Jon-Erik Beckjord

After battling prostate cancer, Beckjord died at the age of 69 on June 22, 2008, near his home in Lafayette, California, where he was a caretaker for the Crosses of Lafayette, a monument to casualties of the Iraq War before his death.

Beckjord became intrigued with the idea of Bigfoot after seeing an article in the newspaper about alleged sightings of the creature. On an expedition to see whether or not the story was true, he claimed he saw a Bigfoot cross the road in front of him from about 200 feet away. Though he later returned with his camera and was unable to find the creature, Beckjord was then convinced of its existence. He also purportedly saw Bigfoot standing 6 feet tall and walking in a "loose, limbo-dance style", and, at another time, eating apricots in an orchard around Vacaville, CA. He frequented a camp with other researchers, an alleged "window site" in the Bear River Reservoir area of Eldorado National Forest where he asserted that "evidence of Bigfoot is almost routinely seen." While he insisted that the exact location not be revealed to the public, Beckjord did agree to take skeptic Robert Sheaffer on a five-day expedition there in 1999. It was only after Sheaffer left the site, having seen nothing unusual, that Beckjord reported manifestations of Bigfoot.

Robert Sheaffer, a founding member of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, asserted that Beckjord "doesn't have one bit of proof. To allay Beckjord's proclamations that "all skeptics were too timid and closed-minded to actually go out into the woods and confront the Bigfoot evidence for themselves," Sheaffer accompanied Beckjord on a 5-day Bigfoot expedition in 1999. He was disappointed at Beckjord's continued lack of evidence and attributed Beckjord's interpretations of rock formations, leaves and shadows as Bigfoot faces or skulls to "the workings of an overzealous imagination."

In 1997, Beckjord opened a third museum in North Beach, CA, which he called the Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster Museum. It was billed as the city's "strangest museum" and consisted of photographs, drawings, and articles devoted to such topics as the Roswell Declaration, Bigfoot, and a sea serpent named "Sassie" which, allegedly, lived in the San Francisco Bay.

CNN correspondent Rusty Dornin wrote in 1997 "Faces on Mars, the Loch Ness monster, or an alien with a name tag (Andy)--if it's far-fetched and unproved, Beckjord buys it. And it's all on display at his storefront 'museum'."

On October 31, 1996, Halloween, Beckjord opened the .mw-parser-output .vanchor>:target~.vanchor-text{background-color:#b1d2ff}Bigfoot, UFO and Loch Ness Monster Museum in San Francisco, California, which featured crop circles. He charged a nominal entrance fee ($3 for adults; $2 for children), but the museum's closing, reportedly, was "due to lack of any substantial evidence."

When Trancas Restaurant went out of business, Beckjord put the museum's contents in storage. Most of it was lost to fire in 1993.

In February, 1989, Beckjord opened the Crypto-Zoology Museum, housed in the corner of Trancas Restaurant in Malibu, CA. The museum had its start on October 31, 1986, when he opened his home to visitors to see his collection. The display primarily consisted of photographs from Beckjord's research into the phenomena of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Mokele M'Bembe of Africa. According to Beckjord, the museum focused on "creatures of fact or fancy" that "to the best of our knowledge appear to be verified, or haven't at least been debunked."

In 1983, Beckjord, then director of the Crypto Zoological Society, spent a week in Scotland videotaping what he believed were three monsters in Loch Ness.

To Beckjord, the Loch Ness monster (Nessie) was a space alien pet left on Earth in a form of energy that could interact with human beings. He described Nessie as a cat-like faced creature, 15–30 feet long, 7–10 feet thick with a body that "looks like a cross between Halley's Comet and the Concorde jet." He claimed to have videotaped three, which he named Faith, Hope and Charity, on a visit to Drumnadrochit, Scotland in 1983. Beckjord admitted that the images might not be "exactly and positively" Nessie, but asserted that "90 percent of the people who have viewed the films believe the images are alive."

In response to a Roy Wagner article, published in the ISC annual journal Cryptozoology (and later reprinted in Fate Magazine, August 1983), Beckjord traveled to Papua New Guinea to search for ri, or mermaids. Wagner's article described eyewitness accounts and sometimes daily sightings of "an air-breathing mammal, with the trunk, genitalia, and arms and head of a human being, and a legless lower trunk terminating in a pair of lateral fins or flippers." After his own investigation and determining that the locals were killing, butchering and eating dugongs—and not mermaids--, Beckjord concluded that no unknown animal was being seen in that area.

All the references cited for his academic credentials are newspaper interviews relying on Beckjord as source. It is highly doubtful any of these degrees are real. Beckjord was a gifted liar according to numerous people he talked into giving him money for his endeavors. One Los Angeles woman gave him close to $40,000 in the early eighties to make a movie about the Loch Ness monster which he vacationed in Scotland with no resultant movie. She sued him and an article appeared about it in the Los Angeles Times around 1982–3 in which he shrugged off the suit with "I have no assets".

He studied law for one year at Boalt Hall at University of California, Berkeley. He later graduated with an MBA from U.C. Berkeley in 1966.

He studied sociology at Tulane University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1961.

Jon-Erik Beckjord (April 26, 1939 – June 22, 2008) was an American paranormal investigator, photographer, and cryptozoologist interested in such phenomena as UFOs, crop circles, the Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot. Throughout his career, he owned three separate, small-scale museums that featured displays, mostly photographs, of alleged UFO, Nessie, and Bigfoot sightings. He made guest appearances on national radio and television shows, but was criticized by fellow cryptozoologists and skeptics alike for not providing substantive evidence to back up his claims of the existence of paranormal beings.