". . . one of my favourite ghoulish tales comes via Rev. Archdeacon St. John D. Seymour, and concerns a bizarre entity once said to have haunted an Irish castle. Certainly, a handful of reports of phantom ape-men and spectral monkeys litter world folklore, and in the UK a scant few exist."
This ghost/monster apparition was described as having a human head, yet "rest of the form belonged to a huge ape." !
Thanks to Nick Redfern at Man Beast UK for the link.
I've had a bad upper respiratory cold/crud/flu thing going on for a couple of weeks. My energy has been very low, and I've been feeling like crap. I don't like taking stuff, but at night, just so I can sleep, I've been taking Coricidin cough capsules. They help a bit, but also make me feel goofy; and cause me to drag throughout the day. When I got home from work today, I was so exhausted I fell asleep in the afternoon, and had this weird dream about Bigfoot.
I probably had this dream because for the past couple of weeks I've been working on a presentation about "high strangeness Bigfoot," especially in terms of how to present this topic to an audience of "flesh and blood" researchers, without completely alienating them. (that was a pun, wasn't it? grin)
The Dream
I'm in the woods, by a river. I'm standing behind some trees, and can see several aliens (not grays but somehow, I know they're ETs.) They're short, maybe, at the tallest, five feet, but the majority of them are under five feet tall. They're all dressed in the same uniform of some kind of dark coppery armor, complete with helmets. These uniforms, in style, remind me a bit of the Samurai warriors from a Kurosawa
film.
These aliens are patrolling the banks of the river. It's obvious they are not nice beings at all; they are very intelligent, and very cold; quick to kill if they have to. What the aliens are patrolling are a few Bigfoot, who are doing some kind of work, like picking up rocks and taking samples and things like that, putting them into little containers, for the aliens.
The Bigfoot are under the control of these aliens. The control is a sort of combination mind control and remote control -- like the electronic collars used by some dog owners -- and this is the only thing keeping the Bigfoot in subjugation.
The Bigfoot are highly intelligent and wise; more so than the aliens. The aliens however, are more "intelligent" as far as technology is concerned. It's not fair to say the aliens are more intelligent because of technology; it's just a difference in culture. The Bigfoot are perfectly capable and intelligent enough to create the same technology if they wanted to. They simply chose, a very long time ago, not to. The Bigfoot are also far more evolved emotionally -- even, spiritually -- but they can't (at least for now) escape the physical control of this remote control device.
The Bigfoot are very sad, and so am I. Scared and sad for them. We both belong here; the Bigfoot and I, the aliens don't. They're intruders, dangerous intruders, but nothing I can do.
And yet, as awful as this is, the Bigfoot understand that in time, this will end, and they will be free. I don't how this will happen, but they seem to be more compassionate and understanding than I'm capable of being.
Well, that's it. I woke up around 6:00 pm and at first, was disoriented, I thought it was 6:00 am, the time I usually wake up during the week. I thought "I just laid down for my nap! It can't be time for work again!" when Jim told me it was the evening, same day.
I don't take the dream seriously in the sense I think aliens are controlling Bigfoot, even though that's a storyline that exists in the lore. But it was interesting!
(Such a weird bit of synchronicity -- I had just finished this piece, checked out the Anomalist, found the following link to Micah A. Hanks Gralien Report to his excellent chupie article: Blood-Sucking Chupacabra to Blame for Farm Deaths? !!!!)
Over ten years ago, when I first heard about the chupacabras, images of the creature weren't easy to find. There were no actual photos or video of the creature, though some supposed real ones, like this one:
The story that I recall accompanying the above image was that a custodian in the Los Angeles area (I think) had found it.
There were also the "alien" chupacabra renderings:
Along with the stories. Red glowing eyes, spines on the back, jumping extremely high or "flying," found on rooftops, trees, going over fences. Claw like hands, bipedal. And the dead animals found in the creature's wake: chickens, rabbits, etc. were found to have been desanguiated (completely drained of blood) with only two deep puncture wounds in their necks.
The stories of the chupacabras, originating from Puerto Rico, soon "jumped" and stories of the creature started to come out of Florida and Mexico. And I remember short news item from Coast to Coast, via Art Bell, that there were reports of chupacabras in Oregon!
(Stories of the chupacabras, while new to some of us in the United States, were not new to others. Puerto Rico has a history of blood sucking creature lore, for example, as Micah Hanks discusses in his recent article on chupie.)
The above stories of the chupacabras involved: bipedal, spiny backed, high jumping, red eyed, blood sucking creatures. Often an alien from space component accompanied these stories; speculations that "chupie" was an alien, or alien "pet." Other speculations: that the creature was a government experiment gone horribly awry. More prosaic explanations offered: an undiscovered bat, or animal of some type unknown to science.
But in none of the above accounts the chupacabras was said to look like a hairless dog or raccoon.
For whatever reasons, the evolution of the chupacabras story has morphed from the glowing red eye spine backed bipedal creature to a mangy dog like creature, at least here in the states. Monster Quest has gone with this idea:
There isn't any comparison between the two creatures and yet it seems to have taken off; that this hairless, canine type animal is a chupacabras. One question is, why have the chupie stories morphed?
Something that is as important as the chupacabras mystery is the fact that there are hairless beasties found in the southwest. These are real creatures (and I'm not implying the earlier chupacabras are not) and, whatever they are, they are. Something is causing animals to loose all their fur; what? Why are there seemingly a large number of animals with this condition? Something's causing them to loose all their fur. And if these animals are hard to identify: fox, dog, coyote, raccoon, etc. what are the implications of that? Does this mean it's simply a matter of difficulty in identifying completely hairless creatures? Or is there some type of mutation going on? Are parasites, pollution, diet, or some other cause responsible for these cases of mange, or whatever it is?
These animals currently being called chupacabras are not chupacabras, except in local lore parlance. What is causing a large population of animals to lose their fur? It's a symptom of something, a signal that we seem to be ignoring.
Concerning white Bigfoot in general, there's something eerie and intriguing about them; on a mythic level they evoke something other, supernatural, or just enough on the fringe to give an added element of mystery. Just last night I was thinking of white Bigfoot stories -- including the Conser Lake creature -- this little bit of synchronicity adds to the overall white Bigfoot weirdness.
Lesley (The Debris Field, etc.) has a nice article this week about Bigfoot for her Gray Matters column on BoA (Tim Binnall's Binnall of America) titled Bigfoot Thoughts. I like what Lesley has to say about field research; those that go out in the woods looking for the creature:
Most humans don’t even go out into “the wild” and the ones that do mostly stick to known paths, which isn’t really part of the wild. Most humans do their hiking (or whatever) during the day and sleep at night. They carry food and supplies with them, which are things that something with a better sense of smell could detect for miles. Humans are also normally pretty noisy as well as pretty predictable, loud and smelly. Really, would it be that hard to not be found by them out in the middle of the wilderness?
And on paranormal Bigfoot, Lesley says:
I have never understood why people have to have it one way or another, Bigfoot is either a real creature or paranormal, why can’t there be both? Maybe Bigfoot is a flesh and blood creature with paranormal powers - why the hell not?
I am convinced that "paranormal Bigfoot" exists. I tend towards agreeing with Lesley and others who think there might be two, concurrent beings, one a "paranormal" entity, the other flesh and blood. It's also possible what we call paranormal are manipulations of otherwise mundane characteristics, like infrasound. No matter what, the fact remains that there is a large body of paranormal (including UFO related events) Bigfoot encounters.
Loren Coleman has an item about an artist, a bigfoot costume, and one's presumed constitutional right to risk getting shot at by trigger happy would be Bigfoot hunters.
A very interesting interview with Bobbie Short from Melisa Hovey’s Search for Bigfoot blog (I’m not sure how recent the interview is; didn’t find a date.) Bobbie Short is a well known researcher, and we’re fortunate she brings us the excellent Bigfoot Encounters site, as well as her newsletter. Lots of good advice from Short in this interview and really, I almost don’t disagree with anything she has to say about research -- Bigfoot not being a giant ape, for example -- but naturally, we go separate ways here:
The most rewarding change has been the move away from the "bizarre" and the exodus away from the UFO related ideas. It used to be in the old days, the only place to read about hirsute hominids was in a UFO or like magazine. That trend is dying a fast death and I'm glad to see it go.
Now if we can just move research away from cryptozoology and those damn mystery apes, chupacabras, the moth man and Spring-Hill Jack, I'll be a happy camper.
Like UFO research, within Bigfoot research, there are huge divergences in ideas about what UFOs/Bigfoot might be. But that aside, it’s a good interview!
I just found the Oregon Sasquatch Symposium site. The OSS will be hosting a Bigfoot Symposium here in Eugene in June! Exciting news, and more to come on this. . . speaking of the Oregon Sasquatch Symposium site, I was pleasantly surprised to find the link used in Sali Sheppard-Wolford's (author of Valley Of The Skookum) bio is my item on her on my Orange Orb blog.
