Jon-Erik Beckjord

Jon-Erik Beckjord (born Cedric Jon Beckjord, April 26, 1939 – June 22, 2008), who also went by Erik Beckjord, was an American self-styled paranormal investigator, photographer and cryptozoologist. He was among the most theatrical figures of late-twentieth-century monster hunting. He is best remembered for the claim that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are not flesh-and-blood animals at all, but shape-shifting, inter-dimensional beings tied to the same mystery as UFOs. He ran a string of small "museums" of the unexplained, turned up on late-night radio and television, and managed to alienate skeptics and fellow monster hunters alike.

Early life and background

Beckjord was born in Duluth, Minnesota, the son of Col. Philip Beckjord, a World War II Army physician, and Margaret (née McGilvry) Beckjord. According to Wikipedia's biography, he had three siblings (Ross, Peter and Pam), and the family traced its roots to Oslo, Norway.

His education was conventional and, by the standards of the field he later entered, unusually credentialed. He spent two years at the United States Air Force Academy, then took a B.S. in sociology from Tulane University in 1961. At UC Berkeley he studied law for a year at Boalt Hall before earning an MBA in 1966. He worked for a time as a city planner in the San Francisco Bay Area. He eventually left that career for what he treated as a full-time vocation: hunting Bigfoot and documenting what he regarded as the physical traces of the paranormal. He described the shift in terms of values, saying that "the object in life is not simply to make money."

Career: expeditions, museums and media

Loch Ness, 1983

Beckjord's first widely reported expedition was to Scotland. As director of an organization he called the Crypto Zoological Society, he spent about a week at Loch Ness in the summer of 1983. A UPI report of August 9, 1983 said he believed he had videotaped three creatures, which he named Faith, Hope and Charity. Even then he hedged, conceding that the images might not be "exactly and positively" the monster. The episode set a pattern that held for the rest of his career. He offered ambiguous images and enthusiastic interpretation, but never a specimen or a decisive photograph.

Museums

Beckjord's most visible legacy was a series of small museums, each cheap to start and quick to disappear:

• Crypto-Zoology Museum, Malibu. It began in his home on October 31, 1986. In February 1989 it moved into the Trancas Restaurant in Malibu. Most of the collection was reportedly lost to a fire in 1993, after the restaurant had closed.
• Bigfoot, UFO and Loch Ness Monster Museum, San Francisco. He opened it on Halloween, October 31, 1996. CNN's Rusty Dornin covered it in April 1997 under the headline "Don't believe in aliens? Visit San Francisco's UFO 'Museum'". Her verdict on its curator, as quoted in Wikipedia, was that "if it's far-fetched and unproved, Beckjord buys it." The Sun Sentinel ran a travel feature on it in June 1997.
• North Beach, San Francisco (1997). A third museum, which featured a sea serpent exhibit named "Sassie."

The exhibits consisted largely of his own photographs, including "blobs of light" he believed were living or non-human entities, crop-circle imagery and cryptid pictures. Visitors were as likely to come for the spectacle as for the evidence, and the museums sat comfortably in San Francisco's tradition of roadside curiosities.

Radio and television

Beckjord was a reliable guest for hosts who wanted a colorful voice. Coast to Coast AM lists him as a repeat guest, and he appeared on The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. These appearances are reported in biographical summaries, and I have not seen the broadcasts. His manner and his claims made for entertaining television, and that probably accounts for his visibility far exceeding the weight of his evidence.

Major contributions and claims

Bigfoot as an inter-dimensional shape-shifter

Most Bigfoot researchers who take the creature seriously, such as anthropologist Jeff Meldrum, treat it as a possible relict primate, one that would leave hair, scat, tracks and eventually bones. Beckjord went the other way. He said he had personally seen a Bigfoot cross a road about 200 feet away, but he never photographed one. He claimed footprints he examined turned into deer tracks, which he took as evidence of shape-shifting. He also argued that no hair, blood or skeletal remains were needed, because the animal was an "inter-dimensional shape-shifter" with a "space-time origin and connection with UFOs," arriving "from an alternative universe by a wormhole."

The argument is unfalsifiable by design. A lack of bodies, which for most investigators is the central problem with Bigfoot, became in his framework a feature of the phenomenon.

Nessie, UFOs and other cryptids

The same logic extended to Loch Ness, which he described as a "space alien pet." He took a similarly unorthodox line on other cases. He floated the idea that the Loveland Frog might be a surviving Coelophysis. He investigated reported mermaids ("Ri") in Papua New Guinea, where he concluded that locals were seeing dugongs. His UFO beliefs included a government cover-up and the idea that anomalous lights were intelligent. He also claimed to see a Ted Kennedy-like formation on Mars, a claim that earned him Esquire's 1991 "Dubious Achievement Award," according to Wikipedia.

His wider outlook was unusually fatalistic: "We may belong to aliens. We may be experimental animals. But I can't prove it."

The 1999 expedition with a skeptic

One of the more instructive episodes came in 1999, when he took the skeptic Robert Sheaffer on a five-day Bigfoot expedition. Sheaffer saw nothing unusual. Beckjord reported manifestations only after Sheaffer had left. He interpreted this as evidence that skeptics repel the phenomenon, a view consistent with his comment that "with the card-carrying skeptics, we will never win." Sheaffer later said that Beckjord "doesn't have one bit of proof," and he wrote Beckjord's obituary for Skeptical Inquirer (Nov.–Dec. 2008) under the title "Jon Beckjord, Advocate of a Paranormal Bigfoot (1939–2008)."

Reception and criticism

Beckjord's reception was not simply a split between believers and skeptics. Those who treated Bigfoot as a flesh-and-blood animal often disliked him more than the skeptics did, because they felt his supernatural theories made serious fieldwork harder.

A sharp illustration came in June 1989, when the International Society of Cryptozoology held its eighth annual meeting at Washington State University in Pullman. As the Deseret News reported on June 26, 1989, the Whitman County sheriff arrested Beckjord, then 50, on the Friday before the conference opened, on suspicion of harassment and coercion. He was released the next day on a $2,500 bond and ordered to stay away from the meeting and from Pullman. Mark Francis, director of the North American Bigfoot Information Network, had sought a restraining order, saying Beckjord had sent him letters that were "basically death threats." The paper reports these as allegations and gives no response from Beckjord, and I found no account of the outcome.

Wikipedia further describes "well-publicized arguments" with writers for Skeptical Inquirer and ISC members, and says he was reportedly banned from online forums over abusive posts. Cryptomundo's 2008 roundup, "Ten Notable 2008 Cryptozoology Deaths", called him a "Bad Boy of Bigfootry" who "remained a controversial figure within Bigfoot circles until his death."

On the substance, the criticism is straightforward and difficult to answer. Beckjord produced no physical evidence, and his framework was built to explain away the lack of it. His photographs were open to ordinary explanations such as lens flare, insects, reflections and pareidolia, though I did not find a detailed technical analysis of them. Credibility is therefore best rated fringe: a real person with real credentials and a documented public career, whose central claims were untestable and never supported.

Later years and death

Beckjord spent his later years in Lafayette, California, east of Berkeley. Wikipedia says he served as a caretaker of the Crosses of Lafayette, a roadside memorial to U.S. service members killed in Iraq. He had prostate cancer. He died near his home on June 22, 2008, aged 69, and Cryptomundo noted that the media did not report his death for more than a month. Sam Whiting's San Francisco Chronicle obituary, "Paranormal believer Erik Beckjord dies at 69," appeared on July 25, 2008. I did not retrieve its text, so the details above come from Wikipedia and Cryptomundo.

Legacy

Beckjord's influence on research was close to nil, because he left behind no evidence base and no school of followers. His significance is cultural. He was an early and loud advocate of the merging of UFOlogy and cryptozoology that later became commonplace. That merging shows in the "interdimensional Bigfoot" ideas that circulate on paranormal radio, in the "woo" end of the Bigfoot community, and in the crossover books and shows that treat cryptids, UFOs and non-human intelligence as one phenomenon. He is also a useful case study in how an unfalsifiable explanation can protect a belief from disconfirmation, and in how late-night media rewarded eccentric certainty over careful evidence. A 2017 book, Beckjord: Biography of a Cryptozoologist, has been reported as a biography of him, but I did not read it and cannot vouch for it.

His own closing posture was disarmingly honest in one respect: he admitted that he couldn't prove any of it. That admission, more than any museum exhibit, is probably the most accurate summary of his legacy.