Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

Come to San Francisco for three days of classic Bigfoot and Yeti movies with documentaries on both screens in the haunted and historic Balboa Theatre!

Guest Speakers Cliff Barackman, Kathy Strain & Tom Yamarone, plus Film-makers Seth Breedlove of Small Town Monsters from Ohio and Craig Flipy from Portland, showing their films and doing a Q & A!

A former resident of Humboldt County is putting on a big show about Bigfoot next month.

The Super Shangri-La Show hosted by Kai Wada Roath, who grew up in Eureka is presenting “Bigfoot Bonanza at the Balboa” March 10, 11 and 12 at the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco.

“I decided to create the Bigfoot Bonanza in the fall of last year,” Roath said. “Many of my friends that currently travel to other states for Bigfoot conferences often complain of the back-to-back speakers and the ‘too seriousness’ of the meetings. I thought it would be fun to have something more social, yet with some of the top speakers on the subject, so it would be relaxed and fun, yet ‘serious.’”

Roath, who attended school in Eureka from 1980 to 1987 while his father worked for the U.S. Forest Service, first became interested in Bigfoot while living on the North Coast.

“I have only fond childhood memories of Eureka, watching movies as a kid at the Eureka Theater and Minor Theater in Arcata, attending the Kinetic Sculpture Race every year and playing in the redwood gulches by our house,” Roath said. “I remember being really young and seeing Jim McClarin’s statue of Bigfoot in Willow Creek and never getting a real answer from adults about if Bigfoot was real or not.

“As a kid, it was like Santa Claus, but some adults still believed in it,” he said. “This left an impression on me. It would not be till late in my life that I would have a interest in the personality of hoaxers when I met a few people who never believed in Bigfoot until they saw one.”

He said their stories left an impact on him, which prompted a five-week trip to Nepal in 2001 to collect Yeti stories from isolated villages.

“The Nepalese people in these remote areas had no reason to make up a hoax and their stories were very honest, like the other folks I met who had witnessed a Bigfoot,” said Roath, whose visit to Nepal is just one of many adventures the former Eurekan has experienced in his lifetime.

Roath now lives in San Francisco and works at Geographic Expeditions, a travel adventure company that gets him out of the country once a year to exotic locales like Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Morocco, Thailand and, most recently, Cuba. He’s also gone digging for Blackbeard’s treasure and visited King Tut’s tomb. This year, Roath plans to go to Loch Ness in Scotland and then to the farmer’s field in France where the Red Baron crashed.

Though a worldwide traveler, Roath still has plenty of local connections. He worked on the Benbow Inn’s “Ghost Stories” publication and he’s also the official “Ambassador of Confusion Hill” in Piercy.

When he’s home in San Francisco, Roath also enjoys putting on the Super Shangri-La Show, showing strange and unusual films twice a month at the Balboa Theatre, located at 3630 Balboa St.

Next month’s three-day Bigfoot film festival and conference will include renowned Bigfoot researchers such as Cliff Barackman, Kathy Strain and Tom Yamarone, as well as independent filmmakers Craig Flipy and Seth Breedlove. In addition to the presenters, the weekend will include a cornucopia of cult classic Bigfoot movies, television shows and documentaries. Some of the more famous titles include “The Legend of Boggy Creek,” “The Abominable Snowman,” “The Mysterious Monsters” and many old documentaries, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Mysterious World” and Leonard Nimoy’s “In Search Of.”

The Bigfoot Bonanza will kick off with an opening night reception March 10, which will include live music, gourmet tacos and beer and a bevy of films.

To purchase tickets to the event and see a full schedule of the speakers and films, go to www.bigfootbonanza.com or by call 415-221-8184. Tickets are $35 for the opening night reception, $45 for Saturday only, $25 for Sunday only or $85 for an all-festival pass.