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Robert Bigelow

Robert Bigelow is a Texas real estate billionaire and UFO researcher who rents the big house and barn on Sherman Ranch near Ballard, Utah, and hosts the task force during The Walkers in Skin. He shares his name with a real-world businessman; in Walkers 06 Andre confirms that it is "the same guy," and that the real Bigelow's company holds the patent for inflatable space habitats.
Type NPC
Aliases Bigelow; the space guy; the billionaire; Mr. Moneybags; Roger Bigelow (slip)
Affiliation Bigelow's research operation
Status Alive (as of Walkers 08); fate unknown afterward
First appearance Walkers 02
Played by Andre

Description

In Walkers 02 he is a sour-faced, middle-aged man in an expensive suit who talks UFOs and space, and who has a satellite-phone meeting to get to. Andre admits at the table that the character "almost got his own voice, and then I got lazy." In Walkers 07 he is furious, storming around a house full of sleepy, confused staff (Walkers 02, Walkers 07).

History

Meeting the task force

Carl Gardner of the Salt Lake City field office names Bigelow as a real estate baron who is renting the ranch house; Bigelow's security man had reported shooting someone, though the physical evidence did not support it. Gardner also recommends Bigelow's hotel, the Budget Suites of America (Walkers 02).

At the big house Bigelow tells the party that the quantity of reported UFO phenomena stands out across a radius of hundreds of miles. He has researched the team ("a lot of interesting stories follow in your wake") and says the Bill Clinton affair "didn't even make the list." He slips by calling Alberta Wilmarth "Madeline." His staff record everything onto big tape reels, with unexplained heat signatures and electromagnetic and electrical readings, and he says some of the sheep exploded. He already knows about the live sperm in Ballard's water (water contamination), adds that it also contains a lot of arsenic, and says his people run theirs through reverse osmosis (Walkers 02). See Sherman Ranch phenomenon.

In Walkers 03 and Walkers 04 he is mostly offscreen. His staff, many of them on university rotations, are fed from the food he buys in bulk, and Walt "Coyote" Murphy clears the party's night patrol with him. In Walkers 03 a Ballard local says Bigelow gave him the same warning about the tap water, without saying why (Walkers 03).

The white ring and the Black Sun

After a white floodlight wakes the party, Bigelow phones to ask, "Do you folks see a light?" He then shows them a sky-camera video of a bright white ring and asks about the Black Sun: the Nazis appropriated it, he says, but it has a long history in pagan mythology. He quotes Revelation 6:12. Several staff have had nightmares (one, Marina, dreams only of drowning). He has his staff psychiatrist debrief the party for about 45 minutes and arranges for a dentist in Roosevelt. He calls the event "one of the most clear-cut events we've ever had here," notes a "definite nonlinear trajectory" on many of his graphs and says they "may be on the verge of making contact." Kurt (addressing him as "Mr. Moneybags") persuades him to set up "a big ring of cameras" around the party (Walkers 05). See the white ring.

Protocol blue

In Walkers 07 Bigelow rages that someone has stolen all his hard drives, tapes and recordings, along with three of his employees, and that the barn has been cleared out too: "Somebody had keys to the whole fucking place." He sends two guards to follow Coyote and the injured intruder to the hospital. After Kurt Larson tells him of the missing students, the cover-up and the sheriff's flight, he declares "protocol blue," unlocks "the big cabinet," and his staff come downstairs with SPAS-12 shotguns and M16s. He sets a defensive perimeter around the ground floor and asks the party to stay as backup (Walkers 07). See Bigelow's recordings.

Walkers 08

Bigelow appears only as the offscreen host of the armed compound, where one of his burly enforcers makes pancakes for the on-edge, armed staff. The party considers recruiting the remainder of his security force, and Rita worries aloud about "worm people" among his staff (Walkers 08).

Trivia

  • In Walkers 06, Andre first calls the real-world Bigelow "Roger" before correcting himself to Robert.

Appearances