EP 41 – Amy Bue – Co-founder of Project Zoobook and Member of the Olympic Project Bigfoot Research Team

Writer, educator, and editor from Ohio, Amy Bue became interested in the search for Bigfoot after seeing something strange in Ohio's Mahoning County in 2012. While her main research areas are in Forest County, Pennsylvania, and its Allegheny National Forest and in Ohio's Columbiana County, Amy has traveled to Michigan, New York State, Kentucky, Oregon, Washington State, West Virginia, Texas, Arkansas, and all over Ohio following up leads.

Much of Amy's efforts have been put into her Project Zoobook, a group she co-founded comprised of primate zookeepers, primatologists, wildlife biologists, marine biologists, forestry workers, archaeologists, anthropologists, university professors, law enforcement officials, taxonomists, and other scientists working alongside Bigfoot researchers from across the country. She was given the International Bigfoot Conference's 2018 Dedicated Researcher Award for her work with this group.

Amy is an active speaker, and has spoken for events and organizations such as Gatlinburg's Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Conference, Oregon's Beachfoot, Ohio's Creature Weekend, several Outdoor Hunting and Fishing Conventions, Ohio's State Parks' system, and for the Ohio Division of Wildlife and its Audubon Society. Creekfoot, a well-loved biannual Bigfooting event in Ohio, was created by Amy and her research partner, Tina Sams.

Amy has also appeared at such venues as Horror Hound Weekend's Fact or Fiction Fest in Indianapolis, and at the Spokane Valley Sasquatch Roundup in Washington State. While in Northern Washington, she participated in the filming of a documentary for Extreme Expeditions Northwest, which was recently released. She also headed up a group of women researchers on an expedition in South Carolina, spoke alongside the Olympic Project at Washington's Sasquatch Summit, and was featured in the December 2019 issue of Squatch GQ magazine.

Amy's plans for 2020 and 2021 included trips to research with the Navajo in Arizona, to speak at the Metaline Falls conference in Washington, and to explore Alaska's Prince of Wales Island and Port Chatham. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, these have been postponed.

As a writer herself, Amy's articles on the topic have been published in California's Bigfoot Times and in newsletters as far away as Norway and Australia. She is currently writing a book about Ohio's Tom Page, one of Peter Byrne and Roger Patterson's financial backers and a partner in their adventures.

In between giving time to those efforts, Amy completed her certification classes through the Ohio State University to become an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist.

For the past seven years, she has spent time gathering evidence while doing a long-term micro-study of a portion of the Allegheny National Forest. She collects photographs of flora and fauna of the area, which she shares with scientists through the iNaturalist app, and gathers audio and photographic evidence with her own long-duration equipment. Eyewitness accounts are also mapped. Amy is also continuing her studies with the Midwest Native Skills Institute, and she plans on continuing to learn and use her survival skills in her continued search for proof of Bigfoot's existence.

For all of these reasons and more, Amy was recently awarded the 2020 Bigfoot Community Choice Female Researcher of the Year Award.

Catch Amy every other Tuesday at 9:00 PM EST on her show, "Wild Bue Yonder," on YouTube's Beyond Explanation Channel.