I first heard of Matt Crowley when I was making reservations to go on the “Mystery Cruise” to Alaska in May 2006. Matt was already highly thought of in the local bigfoot community and I was eager to meet him, as well as Robert Alley, on our Alaskan Cruise. I found Matt to be a very intense person who took bigfoot research and investigation quite seriously. Robert, Matt and I spent many a morning on the cruise drinking coffee, watching the rugged Alaskan shoreline and discussing all things bigfoot related. No one else usually hung around our table very long as the topic was always serious and this group of three wasn’t discussing Bigfoot 101. I enjoyed these morning talks immensely and always had a hard time pulling myself away to do the other things that one does on a cruise.

Personally, I move at a slower pace than Matt does and I knew he wanted quick answers and accountability. Matt wasn’t willing to wait around long or take someone else’s word for bigfoot evidence. You might say he wanted to stick his fingers in the wounds as Doubting Thomas once requested. So on the cruise I recognized that Robert and Matt would both make excellent interview subjects for our SRI newsletter. Both agreed and after my Bobbie Short interview, I made plans to hunt Matt down.

However, just before I was to start, I received an email from Matt right before our interview that took me aback. To paraphrase Matt’s email, he informed me he had quit SRI, AIBR, and he shared with me he felt the whole bigfoot field was in the same predicament it has been in for the last 50 years. In Matt’s opinion, no progress has been made and even the evidence being collected wasn’t being analyzed correctly. Matt was gracious and said maybe an interview with him would not be politically correct in the bigfoot world — but I felt otherwise. We decided to do the interview so here is the uncut version.

Though many of us are still believers and many of us have had personal experiences out in the field we cannot explain, Matt challenges our belief system and that is all right by me. A belief not worth defending is a belief not worth having. I still feel confident I had an encounter up in the Western Sierras in the summer of 2004. Matt in spite of his skepticism is still leaving the door open. So, grab some Rolaids and keep an objective attitude as you learn about someone who has left the field.

Dave: How did you get interested in bigfoot?

Matt: As a child my mother took my brother and me to see a film shown at the student center on the campus of the University of Montana in Missoula. I wish I knew what film that was, but I don’t. This was quite early in the game; I’m guessing 1968 or 1969. I think it included Patterson’s film. I would have been 6 or 7 years old.

A few years later two Canadian high school students stayed with our family as part of an exchange program. I asked one of them about Sasquatch as I knew that’s what they called it in Canada. She didn’t really know that much but later sent me On the Track of the Sasquatch by John Green. This would have been in the early 1970’s. That book, coupled with John Keel’s Strange Creatures from Time and Space, really blew my mind. I was alternately fascinated and frightened by the concepts in those books, depending on whether it was day or night!

Dave: I know you’re a skeptic regarding bigfoot. Why do you involve yourself in bigfoot research such as foot castings?

Matt: Well, being skeptical does not exclude being fascinated with the subject! To me, everyone should be a skeptic if that means utilizing critical thinking skills. But of course, “skeptic” is an emotionally loaded word, and for some people a bigfoot skeptic is a person that has concluded there is no bigfoot.

Believe it or not, I used to define myself as a bigfoot skeptic in the sense that I concluded there was probably no bigfoot until I did the casting artifact researches. I became convinced that a lot of the evidence out there is simply not being as carefully examined as it could or should be, by either the advocates or the skeptics. At this point, I define myself as a bigfoot “agnostic” by the true meaning of that word being “without knowledge.”

With regards to foot castings, I simply saw a class of evidence that an amateur such as myself could reasonably investigate. You don’t need an electron microscope or a gas chromatograph to study cement cast textures or whether or not certain tracks could be fabricated by man.