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Not that that's his only problem. He's at least 8 feet tall. Very hairy. And painfully awkward in his size 85 feet. Very shy, too. Loves dumpsters, but hates puppies, babies and group hugs.

Spotted more than 500 times since 1973 in western Pennsylvania alone, the tall, dark and hairy man-beast known as "Bigfoot" takes center stage today in Jeannette, Westmoreland County, where a gaggle of Sasquatch aficionados will host the fourth annual East Coast Bigfoot Conference & Expo.

Although never captured or otherwise scientifically substantiated, the big lug known for his mammoth footprints continues to cut an impressive — and odorous — path through the collective consciousness of the Keystone State.

"He looks like a big hairy guy and he stinks real bad," said John Vukovich, a West Newton hunter who claims to have seen Bigfoot six times since the early 1960s. "Armpit, body odor, real bad, real concentrated. And diarrhea. He smells like diarrhea, too.

"In the sixties, we didn't really know what he was. We thought these tracks were from some hippie walking barefoot in the woods.

"Now we know better."

Or do we? The Bigfoot tracking network nationwide is split on the nature and number of Bigfeet. Some trackers in the Pacific Northwest insist Bigfoot hasn't relocated to the Pittsburgh area. Some say there are no more than 2,000 Sasquatches nationwide and that they should be on the Endangered Species List. Others estimate as many as 6,000, living in nuclear families from Maine to Alaska, with cousins in Tibet and Guyana.

But Pennsylvania's Bigfoot has always been a bit different. There are more sightings here than any state east of the Mississippi, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. In fact, Pennsylvania sightings rank third nationwide, with nearly as many reports as Canada.

He's also a bit more supernatural here. Surveyors point to our Bigfoot's unusual three-toed footprints, his glowing red eyes and note the big fella mysteriously disappears when shot at or touched — not to mention witnesses who claim they saw Bigfoot carrying a glowing green orb through Beaver County. They've seen him near UFOs. To these Keystone State trackers, he's out of this world.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Bigfoot, and he came to Pennsylvania in a space saucer.

"If you see Bigfoot, call us as soon as possible," says Stan Gordon, a longtime UFO and Bigfoot tracker. "You need to get people there as soon as possible who are trained to do this. Don't shoot at them or disturb them in any way. We still don't know how they'll react."

Gordon has never gazed directly at either UFOs or Sasquatches, but in his Greensburg basement bunker, a vast array of radios and other gadgets patrol the night skies, searching for the crackling whispers from squad cars, jets or park rangers following Bigfoot. Or spacemen. Or both.

Once on an investigation he heard the song of the Bigfoot, and it wasn't pleasant.

"Bigfoot, these creatures make a sound you'll never forget. They vibrate the sound out of them, a wailing, like a baby crying or a woman screaming. That's very common. We heard it and it was like a person with asthma."

Gordon's hotline typically nets callers reporting Bigfoot darting in front of their cars, terrorizing farm animals or crashing through the forest with a deer on his back. He has a newspaper clipping dating to 1931, detailing a giant ape man lurking around barn yards.

But much of the time today, the phone rings from a trailer park. And it's not Bigfoot dialing collect.

"These things, for whatever reason, are commonly attracted to trailers," says Gordon. "Trailer courts, individual trailers. Banging on the sides of the trailers. Why? There are a lot of questions. We don't have all the answers. We just gather the information."

Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society director Eric Altman lives in a Jeanette trailer park, but Sasquatch has never knocked on his door. Altman, however, has probed an August sighting of Bigfoot skulking about the Delallo's Italian grocery store near there. Does Bigfoot nosh on capicola?

"We have a theory: He was going through the dumpster," says Altman. "He has to fight for food. You've got an 800 pound creature roaming around, and he needs a lot of calories. Berries and nuts and twigs aren't going to cut it.

"We went and talked to the woman who saw him at Delallo's. We met her, and she told us all about it. She definitely saw a Bigfoot, and my wife and I staked out the area after that, but he never came back.

"There was a point where my wife got kind of scared, so we left. We don't know if Bigfoot ever returned or not, but he's often sighted in this area. West Newton, Jeanette, the whole Chestnut Ridge. Delallo's is part of that area. Bigfoot country."

But at Delallo's, workers and patrons alike contend they've never seen the Bigfoot. A clerk mumbled something about an ex-boyfriend, but still insisted she'd never spotted Altman's ape man there. Ditto with the guys eating outside on Delallo's picnic table, who were listening to a crooning Sinatra, not the asthmatic wail of the Sasquatch.

"The Bigfoot? Never saw him," says Mike Samsa, an Allegheny Energy Solutions executive from Chicago. "But I can see why he'd come here. Definitely, he should stop by for the sausage-stuffed peppers. Bigfoot would love 'em."

To skeptics, Bigfoot will likely never drop by Delallo's or any other Jeannette haunt. The fact is, they insist, there's no proof Bigfoot exists or has ever existed. Beyond the Indian lore, the plaster casts of three- and five-toed Sasquatches, the brief sightings and the grainy photographs, there's no DNA evidence, no Bigfoot bodies, no nothing but a hazy legend.

"I assume, for the most part, that people are being sincere when they say they've seen Bigfoot," says Ben Radford, editor of the Skeptical Inquirer Digest and a longtime debunker of the Bigfoot myth. "Of course, there are hoaxes, and the Bigfoot field is littered with hoaxes.

"People want to believe in Bigfoot. They want to touch that notion of wild innocence, that Bigfoot is a mysterious creature, a 'wisdom keeper,' who connects us to nature. It's part of a deeper need all cultures have. They want to believe in a creature that modern science or technology can't explain."

For true believers, however, Bigfoot is as real as, well, UFOs. Or vampires. Or Camelot.

"To me, Bigfoot research is like the quest for the Holy Grail," says Jeannette's Altman. "Modern science has never seen the Holy Grail, and people looked for it for years and never found it. The ark. People looked for Noah's ark for years and never found it.

"I like to see myself as a private investigator who is trying to solve a mystery. And, hopefully, our organization or another one will solve the Bigfoot mystery. It's a blast, and I wouldn't trade it for anything."

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