When bigfoot gave me the heebie jeebies..

The recent spate of posts about the confluence of bigfoot and UFOs has brought back a dim memory. It was sparked first by Greg Bishop’s post detailing a 1973 account from Uniontown, Pennsylvania. I know that account well, because it was detailed in B. Ann Slate and Al Berry’s 1976 book Bigfoot, a book I read as a teenager.

Unlike most books about bigfoot, that book is not shy about putting our hairy cousin and the paranormal together. I remember that, as I read it, I became increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn’t that I rejected the paranormal outright, it was something about putting the paranormal and bigfoot together that unnerved me. Then, about three quarters of the way through the book, comes the story from Uniontown, with it’s UFO, its orbs, its tale of some kind of animalistic possession of a witness, and of course, bigfoot, all woven together. It was too much for me. I was actually physically repulsed and terribly upset for days. I stopped reading the book then and threw it away. I discovered on recently re-reading it that i had I forgotten everything else that was in the book, except that one story, the one I had actively tried to forget.

It seems fairly strange to me now that I would have had such a strong reaction against that particular tale, and I take note of the emotional reaction; the strength of it was nearly overwhelming. At that time I simply could not rationally entertain the idea that the story from Uniontown was true, no matter what the actual truth of the situation was. It disturbs me to have been so governed by emotion then, because it makes me wonder what I might reject out of hand as impossible now on sheer emotional grounds. Understand, I’m not endorsing the story as true -- I have no idea whether it is or not, I am talking about my inability to even consider it rationally.

I’ve had cause to wonder about that particular reaction in another context since then, too. I was once part of a bigfoot organization that collected reports from my state. I found an old report that had been rejected from several years back, with words from the investigator along the lines of, “The report has some very good features and the witness seems reliable enough when interviewed, but the mention of UFOs ruins the case and makes it unusable.” With that, the investigation ended. The witness’ statement does mention an odd light that couldn’t be explained, but there’s no indication in the text that the witness insisted it had to be an alien visitor hobnobbing with bigfoot or anything like that. It was just an unexplained light that the witness thought might be related. But that mere taste of a conflation between the two mysteries was enough to scotch the deal for that investigator. Isn’t it possible that we could have gone out there and found that there was a rational explanation for the light the witness saw, and then found evidence of bigfoot too? We’ll never know now. I should point out that the investigator in question was a scientist. No one is immune to the knee-jerk emotional response.

But here’s the deal on that -- we really don’t know anything about what’s going on out there. Some of these details that have been historically winnowed out of bigfoot reports, details like the subjective response of witnesses, how their bodies felt, their emotional reaction; and physical details that don’t fit our understanding of the world, like the occasional light, and who knows what else -- these things get edited right out of the report. We have already been looking at the idea of infrasound on this blog. It’s very difficult now to reconstruct older cases that might be helpful in figuring out whether infrasound has anything to do with bigfoot because the clues have been edited out or repressed. (I’m struck by how much of the Uniontown account seems to resonate with the infrasound hypothesis, though things are still pretty weird and go far beyond it.) Thirty years ago, we had no rational conceptual basket for the experiences that go along with the infrasound hypothesis, so rather than collect the data, we (almost always) threw it out. The same thing could be happening with the lights and other trappings of UFO encounters. There could be data here that, thirty years from now, will have a rational explanation, but we just don’t have the mental framework to grasp it now. We should be meticulous in our collection of the data. If the witness is otherwise reliable, and especially when there is physical evidence too, let’s take it all in. I can almost guarantee that, down the line, the things that weird us out now will look different later on.