Brent Swancer January 3, 2022

Among all of the supposed mysterious creatures out there, the Bigfoot ranks high as one of the most well-known of them all. The creature is usually described as some sort of undiscovered primate or hominid lurking out past our awareness, but there have been plenty of reports that seem to paint it as perhaps something more. Here we get into a tangled realm of accounts and sightings suggesting that Bigfoot is much more than any ordinary animal, and in this case we get into some weird cases of these creatures seeming to phase in and out of our reality through portals.

There have been quite a few sporadic reports of Bigfoot seemingly passing through portals or materializing or dematerializing at will, perhaps passing through a veil between two realities. One such report comes from the U.S. state of Massachusetts, where the Leominster State Forest sprawls out over 4,246 acres near the towns of Leominster, Fitchburg, Princeton, Sterling, and Westminster. Here local historian and Leominster native Ronny Le Blanc had a very strange encounter with a mysterious, apparently dimension shifting beast in the woods since around when he was just 12 years old, and which has to this day convinced him that Bigfoot is more than a flesh and blood animal. He says of his experience:

There was one particular trail that I always used to avoid. It always had a very dark, ominous feeling to it. It would be a beautiful day, and you look down this thing and it looked dark. There were two trees on either side. It just felt like this prehistoric gate welcoming me into this place. I start going down this trail with my bike and I just could hear the bike squeaking and I noticed there are no other sounds in the forest. Nothing. The trail just had a feeling to it. So I was there, and all of a sudden I realized there was no sound, no animal or bird life, just these two huge trees and were like a doorway. There was no life there at all. I was standing there with my feet on the ground, and all of a sudden, the quiet turned into a loud noise. At that moment, something crashed through the woods right in front of me and I could feel it reverberating in the soles of my feet. To me it sounded like an elephant crashing in the woods right near me. It was pushing trees and shrubs, went across the trail and onto the other side. But I couldn’t see anything. That’s what was disturbing. I was so scared and I couldn’t move. Once it stopped, I pedaled out of there so fast, and never went back.

Interestingly, according to Le Blanc there have been numerous reports of people similarly hearing something large crashing through the trees or even seeing the brush get pushed aside, yet been unable to see what it is causing it. Le Blanc has theorized that whatever is behind such sightings is perhaps cloaking itself or can dematerialize at will, or passing through a portal between two different realities. This would perhaps point to Bigfoot being something more than a large, undiscovered biological entity, and he has said of this:

I would say Bigfoot is something that’s more interdimensional, almost spiritual-kind of a realm that has the ability to manifest itself. I started off chasing an ape, a flesh-and-blood animal and now I’m thinking it’s something else. As you dig deeper into Bigfoot, you’re start talking about cloaking and the fact that they can vanish before people’s eyes. And these stories go back hundreds of years where all of a sudden, a posse has this creature cornered and the tracks just disappear in open field, like something just came and picked it up and took it away. So all these stories start to intertwine and I started to go back and I went (Expletive)! A lot of these people are talking about these similar encounters that I had. So there’s a belief that Bigfoot could be alien or interdimensional. And it sounds crazy, like something in science fiction, but when you think about it, we have this preconceived notion that an alien has to be gray or green. People have seen Bigfoot holding an orb. They look like a basketball with plasma swirling around and they’re silent. I’ve just seen them hovering over the sky and just blink out and disappear. There are a lot of different theories about Bigfoot but the reality is something is happening. People are seeing them. They are leaving tracks.

Image by Steve Baxter

According to Le Blanc, the area has been a hotspot of Bigfoot sightings going back all the way to 1884, with early settlers even complaining that the creatures would attack and kill livestock, as well as reports of various other strange phenomena such as UFOs, shadow people, strange beings, and balls of light so considering these bizarre accounts is this maybe because the area has some thin spot between dimensions? There are quite a few reports along these lines, of apparent Bigfoot just blinking out of existence somehow. 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 really classify, seeming to point at vanishing Sasquatch being the result of some sort of inter-dimensional portal. On this day, Larry had 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:

I was walking along the trail enjoying the strong breeze and bright sunshine when in the middle of a step, everything around me started to turn gray and blurry. 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.

Image by Steve Baxter

Then, as suddenly as this had all happened, Larry reports that he seemed to pass through “a barrier,” and that everything returned into focus, but that it was now night time and the wind had completely ceased, the air also becoming more humid, like a rainforest. Upon looking around 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 really quite bizarre events that followed and his thoughts on the matter:

There were no stars in the sky, but there was a diffused light that let me see everything clearly, however I couldn’t tell what the light source was. As often happens when the human body receives a massive dose of adrenaline the entire incident appeared like it was in slow motion and even though I was only there for a second or two I had time to observe my surroundings. The silence was broken by continuous high pitched keening sound, and I was nearly overwhelmed with a sense of fear and danger. My momentum caused me to take one more step before stopping in my tracks. 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. I took two more steps backwards and everything reversed itself from what had just happened. The world around me became lighter, the fir and pines gradually came back into view and by the third step I was back on Saddle Blanket Mountain. I continued to move backwards in terror, and as I did, I observed that where I had just come from was a shimmering oval patch of air about the size of a large door. The woods behind it looked like it was under water. By the fifth backward step the shimmering area seemed to just evaporate and everything was back to normal. By then my lungs had nearly burst from the volume of air I had inhaled during the huge gasp I had just taken. My body felt like it was on fire from the adrenaline surge. I spun around and ran back down the trail as fast as my legs could carry me, and didn’t stop until I reached my truck. I was nearly two days getting to that place and about three hours getting back.

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. Severely shaken, I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about people who have mysteriously disappeared throughout history, and discovered several instances where people have vanished in plain sight of others. The quantum physics people have a theory about parallel universes. They just might be right.

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 claims 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, a 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 refuses 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.

Image by Steve Baxter

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 described as being very remote, rugged, and mountainous. As Gene prowled through the rough landscape looking for his quarry, he claims 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 claims 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, as if it had just phased out of reality. 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.

Image by Steve Baxter

It is yet another case that seems to show these creatures passing through some barrier between realities, and which may hint at these things being more than meets the eye. The idea that these creatures may be more interdimensional than flesh and blood biological entities has created quite a stir in the circles of Bigfoot studies, but according to proponents of the idea that Bigfoot is an interdimensional interloper, in a sense it might explain a lot of the discrepancies in the evidence put forward for such creatures so far. For instance, it might explain why photographs turn out so blurry, or why there has been so little physical evidence or body turned up after all of this time. Considering this, and that such weird reports populate the domain of Bigfoot sightings right along with more traditional sightings of what appears to be simply an undiscovered ape-like creature, some researchers have proposed that we expand our definition of what Bigfoot might be. One of these is paranormal researcher William Hall, who has said of it:

It used to be that the UFO people didn’t talk to the ghost people because they were a little weird, and nobody would talk to the Bigfoot people because they were crazy. I found out, we cannot continue to do that. In reality, quantum physics is leading us there. That (portals) could be why we don’t see any bodies, why there are no bones. I have no official opinion on it. I leave nothing off the table because there are a lot of things we find in our fieldwork that we cannot explain.

it would appear that the Bigfoot phenomenon is perhaps even stranger than it already seems, and it all remains pretty controversial within the field. Yet, however some may want to discount such reports the thing is that this is the same dismissive attitude that the mainstream shows towards Bigfoot reports to begin with. Within the body of sightings there are these uncomfortable accounts, but how can they be thrown out anymore than all of them can be? As long as Bigfoot reports continue to come in, there will be some that will be labelled as more fringe than others, and who are we to completely blow them off? If we are to accept any of them, perhaps we have to accept these as well, and try and find a place to fit them in. I Bigfoot are even real at all, then perhaps there is more than one phenomenon happening here, that of the flesh and blood creature, and that of something else, from beyond what we think we know about the very universe itself. Whether there is anything to this or not, it certainly adds to the discussion on the Bigfoot phenomenon as a whole, no matter what one may think.

MU*