YAKIMA: The Third Curtain

Alright. Weirdness is beginning to muscle in on the blog. The topic seems about to blow up into too many fragments, but we soldier on into the wilderness.

... but I have to admit that I'm just jumping in and winging it on this one.

Does the Yakima Glo-Ball phenomenon have anything to do with Bigfoot? Do the Yakima structured UFOs ? Why even ask the question? 

The question arises because our primary knowledge source, Bill Vogel, began to get quite a few Bigfoot reports right along with getting Yakima Lights reports --- not really AS many but a goodly pile nevertheless. Plus this is "Bigfoot Country", at least sort of.

This is one meta-compilation of Bigfoot sighting locations in the State of Washington. There are a lot. In fact, Washington ranks number one in total recorded Bigfoot sightings by several sites that I looked at. But so what?

 

Stan Gordon of Pennsylvania and Kecksburg fame would remind us that he has seen many reports of Bigfoot in association with UFO cases in his area, particularly in the 1972-1974 era, precisely that of the big Yakima Lights flap recorded by Bill Vogel. That's Stan to the left above, and a ghostly professor is holding up his book and a three-toed cast sent to the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained --- MAYBE from Pennsylvania and Stan; it was not labeled. I do not know if Ivan was the one who received the cast, though Ivan was more skeptical of three-toed casts of anything but bird prints, if we were talking about a biological entity. Mark Moravec from Australia also collected a pile of Bigfoot sightings where some UFO claim was simultaneously made.

OK, so you guys have convinced me to look. Mainly however it was Bill Vogel who did.

Bill Vogel had accumulated over two dozen encounters around or near the reservation, but initially didn't want to talk much about them, at least to the press. This is normal "anomalies researcher behavior", you run into enough problems trying to get anyone to take you seriously on just one anomaly let alone piling several together. But Bill Vogel was a curious and relentless-in-pursuit-of-truth kind of guy, so he kept the cases and wrote them up in what he called his "on the trail" journal. Greg Long was ultimately entrusted with the material and wrote about it in his Examining the Earthlight Theory, mainly including the cases in an appendix. Then Long gave Peter Guttilla the On the Trail journal, and Peter included it in his Bigfoot Files as a separate chapter with Bill Vogel's authorship --- so you know where to go for the readings.

Bigfoot sightings and big claims are all over this area --- in the map above one notices that immediately to the south of Goldendale and the Reservation is the Oregon border town of The Dalles, one of the densest areas for sightings.

On that same map, Bigfoot sightings cluster tightly around Mt. Adams to the Reservation's west, and therefore from the direction that most Yakima Lights are seen by the fire lookouts.

On this map we see our favorite locations: Satus Peak, Toppenish, Goldendale, Mt. Adams. At the teardrop we see the name of Klickitat County, just about where our UFO case of the spinning pinwheel-of-colors from the previous entry took place. The teardrop, though, indicates a place named Skookum Canyon. And .... ?

Skookum is a Native American word, used more in Oregon than anywhere else, which has a few meanings, but two in particular. The more generic of the two meanings is "strong and good" --- meaning I believe a strong good as in something which excels the norm. The second more specific meaning is a "monster of the wilderness." It's not just guesswork that Skookum has been a word related to Bigfoot/Sasquatch, as people from local communities have told the rest of us that this is exactly what the word sometimes means.

So, UFOs all over the place, Bigfoot sightings all over the place, Bill Vogel collecting a pile of each ---- so do they come as a team?

I read pretty carefully every case in Greg Long's book and in Peter Guttilla's Vogel chapter. THERE ARE NO CASES CONTAINING BOTH ANOMALIES. The nearest thing to a case of such is of a police patrolman who was out on a reservation road responding to a UFO call, never seeing a UFO, never getting to the call site, but encountering three "human-like things covered in hair from head to toe" and he panicked and drove off as fast as possible. Data-wise there is no connection.

Still the idea is fascinating. Vogel wondered about the Native American legends of The Stick People, by which they meant the human-like people who live among the "sticks"/wilderness. These people were viewed as having great powers. He fixed his idea of a possible Lights-Bigfoot connection with a legend that he was told to be very old.

   "The Yakimas have one concerning a large man with red eyes who came to live with the tribe. 
   One day he knew he was dying and asked the Indian people to take him to a particular spot or 
   location so that he might die there. They did, and shortly after he died, a huge flying object came
   down from the skies, took his body aboard, and flew away." 

Wait a minute there, Jack, would say Michael Persinger. There are plenty of Earthstress incidents all over that area, AND there are plenty of Bigfoot hallucinations all over that area, AND there are plenty of structured UFO hallucinations [ I actually like the Michigan farmer's way of phrasing this during the 1966 Swamp Gas reporting better --- he called it Hullabillusions. ]

So we have Earthquake stresses and all manner of Lights and Hullabillusions ---> OBVIOUSLY I'M RIGHT!!!

Hmmmm .... I guess that anything's possible, but I don't think so.

I would theorize rather that IF the Earthstresses Theory was correct, and IF those mysterious fields created Hullabilliusions [by an even MORE mysterious and undetected brain mechanism,] THEN, since both the UFO and Bigfoot imagery is widespread and persistent in the area, one should see plenty of Hullabillusions containing both images.

BUT WE DON'T.

I'll keep a slightly open mind about this, but I don't see the data.

In fact, if we go back to that earlier map, when I stare at that thing I see the reservation as an eerily "empty" area for Bigfoot sightings. The Yakima Lights and the Washington Bigfoot phenomenon might be two separate things, which happen to coexist in nearby but not too overlapped geographic locales.

Greetings small hairless humanoids!!

Hello, big fella. Don't take this the wrong way, but I prefer my UFOs without much Sasquatch in them.

You know, multiplying anomalies and all that.

Yeh .... exactly .... little over the top for academia.

But Yakima is not finished.

The Glo-balls have more to say.

Perhaps literally.

The fourth Curtain, next time.

Peace.

Coincidence in Barbados

Yep, this one really is about Barbados. ... admit it, you always wanted to know something about Barbados.

It's October of 1980 and Allen Hynek is sitting at his desk at the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston trying to figure out the Universe. His peaceful reveries are broken by the arrival of the mail. One envelope bears a nice-looking stamp from Barbados --- doubtless some Center employee will swipe that for their stamp collection he thinks.

The letter is from a fellow astronomer, Philip A. Stahl, who resides in the division of Barbados called St. Michael [in the south central of the island.] His small observatory makes him a focus point for what is called The Barbados Astronomical Society. He has a major puzzlement that he wants Allen to solve.

Stahl had received a report that he thought remarkable enough to publish in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. On December 7th, 1978, a pair of adult witnesses had observed, on a well-overcast evening [no stars or Moon visible], a "large green luminous object." The thing was a very bright "ordinary" green [i.e. not lime green like the famous US Southwest Green Fireballs of 1949.] It appeared from behind one cloud bank, brightly illuminating all the clouds around it, Its size and hard-defined circularity made it just as if the Moon had turned green and was moving horizontally through the clouds. It disappeared behind another cloud bank, not to be seen again.

Well, how foolish, eh? The lady and her adult son were obviously seriously mistaken. The object surely WAS the Moon, and something about the atmosphere must have made it look green.

Nope. This lady was a founding member of the Barbados Astronomical Society, and she knew EXACTLY where the Moon would have been if you could have seen it that night. Whatever she saw, she and her Engineer son were sure that it was no Moon nor anything else they could think of.

Stahl was equally puzzled. His observatory was out observing that night and saw no Green Fireball. If there had been one, they too should have seen it. No reports anywhere in the island reached him. This was a locally limited phenomenon. Unless it was some kind of UFO, the only remaining hypothesis was a form of kugelblitz [ball lightning]. Kugelblitz usually isn't reported as brilliantly green, and especially isn't usually claimed to be that big [this would have had to be quite large to be going in and out of cloud banks looking like the apparent size of the Moon at the horizon.]

Stahl, in his paper, shook his head and punted. He said that kugelblitz was the favored hypothesis [he couldn't say "UFO" now could he?] and the distance must have been seriously misjudged --- though how excellent astronomical observers get going in and out of cloud banks wrong is "awkward".

So, the Universe punished him.

In late September 1980, he received another report.

On the 27th of September, 1980, a Queens College school teacher was picnicking on the veranda of her home. The sky was dark and overcast. That overcast blotted out the Moon and stars. [there were a few stars visible in the line of sight.] As she was staring in the direction of an old windmill on the southern end of the property, a spherical object "like a bright green headlight" descended from great height and disappeared beneath the trees standing to the windmill's left.

Ah! Another fireball no doubt. But there's a bit of a problem. She estimated the apparent size as equivalent to a 9 to 10" diameter ball held at arm's length --- try it, it's huge. It's particularly huge when you add in that the trees it disappeared behind were 100-150 meters away. At a minimum the thing would have to be wider than two+ ordinary houses. ... one heck of a fireball or a ball lightning.

So, Hynek, what's the answer?

Allen did what he always did when the going got tough....

He went to lunch.

Clearly there is one leading hypothesis...

The Moon is angry and is throwing pieces at us.

I have good Out Proctor evidence: I've seen Green Cheese --- obviously the explanation.

Peace, friends.

p.s. Marjorie Johnson's Faerie book is starting out to be very interesting reading.