The next morning, I awoke to a single response. Things moved quickly and before long I had a tiny but definite mental picture of the respondent: an intelligent, funny young woman with a local background -- precisely what I was looking for. I was excited and things felt vaguely promising.

Two days later, I had forever lost any chance of meeting her. Haunted by my past, I had inadvertently committed a gaffe that she described as "the height of egotism." It was yet another example, as I frantically tried to explain to her in e-mail, of the scarlet B in action.

Most people don't know me and likely never will. However, if you ran an Internet search on my name, you'd find dozens of links to Web pages with my name mentioned on them. There used to be a lot more; many such links have withered and died in the past three years. Some of the links are to comments I made on Web sites, to sites involving computers, computer games or contract work I've done in the past, but such links are in the minority. The overwhelming majority of links are on the subject of Sasquatch. You know, Bigfoot.

From 1995 to 1998, I was active in what is known as the "Bigfoot community," a loose association of people with a shared interest in one of the most intriguing mysteries of the modern age: persistent accounts of a manlike animal living in the wild places of North America. These people include longtime Bigfoot researchers and investigators, Bigfoot enthusiasts and those who operate Bigfoot Web sites. It's an eclectic, often eccentric, typically disappointing, but occasionally brilliant crowd that sometimes agrees seemingly on only one thing: the reality of a heretofore-unknown hominid.

In 1998, I left the Bigfoot field. I announced I was leaving the Internet Virtual Bigfoot Conference, a now-defunct e-mail list devoted to the subject. I wrote a goodbye letter, took down my Bigfoot Web site and informed other researchers that I would no longer be pursuing Bigfoot research. I had a variety of reasons for doing so, some of which had more to do with my inability to tolerate other Bigfoot researchers and enthusiasts than with the phenomenon I purported to study. However, while I took down my Web site and all of the data on it, I did leave up sighting reports, Native American legends about Bigfoot-like creatures and research that I provided to other paranormal Web site operators.

At the time I left, I really didn't think about how my name would remain floating on the Web, connected to Bigfoot. I was just happy to be away from it all. At the time I was cleaning out the /www/ folder on my ISP's server, a lot of other Bigfoot Web sites were moving on to the Great Server in the Sky. Bigfoot sites have always suffered a high turnover rate, so it never occurred to me that some links would still be hot three years later. I figured that my association with Bigfoot would slowly fade from the Internet and that my legacy, as I wrote to the members of the IVBC, would be to become the "George Lazenby of the Bigfoot field, a vaguely remembered character who made a brief, tiny contribution the nature of which cannot exactly be recalled at the moment."

Alas, it hasn't turned out that way. There are many Bigfoot- and paranormal-related sites out there that still mention my name, usually in a dead link to my site, but often in giving credit for a reproduced article or piece of data borrowed from my site. Anyone running a Web search on my name would come upon the same references and links, so my association with Bigfoot is preserved.

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