• AP Magazine

    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

  • 1
Encounters of the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2015


UFOs and Bigfoot?

by: Brent Raynes


While most ufologists and most cryptozoologists don’t like their fields to overlap into that of the other, for years there has been an ongoing question and controversy about how some UFO activity seems to connect with Bigfoot activity. Can the two be related?

In May 1976, in Flintville, Tennessee, I came across a curious situation. There was quite a Bigfoot scare there that even made the pages of the National Enquirer after the creature allegedly attempted to grab a young child from an open doorway. While I was there interviewing witnesses I became acquainted with a cryptozoologist who had traveled down from New York to investigate the situation. Interestingly, I was told that whenever the Bigfoot-type creature appeared that there were also small balls of phosphorescent looking lights floating silently around the tops of pine trees. I again came across another one of those witnesses who recalled those lights just a couple years ago.

In April 1977, I interviewed a young man in northern New Jersey who claimed that just a couple months before he had come face-to-face with Bigfoot. Behind the creature, he said, hovered briefly a tiny pin point of light from which a “high pitched whistle” emitted. Besides Bigfoot I found this area had been host to much UFO activity as well. In one case, a young man described how a humming metallic saucer-like object directed a beam of light down upon him.

Back in 1974 and 1975, I periodically checked in with Bigfoot hunters Duane and Ramona Hibner. Their stomping grounds was in and around Brooksville, Florida, which also is a well known past UFO hot spot, site of the famed John Reeves contactee case. Though initially I recall Ramona being skeptical of a UFO/Bigfoot connection, she began finding possible correlations. In fact, in October 1974, she stopped along a stretch of road cutting through a swamp to show me where she had seen a “big ball” of light descend, seem to hit the road in front of her car and then bounce back up into the sky, just a few months before. Around August 1974, her husband Duane had spotted a large UFO with what looked like lighted square windows overhead at a ranch where Bigfoot had been appearing, and where they had glimpsed the critters themselves!

Early in my investigations as a teenager back around the late 1960s, I investigated a family in Palermo, Maine, which seemed to be another UFO hot spot, complete with a series of rings on the ground where nothing grew for years afterwards. Both the husband and wife had had separate sightings of a Bigfoot-type creature. She described a man-like figure covered with long and shaggy whitish hair that ran from her auto in leaps and bounds as though, she said, it had springs on its feet. Twice the husband had seen a grayish man-like form leap across the road in front of his car as though it was defying gravity as it effortlessly seemed to leap from one side of the road to the other. The couple had also had ghost-like entity encounters, details of which I had shared in correspondence with John Keel, and appear in his 1970 book, Strange Creatures From Time and Space, as strange encounters in Maine.


Thursday, March 28, 2024