Eric Altman has spent the last 24 years of his life trying to track down Bigfoot. Yes, that Bigfoot, a.k.a. Sasquatch, Yeti, the Skunk Ape, Yeren or Yowie.Altman simply refers to him -- or her -- as "a large, upright, hair-covered primate." And he just knows he's out there, somewhere. Maybe even in one of Pennsylvania's forests. "We get calls about sightings all the time," said Altman, co-founder of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society in Jeanette. As it turns out, our state is a hotbed of close encounters of all kinds -- ghosts, UFOs, monsters and, of course, Bigfoots. These alarming facts were revealed at yesterday's fourth annual Pennsylvania Paranormal Conference in Gettysburg. The event attracted about 100 people, all willing to plunk down the $90 registration fee, plus the cost of a hotel room, to listen to a day's worth of spooky stories. They came from all over -- Pennsylvania and its surrounding states and some as far away as Georgia and Kentucky. Not all are believers, but most seemed open to the possibility that we are not alone. Or, as Bill McEwen of Lawton, Susquehanna County, put it: "They can't all be crazy." McEwen related his eerie tale of a disappearing rabbit. It happened while he and a friend were hunting small game. Both drew a bead on the same bunny and fired. Just like that it was gone. "Poof, it just totally disappeared," McEwen said. He hastily added, "And we weren't drinking.

It was a ghost rabbit." If there's a universal trait among true believers, it's that they're passionate about the paranormal. Frank Feschino's eyes grow as wide as saucers when he talks about the misnamed Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia. It really wasn't a monster, or as Feschino put it, a biological entity. It was a UFO probe that a bad sketch artist and a shaken housewife turned into a monster dressed in monk's clothing, with a blood-red face, claw-like hands and an ace-of-spades cowl.

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