Otherworldly and Bizarre Paranormal Bigfoot Encounters

The Bigfoot phenomenon is already quite strange enough as it is and has long been ground zero for all manner of sightings by people seeing something large, ape-like, and decidedly not human prowling the forests of North America. The main theory behind these encounters is that we are possibly dealing with some undiscovered bipedal primate, perhaps even an ancestral species of human, either way, a flesh and blood creature. However, there has been much speculation over the years that this may not be the case at all, and that these beings could be something far weirder than that. Among these are reports of Bigfoot that have seemingly phased out of reality, gone invisible, or otherwise vanished right before witnesses' eyes. Although perhaps not quite as common as more traditional sightings reports, they nevertheless come in and suggest that possibly something more is going on here than a mere undiscovered animal.

Some bizarre cases are really hard to classify, so we might as well start with one of the weirder reports, described as a “Neanderthal on a stick.” In August of 2012, a witness only known as “Alexander O” was reportedly out in a forested area of the Vitebsk district of Belarus picking mushrooms with his wife. At some point, he lost track of his wife and as he searched for her something truly strange would happen to him. The witness report reads;

“I looked around - there are not many mushrooms and began to call my wife: "Lena! Lena! Let's go! Let's go!" And she went on and didn't hear. Maybe I called him? Or what? So, I see, here's a trifle: birch, podosinovichki, so here. Such a small forest. I'm collecting and calling further. I'm watching: something, like, a burnt tree. That's the thickness. Black and black absolutely. Here, as they say, you can see a tree after a fire. I didn't pay attention, I'm moving on. The tree is standing still. I came up and thought, "Well, I'll see." I was kind of attracted by something. I lift my head up - there is a head three times bigger than mine. It looks like a monkey - a low forehead, big eyes... It looks at me, well, it's literally four meters away. In three or so three meters. So he's looking at me... and such a kind face, nice. Not malicious at all. I wasn't scared at all. Overgrown and black. And the face is black too. Lips, nose seem to be human and big head. But I didn't see the torso, as you could say. I didn't see any arms or legs. I paid attention and even wanted to chat, but... Since he is so attentive, he is a very smart creature. And I said, "Wow!" So. By voice. As he said "wow" - [he] disappeared instantly. [Disappeared or hid behind a tree?] No, it didn't happen at all in front of my eyes, it just disappeared! [...] So further - there are tall pines on the right side. To the lake there. No wind, nothing, that's the weather, that's beautiful. And these trees, here, diverge and converge, diverge and converge. Towards the lake. Fifty meters from the car. And, so, it went towards the lake like a whirlwind. And there was no more after that. My wife came... But for some reason I was terribly unlucky after that. Not that I was touched inside or I was scared: I punctured the wheel in one place - "sat down", we went further along this road - a forest road. [That is, what you took for a tree, did it also disappear?] No, not a tree, it's gone too. It was like a torso. Type of torso. It just disappeared from sight. And three meters, maybe even more, was high [And the girth?] And the circumference is not thick [60 centimeters?] Less [And the head?] And the head is exactly with the torso. But the overgrown one is like this. Or there could be short hair, that's thick wool. Or he was standing sideways... But the main thing is that I couldn't see hands or feet.”

A Bigfoot head with no arms or legs? What in the world was going on here? Another odd story from Belarus is that of a monstrous Bigfoot that was reported as standing 5 meters (17 feet) tall! In 2013 a man by the name of Nikolai was in the remote wilderness out at the Belarusian-Ukrainian borderland along with his family on a camping excursion. The trip had already been a little odd, in that their horses had suddenly gone haywire and had refused to proceed on several occasions, but things were about to get much stranger still. As they sat in the flickering, dancing light of the fire they heard something approaching, crashing loudly through the woods. The witness continues;

“Bent down, he was three to three and a half meters. And then, when I saw it, I clearly understood that it was a danger. I'm whispering - straight whispering, whispering: the boys and the girl... two or three... they already understood that... they're already dressed, that's all. I say: "Look." In a whisper, barely, so that only they could hear. And that's how I said - look - he took another step, then stopped, turned his head, just like an owl. He doesn't have a neck, there, as I see, the hair covers his neck, his head is straight and his shoulders are big... He just turned his head like that. 

And just two huge red eyes. Here's straight to me, straight like this, eye to eye. The eyes are round, absolutely round and the pupils are like a cat's. Red. But I don't know, maybe it was the light from the fire that gave redness. [Ah, you say, what is his height, if he straightens up, what is his height?] It will be five meters! [Such a giant?] Yes. He's so huge... he'll take a cow under his arm without any problems. [...] And then I felt what I think, he kind of... [Perceives?] Yes! I just experienced such horror. That's just how I stood... I just realized that the moment to make a decision had come. That is, he can make a decision, let's say, attack now. [And why did you realize that he feels your thoughts?] I don't know, I've just never experienced such feelings. But I felt it, just like that. [...] I was just terrified, I rushed right away, I flew there, I had three meters each jump there! And the second time I pushed off the ground, and what, I didn't even think about my friends there, I was just thinking about saving myself. Although I've never been so cowardly. But at the moment I realized that at least someone needs to be saved. [...] And right in the air, such a thought "catches up" with me - a tape recorder. We had a tape recorder near the fire. It's not even mine, I absolutely had it [no need] in that situation.”

What was going on here? In other weird reports, one very interesting account of an apparently vanishing Bigfoot was related on the radio show Coast to Coast AM on a July 15, 2016, episode hosted by George Noory. The witness, who called himself "Gene," from Albuquerque, New Mexico, claimed that he had been hunting for elk at around 7 AM out near a border town on the Arizona-Mexico border called Gallup. The land was located on a Navajo reservation and was described as being very remote, rugged, and mountainous. As Gene prowled through the rough landscape looking for his quarry, he claimed that he got the distinct feeling that something large was following him, perhaps even stalking him. He would explain what happened next thus (transcript from the original show):

“I'm an ex-Navy corpsman. I know when something's following me. I'm about an hour and a half back in and I'm way out in the middle of nowhere. So I go around and I end up on a box canyon on top of this mesa that overlooks the boonies. It's like a thousand foot drop off. Okay. Real quick, I head back towards the box canyon. I was trying to get away from whatever is following me. All of a sudden I hear these thundering footsteps and I lean up against the wall and here comes about 7 horses out from the middle of nowhere into this box canyon. Wild horses. I get around the box canyon and there it is. It jumps off the top of a twenty foot dead end box canyon. I was at the bottom. I'm looking up and now I'm looking at it. And it jumped, one foot down, one foot up on the side. It was exactly what everybody says that you guys talk about (Noory says Bigfoot) Yeah... and I'm in the middle of the Indian reservation on the top of a little mesa. It blew my mind. It looked right at me. I was less than fifty yards from it. I took off running. I didn't freeze. I took off running.

Then something threw a rock at me. It was a huge rock. I'd say it weighed about 8 pounds. It would have killed me. I looked and I tripped out... at a 120 to 200 yards there it was... and it looked at me. I'm sorry George but... that far. I'm telling you. It blew my mind. It threw an 8 pound rock at least 120 yards. And this thing was not small. This thing was huge.”

The terrified witness then decided to take a shot at the thing with his rifle and claimed that he actually directly hit it, but after taking a few steps the massive beast simply disappeared into thin air as if it had never been there at all. When he went to investigate there were found to be enormous footprints imprinted in the ground, but no blood or other physical evidence left behind, and there was no sign at all of where the beast could have possibly gone. He was absolutely baffled and would explain:

“I don't know where it's from but wherever it came from, when I hit it, it had the ability to just disappear into thin air. You know, I looked... I followed the footprints. I walked the 120 yards. It wasn't that far from the top of a Mesa it had nowhere to go. Never ever have I seen it again and never ever have I gone back, not by myself.”

There have been several similarly bizarre and inexplicable cases of Sasquatch simply vanishing in full view listed in a paper called Vanishing Bigfoot and Anecdotal Accounts: Implications and Challenges for Researchers, by Sharon Cornet. One of the cases covered comes from the summer of 2000, by a witness named John Bohannon. He claims that had been driving along a dirt road during the daylight hours just west of the Three Rivers Campground, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, when he saw a massive bipedal, ape-like creature, which was estimated to have been around 8 feet tall and walking along in the same direction as his vehicle. The driver slowed down to gape at it, and the massive beast was described as having short, reddish brown hair all over its body, with longer hair underneath its forearms and a face that looked like a “Neanderthal.” It allegedly kept up its brisk stride while staring directly at John for about 100 feet, after which it suddenly just abruptly faded away into thin air, as if it had just been somehow erased. The witness explained that there were no trees or anything that it could have hidden behind and that it seemed as if it had walked through “an invisible wall.”

Also covered is a curious account that allegedly happened to witness Larry Kelm, in August of 1980 near Eugene, Oregon, and it is hard to classify, seeming to point at the vanishing Sasquatch being the result of some sort of inter-dimensional portal. On this day, Larry decided to take a hike along the Mollala Indian trail, which connects the ridges of Saddle Blanket Mountain and nearby Oakridge. At some point during his hike, the witness claims that his surroundings became blurry, overcast, and tinged with an odd grey color, despite the sunny weather, and even though there were no clouds in the sky it seemed as if a shadow had been cast over the land. Larry would say of this:

"The only way I can describe it was as if suddenly I was looking through someone else’s prescription sunglasses. I finished the step and started another. Every inch I moved forward the darkness increased and the gray blurring turned into a jumble of shapes that made no sense.”

Then, as suddenly as this had all happened, Larry reports that he seemed to pass “a barrier,” and that everything returned to focus but that it was now nighttime and the wind had completely ceased. Upon looking about himself, Larry found that the scenery had changed in other bizarre ways as well. Instead of the fir trees that had been around him before, there was now thick, unrecognizable, and wild vegetation similar to a jungle, and the air seemed thick and oppressively humid. Even though it was now night and there was no discernible moon in the sky, he found that he could still see everything to some degree, as if there was some mysterious light source casting a faint frosting of light upon the landscape. At this point, Larry claims that the air was pierced by a “continuous high-pitched keening sound,” which immediately filled him with an unbearable sense of dread. The witness explained the bizarre events that followed thus:

“It was at this point, I heard a whispered "Gotcha" over my right shoulder. I couldn’t tell if I heard it with my ears or inside my head. The word wasn’t directed at me but something said the word quietly to itself. I was so terrified I actually felt my heart stop for a moment. That whispered word is what saved me. I opened my mouth and gasped in a huge gush of thick air and recoiled backward in the same footsteps I had entered wherever I was. As I threw myself backward, I looked over my right shoulder. A dark colored hairy right hand and arm was reaching for my throat over my shoulder. The hand had pale ivory spade-shaped fingernails. The nails looked clean and almost had a manicured look to them. The thumb was placed lower (towards the wrist) on the hand than a human’s is. Both hand and arm were thin and powerful looking and both were covered with thick coarse black hair. I got a good look at it because the thumbnail grazed my neck (it did not break the skin) as I moved backwards. As I continued backwards, the hand clutched where my neck had been a split second before and it seemed to fade off into the distance as I returned through the Portal.”

As soon as he had scampered a few more steps backward, Larry found himself back in the cool mountain air he had left behind and back in his familiar surroundings, and the portal before him seemed to be an oval-shaped patch of shimmering air that slowly faded away until it was gone. Larry then ran off towards his truck as fast as he could without looking back. The terrified witness later would reflect on what had happened to him and came to the conclusion that it had been some sort of inter-dimensional trap, saying:

“On my way home I was absolutely horrified at the thought of what would happen if I were to drive my truck into something like that. It had been a trap pure and simple. Whatever it was that tried to kill me somehow kept the Portal hidden from me on the way in, and I didn’t actually see it until I was back out again. I had terrible nightmares for years, and still haven’t come to grips with what happened. My fingers are trembling and the hair is standing up on the nape of my neck as I write this.”

In yet another report, a witness called Ms. Montanez was driving along a desert highway east of El Paso, Texas, when she spotted a Bigfoot reportedly hunched over a dead coyote. She slowed her vehicle to get a better look at the bizarre sight and claimed that as she looked on the massive beast started to sort of sink, as if being absorbed into the ground, until it was completely gone. The witness was convinced that there had to have been a cave there and that the thing had simply retreated to its dark confines, but when the spot was investigated there was found to be no cave or other opening in the ground. Curiously, the coyote was gone and there were no footprints of anything that could have matched the description of what she had seen. Where in the world did it go? No one knows.

In the book The Psychic Sasquatch and Their UFO Connection, by Kewaunee Lapseritis, M.S., there is an odd account concerning an encounter with a Bigfoot by a group of hikers. According to one of the witnesses, Mrs. Jeffrey, the group was returning from a hike when a large Sasquatch around 9 feet tall stepped out in front of them to stare for a moment before vanishing right before their eyes. The group insists that it simply “dematerialized,” blinking out of existence. The witness was reportedly so upset by what she had seen that she did not leave her house for a week and refused to go back to the area.

There is also a report from the Texas Bigfoot Research Center from a witness near Manchester, Texas. The witness claims that in around 1990 he was deer hunting in Red River County, Texas, and was sitting upon a stool waiting for deer to pass by when he saw a large, 8 or 9-foot-high dark shape around 120 yards away from his position. Thinking it might just be a large tree stump, the witness took a look through his telescopic rifle scope and was startled to see that it was a hulking, ape-like creature that was staring right back at him. The witness observed it for some time before being momentarily distracted by the snap of a twig or stick nearby. He alleges that he looked away for a split second and when he went back to the scope to continue watching the strange creature it was gone. Considering that it had been standing in a grassy meadow and had been out of sight for not even a second, it was as if it had just vanished into thin air. He would later speculate that the snap he had heard had perhaps been a diversion by another one of the creatures. As to why he had not tried to take a shot at it with his rifle, the witness said:

"At this time, I got up and left everything but my rifle and backed out of the area. I had this thing dead to rights in my scope but couldn't shoot because I did not feel threatened.”

How do we deal with such cases and how do they fit into the Bigfoot phenomenon at large? Is there perhaps something more to it all than a flesh and blood animal, or is there more than one phenomenon at work here, intertwining to create a morass of weirdness? There has been the tendency to push cases of paranormal Bigfoot to the periphery, but is there perhaps something we can learn from such cases? Whatever the case may be, it all challenges the idea that this is strictly an undiscovered animal and adds more bizarreness to a field that is already strange enough as it is. 

There has been much speculation and reams of theories written on the more inexplicable and paranormal aspects of some Bigfoot sightings reports, of which the phenomenon of Bigfoot spontaneously vanishing into thin air certainly ranks amongst. In this case, there have been theories such as the idea that Bigfoot are inter-dimensional travelers utilizing portals or vortices, that they are ghosts or spirits of some sort, that they are aliens, that they have some sort of cloaking ability, or that they are using psychic powers to merely befuddle our minds to make it only seem as if they are vanished or invisible. Of course, there are also the more skeptical views that this is all just tall tales, that it was all in the witnesses' heads and that there was no Bigfoot in the first place. I don't intend to get into the specifics of each of these theories here, as many of them are intricate enough to be worthy of separate articles unto themselves, but if there is anything to these cases at all, and if they are to be given consideration equivalent to other sightings more in line with a flesh-and-blood creature, then it suggests that there is perhaps more weirdness to the Bigfoot phenomenon than we can imagine and that it is even stranger than previously thought.

Okay, I lied. We didn’t start with the most bizarre cases because we are just getting weirder and weirder here. Perhaps some of the weirdest Bigfoot encounters of all revolve around them being sighted in conjunction with, or even piloting UFOs. It is far out for sure, but there are many cases like this. One very odd account that was supposedly actually investigated by the CIA’s Project Blue Book UFO mission allegedly occurred in 1966 at Presque Isle State Park, along Presque Isle Bay on Lake Erie, in Pennsylvania. On the evening of July 31, 1966, some visiting tourists were driving at a beach there when their car got stuck in the sand and one of them went to get a tow truck. A passing police car stopped to help them and came back a little later to check on them, and that was when the four tourists and two police officers all witnessed a strange light over a patch of nearby forest, and the policemen and one of the group, a man named Douglas Tibbets, went to check it out as the others waited behind. Things would get very strange from there.

The investigating group had only walked a few hundred yards when they could hear the car honking wildly behind them. When Tibbets and the two officers got there, the others were very agitated and scared. They would claim that they had seen what they described as a “dull black shape, bigger than a man, big head and shoulders, arm-like appendages, no hands, no face visible, as though it had its back turned.” The creature had appeared in front of the car to loom over them before moving off into the night in the direction of where the mysterious light had been seen. After this, a craft with blinking orange and red lights had allegedly come down to land on the beach while tracking the figure with a beam of light. Police would go back to investigate the following morning to find some anomalous triangular indentations in the sand, somewhat corroborating what the women said they had seen.

What was going on here? For some reason, the year 1973 would produce numerous reports of what appears to be Bigfoot and UFOs together. From the files of researcher and author Albert S Rosales comes several that occurred in early September of that year. One of these happened near Penn Township, Pennsylvania, when three women driving along through a wooded area passed by a massive rectangular object that appeared to be metallic and was resting on the ground. It was such an odd sight that they stopped the car to see what it was, and at that instant, a ramp descended from the craft. As the women looked on in awe, three seven-foot-tall hairy ape-like creatures reportedly came barreling out of the craft down the ramp to go running off into the woods. That same month, on September 27, 1973, two girls playing outside in Beaver County, Pennsylvania were startled to see an 8-foot-tall, hairy humanoid with glowing eyes run past them into the woods. According to the witnesses, it was holding some sort of glowing sphere in its hands. One of the girls’ fathers went to investigate and came back visibly frightened, although he refused to say what he had seen. Interestingly, it would turn out that other locals had seen a silvery object shooting a beam down into the woods at approximately the same time as this sighting.

The following month, one well-known such report occurred on the night of October 21, 1973, when Mrs. Reafa Heitfield and her 13-year-old son were asleep in their trailer in Cincinnati, Ohio. When Heitfield woke in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, she claims that she saw a series of inexplicable lights out in the parking area, one of them being a cone-shaped construction of light. When she peered outside to see what the lights were, she reportedly saw a huge, ape-like beast with grayish hair covering its body, which then entered the light before it and the UFO shot off into the night. In that same year, there was a report from a group of farmers in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, who claimed to have seen a huge UFO about 100 feet in diameter, next to which were standing two hairy, ape-like creatures with arms that dangled past their knees and with glowing green eyes. One of the farmers purportedly fired at them with his rifle, after which one of them raised its arm and the UFO shot off into the sky. The two hulking brutes remained, appraised the men for a moment, and then ran off into the forest.

Just as harrowing was a report that came just a few days later, this time also in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. On this occasion, some farmers witnessed a dome-shaped UFO estimated as being around 100 feet in diameter over the road as they drove along. As they approached, they claimed to have seen two “gargantuan creatures covered with thick, matted hair, luminescent green eyes and long arms that dangled below their knees.” The UFO then shot off into the night as the hulking beats lumbered off into the nearby woods. The following year, in December of 1974, there was the very well-known case of dairy farmer William Bosak, who was driving home in Frederic, Wisconsin when he nearly crashed right into a huge spherical UFO sitting on the road. The bottom of the craft was enveloped in a thick mist, and sitting within a glass dome at the craft’s top was a hairy ape-like creature with reddish-brown fur and pointed ears, seemingly at work manning the controls. The craft and its bizarre pilot then blasted off into the night to disappear.

Another very weird report comes from 1989, this one also from the files of Albert S Rosales, and it allegedly happened at Tillamook, Oregon. On the evening of September 27, a woman was woken by her daughter telling her there was something strange outside. The woman went to investigate and was probably not prepared for just how strange it would turn out to be. When she went out there, she saw a disc hovering over the ground, shaped like an inverted toy top and with a nearly transparent surface. The very weird report continues:

“As the woman approached to within 30 feet, a doorway opened, revealing a human-like being of average height, with blond hair, fair skin, and blue eyes, dressed in a silver coverall. At a window next to the door was a “Bigfoot” creature, seemingly seated and visible from the chest up. For the next few minutes, the woman stared at the two, gaining the impression that the “human” was attempting (unsuccessfully) to communicate. Then the vehicle and beings vanished instantly (i.e. without accelerating beyond viewing range). The woman is a psychic and claims to have had periodic encounters with UFOs and “Bigfoot” creatures throughout her life.”

Another baffling account from Albert S Rosales seems to concern hairy hominids that can actually levitate. The incident allegedly happened in January of 1997, out in the remote wilderness of the Chelyabinsk region, in the Urals of Russia. Here lodged within the dense trees was a military radar outpost, and in the early morning hours one of the soldiers stationed there was out collecting firewood on a cold but clear day. There was supposedly lots of snow on the ground that morning, but a clear trail led to the pre-prepared pile of firewood on site. As the soldier began to gather the wood, he then noticed something very peculiar in the form of two hulking hairy humanoids covered in dirty reddish hair standing there within the fence perimeter, one of them gigantic 7.5 feet tall, and the other much shorter, at just under 6 feet tall, and the witness would later speculate that they had likely approached the installation drawn to the smell of breakfast cooking in the nearby kitchen. The odd report continues:

“The soldier thought that the taller entity was a female and the second shorter one, probably a child. Both entities had penetrated inside the perimeter of the unit possibly attracted by the smell of the kitchen area. The witness was carrying an axe and for some strange reason was not afraid only curious, and walked towards the creatures in an attempt to obtain a better look. Amazingly he wasn’t able to approach the pair, since both constantly seemed to move ahead of him, he couldn’t make up any ground between them so he increased his pace, but at the same time the entities increased theirs moving quickly away from him. Finally, moving faster and faster the entities jumped up into the air and momentarily the witness thought that the perimeter fence would hinder their escape, but to his amazement he saw how both of the hairy humanoids simply zoomed into the air and levitated over the fence. The humanoids then flew away and vanished above the tall pine trees in the forest which surrounded the military installation. The witness then stopped his pursuit, returned back to the fence and saw two tracks of footprints which were left on the snow. The layer of snow was thick and strong, evidently the tall hairy humanoid was very heavy. However, the footprints seemed to become dimmer and less deep as they neared the fence, indicating that the humanoids apparently began ascending into the air.”

Such completely bizarre and surreal cases, as well as talk of Bigfoot in relation to UFOs in general, have generally rubbed those in cryptozoology the wrong way. Talking about such things will get you laughed out of most Bigfoot conventions at best, and it is a touchy subject to bring up with Bigfoot researchers. There is the entrenched idea that these must be undiscovered apes, and therefore flesh and blood animals of this earth. Yet these reports exist, and cannot be all just swept under the carpet in order to embrace one particular theory. Perhaps they could both exist in harmony, and maybe these cases represent something other than another real flesh and blood creature, but even then what are we looking at here? Are these aliens, inter-dimensional interlopers, or merely figments of the imagination? There is no way to know, but one thing that is for sure is that these definitely rank as some of the most far-out Bigfoot reports there are.