A Little Walk Out Proctor

Strange things Out Proctor .... a small pile of reports about some of them, accumulated on the sorting table crying [shrieking?] for a home. Well, not to offend dark powers, here are some brief thumbnails.

1942: Hartford, CT. A narrow streak of light crosses the room wherein a husband and wife are trying to have a quiet evening reading. The streak stretches out to a few feet in length, emits a crackling sound, and explodes.

.... sort of "ball" lightning, sort of not?

1973: Demming, WA. A driver sees a bluish bright sky flickering up ahead. On approaching the site, there are railroad tracks alongside the road. From two places on these tracks, powerful blue-white lightning bolts are exploding upwards into the sky, at pulses of about three second intervals. The bolts reach an estimated 100 feet up and then disappear. As he and the occupants of a second car watch, the pulsing simply cuts off.

The second car was full of brain-smashed pot-heads, if anyone can make any connection to that. I, however, remain relatively clear-minded and confused.

1965, Azusa and Anaheim, CA and 1963 Southhampton, PA. The two California cases have been mentioned on the blog before. Because they are close in both space and time, I consider them to be extra weird. Both cases involved "spots-of-light" which appeared inside houses, where some effort was made to eliminate simple light source paths which might explain them. The cases DO differ. The Anaheim incident was a single evening's event where the son told his mom he had a weird light on his bed. She went in and found a 50cent sized round spot which if she covered it with her hand, it showed on her hand [therefore it acted like a beam --- though she said that she could trace no beam.] No obvious sources existed inside or out and the spot suddenly extinguished.

The Azusa case was a repeater lightspot which would appear flame-like on the wall. This one could be covered by objects but still remained [if you peeked] under them on the wall. {i.e. much stranger.} It was about the same size as the Anaheim spot, and gave the observer a feeling of Peace. It showed up many times, but was absent for long intervals as well. This went on for at least three years --- still happening at the time of the report.

The third case is from two years earlier and across the country. In this, a lady awoke with a need to visit the bathroom. When she got there she saw light in the mirror. Glancing more closely, it was coming from her own hand. It looked like a figure eight. She shook her hand, but it went nowhere. Resigned, she went back to bed and in the morning it was gone. A week later she had to get up late again. This time it was upon returning to bed that lights were noticed, this time 3inch rings of light on her sheets and then on herself. Shaking covers and hands, the lights remained.

Weird, but Out Proctor all the lights are weird.

1974: Morton, IL. A family of four was out in their car for a drive. It was the middle of a sunny day. No clouds were anywhere to be seen. Suddenly all light was extinguished --- total blackness. The husband kept driving and soon the darkness just ceased and it was normal again.

We've had red-outs, blue-outs, green-outs, and I think yellow-outs already on the blog. It was about time for a no-light-at-all event.

1963: Between Madison and Centerville, TX. A guy is driving his vehicle on a fairly busy highway at 55mph. Other drivers noticed that his car was leaving the ground. It was elevated from the road, turned 180degrees, and deposited [the engine still running normally] back on the highway but now moving in the wrong direction. Fortunately the deposition was slightly to the road's shoulder, and no cars were immediately upon him. He brought the vehicle to a halt. No sign of any air disturbance was seeable anywhere. The car had no damages. He went confusedly on his way. {Story reminds me of Jim McDonald's favorite mass transference case from Herman, MN, but there one had a clear UFO report.}

1965: Stamford, CT. A whole crowd of people were in the vicinity when a white cloud was seen moving towards a tennis court. It was alone in the sky and there was almost no breeze, and no storm systems anywhere in the area. The cloud took the shape of a vortex and proceeded to pick up three picnic tables with their umbrellas atop. One man tried to hold one down and was dragged upwards. The tricksy twister then dropped a bunch of debris into a swimming pool, while creating a four-foot diameter, 20 foot high waterspout. Apparently satisfied with its malfeasance, it then hoofed it off to the nearby woods. ... and no, I don't see the solution to Fafrotskies in this story, as the thing picked up many different sorts of objects apparently indiscriminately.

1963: Hanson, Yorkshire, UK. Well, it's been fun so far, but this one makes me angry.

A group of highschoolers were in the playground of their school when out of an otherwise windless day came a nasty thing. The vortex, or something, lifted a teenage girl off the ground to about 20 feet high. It then suddenly dropped her. She sustained multiple broken bones and died later in hospital. Dammit!

The case does remind us a bit of the French "horse levitation" case [the horse was dropped and somewhat hurt] and the Canadian "girl-lift" case where a classmate held onto her for dear life and she did not get hurt. ... but here we lost a sweetheart for no reason at all. Even Out Proctor there are limits [if I'd have anything to say about it.]

OK. Enough tragedy. Here are a few oddities that I like to think of as "guardian angel" anomalies.

1964: near Chavio Lake, AK. A pilot was returning from a mission from Umiat to a camp at Chavio Lake. The helicopter found itself in white-out conditions. Forced to land, the pilot dead reckoned a site as near the line of travel as he could, but was still off by 100 miles. Consequently, the emergency search flights of the next day found nothing. That next night however three "flares" were spotted far from the expected ditch area. Subsequent searches there the following day discovered and rescued the pilot. The mystery was that the pilot had no flares and nothing remotely like flares to signal with. Even if there had been an anonymous secretive altruist who saw his plight and wanted to shoot up flares of his own [about as strained an "explanation" as one can devise] the conditions the evening that the rescue plane saw the three redlight signals were STILL so blizzardy that no such flares would have been seeable anyway. So who sent the lights and what were they?

1955: between Cerrillos and Galiston, NM. A woman is trying to get home, but the weather deteriorates so badly that she is in white-out blizzard conditions. She tries to slowly tough it out, but she knows she was getting to the area of the road where there are dangerous drop-offs to each side. She stops. She says a prayer for the storm to stop. It doesn't, but instead there appears a space empty of falling snow just to the front of her car. It seems to be a clear tunnel stretching far ahead. Boggled but willing, she starts her vehicle and drives into the tunnel. There are no flakes at all inside, and the tunnel persists all the way up her driveway to her garage, a two mile distance. She gets out, says thanks, and the tunnel disappears allowing the still falling, now very wet snow, to soak her thoroughly before she gets back inside her home. She didn't mind.

What can I say? I like it.

1953: Seneca, NY. A mother was in critical condition in hospital. Her daughter was visiting her every day as she slowly recovered. The daughter always was sure to check that her mom's emergency bell cord was pinned in proper position so that her mom could reach it if she needed aid. This evening something distracted her [she was really tired] and she forgot. Coming home, she wanted to go straight up to her bedroom. Starting up the stairs, she ran into a barrier which refused to let her pass. She called out to family members, who thought she was a bit balmy, but she persisted. The barrier held. A "hunch" struck her that her mom needed help and couldn't get it. She called the night nurse, who went to check. Her mom was in trouble and could not reach the bell cord. The nurse came to the rescue and things ended happily ever after. For years thereafter the mother and daughter wondered if this was telepathy or spiritual aid or something else.

OK. I can get behind that one too.

1920: Milwaukee, WI. A family was attending to their dying mother in their family home. She was in her final labored moments. Outside the window in the room, lightforms began to appear on the nearby wall. One was larger and stronger looking. One was smaller and bent. The smaller one was slowly struggling to reach the larger. The larger form took on an appearance much like the dying woman's deceased sister, though as a somewhat vague being-of-light. The smaller one took on the same sort of appearance though of the mother. At last, the mother's lightform turned towards the family in the window, smiled, nodded, and was gone.

..... different than the post-death experiences that both my parents blessed us kids with, but with the same message. "Things are alright, children."

Since that last story was almost a candidate for Ghost Whisperer, an entry-ending picture of Jennifer Love Hewitt seems appropriate.

...... come to think of it, you don't even need to have an excuse to post a picture of Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Pure Oxygen as they'd say in the 60s.

Peace ................ as they also used to say then.

UFO News from the 1947 Mountain: 1961-1962.

..... more of Jan Aldrich's pile of UFO Close Encounters case references.

This is still the famous "UFO Desert" of the early 60s. There were only two cases in this part of the pile from 1961, and one was the ultra-famous CE4 of Betty and Barney Hill [illustrated terrifically above, and called in the reference in the pile "Lincoln, NH."] I'll not say any more about the Hills' case except that it is in this pile because both of their watches were permanently damaged, and to admit that this is one of the very few "on-board experiences" cases which I credit with some confidence. There are a few others, but this is an area in UFOlogy which has been abominably poorly researched [mainly due to WAY too much closed-to-scrutiny methodology and poor information-sharing, and horrible follow-ups.] Any CE4 experiencers can "happily" have all the confidence that they want in their experiences and their interpretations of them as far as I am concerned, but everyone should at least try to understand why even sympathetic UFO researchers have serious problems with the research. This is mainly a finger pointed at investigators, not encounter-reporters.

Hmmmm... I hadn't conceived of this post beginning with anything remotely that controversial, but so be it. The rest of this thing will be rather ho-hum comparatively.

Two 1961 incidents and eight separate 1962 incidents plus a flap in Argentina that year.

The cartoon versions of what they looked like, sort of.... {two great artistic drawings including the excellent one of Brian James for the Lake Movil case.}

I'll say just a bit about some of these.

1961: Lakeville/ New Bedford MA. Very loud object surrounded by thick black clouds, flying erratically [bobbing/rolling]. This is a reward for anyone who believes that something is gained by saving all the newsclippings regarding UFO cases [Barry Greenwood is the Champion of this.] These clippings are very strongly supportive of the idea that this thing was independently witnessed. The finding of evidence for independent witnessing is UFO gold as it, obviously, shoots the credibility of the event into the stratosphere.

This is a different sort of multiply witnessed event, but it may well have been a natural physical object having nothing to do with technology. Nevertheless, multiple barometric stations registered increased air pressure as the thing flew over. The one guy quoted says that a "big meteor" could have done it. Well, OK, but at that height and over that much territory? This is another example where science seems to have blown a chance to do some novel science on a multiply-measured case.

I would like to comment further about the Modesto, CA and Bordentown, NJ cases, but the references were a little too lacking in support on the credibility side and I had no other {easy} source. Modesto, though, is a CE2physiological with numbness and near-paralysis --- pretty rare and allegedly multi-witnessed, so possibly significant. Bordentown is one of those "cute" curious{?} BOL things which messes with TV and radio reception and COULD be a novel physical energy phenomenon, or could be a form of intelligence presentation, as major BOL researcher, physicist Massimo Teodorani, seems driven to believe.

This is Lake Movil, MN. The case involves two adult women as primary witnesses. The object seemed to suddenly appear --- whether this was just "POP!" or whether it was just too dark to be seen and then turned on lights, we don't know. When the object later turned off its light, it could still be seen, but as a silhouette, so the women could have just missed it earlier. The hovering object had windows as above and three silhouetted humanoids in them {please forgive my error in the list above which says only two --- I'm too lazy to re-do it now.} The object was in good spatial relationship to their boat dock, and so the estimated 30+ foot diameter is probably accurate. The women got the creeps and felt that the "men" were watching them {rightly or wrongly}. They switched off their cabin lights and the object responded by doing the same. The elder of the two women then had an irresistible urge to open the door and run to the UFO, which she did while her daughter screamed at her not to. The craft responded to this by lifting upwards and rapidly disappearing after slowly angling away.

So what's the downside to the case? The ladies refused to talk about their experience for ten years, not wanting to appear as nuts. Then [we don't know this part] someone convinced them to talk and the National Inquirer got hold of it. Fortunately APRO also responded and did a field investigation old-style ---- this resulted in Brian James' great piece of art, but more importantly bona fides from local residents as to the quality of the witnesses as responsible folks. So, did it happen, and exactly like described? Plenty of strangeness if so. Is it "just" a CE3, or was there some mind control? The case has two "responsive" moments, which is an interesting feature, and the second also speaks against the mental manipulation hypothesis [as the UFO went away instead of taking the woman on-board]. {This is the point in the case where well-known abductionists would say "oh no both of them were abducted and neither remembers." Well, sorry. That is precisely what the case does NOT say, and needs a lot of defending.}

This is the Scotts Bluff area case. It's of interest to me not just because it is a CE2 vehicle interference case, and not just because the young men thought that the UFO "stalked" them, but mainly because the "UFO" is described as a "flat" light with nothing above it and no discernible thickness --- that says to me: "Window or Opening or Portal in the sky".

I'd like to believe that. It would give another datapoint to the hypothesis that advanced technology could manipulate space by opening paths dimensionally [and skipping around the Einsteinian velocity-of-light travel limitation on speed.] I do have several cases which seem to be at least possibly "Portal Events" --- that Skinwalker Ranch thing the other day seemed "Portal-like" --- so perhaps the report of these two guys isn't crazy.

There are other cases above. One is a very rare sighting claim of a miniature disk which not only flies alongside a car but bangs into it. One wonders if the rear collision was something else [a bird?], and the object alongside well seen. Single witness case. No ability to judge how good a look the driver had of the "disk." Collision left no mark.

The Russian case is good TV drama but, for me, worthless. The amount of unsupported rumor of this nature coming out of Russia is massive. With the exceptions of a very few pieces of data, I can't trust any of it.

The Argentinian flap of 1962-3. Well, despite that I begin to get hives when people talk to me about historical South American cases [two exceptions: Brazil when the team of Simoes, Ferriera, and Faria were involved, and Peru when Greenwell was involved], this stuff about this wave might have happened. For one thing, Argentine Air Force and Naval personnel were involved in several incidents, and for another, NICAP got some direct information. Thirdly, the excellent French UFOlogist Patrick Gross has posted on his website a solid review of the various reporting on this wave, and finally, the Condon Committee completely botched their look into the famous Deception Island case of slightly later, but botched it in a way which demonstrated to me that the Argentine military was doing a competent job reporting incidents. {and USA "authorities" were obscuring facts.}

So, we could well have had CE2s of the Electromagnetic, Trace, and Physiological types then and there.

That's it for me this time, folks. The picture above shows the thickness of the paper stack sent to me by Jan WHICH IS STILL LEFT TO DO. It could well be that this is HUMANLY possible to do, but it is not Me-Desirable to do. THEREFORE [and I state this with complete uncertainty of plan or purpose], I ain't gonna plough through all that. I'll do a few more year groups [probably], and may cherry-pick some others, but whoa --- there are only a few years left.

So, I'll ultimately be on to other things..... hmmmm.... what are those things in those unsorted file boxes? ..... case reports which need filing ..... Groan.............................

Till next time, friends, and Peace.

UFO History Group Get-together #4: a small add-on.

Robert Powell sent me some pictures of the May 22-24 get-together, and I wanted to use them as an opportunity to make a point or two about UFO research work and information sharing. {The above picture is of eight of us around the archives room table skyping with Barry Greenwood in Massachusetts.}

The point of the get-togethers seems at first to be information exchanges and brain-trusting but it's mainly about community building. In my many years watching the UFO researcher circus, the thing which has been most appalling to me is the lack of true community and, therefore, an unwillingness to contribute without ego to team projects. Community however takes work.

I and others [it seemed to me] had a need for creating true colleagues and ultimately true friends to facilitate getting projects done which almost demanded a team of people to encourage and support one another, and share the load. That's why I, not knowing if the concept was impractical or not, began inviting some old friends and some new associates, all of whom appeared as civilized humans, to come to Kalamazoo for small-work, high-companionship, styles of get-togethers. I was surprised a bit as to how much people wanted to do that "impractical" thing, and also how little [essentially zero] conflict occurred even among folks on record with opposing opinions on certain things.

{Barry and Bill via Skype}

I'm posting this because I believe that it's time for anyone in UFOlogy who has low enough ego and high enough humanity [and who has been lone-wolfing it] to quit behaving that way and create community with others who share one's UFO interest and who bring something to the table. {The Skype technology isn't ideal, but it allows a "nearly-personal" contact with great guys like Bill Chalker and Barry Greenwood who can't make it to Michigan}.

We all have experienced some of our field's Sounds-of-Thunder Stage-Dominating UFO Egos long enough. More tragic than the consistent lack of open-ness that we have to put up with from such "UFO authorities" is the other group of basically good people, who however have to plough on virtually alone with no real support and, this is important, no pre-publication sounding boards of respected people. We need research teams, and research teams who know one another as human beings and have civil sympathy for each other.

UFO research is hard. But it's a lot more promising [and fun] when you're doing it in a shared community relationship with people that you've grown to like.

As in everything: together is better than alone.

As the Wiccans are wont to say: Merry Meet and Merry Part, and Merry Meet again.

Till then, friends.

UFO News from the 1947 Mountain: a few 1960 Close Encounters.

As you've heard a few posts ago, Jan Aldrich {the "1947 Mountain"} sent me a thick pile of close encounters cases from his files and I've tried to penetrate that a little. Today: year 1960. 

1960 is known traditionally as a relatively dud year, and the number of cases in Jan's stack showed it. There were only nine listings, and one had no UFO present, and another had an error in the date written on it by the original collector. Nevertheless I've listed/illustrated all nine above.

For comments, I feel brevity calling me --- it's called laziness, I think.

"H" is the famous Red Bluff supercase, despite trying to fake me out by naming itself "Corning, CA". It is a UFO Anchor case and we don't need to relive it here. "B" is a military case, very brief and horribly written and nearly illegible, but with cut-off military communications and color changes. "C" is another crescent like the one we had last time. Even green. "E" is more of a physiological case or some other strange physical effect, as the car passengers felt stifling heat despite the distant UFO. "F" is one of my favorite types of cases as it seems to involve what Jim McDonald called "mass displacement". The truck overflown seemed to be lifted and flipped off the road onto its back. This is close to one of McDonald's and my favorite individual cases, the Herman, MN truck displacement of 1965. "G" is a nice sort-of ordinary case of a disk stopping a tractor. The variation here {there's always something} is that the disk is made of separate metal plates, one of which seems to be malfunctioning {smoke} and gets automatically replaced before the witness' eyes.

This leaves three more.

Case "D": Slagelse, Denmark. This is a bit of funny nonsense by the UFO phenomenon --- the sort which makes you think that you have no idea what the agenda of this motley crew of lunatics could be. The case begins with a "common" CE2em vehicle stop with an up-close discoid object. OK, fine. The UFOthing then settles, hovering just over the ground. Three "landing legs" come down and between them a tube of some size. A door slides open in the tube and out step four shinily green-clad "frogmen"--- not actual frog-like men [thankfully] but like Navy frogmen under the sea. In fact their walking motions are just like persons walking under water would look. {Wrap your head around THAT}. They come over to the stalled car followed by a long cable moving out of the ship on its own. The cable has something like a flat TV screen on its end. On screen there seems to be a round lens or "eye". This panel "stares" into the car while the four frogmen [each holding a tube-like "green lantern"] walk about placing their devices here and there on the car. The beings looked very humanlike with slightly flattened faces. They seemed to be talking to one another without any audible sound. Then, they all left back to the craft; it brightened fiercely and shot away. Getting out of the car, the witness smelt a strange odor and felt a lot of remnant heat in the landing trace holes which he checked.

Yep, I've got THAT one surrounded.

Case "A": Aston-Clinton, UK. This was a lot simpler but has a small life lesson for a UFO researcher. The piece of paper involved here was a rudimentary fragment.

To start out I couldn't even tell what clipping on this piece of paper I was supposed to be looking at. Finally I found it and marked what seemed to be a CE2em case. The clip said Aylesworth and was marked 1960. It was the kind of thing you thought: #@*& with this, and tossed it. But in a moment of insanity I decided to look it up, as I had no reference to Aylesworth, UK 1960 in my files. Well, neither did my two super-references for such matters, UFO-DNA nor my "private" gift of a fantastic and obsessive case location catalog bequeathed me by old-time CUFOS associate Hal Haglund. With all those zeros facing you, you have two choices --- quit [wise] or plough on [foolish]. Not wanting to break with my established character, I ploughed on. Through much pulling of library books, turning of papers, and staring at internets, it finally arose that "Aylesworth" was called "Ivinghoe" by Flying Saucer Review, and "Aston-Clinton" by everybody else. And 1960 was 1962. So, light dawned. ... and I could actually read the fuller case in the literature. Well, it's a nice metallic disk/oval which seems to alter the speed of a car, with some dark squares around the rim and generating an obscuring mist. So who cares about the little fragmented clipping? Maybe I shouldn't. But this clipping indicates that the witness reported this immediately to the local police. This solidifies the credibility of this single witness case --- something not included in the FSR article, and something which alongside the investigators' report gives the case its believability. 

Case "I": The not-a-UFO case of Marlington, WV. This is a Bigfoot case with two appearances by Bigfoot, both times accompanied by an engine stoppage. If that is not weird enough, when the Bigfoot seemed to stop the engine its long hair was standing out as if it were affected by static electrical charge as in the old VanderGraff generator "party games" {the pretty girl gets her hair out and crackling a bit, and then zaps anyone who gets close enough to touch --- the static-carpet-on-a-dry-day magnified }. When our Bigfoot "dropped his hair", the car could start again. 

Now that's just ridiculous --- strange plus --- WAY Out Proctor. 

I've always wanted to avoid the so-called UFO/Bigfoot connection, but we had a fellow in Indiana named Don Worley who was an energetic believer and passionate field worker. He collected a couple dozen cases mainly from the midwest during the 1960s and even gave a report on this in the 1976 CUFOS {Invisible College} science symposium. I doubt that many of those guys were convinced, but over in the Land of OZ Mark Moravec was. He ended up with over seventy cases for his catalog above. But it still grates on me --- UFOs and Bigfoot --- NOT part of the core UFO phenomenon as I've seen it. A deliberate sideshow? A "Whole 'Nother Thing?". Folklore Tricksterism? 

Stan Gordon needs no convincing. Pennsylvania seems rife with ABSMs cozying up to flying objects. And an odd thing happened at the Skinwalker Ranch.

I was sitting with Colm Kelleher at lunch one day [at a meeting where both CUFOS and NIDS, among other folks, were present] and Colm wanted to talk about some of the things that had just been experienced at the Ranch. Below are some of the brief notes that I made.

It seems, as you can read more formally in the book, a lightform turned into a tunnel vortex in the air, and a large dark heavily-built "animal" crawled out of it. Holey Portals, Batman!

But, gee whiz that complicates things. It brings me back to that "crazy" old Curtis Gibson guy from the last post --- ETs he said [with authority] just abandon their "pets" here.

No. I'm not buying it. ... and No, I'm not susceptible to hypnosis, so don't even try it.

Peace, friends --- your bedroom is NOT the Skinwalker Ranch, so relax.

Down in the Cryptodumps, part last: Stuff that Ivan was reading.

Last entry on the big pile of miscellaneous cryptozoological chaos which accumulated in an anomalies dump box with no filing. It gives me GREAT pleasure to wrap this small part of the four dump boxes up. 

Most of these things to follow are bits which I found in the SITU files [also chaotic there] and thought interesting enough to photocopy before they disappeared beneath the thermodynamic noise content never to break surface again. This particular set of articles/newsclips etc was stacked together in a way that indicated that Ivan had read them together. So, without further delay: 

This is a famous 1910 article reporting on the alleged sighting of a dinosaur in central East Africa. 

I won't have much insight on most of these articles but I believe that I know just a little about Sanderson's opinion of this one. That's because it rested on the authority of Carl Hagenbeck. Ivan saw Hagenbeck as an outstanding example of his own "tribe", animal collectors and zoo providers. If Ivan had an ideal profession, that was his passion. Because this claim of extant African dinosaurs was a claim of a hero, I believe that Sanderson saw it as strongly likely. As he said: "Hagenbeck was no fool." 

..... and once you accept Hagenbeck, other claims, such as this in a 1919 clipping [unfortunately by a much less known guy] are pretty easy to buy into. I am intrigued by the fact that the location here is Congo --- almost right on top of the claimed area of our later Mokele mBembe claims which got Roy Mackal, Richard Greenwell, and Herman Regusters exploring there 60 years later. 

Ivan didn't have this drawing in these files, just a typed version of an 1819 report of an African explorer traveling up the western coast, and once getting to Gabon, hearing tales of a giant "ourang-utan" called the "Ingeena." The illustration is from Paul duChaillu's book about his extensive [and amazing] travels through central Africa and could fairly be used to illustrate this 1819 claim. In those days, "we" had discovered the Orangutang but not yet the Gorilla. In Africa tales were however coming in that there were two "mysteries" afoot there. The "Lesser Mystery" turned out to be the Chimpanzee. The "Greater Mystery"= the Gorilla. 

The 1819 story told a weird tale of the Ingeena being almost impossible to fight due to its incredible strength, but that you could win due to its stupid imitative behaviors [the origin of the idea of "ape-ing"]. The Ingeena it was said would see us carrying wood on our shoulders and pile so much wood on its own and carry it around endlessly, that it would exhaust itself and you could dispatch it. Other ridiculous claims like this were also made. 

These tales sound so much like the primitive ideas that we had about the Gorilla that it's hard for me to credit them with anything else ... but Ivan seemed looking at them as if they might hint of a "third" mystery ape. 

An 1816 article [typed only] was in the pile. It spoke of a Flathead River, WA experience reported by hunters in the wilderness. Allegedly a bear broke into their camp and grabbed one of the men, then rose on two feet and ran rapidly away on a two-legged sprint. The illustration above is of the recent case of a urban-going bear which walked two-legged all over town. So, bears with a reason [this one had both front paws damaged] can walk on twos just fine. 

So, it's possible that the hunters' tale of the temporary abduction of one of their buddies was true. What one wonders however is whether the Bigfoot Albert Ostman tale decades later relates to this at all. Did Ostman have a bear encounter and embellish it by morphing it into Bigfoot? Ivan doesn't tell us why he was interested in this. 

There was a 1781 report from Quebec with quite charming descriptions of [as far as I'm concerned] walruses and lake sturgeon --- both of which had wowed the writer [he considered the walrus a sea monster]. The diagram included above is my addition not the writer's. 

The writer also said that there was another mystery beast called the seawolf --- again no illustration, so I've appended one sort of old representation of a seawolf. Frankly the author's description sounds like neither the beast above nor my own favorite seawolf [the Wasgo/Sisiutl] but rather another form of walrus-like creature. Why was Ivan interested? Who knows?

A 1778 article described encounters with a wildman of the Pyrenees Mountains. In this case my appended picture isn't far off. Here's a quote: 

"In the year 1774, a savage, or wild man, was discovered by the shepherds, who fed their flocks in the neighborhood of the forest of Yuary. This man, who inhabited the rocks that lay near the forest, was very tall, covered with hair, like a bear, nimble as the Hisars, of a gay humor, and, in all appearance, of a solid character, as he neither did, nor seemed to intend, harm to any body. He often visited the cottages, without ever attempting to carry off anything. He had no knowledge of bread, milk, or cheese. His greatest amusement was to see the sheep running, and to scatter them, and he testified his pleasure at this sight by loud fits of laughter, but never attempted to hurt these innocent animals. When the shepherds (as was frequently the case) let loose their dogs after him, he fled with the swiftness of an arrow shot from a bow, and never allowed the dogs to come near him. One morning he came to the cottage of some workmen, and one of them endeavouring to get near him, and catch him by the leg, he laughed heartily, and then made his escape. He seemed to be about thirty years of age." 

..... the author then went on to assume that this must have been a human abandoned in the forest long ago, who grew up subsisting on local plants. {Not too long thereafter, in early 1800s France, such a "wolfchild", the "Wild Boy of Aveyron", would become the most famous such abandoned survivor in the world, if you discount Romulus and Remus.}

Ivan probably saw in this story a possible primitive humanoid, his favorite of which was the Wudewasa --- and who knows? maybe he was.

The reference to "nimble as a Hisar" flummoxes me, and the widest stretch that I can come up with there is that it could be slang for the fantastically successful and agile Polish cavalry, the Winged Hussars. These forgotten troops were essentially invincible for 100 years of fighting during the 1600s.

The next bit was from the journals of Alexander Henry and David Thompson, 1799-1814. This reference was by Henry, and to the local Native American "Saulters" of the Northwest Great Lakes, that an animal was known there at that time called by them Kitche Amick, or, a giant beaver. I always thought that this sort of thing was a joke, forgetting that such animals DID exist in palaeolithic times or a little earlier. The tale here was of an armed Saulter seeing an animal on the water which he thought was a moose, but was then seen to be a giant beaver. These animals, being felt to be spirit animals, the Saulter refused to shoot. {Saulter is the old French name for the Ojibwe.}

Second to last is a letter in Ivan's files from a guy named Curtis L. Gibson. This letter [sent to someone else] Ivan had copied to his Thunderbird file. The fellow, who I've never heard of, stated plainly that he was an authority on all Fortean Lore {Wow!}, had neatly wrapped all cryptozoology up in a three-point nutshell. Ready?

All cryptozoological claims are due to one of three things:
1). "natural" biological species not recognized by zoologists. He gave as examples super-condor, sea serpent, sasquatch, and a subclass of this category including things like mermaids and satyrs. He kind of lost me there --- biological or not, big fella?
2). "metempsychic creatures": everything you can imagine with "were-" stuck in front of it. These things are completely physical, and only [violating all reason, but a casual matter to Gibson] morph into entirely different forms whenever they want to. He also had a subclass here which included witches, who he said were "slightly more supernatural" --- I can't wrap my head around that and am not sure I want to.
3). Animate robots which are the products of UFOs, and probably left behind by them, or possibly similar creatures which have been inserted into our environments by some technological intrusion. I suppose that you COULD explain about anything with hypotheses like that.

He then comes SLIGHTLY more down to Earth by discussing some claims that the original letter writer posed to him.

The first was that there is no doubt that Satyrs "still" occupy the desert area of Babylon. He said that he had explained this all in his earlier article in Explore The Beyond magazine in 1960. He based his certitude on the sighting of such by a British traveler whose story he read in an unnamed book, PLUS the Bible says that satyrs will be the eternal inhabitants of Babylon along with bats. He does seem to have great trust in biblical things.

His second topic might have more legs, or wings. It was about the large salt desert bird nests found in Utah. The crypto part of this was the flurry of letters he said his article got about these things, which included thunderbird sightings in that area.

He followed that up with a report from a man in Canada who said that he had seen giant birds several times at a lake there {please tolerate the Japanese film monster picture; his claims weren't that big.} Gibson refused to name the exact location as he did not want tourists crowding in there and extincting the animals.

Apparently some winged creatures were visiting the St. Louis region at that time [c.1971], and he thought that he had the solution for that. {Buckle up on this one}. He saw this as a future projection coming back 100 years or so in time. But that's not all of it. Such things happen when a member of a cult merging Christianity and Trance Exercises doses off [in Church --- he said it, not me]. If this fellow is of exceptional psychic strength he will create in his dreams physical manifestations which will appear not in his own time, but in the past.

Uhhh.... OK.

Lastly, he allowed that many of our unusual creatures past and present have been the aliens abandoning their pets. When they do this in pairs or more, these animals will breed a new colony of alien animals sooner or later to be seen by us. This explains most of Earth's humanoid species.

Uhhh... don't bother to get up, I'll let myself out.

One wonders how much of this Ivan paid any attention to, or why he had it in his notes at all. Maybe the Canadian thunderbirds.

The last thing for today was not during Ivan's period --- just a note stuck in among the rest.

In 1985, at a campsite near Greenwater Texas, a couple said that a big [8-foot] hairy [brown curly] heavily built [must have weighed a ton] bear had strode into their camp and --- ready?--- asked them if they had permission to camp there. Not believing their protestations, the bear told them to get off the premises. To hurry them along, the bear threw rocks at them.

A Narnian Bear in Texas ... THAT's a tale that I can get behind.

Peace, folks.