I sing the sasquatch electric

As we've often discussed, infrasound, or ultrasound perhaps, can explain much of the weirdness in certain bigfoot reports, but it can’t explain everything.  You may recall Henry Franzoni in spoke in his interview about such cases, and that infrasound is not one of his own explanations for bigfoot’s “puzzling powers,” as he calls them.  Following ideas of 19th century scientists, known as “vitalists”, who believed that there was a “life force,” Franzoni thinks that bigfoot has some kind of ability to control energy.  To ease in our understanding, he likens this ability to the idea of “the force” in Star Wars.  He also makes use of certain theories of Nikola Tesla concerning the possibility of a “dimension within our dimension” that Tesla believed he had found through some of his experiments.

Whether Franzoni is on the right track or not, it is interesting to note that there are reports of strange energies in certain accounts believed to be associated with bigfoot.  You may recall John Cartwright’s encounter, before which he felt something like an electric shock:

I felt like a static electricity shock, it felt like, and kind of.. have you been shocked before, it’s like your just frozen?  All the hairs on your body are standing up, and you’re just stuck there, I guess.

Of course, there is Franzoni’s own experience.  He had gone to a particular location because he had been told that the “evil god of the mountain” could be found there. He had an experience that was similar in many ways to what we’ve recounted already, but with some crucial differences.  Here’s how Henry told the story in an interview:

I was driving with my wife, in a van, and we were way high in the Cascade mountains at night, about midnight, when suddenly the, you know, classic bigfoot smell overpowered us.  Like a wet dog, but like a skunk, really sweet and pungent, I mean just this incredible smell in the air.  We stopped, and I didn’t see anything. There was nothing in front of us. It was pitch black. My wife looked at me and said, “Geez, you know, I’m tired. I’m just going to take a nap.” And she just laid down and fell asleep instantly.  I.. the hair on my body.. you talk about the feeling of being looked at. Well, this was like that feeling on steroids. Because what happened to me was that all of my hair, and I had hair that was about 4” at the time, stood up all over like you rubbed balloons over my head and held them over my head. My hair stood straight out 4” in all directions, like Einstein’s hairdoo.  This huge afro pointing in all directions. A huge static charge was.. I could feel my skin tingling while this static charge overwhelmed me. And this static charge was more than just electrical.  I mean, certainly it felt like static electricity, my hair was standing up.  It felt like it was aware, and I could feel, like, a mind probing me.  And it was way, way, way more than the feeling of being looked at, it was the feeling of being scrutinized under an electron microscope.  And the electrical field was so strong that it blew the starter motor of my van.  So, this lasted for five minutes, and the whole thing went away. The electrical field went away, and the smell went away. I still never saw anything. And yet I couldn’t start my van because the starter motor had been fried by the electrical field.

Truly, a very strange account, and if it were the only one anyone ever told like it, perhaps we’d be forgiven for looking past it.  But it is not singular in the case of UFO encounters, which frequently are noted to interfere with the working of automobiles and other machines.  But are there any other stories involving bigfoot with engines that go dead?  Indeed there are.

Franzoni’s account echoes that of a motorist, W.C. “Doc” Priestly, near Marlington, West Virginia in 1960.  In that case, Priestly was driving in the Monongahala National Forest when his engine died suddenly.  Shortly afterward he saw a large bigfoot-like creature with its hair standing straight up, as if it were in fright.  (Or, perhaps, as if it also were suffering the effects of an electrical anomaly?)  When the creature’s hair went down, the witness’s car started again.  But he didn’t get far before the car went dead a second time, and there again was the bigfoot.  This time, as in Franzoni’s account, the car would not restart, having suffered the burn-out of a critical component.
 
Other witnesses have noted strange electrical effects.  On a site called kromwallsresearch.com I found this description of an event during a bigfoot research outing, which is similar in some details to that of Franzoni:

It was actually after we went to bed that night that one of the weird things happened to me. At around 4:30 a.m. I found myself wide awake. I didn't hear anything or see anything out of the ordinary but there was an electrical discharge that started in the rear of my skull on the right side and worked it's way to the left side of my skull. It moved so slowly I could actually trace the movement. It lasted several seconds and was an experience I don't remember having before. It was not painful but it was definitely there...curious.

These sensations of electricity are interesting, to say the least.  Recently, during an episode of the radio show I co-hosted with Billy Willard, Sasquatch Watch Radio, I was told by bigfoot researcher and author David Paulides that some of his witnesses have reported electrical effects.  I was also told by a listener during that show that often, in a certain area associated with bigfoot research, people will lose the electrical system in their cars for a period of time.  Certainly, whatever these electrical anomalies might be, it should be stressed that many of them happened without the presence of a bigfoot being  specifically noted at the time.  It is always possible that these electrical disturbances have nothing to do with bigfoot at all.  Yet there are occasional tales of such things, such as a report from Albuquerque in 1966 where, whenever a bigfoot-like creature was nearby, the radio would stop working.

Indeed, these effects are very commonly seen in UFO encounters.  Perhaps these electrical effects are an indirect indication of a common cause?  Since these effects are noted very rarely in bigfoot encounters, one might even hypothesize that they are not really a feature of bigfoot encounters at all, and when they are noted they suggest that the encounter is not what it seems to be.

THE GLOWING EYES PROBLEM

 One energy effect that has perplexed bigfoot researchers for years is the phenomenon of the self-luminous eyes.  There are many accounts that suggest bigfoot can make their eyes glow without a source of light to reflect.  One of the earliest documented cases is one that we just mentioned in the previous section, that of W.C. “Doc” Priestly in 1960, near Marlington, West Virginia, who noted that the creature he observed had two large eyes that glowed “like big balls of fire.”  A witness in a case in Sykesville, Maryland in 1973 noted big luminous eyes.  Another case from October of 1977, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, included an 8ft tall bigfoot with glowing red eyes which seemed impervious to gunfire.4  While the imperviousness to gunfire has been noted in other cases too, that, at least, is relatively rare, while the observation of eyes that glow, whether there is a source of light around or not, is not very rare at all.

A sizable portion of researchers discount the possibility of self-luminous eyes out of hand, suggesting that there must always be a source of light responsible, even if it isn’t noticed by the witness at that time.  But I don’t think this is right.  I have spoken with some witnesses that I trust who have told me the eyes definitely seemed to light up on their own.  For instance, Henry Franzoni told me recently that he had seen “light come from the eyes of one of these guys.”  He did not think that it was on account of another light source.  “I was in an extremely dark place in the woods, with no light,” he said, “and green light came out of the eyes.”  Other researchers have told me similar tales.  One of the best of these accounts comes from Scott Herriot.

Herriot is a comedian and filmmaker by trade, but do not let these facts fool you into thinking he is not a serious minded researcher.  Herriot posses that rare habit of mind of doubting everything unless he has good proof to believe it.  He discounts, for instance, the Skookum cast, calling it an elk lay, and believes the Patterson/Gimlin film is a hoax.  But he has seen the phenomenon we call “eyeshine” for himself, and he believes it is something the creatures can do without a source of light.

“Dude, that was really freaky,” he told me.  The events happened while he and an associate were working their way up a hill near where a sighting had occurred a few weeks earlier.  Near the top of the very large, steep hill, they saw something hidden in the shadows under a fallen tree.

I noticed roughly 40 feet away through all this dense stuff there was a darkness that was low down, part of which was a log that had fallen.  But underneath it was a shadow that really stood out.  And it just caught my eye, and I looked, and it was pretty apparent that there were these two pretty big brown eyes looking out of this darkness at me.  Now because it was low, I wasn't on immediate high squatch alert.  I just thought it was low, but then I kept looking at these eyes.  And at first I was doubting, I mean, are they actually eyes?  But then after about 30 seconds they started swaying very, very slowly back and forth so it was definitely an animal.  I would say they were probably 3" apart, these eyes.

The two researchers observed the eyes for about ten minutes and could not be certain what they were looking at.

I was pretty convinced early that it wasn't a bear.  It was just way too locked onto us with its eyes.  A bear in my opinion would have been gone.  This thing was kind of just checking us out, but very, almost hypnotically.  I mean its eyes were so fixed on us.  But we weren't really freaked, we were just trying to figure out.. because it's shadowed, and all you can really see are the eyes and it looks like little bits of light are reflecting off a face, but it's back in the shadows, so you can't quite make out what it is.  And that's another reason I didn't think it was a bear, because a snout would have actually gone out into the sunlight.

The astute skeptic will no doubt note the “little bits of light .. reflecting off the face” and say that this is what caused the subsequent eye glow.  But I don’t think this fits the observation, which Herriot notes with detail.

So we decided after ten minutes, because we weren't feeling threatened at that point, didn't feel weird.  So let's just go toward it, see what happens, maybe it will move and we can see more of what it is.  So we take one, maybe two steps, and the eyes of this animal, starting at the dead center of the eye, coupled with what appeared to be a dilation of the pupil, gave off this red glow.  . . . It was almost like, imagine, two lit cigarettes behind the eyes and somebody is inhaling as the eyes dilate.

The reflection of light is not a gradual process.  The speed of light being much faster than our perceptions, we would not expect to see the eyes beginning to glow in this way.  Think back to any time you’ve seen a reflector catching some light.  It doesn’t look as Herriot describes at all.  Other researchers have told me the effect is like that of an incandescent bulb on a dimmer switch being slowly turned up.  One researcher said that he noted a roiling motion within the light, as if the liquid in the eye were having an effect on the light.  What can explain this kind of effect?  I didn’t have any idea, but I went looking for possible explanations.  Interestingly enough, I found that light can be produced in a salt water through the use of ultrasound.

We know this because a certain kind of shrimp, commonly called snapping shrimp, are able to do just this.  They use a large claw to make an ultrasound and this creates light when bubbles created in the snapping motion pop under pressure.  The effect is called sonoluminescence.  Since we suspect, with some reason, that bigfoot is able to use sound in unique ways, we should consider this possibility, but we do have some problems.  When the shrimp do this, they also create a great deal of heat, up to 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  I find it difficult to believe that a creature could create this amount of heat within the body without doing itself injury, but I confess I don’t know.  Maybe if the heat is produced in small doses, or is dissipated rapidly?  Also, there may be completely different processes which will create light about which we remain ignorant, so I do not propose to remand the accounts of self-luminous eyes to the Transdimensional theory even if we can’t understand how they work at present.  We may yet discover how such a thing is possible.

DIFFICULTIES WITH CAMERA AND VIDEO EQUIPMENT

“Why don’t you have a good picture or video?” pseudo-skeptics always ask us.  And it’s true, aside from the Patterson/Gimlin film, there isn’t much, and what there is of it is pretty awful.  Bad luck, maybe?  Maybe.  Most researchers look for more prosaic answers.  According to some, the cameras make a noise, inaudible to humans, but audible to animals (as is attested by the many game cam pictures of deer looking straight into the camera).  Other researchers make the more daring (and less easily tested) conjecture that somehow bigfoot can see into the infrared realm.  Something has to account for the fact that although there are now many game cams in the wild, there are no good pictures of bigfoot.  The truth is, we really don’t know why bigfoot, if it exists, isn’t regularly caught on camera.
    But there are some indications that maybe something weird is going on here.  Here is a good example from a Washington state researcher whose initials are BH:

I live in Washington State. This last December tracks were recorded 100 feet from [a] home in the snow by an expert tracker. I've been working on a food station while using two high definition Reconyx cameras for the last few months. For the last month, I've had food taken from the table (HIGH off the ground) with no pictures of the culprits. Mind you, I have a plastic milk crate sitting over the food also. Before this, I had [pictures of] the occasional crow come and eat what's been left. Now I have no pictures what so ever.  (Oh, [I have] the before shot of me putting it up and the after picture of me.) I've checked batteries also and both have been good. The last time food was taken, both cameras were set over to one side by a small fraction. I also have a night shot of a flash or light in one picture. One camera is turned so it sees the table and the other camera. The flash was not from it. It's a mystery!

I have no idea why the camera would not record who or what was taking the bait set before it. Nor why this would be a consistent problem for researchers. Certainly, it adds fuel to the debate over whether bigfoot is a paranormal creature or not.  Regarding the cameras being “set over to one side”, I asked BH whether he meant that he had moved the cameras himself (maybe to get a better shot), but in a reply he reiterated, “Something or someone else did.”  And as for the unexplained flash of light, one can only speculate how this is related.  If it is related, at the very least it shows there is some energy involved in the mystery.
   
This is weird stuff, but BH’s experiences are not unique -- other researchers using game cams have told me of strange happenings, though few are wiling to talk openly about it.   I found a recounting of a typical case on a website called Kromwellresearch.com:

While placing his game cam in a location that would take advantage of all three trails [Jim] experienced problems with the camera.  Even though the batteries were new they failed to activate the game cam.  He took the camera back to base camp to change the batteries and the host asked if he could check the batteries with his ohm meter.  The check of the batteries indicated they were indeed new.  They were placed back into the camera and worked fine in camp just like it had originally.

The game cam was again set up, activated and left alone for the night.  The following morning it was checked and again it had failed to operate properly.  In follow up checks the camera worked perfectly.  Strange...this phenomena has been reported by other Sasquatch researchers and is actually common with paranormal researchers.

On the second day of the expedition Jim wandered back to the place the cam had been set up to see if there were any more tracks.  What he found was a tree spike indicating where the camera had been placed.  Neither he nor anyone else in the expedition had placed the spike.  It was not a fallen branch as indicated by the root ball pointing up into the air.  This tree had been placed there by something or someone; however, only one other person knew where the cam had been placed.

Such things are difficult to explain unless they are simply coincidences.  Yet it is odd that so many researchers experience these particular coincidences.

The testimony of Dave in KY will be useful to us again, as he is familiar with game cams and has had one in use at a certain sighting location for some time.  Here is the story that he told me (edited slightly to remove personal material or to clarify meaning):

Some odd, interesting things continue to happen on the farm.  I have been experimenting with baiting a bit and the food has been taken every time.  Every time there is no game cam or conscious human observer that is.  I think I mentioned that I had tried some baiting with game cam down at the end of the road where the footprint was found last August, but nothing had really come of it.  On the few visits I've made this year I have tried to use my car as a "point of contact" since it tends to stand out.

    Given that I don't think the individual I encountered [at the sighting location] is the same one(s) that may be present at the farm (which lies, geographically about 7 or 8 miles from the other site) I don't consider the car to be taken as a threat.  The farmhouse is only occasionally occupied right now as my dad is not running cattle near the house or upper fields this year and we only make maintenance visits and have had some contractors doing some painting to keep the place weather tight.  Whenever I have stayed overnight I have made it a point to park the car further away from the house than usual, so it can be seen from the road and fields.  I park it facing away from the house, too.  Initially, I left cut apples, cut-side down on the upper hood, which is actually a flat table-like area (handy for sitting things like grocery bags, gallons of milk etc when loading stuff, the kiddo, etc into the car) that sits fairly high off the ground.  I always make sure the hood is clean so I can see any marks, dirt etc that might appear.  The first night I did this the apples were gone the next day-- and could be found nowhere in the vicinity.  I walked the road back to the dead end and gate and saw no evidence of them either.  No marks on hood or car, so no animal footprints or traces visible.  Birds are always a possibility, of course.

     It was a two-day stay so the next evening I put a chicken breast and a biscuit from the local [restaurant], in a closed box, on the hood and stayed up rather late-- until past 4 in the am-- to see if anything made an appearance.  I stayed in the front bedroom with a camcorder with night vision.  The general time for unusual calls or sounds in the area is between 330 and 530 am, but I heard nothing and dozed off sometime after 430 or so.  I woke up pretty late, around 1030 ( I was staying alone this trip) and when I checked the car the box and contents were gone.  No marks on the car anywhere.  I feel that if a coyote (common in the area) or dog or even a bear (reported, but not confirmed) encountered the food they would have to rear up and press against the car to get to it, centered on the upper hood.  They would have to leave a smear or pawprint or scratch--some evidence.  And most obviously, they would probably consume the food right there or at least drop something leaving the area.  There's nothing to be found anywhere that I've searched.  It seems to be a case where something walks up, picks up the box and leaves.

     The next time down I did a repeat of the chicken box, but rigged the game cam up inside the car.  I folded the front passenger seat back (it can be folded all the way down if needed, but I only tilted it back far enough to get good clearance for the camera lens) and strapped it to my daughters seat in the back.  I place it in such a way that the silhouette isn't even visible to someone who might be familiar to what the inside layout normally is.  I set it and left, stayed up to a reasonable hour (I had company this time) and when I checked in the morning the box was undisturbed and the camera had not been tripped.  The second night I placed the box in the same spot but took down the camera.
     It was gone the next morning.  No traces.  No marks.  We get heavy dews in this part of the country, btw, so the chances of something getting up on the hood and not leaving a mark of any kind are slim.  The box was lifted sometime after dewfall as the dry rectangle was evident.  No evidence of it being scooted or dragged though the dew, either.

     I repeated baiting a couple of weekends ago (the anniversary of my sighting, if you remember, coincides with yearly family reunions in the local fairgound) and had the same results.  This time, however, something was left behind.  My father was down earlier in the week to check on the painters and do some general cleanup to make the place habitable and my wife and I arrived in the early evening on Friday.  After unloading and taking a walk around, I parked the car in the same spot I usually do.  It started to rain that evening [so] I didn't purchase chicken, I just put out some apples, cut-face down, on the hood.  I stayed up rather late reading, but heard/saw nothing and went to bed on the living room couch around 2am.  The next morning the apples were gone with no evidence, but my wife remarked that she had heard an odd, low "growl" or something sometime early in the am-- probably around 4 or so.

     We attended the reunion and my wife, mother and daughter went back to Louisville, while I stayed on with the intention of visiting the library and newspaper offices for research.  I kept chicken and biscuits from the reunion and brought them back, and later in the evening placed them at their usual station on the hood.  The next morning they were gone, but in their place was a fairly good-sized piece of flint rock.  It had not been tossed onto the car-- no dents, scratches, marks-- it had been placed there. Inside the dry rectangle where the chicken box had been. It's interesting because while there used to be a lot of flint around the area as a child, both in the old river-rock gravel roadbed and in the form of points and arrow/knife/scraper blades turned up by my grandfather in the field near the springs,  there is very little in obvious evidence now.  I remember there are a couple of places back in the back where the creeks run where it's more common but they're never visited these days by anyone I know.  So is it an object of "value"...?  It could have been perceived as such over a hundred years ago, I suppose.  Maybe it was a trade.  Or maybe someone's messing with me.

Dave doesn’t really think it is someone “messing” with him.  There are few people in the area of his family farm, and those who are there are mostly elderly. 

We have neighbors, but they're all elderly, down the road a piece, and not likely to be out walking a one-lane gravel-packed road late at night.  There is ZERO traffic on this road at night as it dead-ends just below our barn and back field at my Uncle's old place.  There is one older man who walks the road for exercise, but I know him and he's never out late and not given to entering neighbor's yards and stealing chicken and biscuits.

But if it isn’t some neighbor having a joke, what can account for these events?  Certainly, many animals can take food from a baiting station.  But few are able to do it without leaving evidence.  And how many would leave a stone behind, particularly of the sort which our ancestors used to use as tools?  And how could whatever took the food know the camera was there and therefore not take the food that night, but take it every other night when the camera wasn’t there?  Perhaps this is merely a coincidence, but it is striking indeed.

But recall that there were two events when a camera was present and the food wasn’t taken.  The first was when Dave stayed up with his night vision camcorder in hand.  On that night, the food was taken, but not until sometime after he fell asleep.  Since he was in his own house at the time, there can be no question of the camera having done something that alerted the larcenous night visitor, but perhaps Dave was visible.  The second event is more mysterious.  It is odd that every time food is left out and no camera or witness is nearby, the food is gone, yet when a camera is trained on the feeding location, the food is not taken.

While there’s no way to prove the camera problem is actually a product of some kind of energy, my hunch is that this is the right place to put this kind of anomaly.  It seems as if the creatures somehow know about the cameras and avoid them.  Some folks hypothesize that it is the sound these cameras make when they warm up to take pictures.  This would not be relevant to the first case, when Dave was inside with his camcorder.  Granting, for the sake of argument, that there was a creature there that night which opted not to take the food,  how would it know that the camera was there when it was hidden inside the car?  Being inside a car would, one would presume, make any sounds the camera makes very hard to detect.  And in that case, anyway, the camera never fired, so noise cannot account for why the food wasn’t taken on that night, when it was taken whenever no camera was present.  Perhaps the creatures are not detecting sound, but some form of energy?  But even this would not explain the food remaining undisturbed on the night the camera was in the car, since the camera never fired, therefore never powering up to make any kind of noticeable energy either?  These possibilities don’t seem to provide answers for us, leaving us either with a mystery, or the proposition that by coincidence it was only on the night Dave put out a camera that the creature didn’t take the food.

And as I’ve said, Dave’s experience here is not particularly unique, though it is not easy to get researchers to go on the record with happenings like these.  I understand the reason -- what can you say about it?  The camera didn’t get anything, and you don’t know who or what took the bait if the camera didn’t catch it.
 
I know a few folks who are trying to do the same sort of thing that Dave is trying with both game cameras and video cameras, and they have told me about cameras being moved, batteries dying long before they should, blank shots (as in a picture that has nothing on it, not even the vegetation that should be there), distortion or interference, strange lights, and other anomalies.

So, electrical effects, glowing eyes, problems with cameras -- what are we to make of energy anomalies such as these?  The physical nature of some of the effects can’t be explained by the Psychological theory, so that’s one down.  I don’t believe the Flesh and Blood theory can account for all of these cases either.  This is not to say that if these accounts represent real events, that I believe such things must spring from some kind transdimensional source -- as I’ve said before, or actually, Arthur C. Clarke said it, any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.  A technological source puts us right back into the Flesh and Blood camp, although we would have to explain how bigfoot came by such technology.  But by most accounts, bigfoot does not appear to have, or even be capable of having technology.  By most accounts, bigfoot is either disinterested in it, afraid of it, or seemingly without the capacity of understanding it.  I can recall reading several accounts, though I can’t remember exactly where now, with bigfoot reacting strangely near cars and trucks, peering at the people inside the vehicles with puzzled expressions, and even sometimes removing the people as if the bigfoot thought that these folks inside cars were in danger.  Clearly, when it comes to technology, most of the time bigfoot is a luddite.  So how do we explain these anomalies?  One might hypothesize, as Franzoni does, that bigfoot somehow has a natural ability to manipulate energy in a way that we do not understand.  At the present moment, as troubling as such a conclusion would be, the Transdimensional theory seems best able to explain these effects.

Bigfoot sighting reported in Virginia

Here's a link to the story in the Declaration News.

Sheriff Richard Vaughan said the sheriff’s office received a call about 9:30 p.m. from a Grayson County man who said his wife, another woman and a young boy were traveling north on Route 89.

The caller reported that while traveling between the Blue Ridge Parkway bridge and Edmonds Road they spotted a huge creature that was about 7 feet tall, hairy all over and black.

The creature reportedly came up to the edge of the highway and when he saw car lights disappeared into some pine trees nearby.

With all the rain/snow on the ground, you'd figure there'd be prints.

Thermal video now available

Thanks to a post by Cliff over at North American Bigfoot, I can now direct you to that thermal video by Mike Green we heard about last year.  I've seen the video just now, and I have to say, whatever that is in the video certainly looks squatchy.

UPDATE:

Here's a re-enactment video with a human acting the part of the mystery creature.  It does appear to me that the original was larger, but maybe not a lot larger.

The Explanatory Power of the Bigfoot/UFO Hypothesis

Now we come to a serious bone of contention within bigfoot research.  For decades there has been an effort among what we could call “mainstream” bigfoot researchers to keep bigfoot and UFOs mostly separate.  I don’t mean to suggest the subject is never touched -- indeed, John Green’s classic Apes Among Us gives several examples where bigfoot and UFOs appear to be connected in some way.  But, by and large, mainstream Flesh and Blood theorists do not appear to give much thought to UFOs, and indeed do not appear eager to do so.  Among the researchers I’ve asked about this issue, most of those who would take it seriously at all say something like, “We have enough trouble being taken seriously without adding in a bunch of UFO nonsense.”   The majority of researchers, however, just do not believe in any connection between bigfoot and UFOs out of hand.  For instance, in his 2003 book Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, after recounting some bigfoot/UFO cases, Loren Coleman says “I don’t think bigfoot comes from UFOs.”  In his book just cited above, John Green, after describing some of Stan Gordon’s cases out of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, says, “I am rather thankful that there are consistent differences in the descriptions of the creatures, as well as their actions, sufficient to enable me to agree with Stan Gordon’s conclusion that whatever may be involved, it isn’t sasquatches.”  So it appears that, when bigfoot researchers are willing to look into the matter at all, they are content to draw a clear distinction between bigfoot and UFOs.

Indeed, my experience as a bigfoot researcher leads me to believe that most other researchers don’t even want to think about a connection.  This attitude always strikes me as odd among folks who actively research a mystery deemed nonsense by most ordinary people.  The only reason to consider whether bigfoot exists, beyond actual experience, is because one has looked into the facts with an open mind.  I believe doing so will lead most reasonable people to the conclusion that something strange is going on, and it needs explaining.  But if this is so for bigfoot research, it is many times more true in UFO research.  Not only is there the same kind of anecdotal data that bigfoot researchers have, there is likewise physical data, and also many more pictures and videos than bigfoot researchers have, but, more importantly, beyond that there are many government documents, or statements by government officials that presuppose a reality to UFOs such as bigfoot researchers do not have.  If one has objectively examined the case for bigfoot and has decided bigfoot has passed the test, then how can one not do the same in the case for UFOs?

Perhaps this is best explained by reference to how strange such a thing seemed not very long ago.  Indeed, it still seems strange today, but perhaps not as weird as it once was.  I well remember reading Ann Slate and Al Berry’s book Bigfoot when I was a teenager.  The book shares the details of the infamous Uniontown UFO/bigfoot incident of 1973.  That incident seemed so weird to me that I recall I couldn’t finish reading the book.  I actually threw the book away!  I denied that any such thing could ever happen.  But my reaction was not based on reason, for I did not actually know whether such a thing could happen or not, and I did not seek more information about it.  Instead, I shut it out of my mind.  This was simply a fear reflex, much like seeing a snake and involuntarily recoiling.  That such a thing as was recounted in that book could happen seems to have been too dangerous to my world view, so I put it away where I wouldn’t have to think about it.

Add to this natural fear reaction the reinforcement received through media and cultural institutions.  Most mainstream institutions seem to regard UFOs as ridiculous, or at least seem to go to pains to make that appearance.  But if you think that the media would be alerting you to UFOs if they were indeed thought to have some basis in reality, you should probably think again.  Publisher Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, the newspaper made world famous by the investigative journalism that uncovered Watergate in the 1970s, said in 1988 that “there are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t.  I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keeps its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”  There are obvious security implications in any reality of the UFO business, and you can be sure governments and cultural institutions would take steps to keep secrets they thought they ought to.  We might think of this as a sort of “snake reflex” at the cultural level.

Having grown less afraid of such thoughts as I grew older, I have looked into whether there appears to be a connection between bigfoot and UFOs, and I have been very surprised by what I have found.  Initially, based on what is easily available, I thought there were very few cases that suggested a link, but digging deeper I found there were many more than it first appeared.  In my brief search in preparing this post, I have found more than a hundred cases that suggest a link.  I have no doubt that this is only a portion of what is really available.
 
If there were a connection between bigfoot and UFOs, we might hypothesize that we could find various forms of evidence for this, and not solely the stories themselves.  Interestingly enough, it seems there is a statistical correlation between bigfoot and UFO reports even without there being any obvious connection between them.  According to economist Peter Leeson, guest blogging at the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, there is a relationship between them, and

[t]he relationship is strong and positive. States with more U.F.O. sightings also have more Bigfoot sightings. In fact, six of the top ten U.F.O. and Bigfoot states are the same: Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Alaska, Wyoming, and Colorado. Two states, Washington and Oregon, are among both categories’ top five.

It does not seem intuitively obvious that bigfoot and UFO reports should correlate unless there really is a connection between them.  That connection might be as simple as “the same people make both of them up,” but I don’t believe that is the case.

Let’s take a moment now to consider what the implications would be if there were a connection between bigfoot and UFOs.  And let us not bother too much with the “who” where the occupants of UFOs are concerned.  Let’s just stipulate that we are talking about a people and a technology far advanced beyond ours.  For all we know, there could be millions of extra-solar civilizations.  After all, our solar system was born some billions of years after most of the universe had already formed.  It is possible that there are (or were) millions of advanced civilizations, and these would be on the order of millions to billions of years ahead of ours in technology.  All of the effects witnesses have noted in the weirdest bigfoot accounts could be explained by a vastly superior technology.

If bigfoot seems to have capabilities beyond our understanding, no matter what those capabilities are, an explanation would be available.  Without considering the advanced technology of another civilization, our trouble has been in imagining bigfoot as actually having this technology, since they seem to be completely uninterested in technology by most accounts.  But if the technology comes from another source that uses bigfoot for one reason or another, then bigfoot need not be interested in the technology, or even understand it.

One may well ask, then, why would this hypothetical alien civilization need bigfoot to do their bidding?  I don’t think we have to go very far to imagine a reason.  For instance, we ourselves have done something practically identical -- rather than sending people to Mars, we sent the Mars Rovers.  If we had a technology that gave us the ability to meticulously control biological creatures, and provided they could withstand the harsh atmosphere, I can see no reason why we would not have preferred to send them rather than the rovers.  Living creatures have a natural ability to contend with the unforeseen obstacles that always lurk in such endeavors.  And if they can be self sustaining on a world that has resources to provide them food, such as ours does, all the better.  (After all, the rovers do this with their solar power cells.)   I don’t find anything really controversial in this point of view.  Given a civilization with the requisite technology, the ability to get from their world to ours, and a reason for wanting to come here, I think we might expect something just like this to happen.

Bigfoot does not even have to be a proper biological creature.  So long as the alien culture has progressed in biology as much as the other sciences, one can suppose that whatever creature they chose to use in their explorations would have been genetically modified to suit the job.  So with this explanation, we need not be surprised if bigfoot’s eyes light up, or he can run so much faster than we would expect, or have such incredible strength, or even that he seems to have the ability to affect our own minds, or disappear, or go invisible, or whatever else people have experienced.  These are not magical or paranormal effects, but technologies.  As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

This is only an outrageous proposition inasmuch as we do not believe alien civilizations to be visiting us, but the fact is that we do have evidence that this may well be the case; indeed, we have better evidence of this than we do of the existence of bigfoot.  Though it is not much commented on in popular media, we have through history many statements by government officials in the United States and other countries, made either publicly or acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, that this is indeed the fact of the matter.  Furthermore, there is no philosophical or scientific reason that alien civilizations could not be visiting us, even if, at present, most people put this idea in the realm of science fiction.  As Michio Kaku puts it in his recent book Physics of the Impossible,

[S]o many technologies in science fiction are dismissed by scientists as being totally impossible, when what they actually mean is that they are impossible for a primitive civilization like ours.  Alien visitations, for example, are usually considered impossible because the distances between the stars are so vast.  While interstellar travel for our civilization is clearly impossible, it may be possible for a civilization centuries to thousands or millions of years ahead of ours.

Kaku describes several technologies which should resonate with us, given some reports we have already talked about on this blog, that are impossible today, but which do not seem far outside of our present capability, such as “teleportation, antimatter engines, certain forms of telepathy, psychokenesis, and invisibility.”  So the hypothetical alien civilization need not be vastly superior to account for most of the weirdness in our anomalous reports.

So what kind of evidence can we present for this supposed UFO/bigfoot connection?  My initial opinion of the bigfoot/UFO connection was that, while something strange might have been going on, the majority of the stories seemed to originate with one UFO researcher in Pennsylvania, and this fact did not fill me with confidence.  It would be a very strange thing for such cases to be confined to one area and one researcher like that.  While researching for this post, however, I found the situation was actually very different than I first supposed.  There were many such reports collected by different researchers from different places throughout modern history.

As it happens, stories of both bigfoot and strange lights in the sky go back centuries, though they are not usually told in the same tale.  The earliest account that I have found that clearly has a bigfoot-like creature and a UFO together comes from the Presque Isle incident of 1966.  During that encounter, witnesses observed a strange looking craft descend into a wooded area, lighting up the woods.  Coming out of this same area witnesses observed “a dark, featureless, gorilla like humanoid about six feet tall walking toward them.”  The Presque Isle incident is a particularly good one because it was well documented at the time, and witnesses have continued to talk about it.  There were suspicions that a hot air balloon could account for the UFO, at least, but researchers have made a good showing that wind patterns and weather noted for that day make this explanation very unlikely.  The creature, whatever it was, left foot impressions in the sand, so it appears to have been a physical thing and not a hallucination.

A case from 1969 is even more remarkable, given our speculations, although it is less well attested.  It describes an encounter between two boys and a huge bigfoot-like creature.  According to the tale, the creature picked the boys up and brought them inside a UFO.  The boys saw the bigfoot sit in a chair while inside the UFO, and saw a device with wires placed upon its head.  This is a strange story indeed.  Even stranger, this is not the only time such a thing has been claimed by a witness.  A case from  Clearwater, Colorado in 1977 tells of a witness who observed two beings near a UFO who could apparently control a bigfoot through the use of a black box device, which they warned the witness not to touch.

During that same year, another witness from Snohomish, Washington had a similar encounter with two beings who appeared to have control of a bigfoot.  This witness was interviewed by several different researchers and seems to have been able to keep his story straight, though some of the material arose from hypnotic regression, and the witness appears to have thought some of it had properties that were dreamlike.  Interestingly, he was able to recall seeing the bigfoot without regression.  The “recovered” memories may be called into question on grounds that they were suggested to the witness by the hypnotist; however, the witness was able to recall one detail that would have produced physical evidence.  He recalled that the alien beings descended from their vehicle using a very strange contraption that looked like a small seat with a helicopter blade attached to the top of it.  It appeared to work with a column of forced air, making a “loud buzzing sound.”  When the air controlled contraptions lifted off the ground, the witness noted that they left a hole in the ground about 1 1/2” in diameter and 4” deep.  After recovering this information, the witness returned to the location and found the holes he had been able to remember during hypnosis.  While this doesn’t prove everything he recalled was accurate, it does lend support to his recollection.

Another odd case comes out of Genoa, Italy in 1979.  The witness in that case tells of being brought on board a UFO and shown large glass cylinders with different creatures floating in bluish liquid inside them.  In one of these cylinders he saw a large hairy humanoid fitting the description of a bigfoot.  A very similar account comes out of an unnamed city in Oregon in 1988.  In that instance, the witness reported being taken aboard a UFO and shown a kind of zoo with glass enclosures.  In one of these, two bigfoot-like creatures were observed sleeping.  Remarkably, they had furniture in their “cage.”  Chairs and a desk were described as well as a quantity of books.  One of them appeared to have fallen asleep reading what looked to be a newspaper.  (If I were to speculate, perhaps this scenario was intended to deliver the message that bigfoot are people too.)

Already we’ve seen a number of cases that suggest a connection between UFOs and bigfoot, but there are many more where these come from.  In 1981, in the Los Angeles National Forest, a witness reported seeing a UFO descend to the ground, and watched two bigfoot approach the craft.  Unfortunately, he did not stick around to see if they entered it.  In 1989, near Mt. Hood, Oregon, another witness observed something that looked like a large transparent, shimmering “raindrop” hovering just above the ground.  Out of this strange object stepped a bigfoot-like creature which then dashed into the woods.  (One might speculate that this is some kind of portal between dimensions rather than a UFO.  There are other stories that suggest such portals have been part of bigfoot encounters, including one that same year out of Sedona, Arizona.  There, the witness observed something that resembled a window in the air, with two tall hairy bigfoot-like humanoids standing near it, as if on guard.)

Also from 1989 comes a very interesting case in which the witness observed through a porthole in the side of a UFO a bigfoot-like creature apparently seated inside the craft.  Near Atascadero, California, in 1993, a witness claims to have observed two bigfoot-like creatures descend from a UFO to, seemingly, collect soil samples.  The creatures returned to their craft as soon as they had these secured.  In 1996, on July 4th, shortly after they had finished setting off their holiday fireworks, witnesses saw a light in the woods near their home.  Thinking others were in there setting off fireworks, they went to investigate.  Instead, they saw three triangular UFOs hovering over a clearing, and three large, hairy bigfoot-like creatures beneath them, carrying on a conversation in a gruff language.

As you can see, far from beginning and ending in Pennsylvania in the 1970s, accounts of bigfoot and UFOs continue into the present, though it is true the accounts are very rare and often poorly substantiated.  A trio of very recent cases come from Belgium, Maine, and Mexico.  In Belgium, in 2005, a witness recalled being abducted by a bigfoot-like creature which took him to a UFO after a brief struggle.  In October of 2008 witnesses in New Gloucester, Maine, reported seeing a large bigfoot-like creature shortly after seeing an extremely bright light in a 60 acre sand pit.  The bright light wasn’t identified as a UFO, but it is suggestive.  Similarly, in April of 2009, witnesses in Sonora, Mexico reported seeing a bright flash of light behind a building.  When they went to investigate, they reportedly saw a short, dark, hairy ape-like creature which fled at their approach.

The cases that I’ve chosen to include here do not exhaust the supply available, though they are the most interesting cases I have found.  (You may notice, for instance, that I didn’t include any of the well known cases from Pennsylvania in the 1970s.)  What do cases such as these mean?  I do not myself have very many cases where bigfoot and UFOs intersect in my own files.  And by “not many” I mean none.  I have seen a case unpublished in the BFRO Virginia database that another investigator had briefly looked into, and I have heard of several others.  But here my interview with Henry Franzoni will prove useful.  “I ran into a bigfoot once in the mountains, in the Cascades,” he said, “and I went back a month later, and a UFO came out of the ground and took off.”

I was really close. The thing is that I was, maybe, an eighth of a mile, and I was on a valley wall, and the UFO came out of the ground in the valley below me. And it came up above the trees, and it hovered above the trees.. and I’d say an eighth of a mile, which is, what? 600 feet or so? And it was really.. it looked like a sideways ice cream cone.  It didn’t look like a UFO that I had ever seen in a book or anything. It had a glowing amber half-ball at one end, like at the ice cream end of the cone, and it went down to a point, and it was a silver point. And it wasn’t flying like a rocket, it was flying sideways. So it was actually hovering sideways above the ground. And it slowly turned.. like a video game, just the yaw and pitch, and stayed at one altitude above the trees, and just rotated in a plane about 90 degrees. And then the orange ball got really bright and it just squirted way up into the sky, and disappeared.

Henry described how seeing the UFO, and what happened the next day, changed his perspective on things.

It was a machine that we could see, a craft with an unknown propulsion system. And I came to the conclusion, after the shock, that either that was one of ours, and there’s a closed book of science that the military has [and] we don’t know anything about it. Or aliens are already here on earth. Or both! So when I saw that happen that day, I thought, well one of these things is true. I went from never believing in UFOs to, wow, they’re real.  My wife and I.. this happened about 3:00 in the morning. So we took a short nap, and then we went to where it came out of the ground. Because we had seen the exact spot it came out of the ground. We had a real good view of it. We had to drive down logging roads that went down around the valley, because there were no straight road that went there, and there was some pretty severe terrain. So we drove up to the spot. And as we drove up to the spot, who would be between us and the spot it came up out of the ground but two men in black. 

The men in black is a not-uncommon aspect of UFO encounters.  It’s important to understand that the MIBs, no matter how much they look like ordinary people with cars and jobs, however covert, exhibit evidence that they are not.  Their vehicles and clothes look pristine and new, as if they have just materialized moments before the witness sees them.

[T]he thing is that as I came up to this place where the thing came out of the ground, and I could see no evidence of there being a hole or anything, it just looked like a solid.. just a clearing in the woods, like a clear cut. And the MIBs are standing on the edge of it, and they came towards me and, here’s where we get totally “out there”.. I got the telepathic message from the MIBs that, “You don’t belong here.” That was the message I got from them.  they were still probably 20’ away, but they were walking towards me, and I was looking at these two guys, and there was a woman in red. It was just like some of these experiences that you read about. I read about them later. After running into the MIBs, I learned about them on the internet! (laughing) I was like, no, the men in black aren’t real too, are they? But there was a woman in red, who had blonde hair, bright red dress, and white skin, and she was wearing sun glasses. They were all wearing the same sun glasses. They really had the same sort of oriental look, sort of asian look, really thin, same hair, shiny black shoes in the middle of the Cascade mountains. You know it was really strange. And they had what looked to be like a Ford Explorer, or a Ford Expedition, like a big, green, dark green government looking thing. And we had come down the logging road and had not seen any trace of anyone beating us to this place at six in the morning down the logging road. It was like they had appeared in front of us. And, I just looked at my wife when I got the message from them that we didn’t belong here and I said, “Shit, the men in black, let’s get the hell out of here!”  I just hit reverse and just whipped out of there on that gravel road as fast as we could. It wasn’t like they really threatened me or anything. I did get this message I didn’t belong there, and I respected it. Partially because they had communicated it telepathically. 

That the beings Henry saw could speak into his mind unnerved him.  So too, on reflection, did the fact that the SUV and the people looked immaculately clean. Whatever the encounter was, Henry is sure it wasn’t a hallucination.

I don’t think it was a mass hallucination in my case. Whenever I did talk to rational, scientific people, they’d kind of go through the same story, which is they’d say, “Uh, well, you know, you must have been mistaken, it must have been a helicopter. It was wishful thinking, that’s what it was, you wanted to see aliens. You dream of aliens and you wanted to see them so you manufactured that. Unwittingly, you fabricated that with your mind.” One explanation after another. And I sat there, and at the end I said, “No, I just saw a space ship come out of the ground is what it was.”

While Henry did not see the bigfoot and the UFO at the same time, it is striking, given the other historical accounts that we’ve seen, that both were seen in the same area.  What is also suggestive is that Henry has received telepathic suggestions from both the MIB and bigfoot creatures (see Henry's interview for more about this).  This doesn’t prove a common origin, but a common origin would help explain how bigfoot sometimes seems to have strange abilities that we cannot currently comprehend with our own science.

It is intriguing, however, that the MIBs communicated the idea that Henry “didn’t belong” in the area where the UFO had appeared.  This resonates strongly with the sense other witnesses have had that they did not belong where they had their bigfoot encounter.  Recall the case of Dennis in New Jersey, or Dave in Kentucky.  Both got a strong feeling that they did not belong, or had made some kind of transgression by being where they were or seeing what they had seen.  This feeling of not belonging, communicated in some telepathic way, might be an indicator that there is a connection between bigfoot and UFOs.

Remarkably, another story Henry tells might contain a clue, though he has not seen it this way himself.  During his time as a bigfoot investigator, Henry spent much of his time trying to learn what Native American tribes knew about bigfoot.  Many tribes have beliefs that they do not share with outsiders very willingly.  But Henry is part Native American, and he has a way of gaining confidence.  He told me of the Kwakiutl tribe and their beliefs that bigfoot was a messenger god in the employ of another, more secret god.

[I]t turns out that the view of the Kwakiutl is that the Dzunukwa is merely the messenger for the really heavy duty god named Bakbakwaliwiksawae. This is the invisible god that has a thousand eyes and a thousand mouths, who lives on the bottom of the ocean, and bigfoot is only a door man for Bakbakwaliwiksawae’s palace that’s on the bottom of the ocean. So they have a whole other level beyond bigfoot, where bigfoot is just the doorman of the really heavy duty god. These local tribes up here have some pretty evolved ideas about bigfoot!

The idea of a god with “a thousand eyes and a thousand mouths” could be a poetic way of speaking of a telepathic culture.  This is interesting, as in UFO circles, alien beings are often described as having a kind of "hive culture" based on telepathically sharing minds.  According to UFO researcher David Jacobs, if an alien culture was truly telepathic, it would be very different from human culture (bolding is mine).

The totally telepathic society, while having logic, and rationality in common with human societies would, by necessity, be profoundly different. Although an uncontrollable full exposure of all thoughts would be considered horrifying in most human societies, it could be the norm for a totally telepathic society and its consequences would be vast. In effect, one would be forced to share one's innermost private life with all others and therefore individual freedom of thought would be diminished or even nonexistent.

In this type of society uniqueness and individuality could be significantly curtailed. Special characteristics of physiology, clothes, affect, and expression, which can be important for human expression of individuality, would have little, if any, use in a society where individual identity is severely mitigated or altogether unnecessary. The inhabitants would be born into a “public,” or even “corporate,” rather than private culture. The aliens' identity would be reflective primarily of that society’s needs and of the specific function that they must perform within it. Individuality would not be a functional operative within this system.

I believe such creatures could indeed be depicted with only a modicum of poetic license as a single being with “a thousand eyes and a thousand mouths.”  Perhaps it seems far-fetched to think that aliens live (or lived) on the ocean floor, but the idea that UFOs are associated with the ocean has been around for decades.  Ivan Sanderson, an early cryptozoologist, wrote a book on the subject, Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs.  Could the story told by the Kwakiutl tribe, carried forward who knows how many years, tell us something about the nature of bigfoot that we are only now beginning to understand?

What seems clear to me is that some people experience UFOs, some people experience bigfoot, and a subsection of these folks experience both at the same time.  What reality pertains to any of this remains beyond our ability to measure at present. But, granting bigfoot and UFOs are a physical reality, if bigfoot were to be associated with UFOs in the way suggested by the accounts illustrated in this post, it would explain most of the mysteries we have encountered in bigfoot accounts.  The unexplainable anomalies would be explained: bigfoot has access to technology that grants it these abilities, and might even have been biologically altered so that the abilities are in-built, such as the capacity to communicate telepathically, or to use self-luminous eyes for some unknown purpose.  I find this explanation very attractive because it has the power to explain everything, but I grant that there are some difficulties with it.  Although there is a lot of evidence for the reality of UFOs as a phenomenon, there is as yet insufficient evidence available to us to say what it is, or even how much reality pertains to it.  The phenomenon inhabits the very same quasi-reality that bigfoot does. 

I think the skeptical stance that none of this has any reality is very hard to sustain.  People do experience these things.  I cannot be so cynical as to believe that the many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who have reported anomalous events are all hoaxing.  It seems also very difficult to believe that they could all be mistaken about what they have seen.  But, no matter how hard it is for me to believe such, it must be also be said that there is no philosophical reason that this could not be the case.  But if it were the case, it would say something about the human condition that is so far not well understood.

Bigfoot, aliens, and Regan's dream

As you know if you've been following this blog, I've been collecting reports that show anomalies in bigfoot encounters.  There are an awful lot of things that need explaining, from the fact that bigfoot very often seems to have exaggerated musculature (apes don't, for instance), or that there is absolutely no convincing evidence for their existence even though people do experience seeing them, or that they run at speeds that seem impossible, or that they cause a strange fear reaction in witnesses, to the embarrassment of self-luminous eyes, or the scandal of the ubiquitous bigfoot, and on to things like the strange connection between bigfoot and UFOs in some reports.  These things are usually taken piecemeal and dealt with one by one, either by proposing a sciency (but unproven) explanation, or by disregarding the accounts altogether.  But what I am after is an explanation that will account for everything in bigfoot reports.  That desire leads me to consider some of what are considered the more outrageous possibilities.  But, taking off from yesterday's video about critical thinking, it is wrong to allow our emotions to control our thinking process here.

So anyway, I was working up to writing a lengthy series of posts about these anomalies, and the various theories that attempt to explain them, and what strengths and weaknesses each of them have.  And then I ran across a post by Regan Lee at Frame 352 that details a strange dream Regan had.  What made me stop and take notice was how well that dream illustrates one of the theories that would help to explain all this weirdness in bigfoot reports.

Regan's dream shows a group of aliens controlling some bigfoot with technological devices, and using them for menial tasks.

.  . . the aliens are patrolling [ ] a few Bigfoot, who are doing some kind of work, like picking up rocks and taking samples and things like that, putting them into little containers, for the aliens.

The Bigfoot are under the control of these aliens. The control is a sort of combination mind control and remote control -- like the electronic collars used by some dog owners -- and this is the only thing keeping the Bigfoot in subjugation.

  That aliens would use bigfoot as laborers is an old story, going back to at least the 1970s and Zechariah Sitchen.  But what I didn't know until recently is how many of the anomalous bigfoot accounts actually support something like this.

For instance, in a report from 1969, a bigfoot actually facilitates what would be called an abduction today.  Note the suggestion of a mind control device used on the bigfoot, as in Regan's dream.

Two 14-year old boys were playing in a conservation area when a huge Bigfoot type creature approached and picked them up, the creature took them onboard a landed disc shaped object. Inside, several short humanoids dressed like doctors examined them apparently putting an implant into one of them. The Bigfoot type creature was seen to sit on a large chair inside the object. Several wires were placed on its head, which led to another device nearby.

A strange enough synchronicity by itself, but this isn't the only case where such a thing is suggested.  In one case from 1977, in which a witness has a conversation with some occupants of a UFO near a bigfoot and a black box, the black box appears to have something to do with controlling the bigfoot.

[The aliens] told him he was wise to have backed off from the black box, which was nearby. They pointed in a particular direction and the tone on the box changed; as it did, a Bigfoot type creature got up off the ground and walked toward the box. The tone changed and the creature dropped.

 Another case from 1977 involves a bigfoot that is seen to obey the UFOnauts.

The two humanoids then began walking away looking over their shoulders at the witness. He then heard a noise and noticed a huge hairy Bigfoot type creature hiding behind a nearby stump. The two humanoids then seemed to motion at the Bigfoot to come with them. It seemed to obey and left with them.

Lest we think that these accounts are all from the weird 1960s and 70s, I will share this one from 1993, which resonates quite strongly with Regan's dream:

  [The witness] was watching TV when he saw a flash of light in the window shining through the curtains. Jumping up to get a better look he saw this glowing red light on the hillside in the trees. From his back door he could see a ship sitting on the ground in the trees. Then the door of the craft opened and two Bigfoot like creatures came out and took some soil samples, and went back into the ship. It then shot up into the sky and vanished.

Of course, there are more of these suggestions that bigfoot and UFOs have a deep and important connection, but this will suffice for today.  I will never insist that bigfoot and UFOs must be connected, but tomorrow (or soon, at least) I will share with you the most persuasive argument for it that I can construct.

UPDATE: And here it is.

Critical thinking is good for you

NOTE: "Tolerance of ambiguity" is probably an important trait in people who look for anomalous creatures.

American Paranormal bigfoot episode hits it out of the park

I recorded last night's episodes of American Paranormal from the National Geographic Channel and watched the bigfoot episode just now.  It is outstanding.  If you haven't seen it, make sure to watch it when it repeats.  (You can visit the American Paranormal website here.)

The show focused on the work done by Bill Munns and Dr. Meldrum.  It made the point that hair samples return as "unknown primate,"  and that the Patterson/Gimlin film shows a figure that simply could not be a human in a suit because of body proportions, musculature, and size.  It's the best presentation I've seen of this evidence, and it was very well done.  You have to watch it.

Here's a couple of clips from their website: