I have been away from the blog for a while, the end of the school year is always busy and this year was no exception. Now that I am done I finally have some time to breath and do some things on my own. Recently I attended my first ever Bigfoot/Skunkape conference in Punta Gouda. The Southwest Florida Bigfoot/Skunkape Townhall Conference was certainly an experience, full of lots of the certainly much more fringe ideas from the Bigfoot/Skunkape world of Florida.
The conference was organized by Phylis Csaszar, who is described as a born again Christian minister, paranormal researcher, psychic medium and Skunkape researcher in various blogs where she has given interviews. The conference itself was relatively small affair, it was all in one room with the speakers and merch tables on opposite ends. The MC of the event was Ryan Golmbeske, a veteran of finding Bigfoot and Expedition Bigfoot. The keynote speakers were David Shealy of the Skunkape Headquarters in Ochopee, Florida and Stacey Brown, a skunkape researcher from Florida. Other speakers included Thomas Sinclair, John Urban, authors Mark Muncy, Robert Robinson, Chris Balzano and a segment led by the Mid Florida Bigfoot Research Group. Anyone who reads my blog or follows me on Instagram/Twitter knows that I’m a pretty grounded guy. I tend to steer clear of the “woo” and the paranormal. Many of the speakers veered a bit to far into the paranormal and the woo for me, so for me the speakers were sort of a mixed bag.
Ryan Golembeske, otherwise known as “RPG” is an alum of both Finding Bigfoot and later shows. He gave some short presentation and he assured the crowd that the crew of Finding Bigfoot never faked anything, not even once. He then went into some more personal stories and ideas. He set the tone for the day, claiming it would be a safe space for all ideas about the Skunkape, but based on the tone of the whole thing he meant it was a safe space for a lot of the more unorthodox ideas concerning the Skunkape. He even referred to confrence itself and the speakers present as “the edge of the fringe”. RPG seems to take the Bigfoot thing more spiritually than most, regaling the crowd with tales of how he carries a small pouch full of safe with him every time he goes into the woods and used the phrase “set your expectation” and get into the right headspace to actually see or encounter something. RPG sort of went out into left field a few times, he was the MC of the event, and filling in the blanks sort of fell to him. He certainly leans more into the paranormal than I normally would. One of the things he spoke about was orbs, or lights in the forest. He claimed that many big footers have claimed to have seen these mysterious lights when they venture into the forest, and ,his theory on what those lights were was one of the more ‘out there’ (literally) things I’d heard that day. He claimed that orbs of light in the forest acted as some sort of drones meant to keep us separate from the ‘relict hominids’ that live in the forest. He went on to posit that he believed the earth may be some sort of ‘game preserve’ for something? He was sort of dodgy on what exactly he believed the earth was a game preserve for. At different points he also invoked things like the ‘quantum paranormal’ and said he believed in ‘astral projection’ and claims to have astral projected twice. So, RPG really sort of set the tone for the whole event. A day that was full of paranormal conspiracy theories, some cryptozoology and some Skunkape.
This is just the first post I plan on writing about my visit to the conference, I plan on doing a write up about all the speakers speeches, but especially the keynote, David Shealy. There is a lot to unpack from each speaker and the conference as a whole,so I hope you’ll stick with me as I regale you with my tales from my venture into the fringe.
Comments
Post a Comment