SFGate writes “On the side of Highway 9 deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the barn-like exterior of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum has been beckoning believers and skeptics alike for the past two decades. Now, one of the most unusual museums of its kind in California is closing for good.
Good Times Santa Cruz first reported the news in late October, after longtime proprietor and curator Michael Rugg listed the property on the market. Rugg told the outlet he expected to sell most of the exhibits and memorabilia in the near future — including plaster feet and handprints, newspaper clippings, a map of local sightings, and an aging iMac that played the famed Patterson-Gimlin footage of the Sasquatch on a loop.
On Friday, KSBW confirmed the closure was final as Rugg made the decision to retire. “It’s going to be weird for me. Yeah. I’m so used to this, and I’ve been doing this for so, so long. To suddenly have it all go away and everything is going to be strange,” he said.
Rugg claims to have first seen the hairy humanoid with his own eyes while camping with his family in Humboldt County at the age of four. His parents convinced him he was imagining things, he told SFGATE in 2021, but when the memory surfaced again several years later, he became steadfast in a mission to confirm the existence of the elusive beast once and for all.
While on full scholarship at Stanford University in the 1960s, he attempted to write a paper describing the importance of studying Bigfoot, only for a professor to give him an F. Later in life, he took a detour to “sit in a cubicle and push pixels” in Silicon Valley, but lost his job in 2002 when the dot-com boom busted. He realized it was time to return to his passion, and in 2004, opened the donation-sustained museum with his wife, Paula Yarr, so people around the world could learn about the enigma of a creature.
Rugg claims to have familiarized himself with just about every aspect of Bigfoot’s existence. “Imagine a skunk that had rolled around in dead animals and had hung around the garbage pits,” he said of the way it smells. When asked to describe its scream, he said it sounded “like going down the Matterhorn [at Disneyland].” He believes the creatures communicate with one another and coordinate hunts using a language similar to Morse code.
The reason why Bigfoot and its brethren have evaded capture after all these years? “These animals realized if they didn’t hide from us, we were going to murder them all.”
He told KSBW that approximately 30 to 70 people visited the museum on a daily basis, and people raised more than $16,000 to keep it afloat during the pandemic. Though Rugg owned the building, he was still struggling to pay the mortgage, and health complications made it even more challenging to keep the museum going. He told SFGATE he put his weekly Bigfoot hunting trips on hold because of his obstructive pulmonary disease, which requires him to carry an oxygen tank around wherever he goes.
“He went from being open six days a week to four days a week, and it’s just time,” his wife, Yarr, told Good Times Santa Cruz.
The museum’s website is down, and calls from SFGATE went unanswered Sunday, though its voicemail message still says its hours of operation are Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.”
Charles R
Such a shame, but we all get old. He has been in bad health for a long time. He use to join us a bit on the old Bigfoot Evidence 24/7 blog over a decade ago. He was the go to guy in this area of California for Bigfoot information and so many folks who had encounters would go to him to listen to their stories. I believe he had a big map and push pin each location. Best wishes for you in your retire Mike Rugg.
Ed M
Very sad to hear this. We used to take the kids and then the grandkids by there on our way to the Boardwalk. A truly iconic place to visit like the Mystery Spot, Big Basin and Sea Cliff Beach etc.