Excerpt from Living Anomaly -- Bigfoot and UFOs

As I am under the weather this week, I'm giving you a treat -- an excerpt from the book that I was writing last year.  This is the chapter on bigfoot and UFOs mostly as I had it when I left off, though I did add one or two things that I found recently (note that the footnotes didn't translate over, so if you see a random number, it's a footnote):

CHAPTER 7: BIGFOOT AND UFOS

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. Many refuse to entertain the idea that UFOs exist. This attitude always strikes me as odd among those 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 beyond that there are many government documents, or statements by government officials, scientists, and other leaders such as bigfoot researchers do not have. To make the point concrete, here is an incomplete list of such statements compiled by Dennis Balthaser at theufochronicals.com 12:

“UFOs are real as the airplanes that fly over your head…I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just had to say something.”
--Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defense Minister, September 25, 2005, at the U. of Toronto

“Maximum security exists concerning the subject of UFOs.”
-Allen Dulles, CIA Director, 1955

“It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings. Behind the scenes high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.”
--Admiral Hillenkoetter, first Director of the CIA, February 27, 1960

“I certainly believe in aliens in space, and that they are indeed visiting our planet. They may not look like us, but I have very strong feelings that they have advanced beyond our mental capabilities”.
--Senator Barry Goldwater, Arizona, 1965

“I feel that the Air Force has not been giving out all the available information on the Unidentified Flying Objects. You cannot disregard so many unimpeachable sources.”
--John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1965

“In my official status, I cannot comment on ET contact. However, personally, I can assure you, we are not alone.”
--Charles J. Camarda, (Ph.D.), NASA Astronaut

“There are many reasons to believe that UFOs do exist. There is so much evidence from reliable witnesses.”
--Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, March 28, 1954

“The phenomenon of UFOs does exist, and it must be treated seriously.”
--Mikhail Gorbachev, Premiere of the Soviet Union, May 4, 1990

“I can assure you the flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on earth.”
--President Harry Truman, April 4, 1950, White House Press Conference

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think, how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask is not an alien force already among us?”
--President Ronald Reagan to a full session of the United Nations, September 21, 1987

“I am aware that hundreds of military and airline pilots, airport personnel, missile trackers and other competent observers have reported sightings…These UFOs are interplanetary devices systematically observing the earth, either manned or under remote control, or both.”
--Col. Joseph Bryan, CIA 1960

“Mankind has long wondered if we’re 'alone' in the universe. (But) only in our period do we really have evidence. No, we’re not alone.”
--Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, at the National Press Club, 2009

As I mentioned, this is only a partial list of statements from world leaders. 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, 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.”13 Also, in a recent blog post on Eschaton, blogger Jay Ackroyd wrote of attending a conference where he heard Daniel Ellsberg speak of the effect high security clearance has on those who possess it.

At a conference I was at this week, Daniel Ellsberg recounted a time in 1969 when he explained to Henry Kissinger what would happen after he was given the dozen or so clearances above Top Secret (the existence of which is also classified, of course). What happens first is you feel like a fool. You've published books that you now discover were filled with stuff that was wrong. You have believed you understood how things worked for your entire professional life, but you now find out you were completely wrong, that the real world is entirely different from what you have been told. The books you've written, the lectures you've given are based on a false understanding of the world.

But this stage only lasts a few weeks. After you have been reading this material hitherto unavailable to you for a while, you begin to see everybody else as fools. Only people with these top level clearances know the truth. People whom you previously regarded as experts become ignoramuses, doubly so because they don't realize that they actually know nothing.

And so your conversations with them become telling them what you want them to think. 14

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 book, 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.

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.15


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 I know, there could be millions of extra-solar civilizations (or none), but I want to keep it simple so I’m just positing one civilization. All of the effects witnesses have noted in the weirdest bigfoot accounts could be explained by a vastly superior technology. Our trouble has been in imagining bigfoot as actually having this technology, since they seem to be completely uninterested in technology by most accounts. 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, so long as it is monitored by the other civilization which can then make use of the technology.

One may well ask, then, why this hypothetical alien civilization would 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 robots. 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 they can be self sustaining on a world that has resources to provide them food, such as ours does. 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 seems to have the ability to affect our own minds, or can disappear, or go invisible, or whatever else people have experienced. These are not magical or paranormal effects, but technologies. This is only an outrageous proposition inasmuch as we do not believe alien civilizations to be visiting us, but we do have evidence that this may well be the fact of the matter; 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 case.16 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 the reports we have already talked about, 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 do we have 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 book, 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, it was just that the Pennsylvania researcher had been featured in some of John Green’s books and so people remembered those stories. The rest, it seems, were pushed out of view through the process of selecting stories that fit the prevailing paradigm, while neglecting those that didn’t.

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. In Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck's book Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, there is a tale from 1680 in Lisbon, Portugal of a man who had seen a "huge hair covered being" released from a black cloud that lowered into a field.  The earliest modern 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.”17 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.18 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.19

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 seems 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. 20 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.21 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.22 (If I were to speculate, perhaps this scenario was intended to deliver the message that bigfoot are people too.)

Already we’ve seen a remarkable 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.23 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.24 (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.25

Also from 1989 comes a very interesting case in which the witness observed through a porthole in the side of the craft a bigfoot-like creature apparently seated inside a UFO.26 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.27 In 1996, on July 4th, shortly after they 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.28
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.29 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.30 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.31

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. This wasn't because they aren't good cases, but to prove that others do exist, in numbers.) What do cases such as these mean? I do not 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 again Henry Franzoni has had a useful experience which he told me about during a recent interview. “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 unheard of 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 (as we will see in the next chapter). 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, since, no matter how many individuals exist in such a society, speaking out of their thousand mouths and seeing with their thousands of eyes, they think with one mind. According to David Jacobs, if an alien culture was truly telepathic, it would be very different from human culture.

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.32

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, in the 1960s. 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 chapter, it would explain most of the mysteries we have encountered. 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 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.

This appearance of quasi-reality itself might suggest a common source, but in a different way. We may yet discover, in a way akin to Jung’s Collective Unconscious, that there is an unknown dimension to our reality, a kind of imaginal realm, which can at least occasionally impact our everyday reality, and it is that which accounts for these phenomena being experienced without themselves having what we understand as objective reality. This would be a kind of advanced Psychological theory. The main trouble with this is that there is physical evidence to be dealt with. Yet it may be that, for these very strange cases, where, indeed, physical evidence seems relatively scarce, something along these lines is in operation, while in the majority of the more ordinary cases there is a real animal involved. (There would still be the rare cases where physical evidence is present to account for, as in the case of the terminating lines of tracks found in snow.) For there is no philosophical reason that bigfoot cannot exist while also some other phenomenon also exists which is utterly different yet uses the same form for its own expression. This would be the same thing as seeing a phantom car or airplane, which witnesses have indeed reported.

I think the skeptical stance that none of this has any reality beyond the fevered minds of the fantasy prone is very hard to sustain. People from all walks of life do experience these things. I cannot be so cynical as to believe that the many thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, or dare I say even millions of people who have reported anomalous events are all hoaxing, deluded, or stupid. But, no matter how hard it is for me to believe such, it must also be said that there is no philosophical reason that this could not be the case. Yet if it were the case, it would say something about the human condition that is so far not well understood, and which it would appear should be crucial for us to understand if we wish to know ourselves.