When a friend suggested we take a trip to Southeast Oklahoma to attend a Bigfoot conference, I laughed. What started as a joke grew into curiosity and, ultimately, a plan. Committing to attend was a game of chicken, and yet, as the warm October weekend approached, no one backed out.
From Kansas City, Highway 49 offers a smooth road and not much else. As our car drew south, the landscape changed from barren fields scattered with oil donkeys into rolling hills. Suddenly, I understood how Bigfoot could live here: the pine trees, the rocky terrain, the horizon free of gas stations and subdevelopments. We were in an area so remote neither Verizon nor T-Mobile could keep us connected. We swiftly became adventurers of another era, using an atlas instead of Google Maps, suspending data plans and disbelief. Honobia, Oklahoma, pronounced Ha-No-Bee if you’re a tourist or Hoe-nubby if you’re local, isn’t known for much. You could pass the unincorporated community without even knowing (as we did). There is but one hotel in the area (sold out for the weekend months ago — a testament to the popularity of the festival), but Airbnb offered an extensive selection of cabins billed as retreats for lovers or hunters or both. We easily found comfortable accommodations.
The conference deserves a report from a better sociologist than me. It offered a dizzying array of acronyms and associations — SBA (Southern Bigfoot Alliance), BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization), and so many more. Friday evening, the Native Oklahoma Bigfoot Research Organization (or NOBRO, as they refer to themselves) hosted a bonfire storytelling session. We spread out our picnic blanket and slurped surreptitious wine from our water bottle, listening to rambling stories that were mainly inside jokes about mistaking turkey buzzards for cryptids.
As the world darkened and a chill set in, instinctively, we all nestled a little closer to the bonfire, curling the edges of the picnic blanket around our exposed arms. The fireside became a platform where anyone could share their story. A recently retired pediatrician emerged from the crowd to share her encounter. The anonymous speaker was a self-professed woman of science — she was one of the area’s few doctors after all — and yet she waited until after her retirement to reveal her personal bigfoot encounter because of her position in the community, and fear of what being a believer might mean for her credibility in her career. The sincerity and solemn tone of her story tilted my personal belief needle from full-on-skeptic to Bigfoot-curious.
Starting Saturday morning, the two-day conference hosted a repeat lineup of Bigfoot experts (all white men), and a diverse audience of Bigfoot skeptics, believers and Knowers (all Indigenous Americans). Although the presenters were billed as experts, none of the evidence shared at the conference convinced me as much as whispered conversations between attendees, finally free to share their own stories between sessions. The first speaker had been looking for Bigfoot for over 40 years and had no evidence, no sightings, but spoke with deep reverence for his time in the woods and for his friends who Know. The next speakers were a pair of men who had soooooo many Bigfoot encounters as to merit their own podcast. The last speaker showed photo after photo of realistic Bigfoot evidence, then broke the news that the images were all fake. My favorite photo (real or generated) was of a smeared handprint on a grease-filled dumpster behind a casino. Raccoon or Bigfoot, something was hungry.
The conference was surrounded by a free-ad-mission festival, offering countless craft booths, food trucks, a bounce house, and helicopter rides. I ate fry bread until my seams were bursting. The true treasure of the festival offerings was the abundant collection of self-published Bigfoot novels. I greedily purchased an armful of stories, including a signed copy of Bigfoot Watching Woman Watching Bigfoot by M. Sparks Clark. I ended up buying the rest of her trilogy after the festival, both because I enjoyed the stories and because it helped me gain a deeper sense of appreciation for Southeast Oklahoma. Plus, everyone knows fiction can get you closer to the truth.
Despite the wonderful weekend and the unexpected beauty of the area, I can’t recommend you attend the Hanobia Bigfoot Conference. After 17 solid years, the festival is henceforth cancelled due to a disagreement with the venue and what appears to be a personal feud over who owns the rights to the event, according to posts, comments and passive-aggressive Keanu Reeves memes on the festival’s Facebook page.
While the festival is off my vacation list, Southeast Oklahoma certainly isn’t. Who knows, I might even attend another regional Bigfoot conference … for the gag, of course.
