Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2024
Bigfoot and UFOs – Is there a connection?
by: Brent Raynes
“First the UFO sightings, and many of those were close-range, low-level objects, not just lights in the sky. There were amazing reports of things on highways hovering over cars, landing reports. Then in the summer of 1973 we had the biggest outbreak of Bigfoot sightings ever documented. That went on to early ’74 and we’ve had Bigfoot sightings every year since then, including last year.”
A number of the Bigfoot cases they were investigating suggested a connection to the prevailing UFO activity. I mentioned the noted case he had written about involving a Bigfoot seen holding a globe of light. “Well, that was a very interesting case,” Stan admitted. “That was September 1973, and that’s when again a lot of things were going on. That was north of Pittsburgh. There were two young ladies waiting for a friend to pick them up and while they’re standing around out in the country, they see this around 7 – 8-foot-tall Bigfoot with white hair. This thing’s running across the road and in one of its hands it is carrying a glowing small ball of light and it kept moving off into the woods. A short time later this object came across the sky projecting a beam of light down to the woods in the area where the creature ran into.”
Stan explained how since the 1960’s he’s had a lot of reports of these small spheres and how in 2022 he and his team came upon “the biggest surge of these small sphere reports.” He added, “Historically, in Pennsylvania, in areas you have a long history of Bigfoot activity, there have been many witnesses, as well as researchers, who have for years seen these small spheres of light low to the ground, low in the trees in some cases. Even in recent years, coming out of the woods, coming very close to these people.”
One specific case Stan recalled happened he said back in May 2019, in a rural area perhaps 8-10 miles outside of Pittsburgh, where Bigfoot activity has previously been reported. “This is 1 o’clock in the morning and this fella happens to get up and is looking out his kitchen window. There’s a lot of woods back there but it’s very well lit. He sees a small Bigfoot. We do get reports of these small ones, about 4 to 5 feet tall. …Had dark hair. Long hair on the head and the back area. It’s walking upright, kind of stooped over. He could see this thing very clearly. He saw it from about 75 feet away.”
As the man watches, the hairy creature enters the woods and within an estimated three seconds a light about 3-4 inches in diameter, and about four feet above the ground, It moved for an estimated three seconds, just a short distance, and then vanished. “Then several seconds later the light reappeared again about 10 feet away. This time that small sphere emitted a bright beam of light that extended out about 10-12 feet. The beam vanished and the light was gone and that was it.”
In April 1977, this author spent several days in and around Somerville, New Jersey, where a rash of Bigfoot encounters were being reported. I was invited to come in and investigate the situation, which was being withheld from the local news media. Just a couple of months prior to my visit a young man claimed that he had come face-to-face one night with the creature! He claimed that at the same time, just a few feet behind the Bigfoot, there was a tiny pinpoint of light from which a “high pitched whistle” noise was originating. He found himself unable to move, and the creature seemed to be in the same predicament, until after a short while the light and whistle ceased to be, whereupon the Bigfoot turned and walked away. He said he found he could move again too and hastily walked away too, but in the opposite direction.
Back in early May 1976, I looked into some Bigfoot activity that had been reported in Flintville, TN. The stories were getting national attention and had even been described in the pages of The National Enquirer. One resident described for me how about five months earlier, one night around 9:30 p.m., he went outside to investigate why his dog was barking. That’s when he noticed something about seven foot tall, broad shouldered and with long hair, a mixture of black and brown, covering it’s entire body. It was standing by his chicken pen, facing him initially, and then turned and walked away. He had it in sight for about a minute. “I was scared,” he admitted. He rushed inside to get his gun, but when he returned outside the creature soon disappeared from sight down a gravel road.
The incident that had sparked so much media attention had happened a month earlier, in April 1976. It was then that his neighbors had reported seeing the tall hairy creature grab for their 4-year-old boy. Luckily, it wasn’t successful. But the man I was talking to said that two nights before that he was outside and saw it standing only 8-10 feet from their house. Again he said it looked about 7 feet tall, was “shaggy looking” and walking upright. “There’s just a silence down there when we’ve heard this thing,” he added. “We all heard something walking down there.” There’s also been described a “rotten egg” odor in connection with the creature’s presence, and a sound like a “hysterical woman crying.” The creature had also been reported making a noise like someone suffering from a bad case of asthma.
For over a year I periodically went back and forth to Flintville, to follow up on the stories and see what more I could learn. One very pleasant elderly lady who lived in the same neighborhood as the two families I just mentioned had also seen the creature, she told me. She recalled one personal encounter, back in the summer of 1976, which happened, she said, in the presence of other witnesses. She was in a nearby field and had slipped and fallen, which is when the creature appeared. She said she saw a 6-7 foot tall, short white haired creature with “real red eyes,” standing a mere 25 feet or so away, at the edge of the woods, just watching her and her friends. It had an upright human-like form, but with a pointed head and eyes that looked a little bigger than a regular human’s eyes. She said she and a neighbor had seen it eating potato peelings she had thrown out. She didn’t seem afraid of it, and added, “Why don’t you come down and see it.”
During my initial visit, there was even a young man on hand from New York City named Lee Frank. He explained how he was a skin diver and photographer who had spent some six months at Scotland’s Loch Ness, looking for their legendary “monster.” We went to Pizza Hut in Fayetteville with one of the witnesses and discussed “monsters” over pizza. Later, in the January 1977 issue of High Times magazine, Lee Frank’s article about his investigation was published. Entitled “Stalking Bigfoot in the Land of Cotton,” he described how he himself encountered the chilling “silence”, but that wasn’t all. One man, who had been a staunch “UFO disbeliever,” had earlier on this particular night, along with another witness, seen “great glowing spheres just above the trees several times.” I had also heard about these “glowing spheres” from one of the other neighbors myself, a man who admitted to me, “I do not believe in flying saucers,” and was at first very reluctant to share with me what he had seen. At any rate, Frank wrote that he and the others heard what sounded like heavy footsteps coming towards them. He wrote: “The thuds approach the wide part of the path 25 feet away, still behind trees; they swerve to the left and change to what sounds like a loud mechanical clicking. Like baseball cards snapping against wheel spokes, only slow, about two clicks per second, and much louder and very mechanical. The clicks come from a height of nine feet. In four seconds, the noise abruptly ends and there is nothing but dead silence.”
Bigfoots, “glowing spheres,” the “dead silence” and “mechanical” clicks? What is going on? Is it a biological mutation, a “missing link”, some sort of alien visitation, or some sort of poltergeist-type activity? Whatever it is, over the years, many others in this area and throughout the world have had similar encounters. Many will keep silent for fear of ridicule. I know one of the witnesses I had spoken with wished he had kept silent. “People have been coming into the area with guns looking for the ‘monster,’” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep,” he also complained, telling me about the crank phone calls he’d gotten all hours of the night.
The “monster” wasn’t his problem at all. It was the people.
Periodically, back in 1974 and 1975, I joined Bigfoot hunters Duane and Ramona Hibner in the field. They had set up in Brooksville, Florida, a hotbed for Bigfoot activity and other anomalous high strangeness. They introduced me to a ranch family there who was experiencing Bigfoot activity, a location that Duane and Ramona both saw the creatures themselves. In fact, one night Duane had spotted a large craft with lighted square windows flying low overhead. Nearby Ramona pointed out a two-lane section of country road to me where she had been startled to see a “big ball of light” drop down one night in front of her car and then seemingly bounce back up into the sky.
“Duane told me that during the early part of 1977 he watched a ball of light come through our bedroom window, hover for a split second over my face and head, then curve and go out another window,” Ramona wrote me later in 1978. “He said that it lit up the area quite well. I was sound asleep and had no knowledge of it till the next morning when he told me.”
During one of my visits to Brooksville in November 1973, a Eula Lewis described to me how she had once been out in her yard watering a tree when she heard a sound she compared to static electricity or someone jumping in dry leaves. The noise seemed to be coming from overhead. Lifting her head her glance fell upon a man-like figure with huge shoulders, its body covered in dark brown hair standing nearby in her yard. She immediately rushed to the front door, making it just in time, reaching it just as the creature reached the edge of her small porch. Later Ramona informed me that Eula had also been seeing balls of golden light.
“People have no idea what’s really happening out there,” Stan Gordon explained. “I think the government is in a position where they know it’s happening. They don’t under it either. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. It’s so beyond our present scientific understanding nobody understands it.”
“It’s a lot more complex, and it may not be extraterrestrial. It might be something else, and I’m telling you there’s a physical and non-physical component to it. We’re dealing with something that, for lack of a better term, is interdimensional in many of these cases.”
Stan further explained that with Bigfoot, while they can appear perfectly solid and physical, there are other cases where they appear misty or foggy like, or only partially physical, while some parts of their bodies may appear transparent. They can also reportedly appear and disappear. Stan recalled a case from 1974 “where the woman shot at it with a 16-guage shotgun six feet away. There was a bright flash of light and it vanished.”
Check out Stan’s website which contains much thought-provoking information:
https://www.stangordon.info/wp/2021/06/07/the-government-needs-to-be-more-forthcoming-about-the-ongoing-ufo-mystery-ufo-sightings-reported-yearly-in-pennsylvania/
Not long ago, I was in touch with a man who recalled how at age 13, he was with part of a team that was working with Stan Gordon when they had a most bizarre encounter. “I was standing beside them on September 21, 1991, when two 9-foot black fur covered Bigfoot creatures jumped out of a tree line in front of us.” The creatures had their backs to them.
“When everyone hit these two creatures with their flashlights, the creature behind the first one turned its shoulder (it didn’t appear to have a neck) to look at us. I remember big round green eyes, wide set, glowering at us as they ran. That trailing creature bolted faster and bumped into the one in the lead. The lead creature then turned it’s shoulders to look at us. As they ran from our right to left, they began to fade out into a transparent form, and in seconds disappeared from sight. One of those men, a chemist from the university, knelt down, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me the rare numerical statistic of what we all had witnessed that night. He said, ‘You will never forget what you just saw tonight, and you will never be the same. Remember what a privilege you have had tonight!’ It has driven me on to more investigating.” That experience has driven him on to this day, living now in Arizona, investigating active sites in Sedona, including the Bradshaw Ranch, for more than a decade.
Tommy Blann’s Bigfoot encounter
Tommy Blann, a long time field investigator of UFO sightings nationwide, a while back told me about the time he and his wife believed they had seen a Bigfoot, and I asked him if he’d mind sharing that experience with our readers and if he would mind weighting in on a possible UFO/Bigfoot connection. He replied:
As for the Bigfoot incident near Calvert, Texas in the early morning hours (around 1:30 am) when we were camped out in a tent near a creek, you can go ahead with that story. Over the years, the Central Texas area had reports of Bigfoot and UFO sightings. I'm not saying the two are directly connected as I don't have any data to support that hypothesis, but it does seem like both these reports in some instances, not all, frequent the same location and time period.
I do know that a number of "Bigfoot" sightings have turned out to be misidentification of bears, monkeys and other animals, plus hoaxes created by people especially where tracks are found.
I can honestly say that I don't know what that creature was that my wife and I saw in the early morning hours near the creek that we were overlooking from a grove of trees at a higher elevation. I believe it was in the month of May, 1971. It's been so long ago. It was a moonlit night, my wife and I were camped out in a tent with some friends (Leonard and Brenda) who had retired for the night. We were looking at the stars and quietly talking when we heard a noise in the woods like something had stepped on a tree limb. So we got up and walked to an area crouching behind some vegetation where we could see the woods and creek. Our attention was drawn to a creature walking slowly from some trees toward the sandy creek area. We were on a small hill (bank of the creek bed) overlooking the creek (distance estimated roughly at about 40 yards or slightly less) with some trees and a field where our tent was located.
At first we thought it was someone, but as it got closer to the creek we could see by the moonlight that it had long dark black hair over its entire body and was about seven feet tall. The black hair glistened in the moonlight. It had a muscular build, but not real bulky. We were peering through some vegetation and watched it bend down on one knee, extend its right arm down toward the water and appeared to scoop it up in its hand to drink it. It then turned its head toward us, looked in our direction, got quickly up, and walked back into the woods. We must have made a slight noise and it heard it. Maybe it heard our hearts beating, as I could feel mine as it felt like it was going to come through my chest. We couldn't believe what we were seeing, since it was not a person, bear or monkey.
After it walked off into the woods, we quietly sat there hoping we could see it again in the woods, but it was not to be. We didn't wake up our friends, and we retired back into the tent and went to sleep. We told them the next morning, and Leonard told us, "Well, maybe you saw a bear." Yeah, sure. Both my wife and I grew up in the country, fishing and hunting, and we know what bears look like and how they act. Plus, black bears were very rare in the Central Texas area in the early 70s and most commonly seen in the far West Texas mountains or deep East Texas piney woods. We don't know what it was, but it definitely fit the profile of reported Bigfoot. After that event, Linda became extremely interested in Bigfoot.
In 1972, I investigated a case of a Bigfoot in Missouri. I was in contact with Ivan Sanderson at the time on this case. Ivan was known for his research into cryptozoology or the study of unknown animals. Most people did not know that he had worked for British Naval Intelligence during World War II. He also had done extensive research into Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs) and wrote a book called "Invisible Residents."
www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/noxie3.htm
Bigfoot: Noxie, Oklahoma - Probe the Unknown
In 1974, my wife and others in our group visited Fouke, Arkansas since there had been Bigfoot reports coming from this area. Stories of the creature in this area during the early 70's influenced the 1972 docudrama film "The Legend of Boggy Creek" .
We (actually Linda while driving the car) found some tracks that went across a back road from one heavily wooded area to another heavily wooded area. They appeared to be large (size 14), barefoot human-looking footprints. The tall grass and vegetation on the sides of the road one could tell where something had walked through it.
