No, the title above is not a reference to a new Japanese monster-movie, as much as it might sound like it should be! What I’m actually referring to is something that both students of UFOs and researchers of strange creatures – for the most part, anyway – absolutely hate. What is it? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s those curious, and not irregular, occasions when Ufology and Cryptozoology don’t just cross paths, but where certain cases suggest a common point of origin for both phenomena.
Of course, many Ufologists and Cryptozoologists get irate and fired up when I bring up such matters. But what the heck; I don’t care. The fact is that there are a lot of cases suggesting a connection. So why hide them? Let’s take a look…
Stan Gordon is a well-known, long-term researcher, writer and authority on many things of a Fortean nature – as is clearly evidenced by his excellent and insightful 2010 book, Silent Invasion: The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook, which was sent to me for review in January of that year. Now, I know for sure that any book suggesting Bigfoot may somehow be inextricably linked with the UFO phenomenon is bound to raise distinct hackles in certain quarters, but, such reports undeniably exist, so examine them we must…
The fact of the matter is that there is surely barely a Bigfoot researcher out there who has not been exposed to even just a few creature cases that absolutely reek of undeniable high-strangeness, and that place the hairy man-beasts into definitively Fortean – rather than zoological or cryptozoological – realms, whether in Britain, the United States, Australia, or elsewhere. But, whether or not those same Bigfoot researchers are willing to give such reports some degree of credence is a very different matter.
Fortunately, there are a number of researchers who recognise that as much as it would be undeniably preferable to place Bigfoot in a purely flesh and blood category and nothing else whatsoever, there is a significant and hard to deny body of data and testimony that points in a very different direction. And it’s a direction that, to his credit, Stan Gordon does not shy away from. Indeed, Stan’s book is a first-class study of a truly weird wave of Bigfoot / UFO activity that swamped the good folk of Pennsylvania, USA in the period from 1972 to 1974.
