My Fascination with High Strangeness Bigfoot
The first time I came across a story of a high strangeness Bigfoot encounter, which included telepathy between Bigfoot and witness, a UFO, and Bigfoot dematerializes, I almost threw the article in the trash. But I'm an admitted Fortean junkie so I kept the story and filed it away. As happens in the realm of the weird, synchronicity arrived, by giving me a new story about a supernatural and/or alien/Bigfoot encounter just about every week. I had gone from never hearing about such things, even though I was very much interested in UFOs and other esoteric topics, to coming across one every other story, it seemed.

Then I found two stories involving aliens, flying saucers, Bigfoot, telepathy, contactee experiences and more, right here in Oregon.

I've since met people with these weirder stories of Bigfoot that go beyond the "flesh and blood" sighting. Like contactees and abductees and other high strangeness events, it's one thing to speculate on the kind of people that have stories of these experiences; it's another when you meet a witness who is sincere and appears credible.

Since that day when I came across that first "weird Bigfoot" article I've accumulated a lot of interesting stories about these encounters, and have read a lot of good books on the subject.

Bigfoot research of the strictly physical kind has no patience with this aspect of the Bigfoot subject, and many UFO researchers don't see much in it either. But then there's people like myself who consider this area a highly intriguing one and don't see a contradiction between Bigfoot as both flesh and blood as well as something more . . . well, strange.

I'm not sure what to make of many of the stories; it's not that I always take them literally. Like much of the abduction phenomena, or stories of meetings with reptilians, for example, I think there's a there there, just maybe not always exactly what's being manifested to us.

If we look at these encounters as a Fortean event, rather than as belonging in a rigid category of "flesh and blood," or "nuts and bolts" UFO, it doesn't seem that weird at all.

I've had my own lifetime of UFO, paranormal and just all around weird events, including missing time episodes. I've never seen a Bigfoot but I am 99% sure it exists. Simply my opinion, based on evidence which includes anecdotal evidence. And that includes the weirder stories of Bigfoot which I find endlessly fascinating.


High Strangeness Bigfoot: "Cross Over Cases"
Cryptozoologist and UFO researcher Nick Redfern refers to these cases as "cross over" cases. Lisa Shiel has written about Bigfoot and its relation to orbs, UFOs and fairies in her book Backyard Bigfoot: The True Story of Stick Signs, UFOs, and the Sasquatch. Sali Sheppard-Wolford wrote about her often times mystical encounters with Bigfoot in Valley of the Skookum. (Sheppard-Wolford is the mother of Oregon Bigfoot researcher Autumn Williams.) Peter Guttilla has collected numerous tales of very weird encounters in Bigfoot Case Files. Stan Johnson (deceased) wrote of his own encounters with a family of Sasquatch on his Oregon property in his self-published books, which you can often find on-line at places like eBay and Amazon.com. Lee Trippet and co-author Ida Kanneberg (also both of Oregon) recently released their book My Brother is a Hairy Man.

All these books (and there are many others) discuss Bigfoot encounters of the high strangeness variety.

Part of the Data
These stories are data, and must be included in Bigfoot -- and UFO -- research. They cannot be ignored. To borrow a quote about UFOs from the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek : "The part we ignore…may contain the clue to the whole subject." (Hynek:The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry.)