Bigfoot Does Cameos, Not Recurring Roles
The more you study the Bigfoot phenomenon, the more you bump into events and circumstances that warp the boundaries we’ve established. UFOs, missing time, disappearing Bigfoots…none of these jive with the just-an-ape theory. But one seemingly innocuous phenomenon has incited more debate than one would expect.
Witnesses who claim repeated encounters with Bigfoots.
I’ve heard various labels attached to these witnesses. On her website, Autumn Williams calls them long-term witnesses. Loren Coleman calls them Bigfoot contactees (a reference to the UFO contactee movement of the 1950s & 1960s). Why can’t we simply call them witnesses?
The need to label these witnesses seems silly. UFO witnesses who have more than one encounter rarely get labeled with a special designation. The UFO contactees were people who claimed to have had face-to-face encounters with ufonauts on spaceships—like George Adamski, the most famous contactee. Usually, the witness returned from the trip with a peaceful message or a benign warning for humanity to clean up its act.
Some Bigfoot witnesses claim to have had psychic communication from the creatures, with messages which relate themes similar to the what UFO contactees reported. Most repeat witnesses have no message for humanity. They have simply met Bigfoots on more than one occasion. When a witness starts to recount multiple sightings, why must we stamp a name on that person’s forehead? Instead, we should try to figure out why certain people have multiple encounters.
Of course, before we can do that, we must first apply the same credibility test to these witnesses as we use for incidental witnesses. We must treat them with respect, rather than snickering at them.
©2007 Lisa A. Shiel
Lisa A. Shiel is the author of Backyard Bigfoot: The True Story of Stick Signs, UFOs, & the Sasquatch, a ForeWord Magazine 2006 Book
As a recognized Bigfoot expert, Lisa has been interviewed by big-city newspapers, drive-time talk radio hosts, local and national magazines, and TV reporters. In 2005, she founded the Michigan Upper Peninsula Bigfoot Organization (MUPBO) to explore all aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon, from sightings to evolution to UFOs. Lisa has a master’s degree in Library Science. She currently pens a blog, Bigfoot Quest, as a companion to the MUPBO site.
Tags: Bigfoot, research, Sasquatch, sightings, witnesses