The point: On the West Coast, many believe Bigfoot to be a flesh-and-blood animal, not a ghost or an alien. But he did offer this compromise: Couldn't there be ghosts of dead Bigfoots roaming around as well?
This kind of talk reinforces the view of researchers in the West that the East is an amateur scene, said Matt Moneymaker of California, who heads the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.
Don Wilding of Buena Vista, Pa., checks out Bigfoot plaster foot impressions at the East Coast Bigfoot Conference near Pittsburgh on Saturday.
(Photos Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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"They're kind of at the stage where Bigfoot research . . . had been stuck in, like, the mid-'80s," he said.
The West's Bigfoot movement is older and larger and provided some of the movement's most cherished evidence, including many footprints and a famous 1967 film purporting to show a Bigfoot walking through a California forest.
But folks on the East Coast say there is no shortage of sightings here. Mark Opsasnick, an author from Prince George's County, notes in his Maryland Bigfoot Digest that hairy beasts were spotted near Baltimore in the 1970s: the Sykesville Monster in 1973, the Harewood Park Monster in '76 and a string of sightings in Harford County.
More recently, construction workers building Arundel Mills in Hanover in 2000 said they saw a 12-foot-tall animal with glowing red eyes in nearby woods.
For those intent on finding the creature, however, "sasquatchery" in the East is not easy.
First, there is the time constraint: They need hours to spend in the woods looking for evidence. But most everybody has a day job. Dranginis designs surveillance equipment, Chance sells Christmas trees, and McHenry is an intelligence analyst for the Navy.
Another problem, the researchers say, is that many people in the East aren't familiar with either the Bigfoot legend or the forests the creature might inhabit. McHenry recalled one woman who called to say she saw a werewolf.
He and others reassured her that it was probably a sasquatch. "She was glad, because to her Bigfoot was something more real than a werewolf," he said.
Then there are the insults from their Western counterparts, who scoff at the notion that the same species of sasquatch spotted there -- or perhaps a three-toed cousin called the skunk ape -- might live on the East Coast.
But the biggest difficulty of Bigfoot-watching, here and in the West, remains the elusiveness of the quarry.
Nobody knows this better than Dranginis. After being snubbed when he tried to report his sighting, the Manassas man used his expertise in surveillance to turn a minibus into the $50,000 Mobile Bigfoot Research Lab.
The vehicle, with the license plate VA YETI -- a reference to the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas -- has infrared cameras and night-vision cameras on board. Dranginis also has tiny cameras and microphones that can be left in the woods. He has spent years deploying this equipment.
So far, no Bigfoot.
Instead, Dranginis says he has found clues that might be near-misses: a leaf placed over his camera lens, a clump of smelly, red hair on the forest floor.
"I came on board thinking I could solve this problem in a couple years," he said. "But they end up winning."
