will the proposed big foot statue be San Francisco's own Sasquatch? Eric Beckjord: Well, it might as well be, since the artist refuses to make any comment about what it's supposed to mean. But Bigfoot, the critter, is alive and well in every state of the union except Hawaii. BG: Have you ever seen a Bigfoot? How big are they? EB: In my experience, they vary from five foot six inches up to seven foot three inches. However, some people have seen 'em taller and some have seen 'em shorter. I've seen them in Ohio and Washington state. BG: Oh. I'm from Bellevue, Wash. EB: Really? There was a mysterious creature running around the Bellevue-Kirkland area eating up cats for awhile. It wouldn't eat the entire cat; it would just tear it in half and scoop out the guts. Sometimes it would just kill it for the fun of it. Sort of like a chupacabras type of thing, but they blamed it on Bigfoot. BG: I don't think that happened in my neighborhood. EB: Bigfoot is seen every week someplace in the States. Probably every day, if you could reach everybody who makes a sighting, because a lot of people don't tell anyone. The Bigfoot lives throughout California, but primarily in the Sierras, Humboldt County, and places that have salmon streams. BG: They like salmon? EB: Yes. BG: Is it significant that Event Horizon opened the same week the Mir space station started experiencing mechanical difficulties? EB: I think it's more a question of Russian ineptitude. They don't have much money these days. The other possibility is that aliens are in there trying to bollix things up, like space gremlins. Remember Apollo 13? There are always mysterious things blowing up and being depleted. The Russians had a space probe that photographed a long black cylindrical object -- I think I have a picture of it here somewhere -- before blanking out. The theory was that it blew up. The authorities always try to come up with a prosaic explanation to reassure us. BG: Tell me about your experiments with crop circles. EB: This is hot news. I think it ought to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. I think we may be communicating with aliens using a blackboard and a wheat field. I just came back from spending a couple of weeks in Wiltshire county, England, where crop circles are forming every day. It's the center for that sort of thing -- Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, and so is Avesbury, which is another large, megalithic stone ring, and Silbury Hill, which is the largest man-made hill in the world, not counting the Mexican pyramids. It's kind of a rounded pyramid made out of chalk. It looks like a large breast. And all around these things appear crop circle formations in different patterns. BG: How did you communicate with the aliens? EB: We rented a farmer's field and used a board to lay down words by pressing down on the wheat. We laid down English words saying "Where do you live?" The purpose was to stimulate some kind of a linear response using letters. We had such a response in 1991. BG: What did it say? EB: It was incomprehensible. But we were trying to get the aliens out of the habit of making circular things. This time it worked and it didn't. We got a response, but it was still circular. It was quite dramatic, though. It looked like a Star of David. I think you're a nice Jewish girl. You should appreciate that. BG: I'm Presbyterian. EB: Anyway, it had extra points at the tips that made it into a fractal equation, which is something out of fractal mathematics and chaos theory. I have no idea how it works, but mathematicians really get into it. So it was a fractal Star of David with 200 smaller circles around the edge, and it was almost 300 feet across. And in the middle was a second star. BG: What did it signify? EB: I thought you'd never ask. A star inside of a star could mean "We come from the stars" or also "We come from inner space." BG: Do you have a favorite object in your museum?
EB: Well, we do have the world's best alien picture. It shows an alien that has a dick. But you can tell he's liberal and advanced, because he's carrying a baby. He's definitely a '90s alien. The UFO, Bigfoot, and Loch Ness Monster Museum, 709 Union, S.F. Daily, noon-6 p.m. (415) 974-4339.
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