Post by shatnerswig on Feb 12, 2010 6:31:51 GMT 10
As we've often discussed, infrasound, or ultrasound perhaps, can explain much of the weirdness in certain bigfoot reports, but it can’t explain everything. You may recall Henry Franzoni in spoke in his interview about such cases, and that infrasound is not one of his own explanations for bigfoot’s “puzzling powers,” as he calls them. Following ideas of 19th century scientists, known as “vitalists”, who believed that there was a “life force,” Franzoni thinks that bigfoot has some kind of ability to control energy. To ease in our understanding, he likens this ability to the idea of “the force” in Star Wars. He also makes use of certain theories of Nikola Tesla concerning the possibility of a “dimension within our dimension” that Tesla believed he had found through some of his experiments.
Whether Franzoni is on the right track or not, it is interesting to note that there are reports of strange energies in certain accounts believed to be associated with bigfoot. You may recall John Cartwright’s encounter, before which he felt something like an electric shock:
I felt like a static electricity shock, it felt like, and kind of.. have you been shocked before, it’s like you're just frozen? All the hairs on your body are standing up, and you’re just stuck there, I guess.
Of course, there is Franzoni’s own experience. He had gone to a particular location because he had been told that the “evil god of the mountain” could be found there. He had an experience that was similar in many ways to what we’ve recounted already, but with some crucial differences. Here’s how Henry told the story in an interview:
I was driving with my wife, in a van, and we were way high in the Cascade mountains at night, about midnight, when suddenly the, you know, classic bigfoot smell overpowered us. Like a wet dog, but like a skunk, really sweet and pungent, I mean just this incredible smell in the air. We stopped, and I didn’t see anything. There was nothing in front of us. It was pitch black. My wife looked at me and said, “Geez, you know, I’m tired. I’m just going to take a nap.” And she just laid down and fell asleep instantly. I.. the hair on my body.. you talk about the feeling of being looked at. Well, this was like that feeling on steroids. Because what happened to me was that all of my hair, and I had hair that was about 4” at the time, stood up all over like you rubbed balloons over my head and held them over my head. My hair stood straight out 4” in all directions, like Einstein’s hairdoo. This huge afro pointing in all directions. A huge static charge was.. I could feel my skin tingling while this static charge overwhelmed me. And this static charge was more than just electrical. I mean, certainly it felt like static electricity, my hair was standing up. It felt like it was aware, and I could feel, like, a mind probing me. And it was way, way, way more than the feeling of being looked at, it was the feeling of being scrutinized under an electron microscope. And the electrical field was so strong that it blew the starter motor of my van. So, this lasted for five minutes, and the whole thing went away. The electrical field went away, and the smell went away. I still never saw anything. And yet I couldn’t start my van because the starter motor had been fried by the electrical field.
Truly, a very strange account, and if it were the only one anyone ever told like it, perhaps we’d be forgiven for looking past it. But it is not singular in the case of UFO encounters, which frequently are noted to interfere with the working of automobiles and other machines. But are there any other stories involving bigfoot with engines that go dead? Indeed there are.
Franzoni’s account echoes that of a motorist, W.C. “Doc” Priestly, near Marlington, West Virginia in 1960. In that case, Priestly was driving in the Monongahala National Forest when his engine died suddenly. Shortly afterward he saw a large bigfoot-like creature with its hair standing straight up, as if it were in fright. (Or, perhaps, as if it also were suffering the effects of an electrical anomaly?) When the creature’s hair went down, the witness’s car started again. But he didn’t get far before the car went dead a second time, and there again was the bigfoot. This time, as in Franzoni’s account, the car would not restart, having suffered the burn-out of a critical component.
Other witnesses have noted strange electrical effects. On a (now defunct) site called kromwallsresearch.com I found this description of an event during a bigfoot research outing, which is similar in some details to that of Franzoni:
It was actually after we went to bed that night that one of the weird things happened to me. At around 4:30 a.m. I found myself wide awake. I didn't hear anything or see anything out of the ordinary but there was an electrical discharge that started in the rear of my skull on the right side and worked it's way to the left side of my skull. It moved so slowly I could actually trace the movement. It lasted several seconds and was an experience I don't remember having before. It was not painful but it was definitely there...curious.
These sensations of electricity are interesting, to say the least. Recently, during an episode of the radio show I co-hosted with Billy Willard, Sasquatch Watch Radio, I was told by bigfoot researcher and author David Paulides that some of his witnesses have reported electrical effects. I was also told by a listener during that show that often, in a certain area associated with bigfoot research, people will lose the electrical system in their cars for a period of time. Certainly, whatever these electrical anomalies might be, it should be stressed that many of them happened without the presence of a bigfoot being specifically noted at the time. It is always possible that these electrical disturbances have nothing to do with bigfoot at all. Yet there are occasional tales of such things, such as a report from Albuquerque in 1966 where, whenever a bigfoot-like creature was nearby, the radio would stop working.
Indeed, these effects are very commonly seen in UFO encounters. Perhaps these electrical effects are an indirect indication of a common cause? Since these effects are noted very rarely in bigfoot encounters, one might even hypothesize that they are not really a feature of bigfoot encounters at all, and when they are noted they suggest that the encounter is not what it seems to be.
THE GLOWING EYES PROBLEM
One energy effect that has perplexed bigfoot researchers for years is the phenomenon of the self-luminous eyes. There are many accounts that suggest bigfoot can make their eyes glow without a source of light to reflect. One of the earliest documented cases is one that we just mentioned in the previous section, that of W.C. “Doc” Priestly in 1960, near Marlington, West Virginia, who noted that the creature he observed had two large eyes that glowed “like big balls of fire.” A witness in a case in Sykesville, Maryland in 1973 noted big luminous eyes. Another case from October of 1977, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, included an 8ft tall bigfoot with glowing red eyes which seemed impervious to gunfire.4 While the imperviousness to gunfire has been noted in other cases too, that, at least, is relatively rare, while the observation of eyes that glow, whether there is a source of light around or not, is not very rare at all.
A sizable portion of researchers discount the possibility of self-luminous eyes out of hand, suggesting that there must always be a source of light responsible, even if it isn’t noticed by the witness at that time. But I don’t think this is right. I have spoken with some witnesses that I trust who have told me the eyes definitely seemed to light up on their own. For instance, Henry Franzoni told me recently that he had seen “light come from the eyes of one of these guys.” He did not think that it was on account of another light source. “I was in an extremely dark place in the woods, with no light,” he said, “and green light came out of the eyes.” Other researchers have told me similar tales. One of the best of these accounts comes from Scott Herriot.
Herriot is a comedian and filmmaker by trade, but do not let these facts fool you into thinking he is not a serious minded researcher. Herriot posses that rare habit of mind of doubting everything unless he has good proof to believe it. He discounts, for instance, the Skookum cast, calling it an elk lay, and believes the Patterson/Gimlin film is a hoax. But he has seen the phenomenon we call “eyeshine” for himself, and he believes it is something the creatures can do without a source of light.
“Dude, that was really freaky,” he told me. The events happened while he and an associate were working their way up a hill near where a sighting had occurred a few weeks earlier. Near the top of the very large, steep hill, they saw something hidden in the shadows under a fallen tree.
I noticed roughly 40 feet away through all this dense stuff there was a darkness that was low down, part of which was a log that had fallen. But underneath it was a shadow that really stood out. And it just caught my eye, and I looked, and it was pretty apparent that there were these two pretty big brown eyes looking out of this darkness at me. Now because it was low, I wasn't on immediate high squatch alert. I just thought it was low, but then I kept looking at these eyes. And at first I was doubting, I mean, are they actually eyes? But then after about 30 seconds they started swaying very, very slowly back and forth so it was definitely an animal. I would say they were probably 3" apart, these eyes.
The two researchers observed the eyes for about ten minutes and could not be certain what they were looking at.
I was pretty convinced early that it wasn't a bear. It was just way too locked onto us with its eyes. A bear in my opinion would have been gone. This thing was kind of just checking us out, but very, almost hypnotically. I mean its eyes were so fixed on us. But we weren't really freaked, we were just trying to figure out.. because it's shadowed, and all you can really see are the eyes and it looks like little bits of light are reflecting off a face, but it's back in the shadows, so you can't quite make out what it is. And that's another reason I didn't think it was a bear, because a snout would have actually gone out into the sunlight.
The astute skeptic will no doubt note the “little bits of light .. reflecting off the face” and say that this is what caused the subsequent eye glow. But I don’t think this fits the observation, which Herriot notes with detail.
So we decided after ten minutes, because we weren't feeling threatened at that point, didn't feel weird. So let's just go toward it, see what happens, maybe it will move and we can see more of what it is. So we take one, maybe two steps, and the eyes of this animal, starting at the dead center of the eye, coupled with what appeared to be a dilation of the pupil, gave off this red glow. . . . It was almost like, imagine, two lit cigarettes behind the eyes and somebody is inhaling as the eyes dilate.
The reflection of light is not a gradual process. The speed of light being much faster than our perceptions, we would not expect to see the eyes beginning to glow in this way. Think back to any time you’ve seen a reflector catching some light. It doesn’t look as Herriot describes at all. Other researchers have told me the effect is like that of an incandescent bulb on a dimmer switch being slowly turned up. One researcher said that he noted a roiling motion within the light, as if the liquid in the eye were having an effect on the light. What can explain this kind of effect? I didn’t have any idea, but I went looking for possible explanations. Interestingly enough, I found that light can be produced in a salt water through the use of ultrasound.
We know this because a certain kind of shrimp, commonly called snapping shrimp, are able to do just this. They use a large claw to make an ultrasound and this creates light when bubbles created in the snapping motion pop under pressure. The effect is called sonoluminescence. Since we suspect, with some reason, that bigfoot is able to use sound in unique ways, we should consider this possibility, but we do have some problems. When the shrimp do this, they also create a great deal of heat, up to 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. I find it difficult to believe that a creature could create this amount of heat within the body without doing itself injury, but I confess I don’t know. Maybe if the heat is produced in small doses, or is dissipated rapidly? Also, there may be completely different processes which will create light about which we remain ignorant, so I do not propose to remand the accounts of self-luminous eyes to the Transdimensional theory even if we can’t understand how they work at present. We may yet discover how such a thing is possible.
DIFFICULTIES WITH CAMERA AND VIDEO EQUIPMENT
“Why don’t you have a good picture or video?” pseudo-skeptics always ask us. And it’s true, aside from the Patterson/Gimlin film, there isn’t much, and what there is of it is pretty awful. Bad luck, maybe? Maybe. Most researchers look for more prosaic answers. According to some, the cameras make a noise, inaudible to humans, but audible to animals (as is attested by the many game cam pictures of deer looking straight into the camera). Other researchers make the more daring (and less easily tested) conjecture that somehow bigfoot can see into the infrared realm. Something has to account for the fact that although there are now many game cams in the wild, there are no good pictures of bigfoot. The truth is, we really don’t know why bigfoot, if it exists, isn’t regularly caught on camera.
But there are some indications that maybe something weird is going on here. Here is a good example from a Washington state researcher whose initials are BH:
I live in Washington State. This last December tracks were recorded 100 feet from home in the snow by an expert tracker. I've been working on a food station while using two high definition Reconyx cameras for the last few months. For the last month, I've had food taken from the table (HIGH off the ground) with no pictures of the culprits. Mind you, I have a plastic milk crate sitting over the food also. Before this, I had [pictures of] the occasional crow come and eat what's been left. Now I have no pictures what so ever. (Oh, the before shot of me putting it up and the after picture of me.) I've checked batteries also and both have been good. The last time food was taken, both cameras were set over to one side by a small fraction. I also have a night shot of a flash or light in one picture. One camera is turned so it sees the table and the other camera. The flash was not from it. It's a mystery!
I have no idea why the camera would not record who or what was taking the bait set before it. Nor why this would be a consistent problem for researchers. Certainly, it adds fuel to the debate over whether bigfoot is a paranormal creature or not. Regarding the cameras being “set over to one side”, I asked BH whether he meant that he had moved the cameras himself (maybe to get a better shot), but in a reply he reiterated, “Something or someone else did.” And as for the unexplained flash of light, one can only speculate how this is related. If it is related, at the very least it shows there is some energy involved in the mystery.
This is weird stuff, but BH’s experiences are not unique -- other researchers using game cams have told me of strange happenings, though few are wiling to talk openly about it. I found a recounting of a typical case on a website called Kromwellresearch.com:
While placing his game cam in a location that would take advantage of all three trails [Jim] experienced problems with the camera. Even though the batteries were new they failed to activate the game cam. He took the camera back to base camp to change the batteries and the host asked if he could check the batteries with his ohm meter. The check of the batteries indicated they were indeed new. They were placed back into the camera and worked fine in camp just like it had originally.
The game cam was again set up, activated and left alone for the night. The following morning it was checked and again it had failed to operate properly. In follow up checks the camera worked perfectly. Strange...this phenomena has been reported by other Sasquatch researchers and is actually common with paranormal researchers.
On the second day of the expedition Jim wandered back to the place the cam had been set up to see if there were any more tracks. What he found was a tree spike indicating where the camera had been placed. Neither he nor anyone else in the expedition had placed the spike. It was not a fallen branch as indicated by the root ball pointing up into the air. This tree had been placed there by something or someone; however, only one other person knew where the cam had been placed.
Such things are difficult to explain unless they are simply coincidences. Yet it is odd that so many researchers experience these particular coincidences.
The testimony of Dave in KY will be useful to us again, as he is familiar with game cams and has had one in use at a certain sighting location for some time. Here is the story that he told me (edited slightly to remove personal material or to clarify meaning):
Some odd, interesting things continue to happen on the farm. I have been experimenting with baiting a bit and the food has been taken every time. Every time there is no game cam or conscious human observer that is. I think I mentioned that I had tried some baiting with game cam down at the end of the road where the footprint was found last August, but nothing had really come of it. On the few visits I've made this year I have tried to use my car as a "point of contact" since it tends to stand out.
Given that I don't think the individual I encountered [at the sighting location] is the same one(s) that may be present at the farm (which lies, geographically about 7 or 8 miles from the other site) I don't consider the car to be taken as a threat. The farmhouse is only occasionally occupied right now as my dad is not running cattle near the house or upper fields this year and we only make maintenance visits and have had some contractors doing some painting to keep the place weather tight. Whenever I have stayed overnight I have made it a point to park the car further away from the house than usual, so it can be seen from the road and fields. I park it facing away from the house, too. Initially, I left cut apples, cut-side down on the upper hood, which is actually a flat table-like area (handy for sitting things like grocery bags, gallons of milk etc when loading stuff, the kiddo, etc into the car) that sits fairly high off the ground. I always make sure the hood is clean so I can see any marks, dirt etc that might appear. The first night I did this the apples were gone the next day-- and could be found nowhere in the vicinity. I walked the road back to the dead end and gate and saw no evidence of them either. No marks on hood or car, so no animal footprints or traces visible. Birds are always a possibility, of course.
It was a two-day stay so the next evening I put a chicken breast and a biscuit from the local [restaurant], in a closed box, on the hood and stayed up rather late-- until past 4 in the am-- to see if anything made an appearance. I stayed in the front bedroom with a camcorder with night vision. The general time for unusual calls or sounds in the area is between 330 and 530 am, but I heard nothing and dozed off sometime after 430 or so. I woke up pretty late, around 1030 ( I was staying alone this trip) and when I checked the car the box and contents were gone. No marks on the car anywhere. I feel that if a coyote (common in the area) or dog or even a bear (reported, but not confirmed) encountered the food they would have to rear up and press against the car to get to it, centered on the upper hood. They would have to leave a smear or pawprint or scratch--some evidence. And most obviously, they would probably consume the food right there or at least drop something leaving the area. There's nothing to be found anywhere that I've searched. It seems to be a case where something walks up, picks up the box and leaves.
The next time down I did a repeat of the chicken box, but rigged the game cam up inside the car. I folded the front passenger seat back (it can be folded all the way down if needed, but I only tilted it back far enough to get good clearance for the camera lens) and strapped it to my daughters seat in the back. I place it in such a way that the silhouette isn't even visible to someone who might be familiar to what the inside layout normally is. I set it and left, stayed up to a reasonable hour (I had company this time) and when I checked in the morning the box was undisturbed and the camera had not been tripped. The second night I placed the box in the same spot but took down the camera.
It was gone the next morning. No traces. No marks. We get heavy dews in this part of the country, btw, so the chances of something getting up on the hood and not leaving a mark of any kind are slim. The box was lifted sometime after dewfall as the dry rectangle was evident. No evidence of it being scooted or dragged though the dew, either.
I repeated baiting a couple of weekends ago (the anniversary of my sighting, if you remember, coincides with yearly family reunions in the local fairgound) and had the same results. This time, however, something was left behind. My father was down earlier in the week to check on the painters and do some general cleanup to make the place habitable and my wife and I arrived in the early evening on Friday. After unloading and taking a walk around, I parked the car in the same spot I usually do. It started to rain that evening [so] I didn't purchase chicken, I just put out some apples, cut-face down, on the hood. I stayed up rather late reading, but heard/saw nothing and went to bed on the living room couch around 2am. The next morning the apples were gone with no evidence, but my wife remarked that she had heard an odd, low "growl" or something sometime early in the am-- probably around 4 or so.
We attended the reunion and my wife, mother and daughter went back to Louisville, while I stayed on with the intention of visiting the library and newspaper offices for research. I kept chicken and biscuits from the reunion and brought them back, and later in the evening placed them at their usual station on the hood. The next morning they were gone, but in their place was a fairly good-sized piece of flint rock. It had not been tossed onto the car-- no dents, scratches, marks-- it had been placed there. Inside the dry rectangle where the chicken box had been. It's interesting because while there used to be a lot of flint around the area as a child, both in the old river-rock gravel roadbed and in the form of points and arrow/knife/scraper blades turned up by my grandfather in the field near the springs, there is very little in obvious evidence now. I remember there are a couple of places back in the back where the creeks run where it's more common but they're never visited these days by anyone I know. So is it an object of "value"...? It could have been perceived as such over a hundred years ago, I suppose. Maybe it was a trade. Or maybe someone's messing with me.
Dave doesn’t really think it is someone “messing” with him. There are few people in the area of his family farm, and those who are there are mostly elderly.
We have neighbors, but they're all elderly, down the road a piece, and not likely to be out walking a one-lane gravel-packed road late at night. There is ZERO traffic on this road at night as it dead-ends just below our barn and back field at my Uncle's old place. There is one older man who walks the road for exercise, but I know him and he's never out late and not given to entering neighbor's yards and stealing chicken and biscuits.
But if it isn’t some neighbor having a joke, what can account for these events? Certainly, many animals can take food from a baiting station. But few are able to do it without leaving evidence. And how many would leave a stone behind, particularly of the sort which our ancestors used to use as tools? And how could whatever took the food know the camera was there and therefore not take the food that night, but take it every other night when the camera wasn’t there? Perhaps this is merely a coincidence, but it is striking indeed.
But recall that there were two events when a camera was present and the food wasn’t taken. The first was when Dave stayed up with his night vision camcorder in hand. On that night, the food was taken, but not until sometime after he fell asleep. Since he was in his own house at the time, there can be no question of the camera having done something that alerted the larcenous night visitor, but perhaps Dave was visible. The second event is more mysterious. It is odd that every time food is left out and no camera or witness is nearby, the food is gone, yet when a camera is trained on the feeding location, the food is not taken.
While there’s no way to prove the camera problem is actually a product of some kind of energy, my hunch is that this is the right place to put this kind of anomaly. It seems as if the creatures somehow know about the cameras and avoid them. Some folks hypothesize that it is the sound these cameras make when they warm up to take pictures. This would not be relevant to the first case, when Dave was inside with his camcorder. Granting, for the sake of argument, that there was a creature there that night which opted not to take the food, how would it know that the camera was there when it was hidden inside the car? Being inside a car would, one would presume, make any sounds the camera makes very hard to detect. And in that case, anyway, the camera never fired, so noise cannot account for why the food wasn’t taken on that night, when it was taken whenever no camera was present. Perhaps the creatures are not detecting sound, but some form of energy? But even this would not explain the food remaining undisturbed on the night the camera was in the car, since the camera never fired, therefore never powering up to make any kind of noticeable energy either? These possibilities don’t seem to provide answers for us, leaving us either with a mystery, or the proposition that by coincidence it was only on the night Dave put out a camera that the creature didn’t take the food.
And as I’ve said, Dave’s experience here is not particularly unique, though it is not easy to get researchers to go on the record with happenings like these. I understand the reason -- what can you say about it? The camera didn’t get anything, and you don’t know who or what took the bait if the camera didn’t catch it.
I know a few folks who are trying to do the same sort of thing that Dave is trying with both game cameras and video cameras, and they have told me about cameras being moved, batteries dying long before they should, blank shots (as in a picture that has nothing on it, not even the vegetation that should be there), distortion or interference, strange lights, and other anomalies.
So, electrical effects, glowing eyes, problems with cameras -- what are we to make of energy anomalies such as these? The physical nature of some of the effects can’t be explained by the Psychological theory, so that’s one down. I don’t believe the Flesh and Blood theory can account for all of these cases either. This is not to say that if these accounts represent real events, that I believe such things must spring from some kind transdimensional source -- as I’ve said before, or actually, Arthur C. Clarke said it, any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. A technological source puts us right back into the Flesh and Blood camp, although we would have to explain how bigfoot came by such technology. But by most accounts, bigfoot does not appear to have, or even be capable of having technology. By most accounts, bigfoot is either disinterested in it, afraid of it, or seemingly without the capacity of understanding it. I can recall reading several accounts, though I can’t remember exactly where now, with bigfoot reacting strangely near cars and trucks, peering at the people inside the vehicles with puzzled expressions, and even sometimes removing the people as if the bigfoot thought that these folks inside cars were in danger. Clearly, when it comes to technology, most of the time bigfoot is a luddite. So how do we explain these anomalies? One might hypothesize, as Franzoni does, that bigfoot somehow has a natural ability to manipulate energy in a way that we do not understand. At the present moment, as troubling as such a conclusion would be, the Transdimensional theory seems best able to explain these effects blogsquatcher.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-sing-sasquatch-electric.html
Whether Franzoni is on the right track or not, it is interesting to note that there are reports of strange energies in certain accounts believed to be associated with bigfoot. You may recall John Cartwright’s encounter, before which he felt something like an electric shock:
I felt like a static electricity shock, it felt like, and kind of.. have you been shocked before, it’s like you're just frozen? All the hairs on your body are standing up, and you’re just stuck there, I guess.
Of course, there is Franzoni’s own experience. He had gone to a particular location because he had been told that the “evil god of the mountain” could be found there. He had an experience that was similar in many ways to what we’ve recounted already, but with some crucial differences. Here’s how Henry told the story in an interview:
I was driving with my wife, in a van, and we were way high in the Cascade mountains at night, about midnight, when suddenly the, you know, classic bigfoot smell overpowered us. Like a wet dog, but like a skunk, really sweet and pungent, I mean just this incredible smell in the air. We stopped, and I didn’t see anything. There was nothing in front of us. It was pitch black. My wife looked at me and said, “Geez, you know, I’m tired. I’m just going to take a nap.” And she just laid down and fell asleep instantly. I.. the hair on my body.. you talk about the feeling of being looked at. Well, this was like that feeling on steroids. Because what happened to me was that all of my hair, and I had hair that was about 4” at the time, stood up all over like you rubbed balloons over my head and held them over my head. My hair stood straight out 4” in all directions, like Einstein’s hairdoo. This huge afro pointing in all directions. A huge static charge was.. I could feel my skin tingling while this static charge overwhelmed me. And this static charge was more than just electrical. I mean, certainly it felt like static electricity, my hair was standing up. It felt like it was aware, and I could feel, like, a mind probing me. And it was way, way, way more than the feeling of being looked at, it was the feeling of being scrutinized under an electron microscope. And the electrical field was so strong that it blew the starter motor of my van. So, this lasted for five minutes, and the whole thing went away. The electrical field went away, and the smell went away. I still never saw anything. And yet I couldn’t start my van because the starter motor had been fried by the electrical field.
Truly, a very strange account, and if it were the only one anyone ever told like it, perhaps we’d be forgiven for looking past it. But it is not singular in the case of UFO encounters, which frequently are noted to interfere with the working of automobiles and other machines. But are there any other stories involving bigfoot with engines that go dead? Indeed there are.
Franzoni’s account echoes that of a motorist, W.C. “Doc” Priestly, near Marlington, West Virginia in 1960. In that case, Priestly was driving in the Monongahala National Forest when his engine died suddenly. Shortly afterward he saw a large bigfoot-like creature with its hair standing straight up, as if it were in fright. (Or, perhaps, as if it also were suffering the effects of an electrical anomaly?) When the creature’s hair went down, the witness’s car started again. But he didn’t get far before the car went dead a second time, and there again was the bigfoot. This time, as in Franzoni’s account, the car would not restart, having suffered the burn-out of a critical component.
Other witnesses have noted strange electrical effects. On a (now defunct) site called kromwallsresearch.com I found this description of an event during a bigfoot research outing, which is similar in some details to that of Franzoni:
It was actually after we went to bed that night that one of the weird things happened to me. At around 4:30 a.m. I found myself wide awake. I didn't hear anything or see anything out of the ordinary but there was an electrical discharge that started in the rear of my skull on the right side and worked it's way to the left side of my skull. It moved so slowly I could actually trace the movement. It lasted several seconds and was an experience I don't remember having before. It was not painful but it was definitely there...curious.
These sensations of electricity are interesting, to say the least. Recently, during an episode of the radio show I co-hosted with Billy Willard, Sasquatch Watch Radio, I was told by bigfoot researcher and author David Paulides that some of his witnesses have reported electrical effects. I was also told by a listener during that show that often, in a certain area associated with bigfoot research, people will lose the electrical system in their cars for a period of time. Certainly, whatever these electrical anomalies might be, it should be stressed that many of them happened without the presence of a bigfoot being specifically noted at the time. It is always possible that these electrical disturbances have nothing to do with bigfoot at all. Yet there are occasional tales of such things, such as a report from Albuquerque in 1966 where, whenever a bigfoot-like creature was nearby, the radio would stop working.
Indeed, these effects are very commonly seen in UFO encounters. Perhaps these electrical effects are an indirect indication of a common cause? Since these effects are noted very rarely in bigfoot encounters, one might even hypothesize that they are not really a feature of bigfoot encounters at all, and when they are noted they suggest that the encounter is not what it seems to be.
THE GLOWING EYES PROBLEM
One energy effect that has perplexed bigfoot researchers for years is the phenomenon of the self-luminous eyes. There are many accounts that suggest bigfoot can make their eyes glow without a source of light to reflect. One of the earliest documented cases is one that we just mentioned in the previous section, that of W.C. “Doc” Priestly in 1960, near Marlington, West Virginia, who noted that the creature he observed had two large eyes that glowed “like big balls of fire.” A witness in a case in Sykesville, Maryland in 1973 noted big luminous eyes. Another case from October of 1977, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, included an 8ft tall bigfoot with glowing red eyes which seemed impervious to gunfire.4 While the imperviousness to gunfire has been noted in other cases too, that, at least, is relatively rare, while the observation of eyes that glow, whether there is a source of light around or not, is not very rare at all.
A sizable portion of researchers discount the possibility of self-luminous eyes out of hand, suggesting that there must always be a source of light responsible, even if it isn’t noticed by the witness at that time. But I don’t think this is right. I have spoken with some witnesses that I trust who have told me the eyes definitely seemed to light up on their own. For instance, Henry Franzoni told me recently that he had seen “light come from the eyes of one of these guys.” He did not think that it was on account of another light source. “I was in an extremely dark place in the woods, with no light,” he said, “and green light came out of the eyes.” Other researchers have told me similar tales. One of the best of these accounts comes from Scott Herriot.
Herriot is a comedian and filmmaker by trade, but do not let these facts fool you into thinking he is not a serious minded researcher. Herriot posses that rare habit of mind of doubting everything unless he has good proof to believe it. He discounts, for instance, the Skookum cast, calling it an elk lay, and believes the Patterson/Gimlin film is a hoax. But he has seen the phenomenon we call “eyeshine” for himself, and he believes it is something the creatures can do without a source of light.
“Dude, that was really freaky,” he told me. The events happened while he and an associate were working their way up a hill near where a sighting had occurred a few weeks earlier. Near the top of the very large, steep hill, they saw something hidden in the shadows under a fallen tree.
I noticed roughly 40 feet away through all this dense stuff there was a darkness that was low down, part of which was a log that had fallen. But underneath it was a shadow that really stood out. And it just caught my eye, and I looked, and it was pretty apparent that there were these two pretty big brown eyes looking out of this darkness at me. Now because it was low, I wasn't on immediate high squatch alert. I just thought it was low, but then I kept looking at these eyes. And at first I was doubting, I mean, are they actually eyes? But then after about 30 seconds they started swaying very, very slowly back and forth so it was definitely an animal. I would say they were probably 3" apart, these eyes.
The two researchers observed the eyes for about ten minutes and could not be certain what they were looking at.
I was pretty convinced early that it wasn't a bear. It was just way too locked onto us with its eyes. A bear in my opinion would have been gone. This thing was kind of just checking us out, but very, almost hypnotically. I mean its eyes were so fixed on us. But we weren't really freaked, we were just trying to figure out.. because it's shadowed, and all you can really see are the eyes and it looks like little bits of light are reflecting off a face, but it's back in the shadows, so you can't quite make out what it is. And that's another reason I didn't think it was a bear, because a snout would have actually gone out into the sunlight.
The astute skeptic will no doubt note the “little bits of light .. reflecting off the face” and say that this is what caused the subsequent eye glow. But I don’t think this fits the observation, which Herriot notes with detail.
So we decided after ten minutes, because we weren't feeling threatened at that point, didn't feel weird. So let's just go toward it, see what happens, maybe it will move and we can see more of what it is. So we take one, maybe two steps, and the eyes of this animal, starting at the dead center of the eye, coupled with what appeared to be a dilation of the pupil, gave off this red glow. . . . It was almost like, imagine, two lit cigarettes behind the eyes and somebody is inhaling as the eyes dilate.
The reflection of light is not a gradual process. The speed of light being much faster than our perceptions, we would not expect to see the eyes beginning to glow in this way. Think back to any time you’ve seen a reflector catching some light. It doesn’t look as Herriot describes at all. Other researchers have told me the effect is like that of an incandescent bulb on a dimmer switch being slowly turned up. One researcher said that he noted a roiling motion within the light, as if the liquid in the eye were having an effect on the light. What can explain this kind of effect? I didn’t have any idea, but I went looking for possible explanations. Interestingly enough, I found that light can be produced in a salt water through the use of ultrasound.
We know this because a certain kind of shrimp, commonly called snapping shrimp, are able to do just this. They use a large claw to make an ultrasound and this creates light when bubbles created in the snapping motion pop under pressure. The effect is called sonoluminescence. Since we suspect, with some reason, that bigfoot is able to use sound in unique ways, we should consider this possibility, but we do have some problems. When the shrimp do this, they also create a great deal of heat, up to 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. I find it difficult to believe that a creature could create this amount of heat within the body without doing itself injury, but I confess I don’t know. Maybe if the heat is produced in small doses, or is dissipated rapidly? Also, there may be completely different processes which will create light about which we remain ignorant, so I do not propose to remand the accounts of self-luminous eyes to the Transdimensional theory even if we can’t understand how they work at present. We may yet discover how such a thing is possible.
DIFFICULTIES WITH CAMERA AND VIDEO EQUIPMENT
“Why don’t you have a good picture or video?” pseudo-skeptics always ask us. And it’s true, aside from the Patterson/Gimlin film, there isn’t much, and what there is of it is pretty awful. Bad luck, maybe? Maybe. Most researchers look for more prosaic answers. According to some, the cameras make a noise, inaudible to humans, but audible to animals (as is attested by the many game cam pictures of deer looking straight into the camera). Other researchers make the more daring (and less easily tested) conjecture that somehow bigfoot can see into the infrared realm. Something has to account for the fact that although there are now many game cams in the wild, there are no good pictures of bigfoot. The truth is, we really don’t know why bigfoot, if it exists, isn’t regularly caught on camera.
But there are some indications that maybe something weird is going on here. Here is a good example from a Washington state researcher whose initials are BH:
I live in Washington State. This last December tracks were recorded 100 feet from home in the snow by an expert tracker. I've been working on a food station while using two high definition Reconyx cameras for the last few months. For the last month, I've had food taken from the table (HIGH off the ground) with no pictures of the culprits. Mind you, I have a plastic milk crate sitting over the food also. Before this, I had [pictures of] the occasional crow come and eat what's been left. Now I have no pictures what so ever. (Oh, the before shot of me putting it up and the after picture of me.) I've checked batteries also and both have been good. The last time food was taken, both cameras were set over to one side by a small fraction. I also have a night shot of a flash or light in one picture. One camera is turned so it sees the table and the other camera. The flash was not from it. It's a mystery!
I have no idea why the camera would not record who or what was taking the bait set before it. Nor why this would be a consistent problem for researchers. Certainly, it adds fuel to the debate over whether bigfoot is a paranormal creature or not. Regarding the cameras being “set over to one side”, I asked BH whether he meant that he had moved the cameras himself (maybe to get a better shot), but in a reply he reiterated, “Something or someone else did.” And as for the unexplained flash of light, one can only speculate how this is related. If it is related, at the very least it shows there is some energy involved in the mystery.
This is weird stuff, but BH’s experiences are not unique -- other researchers using game cams have told me of strange happenings, though few are wiling to talk openly about it. I found a recounting of a typical case on a website called Kromwellresearch.com:
While placing his game cam in a location that would take advantage of all three trails [Jim] experienced problems with the camera. Even though the batteries were new they failed to activate the game cam. He took the camera back to base camp to change the batteries and the host asked if he could check the batteries with his ohm meter. The check of the batteries indicated they were indeed new. They were placed back into the camera and worked fine in camp just like it had originally.
The game cam was again set up, activated and left alone for the night. The following morning it was checked and again it had failed to operate properly. In follow up checks the camera worked perfectly. Strange...this phenomena has been reported by other Sasquatch researchers and is actually common with paranormal researchers.
On the second day of the expedition Jim wandered back to the place the cam had been set up to see if there were any more tracks. What he found was a tree spike indicating where the camera had been placed. Neither he nor anyone else in the expedition had placed the spike. It was not a fallen branch as indicated by the root ball pointing up into the air. This tree had been placed there by something or someone; however, only one other person knew where the cam had been placed.
Such things are difficult to explain unless they are simply coincidences. Yet it is odd that so many researchers experience these particular coincidences.
The testimony of Dave in KY will be useful to us again, as he is familiar with game cams and has had one in use at a certain sighting location for some time. Here is the story that he told me (edited slightly to remove personal material or to clarify meaning):
Some odd, interesting things continue to happen on the farm. I have been experimenting with baiting a bit and the food has been taken every time. Every time there is no game cam or conscious human observer that is. I think I mentioned that I had tried some baiting with game cam down at the end of the road where the footprint was found last August, but nothing had really come of it. On the few visits I've made this year I have tried to use my car as a "point of contact" since it tends to stand out.
Given that I don't think the individual I encountered [at the sighting location] is the same one(s) that may be present at the farm (which lies, geographically about 7 or 8 miles from the other site) I don't consider the car to be taken as a threat. The farmhouse is only occasionally occupied right now as my dad is not running cattle near the house or upper fields this year and we only make maintenance visits and have had some contractors doing some painting to keep the place weather tight. Whenever I have stayed overnight I have made it a point to park the car further away from the house than usual, so it can be seen from the road and fields. I park it facing away from the house, too. Initially, I left cut apples, cut-side down on the upper hood, which is actually a flat table-like area (handy for sitting things like grocery bags, gallons of milk etc when loading stuff, the kiddo, etc into the car) that sits fairly high off the ground. I always make sure the hood is clean so I can see any marks, dirt etc that might appear. The first night I did this the apples were gone the next day-- and could be found nowhere in the vicinity. I walked the road back to the dead end and gate and saw no evidence of them either. No marks on hood or car, so no animal footprints or traces visible. Birds are always a possibility, of course.
It was a two-day stay so the next evening I put a chicken breast and a biscuit from the local [restaurant], in a closed box, on the hood and stayed up rather late-- until past 4 in the am-- to see if anything made an appearance. I stayed in the front bedroom with a camcorder with night vision. The general time for unusual calls or sounds in the area is between 330 and 530 am, but I heard nothing and dozed off sometime after 430 or so. I woke up pretty late, around 1030 ( I was staying alone this trip) and when I checked the car the box and contents were gone. No marks on the car anywhere. I feel that if a coyote (common in the area) or dog or even a bear (reported, but not confirmed) encountered the food they would have to rear up and press against the car to get to it, centered on the upper hood. They would have to leave a smear or pawprint or scratch--some evidence. And most obviously, they would probably consume the food right there or at least drop something leaving the area. There's nothing to be found anywhere that I've searched. It seems to be a case where something walks up, picks up the box and leaves.
The next time down I did a repeat of the chicken box, but rigged the game cam up inside the car. I folded the front passenger seat back (it can be folded all the way down if needed, but I only tilted it back far enough to get good clearance for the camera lens) and strapped it to my daughters seat in the back. I place it in such a way that the silhouette isn't even visible to someone who might be familiar to what the inside layout normally is. I set it and left, stayed up to a reasonable hour (I had company this time) and when I checked in the morning the box was undisturbed and the camera had not been tripped. The second night I placed the box in the same spot but took down the camera.
It was gone the next morning. No traces. No marks. We get heavy dews in this part of the country, btw, so the chances of something getting up on the hood and not leaving a mark of any kind are slim. The box was lifted sometime after dewfall as the dry rectangle was evident. No evidence of it being scooted or dragged though the dew, either.
I repeated baiting a couple of weekends ago (the anniversary of my sighting, if you remember, coincides with yearly family reunions in the local fairgound) and had the same results. This time, however, something was left behind. My father was down earlier in the week to check on the painters and do some general cleanup to make the place habitable and my wife and I arrived in the early evening on Friday. After unloading and taking a walk around, I parked the car in the same spot I usually do. It started to rain that evening [so] I didn't purchase chicken, I just put out some apples, cut-face down, on the hood. I stayed up rather late reading, but heard/saw nothing and went to bed on the living room couch around 2am. The next morning the apples were gone with no evidence, but my wife remarked that she had heard an odd, low "growl" or something sometime early in the am-- probably around 4 or so.
We attended the reunion and my wife, mother and daughter went back to Louisville, while I stayed on with the intention of visiting the library and newspaper offices for research. I kept chicken and biscuits from the reunion and brought them back, and later in the evening placed them at their usual station on the hood. The next morning they were gone, but in their place was a fairly good-sized piece of flint rock. It had not been tossed onto the car-- no dents, scratches, marks-- it had been placed there. Inside the dry rectangle where the chicken box had been. It's interesting because while there used to be a lot of flint around the area as a child, both in the old river-rock gravel roadbed and in the form of points and arrow/knife/scraper blades turned up by my grandfather in the field near the springs, there is very little in obvious evidence now. I remember there are a couple of places back in the back where the creeks run where it's more common but they're never visited these days by anyone I know. So is it an object of "value"...? It could have been perceived as such over a hundred years ago, I suppose. Maybe it was a trade. Or maybe someone's messing with me.
Dave doesn’t really think it is someone “messing” with him. There are few people in the area of his family farm, and those who are there are mostly elderly.
We have neighbors, but they're all elderly, down the road a piece, and not likely to be out walking a one-lane gravel-packed road late at night. There is ZERO traffic on this road at night as it dead-ends just below our barn and back field at my Uncle's old place. There is one older man who walks the road for exercise, but I know him and he's never out late and not given to entering neighbor's yards and stealing chicken and biscuits.
But if it isn’t some neighbor having a joke, what can account for these events? Certainly, many animals can take food from a baiting station. But few are able to do it without leaving evidence. And how many would leave a stone behind, particularly of the sort which our ancestors used to use as tools? And how could whatever took the food know the camera was there and therefore not take the food that night, but take it every other night when the camera wasn’t there? Perhaps this is merely a coincidence, but it is striking indeed.
But recall that there were two events when a camera was present and the food wasn’t taken. The first was when Dave stayed up with his night vision camcorder in hand. On that night, the food was taken, but not until sometime after he fell asleep. Since he was in his own house at the time, there can be no question of the camera having done something that alerted the larcenous night visitor, but perhaps Dave was visible. The second event is more mysterious. It is odd that every time food is left out and no camera or witness is nearby, the food is gone, yet when a camera is trained on the feeding location, the food is not taken.
While there’s no way to prove the camera problem is actually a product of some kind of energy, my hunch is that this is the right place to put this kind of anomaly. It seems as if the creatures somehow know about the cameras and avoid them. Some folks hypothesize that it is the sound these cameras make when they warm up to take pictures. This would not be relevant to the first case, when Dave was inside with his camcorder. Granting, for the sake of argument, that there was a creature there that night which opted not to take the food, how would it know that the camera was there when it was hidden inside the car? Being inside a car would, one would presume, make any sounds the camera makes very hard to detect. And in that case, anyway, the camera never fired, so noise cannot account for why the food wasn’t taken on that night, when it was taken whenever no camera was present. Perhaps the creatures are not detecting sound, but some form of energy? But even this would not explain the food remaining undisturbed on the night the camera was in the car, since the camera never fired, therefore never powering up to make any kind of noticeable energy either? These possibilities don’t seem to provide answers for us, leaving us either with a mystery, or the proposition that by coincidence it was only on the night Dave put out a camera that the creature didn’t take the food.
And as I’ve said, Dave’s experience here is not particularly unique, though it is not easy to get researchers to go on the record with happenings like these. I understand the reason -- what can you say about it? The camera didn’t get anything, and you don’t know who or what took the bait if the camera didn’t catch it.
I know a few folks who are trying to do the same sort of thing that Dave is trying with both game cameras and video cameras, and they have told me about cameras being moved, batteries dying long before they should, blank shots (as in a picture that has nothing on it, not even the vegetation that should be there), distortion or interference, strange lights, and other anomalies.
So, electrical effects, glowing eyes, problems with cameras -- what are we to make of energy anomalies such as these? The physical nature of some of the effects can’t be explained by the Psychological theory, so that’s one down. I don’t believe the Flesh and Blood theory can account for all of these cases either. This is not to say that if these accounts represent real events, that I believe such things must spring from some kind transdimensional source -- as I’ve said before, or actually, Arthur C. Clarke said it, any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. A technological source puts us right back into the Flesh and Blood camp, although we would have to explain how bigfoot came by such technology. But by most accounts, bigfoot does not appear to have, or even be capable of having technology. By most accounts, bigfoot is either disinterested in it, afraid of it, or seemingly without the capacity of understanding it. I can recall reading several accounts, though I can’t remember exactly where now, with bigfoot reacting strangely near cars and trucks, peering at the people inside the vehicles with puzzled expressions, and even sometimes removing the people as if the bigfoot thought that these folks inside cars were in danger. Clearly, when it comes to technology, most of the time bigfoot is a luddite. So how do we explain these anomalies? One might hypothesize, as Franzoni does, that bigfoot somehow has a natural ability to manipulate energy in a way that we do not understand. At the present moment, as troubling as such a conclusion would be, the Transdimensional theory seems best able to explain these effects blogsquatcher.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-sing-sasquatch-electric.html