Bigfoot

Erik Beckjord sees faces everywhere he looks: In bushes.  In trees.  In
water.  On Mars.

And he has the pictures to prove it.

With a squint of the eye, many of his blurry and grainy photos show what
appear to be faces, although of the nonhuman variety.  In his collection are
aliens carrying babies, transdimensional monsters, ghost dogs and more.

The burly and blond Beckjord is the curator of the UFO, Bigfoot and Loch
Ness Monster Museum, a fancy-sounding name for a room in his Venice home.

The outside of the house is nondescript.  The lawn is neglected and the
paint is peeling.  A world-weary sheep dog named Jeepers is tethered out
front and completely ignores guests as they arrive for their encounters
with the unexplained.

Inside the front door, a blanket hangs in a door frame, separating the
living quarters from the museum.  A small, unfurnished bedroom inside has
been turned into his museum of the strange and unexplained.

"We've got things other museums don't have," Beckjord said.  "The contents
should make up for the rudimentary structure.  There's nothing like this in
all of Los Angeles."

One wall of the museum is devoted to crop circles, elaborate designs in
wheat fields Beckjord says might have been created by aliens.  Or maybe not.
He doesn't know for sure where they came from, but he suspects they are
the work of beings from other worlds.

"This is all a big maybe," said Beckjord, 48.

Other exhibits include the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, aliens and faces
carved into rocks on Mars.

"Here's a scoop for you," he says, pointing to previously undiscovered
faces in the rocks of the Red Planet.  "Nobody knows these are here."

The pictures are neatly taped to the walls.  Underneath them are a series of
books with titles like Bigfoot of the Blue, Martian Enigma and UFO
Encyclopedia.

Simpson connection

The latest addition is an exhibit on the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson
and Ron Goldman.  The Simpson wing -- a closet without a door, really --
seems to show the visages of the murdered pair in shadows and trees.  A
mounted letter from the company that processed the film asserts the film was
not tampered with.

Maybe these are really just ordinary shadows.  Maybe it's just light
reflecting into familiar patterns.  Beckjord can't say for sure that
anything sinister is going on here, but then again, he won't say there
isn't.

"If you're a spirit and you want to manifest yourself, you have to use
what is available," he said.

Molly Hanson, an organizational psychologist and member of a skeptics
organization, has been on a Bigfoot expedition with Beckjord.  She thinks a
lot of his theories are out of this world, but she sees no harm in it.

"It's good for entertainment," she said.  "There are a number of people
interested in that sort of thing.  It provides a distraction for daily
problems.  Some of it's stupid; some of it's interesting."

She has no explanation for the pictures of Ms. Simpson.

`Makes one speculate'

"It makes one wonder," she said.  "He tends to see faces in a lot of things
nobody does, but I have to admit, that was very clear.  It makes one
speculate."

Beckjord, who makes a living selling lighting supplies, has been chasing
oddities for 18 years, ever since a trip to Washington State, where he
tried to uncover Bigfoot impostors.  But the first week there, he came
across one of the monsters.  Beckjord, who earned a master's degree from
the University of California, Berkeley, quit his job as an urban planner
and started chasing unsolved mysteries.

"I went up there with the idea of catching fakes," he said.  "But nobody's
dumb enough to walk around in the woods in a monkey suit.  They will have a
bullet in their heart in no time."

There are Biogfoots (or is it Bigfeet?) roaming all over California,
Beckjord says.  Nobody has been able to catch one because the Bigfoot can
read minds and transport themselves into other dimensions.

Before setting up shop in Venice, he ran a museum in Malibu called the
Crypto Phenomenon Museum.  Many of those exhibits, such as casts of Bigfoot feet, were destroyed by fire a few years ago.

He has made expeditions around the world in search of the unexplained and
the bizarre.  He has ventured to England several times to uncover crop
circles appearing for the past several years.  The markings appear in the
dead of night and come in strange shapes and forms.

Although Beckjord concedes about half the markings probably are frauds, he
believes the other half are an alien culture's attempt to communicate with
Earthlings.

The only problem is nobody understands what they are trying to say.  So
Beckjord decided to force the issue.  He created his own pattern in the
English countryside.

"TALK TO US," it said.

"I've been pressuring them to get real," he said.  I'm pressuring them to
get linear."