It used to be easy for me to laugh at those reality shows about ancient aliens, the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, flying saucers, haunted houses, and Bigfoot.

The “experts” all frantically search for an hour (less commercial time) but nobody ever finds anything — well, almost nothing.

A couple of weeks ago, a guy searched for Bigfoot in the forests of Virginia. The program ended with him proudly holding up a piece of key Bigfoot evidence — a plastic bag of poop that he felt was certainly a souvenir from the big guy.

As ridiculous as that used to seem, today I realize how foolish I was. That’s because I learned that Bigfoot, or at least one of his relatives, actually prowled in our area, in Fontana, almost 50 years ago.

Bigfoot, or “a horrible monster with a hairy body, long hands and claws dripping with slime,” was seen on numerous occasions near the old Fontana dragstrip between Foothill Boulevard and Base Line Road, according to the Ontario Daily Report of Aug. 26, 1966.

I know now that this was really serious stuff because both the Daily Report and the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram reported on it several times. They quoted reports from a bunch of Fontana teenagers — always a reliable source for such things.

The first incident was five weeks earlier when a group of teen boys were hanging around the race track one night long after everyone had left. They saw the hairy monster swinging from a tree so they naturally did what anyone would do in that situation — they hurled an empty orange crate at it.

When the crate came flying back out of the trees, they took off and reported the sighting to sheriff’s deputies. They searched but could find only a lone print of a foot with three toes.

(Traditionally, when media discovers such a mystery like this, they give it some kind of provocative name. The Daily Report called it “The Invincible Brush Man,” a rather dull effort that made the monster sound like a door-to-door salesman.)

On Aug. 28, the sightings were important enough to be spread across the top of the front page of the Sunday Daily Report under the headline, “Fontana Girls Describe Monster.”

Two girls, both 16, reported to deputies they had been attacked by the hairy beast along Base Line Road. “It reached out and grabbed me,” said one teen. “The monster is real and horrible.”

The paper reported one girl, whom they chose to describe for some reason as a “platinum blonde,” said they stopped their car on Base Line with what they thought was a flat tire.

Suddenly the monster jumped out of the brush and approached the girls. The article said they got back in the car and drove off while Bigfoot tried to grab them with his slimey claws.

In all those 1950s space alien and giant monster movies, every local police officer usually shrugged off impending disaster until it was too late to do anything about it. That pretty much described disbelieving sheriff’s Deputy O.W. Manning: “I think this monster business is a lot of hooey.”

Manning said the girls refused to take a lie detector test when asked, but one of them told the paper they weren’t allowed to take such a test.

“Probably scared they’d discover we were telling the truth,” she said indignantly.

The Sun-Telegram reported on a 21-year-old Ontario Marine scout, just back on leave from combat in Vietnam, who vowed to arm himself and use his military stealth skills to sneak up and ambush Bigfoot. If he was successful, it was never reported.

In the Aug. 30 Daily Report was an item that deputies were called out to reports of shooting around the race track. They didn’t find any Marines but instead four teenaged boys, with two rifles “combing the brush and shooting at everything that moved.”

Deputies called it a “small scale war in the area where the monster lived” and confiscated the guns for two weeks, sparing Bigfoot and anything else still alive out there for a while.

That seems to be the last sighting of our hairy visitor, at least in the local papers. That undeveloped area nearly 50 years later is now covered with tract homes, with nothing truly Bigfoot-like to be seen, not even monster poop.