Photo courtesy of the City of Grande Prairie

By Emily Keller

Sasquatch

Sasquatch Symposium comes to Grande Prairie

Sep 8, 2019 | 2:24 PM

Grande Prairie, AB – The Grande Prairie Museum will be hosting a Sasquatch Symposium on September 28 in Centre 2000 at the Heritage Discovery Centre.

The museum says the success of their “In the Shadow of the Rockies: Alberta’s Sasquatch Stories” exhibit at the Heritage Discovery Centre led to the symposium.

Charles Taws, Museum Curator and Collections Supervisor for the city of Grande Prairie, says the exhibit has done so well because of the topic.

“This topic really excites a lot of interest and a lot of passion with people, because what are the ‘what-ifs’? What if? What if it really existed? That would mean there’s this human-like creature that’s been under our noses for all these years, and we haven’t discovered it.”

Taws says there is a longer history between the Sasquatch and Alberta than most might think.

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“The first, I guess you could call it modern incident, a sasquatch incident, took place in 1811 with the famous explorer David Thompson when he was going through the Jasper area, where he uncovered large footprints which were said to have been those of a Sasquatch. His Indigenous guides would not follow these tracks and they were quite notable, and he wrote it up in his account. A lot of his Indigenous guides, they eventually ended up in our area here in Grande Prairie.”

He says there have been many sightings dating back to the 1970’s in areas such as Grande Cache and a notable one between Sexsmith and Spirit River. They encourage people to share their sightings and experiences.

“We’d love to hear of any other local sightings because obviously a lot of these things don’t make the news or we don’t hear about them, but there’s definitely been sightings in this area.”

The symposium will take place in two sessions, one in the afternoon and one in the evening.

The afternoon one begins at 1:30 p.m. and will focus more on the Sasquatch’s relationship with Alberta and the Grande Prairie region. The session begins with a presentation from the Alberta Sasquatch Organization titled “A brief history of Sasquatch in Alberta: Bigfoot in Wild Rose Country.”, which will provide a brief history of Sasquatch encounters from around Alberta and stories from past and present sightings and experiences.

Following that, there will be a viewing of the documentary “Bigfoot: Quest for the Wildman” by Justin Chernipeski to finish the afternoon session. The documentary shows Chernipeski on his travels throughout the back country of remote locations in Alberta in search of answers about Bigfoot.

The evening session will begin at 7:30 p.m. and will have a retrospective of the Patterson-Gimlin film, a short film from California in 1967 that is one of the most popular examples of evidence for Sasquatch existence. This will be hosted by Professor Jeffrey Meldrum of Idaho State University, who is a popular Sasquatch researcher. It will also include a Q&A session.

Tickets for both sessions are $15 for each, or $25 for both sessions. Tickets can be purchased at the Grande Prairie Museum and the Heritage Discovery Centre.

To purchase tickets or for more information, please call the Grande Prairie Museum at 780-830-7090.