TL;DR: "My photo of Bigfoot is a different story." I have to begin this article with a picture of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle I noticed around the time of their engagement. The two were standing up on some kind of platform or porch, smiling and looking down upon a crowd of admirers.
by Geri Roberts
"She's got photos, Barbara".
"Adam, you had a photo of Bigfoot".
"My photo of Bigfoot is a different story."
Beetlejuice (movie) 1988
I have to begin this article with a picture of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle I noticed around the time of their engagement. The two were standing up on some kind of platform or porch, smiling and looking down upon a crowd of admirers. I usually try to avoid the sight of Harry and Meghan, but this photo immediately caught my attention because none of these people were looking up at the happy couple (who, by the way, did not look very happy). I noticed that every single person standing in front of Harry and Meghan had their head bent and their eyes cast down.
I was puzzled. "What in the world are they all doing?" I wondered. "Praying to the Royals?"
Because that was exactly what it looked like. Then I realized what was going on. The crowd was taking pictures of the happy couple with their cellphones rather than staring up at them with their own two eyes.
It used to be different. We used to smile and wave at celebrities and call to them in an effort to make contact, attract their attention and make them look directly at us. Taking a photograph was a secondary concern unless you were a professional photographer. We had lots of photos of celebrities on paper in magazines and newspapers. What we wanted back then was personal contact, even just our eyes meeting for a moment. We wanted a relic they had touched that we could touch in turn--a prop from their latest movie or their signature on a piece of paper. Some evidence that they were real.
What does this new ritual of silent and subdued worship of the Nefarious Elite mean? Does it mean anything? Yes, I think it does. And it involves, of all things, Big Foot and what he has been trying to tell me for a long time now, ever since I rode the bus to work.
From 1990 until my retirement in 2010, twenty years of my life were spent riding buses between southern New Jersey and Center City Philadelphia. This involved an hour each way, out of the suburbs, across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, through the tollbooths, into the city in the morning and back again in the afternoon. Over and over the same buildings and streets passed the bus windows, baking in the sun, peering out from beneath a blanket of dirty snow or glistening with rain.
My favorite bus was the one I caught in the dark at 5 o'clock in the morning. It was a local and took an extra half hour longer as it stopped in every small town along the way, crowded with working folk like myself. Passengers often fell asleep but the driver and fellow travelers usually knew everybody's stops and woke them up in time for them to get off. I felt part of a human community and appreciated the extra time it gave me to read and be by myself.
Craving distraction from the monotony, I decided to lug aboard a supply of books on various esoteric topics to occupy my mind. The farther out from every day reality the books took me, the better. This led directly to my mushrooming fascination with ufology, global conspiracy theories and Fortean phenomena.
Ufology immediately emerged as my greatest obsession, at first fueled almost entirely by Whitley Strieber's Communion books. I moved from reading about the topic of UFOs during my commute to pondering and writing about it throughout the day whenever I had a spare moment. UFOs, via Strieber's busy pen, were telling me something important, I became convinced. I was sure that if I read enough, I would discover the answer to a question I didn't even know how to ask.
Strieber's books, the "nonfiction" ones in his Communion saga, enthralled me for quite a while. Enthralled is the right word. The archaic definition of enthrall is "to enslave." You see, this was more than mere interest. I couldn't STOP reading them.
Strieber is an adept writer. I believe his books are embedded with hooks baited with attractive ideas from science fiction, which I had been devouring avidly since childhood. These are ideas primed by the works of Gene Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke (to name just a few). Strieber subtly promised to reveal cosmic secrets to me. I would be one of the chosen few to whom these secrets would be revealed if I just kept reading and trusting the veracity of his experiences. Eventually he would tell me what the aliens (whom he called the "Visitors") actually were and what they wanted and prove to me that they existed outside of his imagination.
A deep sense of loneliness wells up through Strieber's writing and that greatly appealed to me. I identified with his yearning for some kind of completion that only the Visitors could provide and his fellow humans could not. As I read about the mysteries of his childhood, I decided that my own unhappy childhood must contain a hidden contact with something. I too must have suffered trauma in my early years--but at whose hands?
I investigated my own childhood by talking to my older sister. She was my only source of information as my parents were dead and, before his own death, my alcoholic father had managed to alienate the few friends and relatives my family had to begin with. So my sister and I were left pretty much alone in the world. I therefore had to rely on our own memories.
My sister, Anna, remembered that when I was approximately three or four, I would constantly get up in the middle of the night and wander through the house, mechanically performing actions like opening and shutting doors and flushing the toilet over and over without really waking up. I never knew about this and it was interesting but, no matter hard I tried, I was unable to find any evidence of physical abuse or other worldly contact associated with it.
I slowly became disillusioned with Strieber. I noticed that his books led to the same familiar cul de sac. Each book uncovered memories of contact with sinister entities but, in the end, the evidence was--aw, shucks!-- just not there after all. But it might be in the next book. In addition, his hyper-emotionalism started to become wearing, even annoying.
In later years as I read Jasun Horsley's books, I was a bit shocked but, on reflection, not truly surprised when he pointed out that Strieber, along with other writers I admired such as Carlos Castaneda and Peter Levenda, had links to various government think tanks and intelligence agencies. I am discovering that more and more of the books I devoured aboard the bus possess such a background. I have to wonder how much of my world view has been scenery painted and propped up by those sources.
I don't believe that Strieber is lying about his adventures with the Visitors. During my years on the bus I came to understand that I was raised in a literal minded society where everything must be either true or false, fact or fiction. Strieber's books are all of the above.
Strieber seems to believe he is telling the truth and to a significant degree he might very well be, but it is a truth buried under accretions of pain and distortion. Something or someone has primed an engine inside him that allows him no peace or healing. He is a conduit for a message that spiritual enlightenment comes only with suffering and abuse, both physical and mental.
The writer and mystic Jane Roberts says that our minds all possess neatly painted and well tended front doors that look out onto the world. Usually this is the only door of which we are aware. But we can remember a secret back door from our childhoods, a "magic entrance" through which strange messages are delivered. This neglected back door is the liminal space that joins us to the otherworld from which we came and to which we will return, that we are invited to open during our lifetimes here.
I cannot put it any better than did Patrick Harpur in A Complete Guide to the Soul:
"What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real - and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built up, brick by brick, to shut out colour and light and prevent us from flying."
This liminal space in Strieber's mind has been violently battered open by someone or something. His experiences with the Visitors have become his raison d'etre and he is forever compelled to cram them into an objective reality, much like Cinderella's Wicked Stepsister slicing off part of her foot to make it fit the glass slipper. I have sympathy for Strieber's suffering but disagree with his belief that only our suffering will open the door to that Otherworld.
For a long time Conspiracy theories became my driving interest. In his book Twilight Language, Michael Hoffman claims that this type of literature is in a sense addictive, that it whets our appetite for greater stimulation, more and more salacious revelation without a breathing space for any thought or research.
"Many of the people stewed in morbid conspiracy theory suffer the effects of the mental contagion they imagine they are decoding. The Process ends when the nervous system becomes too anesthetized and stupefied to experience further stimulation."(Hoffman p. 25)
I have to agree. Now I realize that I enjoyed the almost prurient excitement of looking up the skirts of the Nefarious Elite without wondering very much about what lurked under my own skirts. I was a lazy and shallow reader who never examined references or took notes for a deeper study that would help me see the rickety floorboards beneath my heedless feet. I was only interested in the next thrill ride. Like the UFO phenomenon (to which is it related) Conspiracy Land contains truth but all too often a heavily distorted truth designed to serve some hidden agenda.
Fortunately writers like John Keel and Jacques Vallee slowed down my headlong rush into the growing conspiracy and alien abduction fields of literature. The UFO phenomena, whatever it is, has been here among us humans for a long, long time and involves more than spaceships and aliens. I realized that before I received any answers, I needed to go back and decide what questions I wanted to ask.
So I went back into books on folklore, psychology and mythology, all the fields I had ignored because they required thought and work to understand. I took notes and kept a reading journal. I dragged a dictionary around with me and looked up words I wasn't sure of and wrote down the titles of books I needed to read for myself. I stopped (almost) buying clothes and going on vacation and out to dinner. Instead I used my extra money to buy those books and to send away for copies of articles and research papers.
For a long time I ignored the field of cryptozoology. It was all so silly. Who could seriously believe that dinosaurs lived in lakes, giant cats stalked the English countryside and a species of hairy, smelly ape men haunted North American forests?
There was an immediacy and genuineness to encounters with Big Foot and his ilk that Strieber's polished writing lacks. I knew instinctively that these encounters had something to tell me. Gradually my I began to pull my head out of the true/false snare that had held me captive since my school years.
Big Foot demands our undivided, complete attention. With glowing eyes, he comes marching out of a flying saucer and parades around someone's backyard. He is even seen piloting a flying saucer. He jumps in front of speeding cars. He hides in the woods around our campsites and cries like a baby, hoots like an owl and gibbers in an untranslatable language. He tries to snatch our beloved children and pets from us. He steals a basket of vegetables from someone's porch and in its place leaves a gift of a headless mouse carefully wrapped in a leaf.
Big Foot displays a disturbing interest in human reproduction, spying on teenagers in lovers' lanes and accosting menstruating women. He hangs upside down from a trailer home roof to peer through the window at a woman as she undresses. He has been seen throughout the world in the company of the spectral, bride-like Woman-in-White.
Big Foot is as terrifying as King Kong on a rampage and as goofy as the Three Stooges. Why is he doing all this this? What does he want from us?
During my last few years on the bus I read and read while I scribbled in my notebooks, intently following bibliographic bread crumbs. I did this right up to the last bus trip I took on the day I retired eleven years ago. On that day Big Foot's appearances, along with the entire UFO book of riddles, were still a total mystery to me. And it all remained an undecipherable puzzle until that day in 2019 when I first saw that picture of Harry and Meghan and, just like that, I solved it.
Before I tell you the answer I came up with, I have to tell you that it is my answer and no one else's. It belongs only to me because the UFO phenomenon talks to each of us personally. No bulk mailings will ever arrive at that liminal backdoor in our mind; only revelations meant only for us.
Here is what Big Foot was saying to me:
L O O K A T M E
Big Foot is just one of the forms that our Daimon assumes, the guardian who stands at the threshold of our liminal space, who serves as interpreter and intermediary between us and the Creator. Our Daimon is the psychopomp ready to lead us where we need to go and will wait patiently at that backdoor in our head until we are ready to let it in. As the fascination of the UFO mystery catches us up, our Daimon will morph into the form that most appeals to us. Mothmen, angels, five foot tall owls, giant black panthers, Men in Black and Black-Eyed Children and leprechauns are all various disguises worn by the same force.
Big Foot simply wanted me to put down the books, forget the cellphone, take off the headphones, turn my back to my email inbox and Facebook, and use my eyes and ears to look at and listen to my fellow humans. He wanted me to look past all that pretty painted stage scenery and see what was really there.
And I discovered that to look at Big Foot was to look at myself. And I did not like what I saw.
I realized that I spent all those extra hours and endless years sitting in a bus riding in circles on rubber wheels on a cement highway, hoarding time when I should have been less miserly with it. I now regret the time I didn't spend outside in the yard with my son, talking to my friends and co-workers or watching the squirrels and blue jays up in the trees outside my suburban house when I had a suburban house.
In Prisoner of Infinity Jasun Horsly says "Simply stated, to understand the UFO, it is necessary to understand ourselves." To that, I can only say "Amen."
The natural world and the people in it are rapidly losing one another; not to technology, but to a belief in technology. We believe what the voice of a machine tells us rather than looking around with our own eyes and listening to one another with our own ears.
I admit I am afraid to lose my modern way of life--my computer, refrigerator, hot water and flush toilet. I don't want to go ALL THE WAY back to nature. But I think we are encouraged to buy into the idea that we must choose between our technologic comforts and a life in harmony with the natural world, that the two are incompatible. We find ourselves trapped inside the box instead of thinking creatively outside it, outside the true/false paradigm.
Each of us are descended from people who lived as part of the Earth. Not just on top of the Earth, but with it, both physically and spiritually. Anthropologists and archaeologists can attempt to reconstruct the lives of our ancestors, but in reality they have no idea how people actually lived thousands, or even hundreds, of years ago. We have been convinced by the scientists that it is impossible to live in physical and spiritual comfort close to the Earth without the technology they give us.
But there is a growing evidence that in the past people might have done just that--that civilizations might have once existed on Earth with access to a technology that made lives easier but that did not invade our privacy, reduce us to wage slaves or rob us of our human dignity and inherent power.
For centuries we humans have been removed from our traditional lands through force, economic pressure, the violence of war or outright trickery. Now that we have left it, the Earth is wracked by lethal storms, plagues and epidemics, floods and fires of mysterious origins. Perhaps the UFO phenomenon, in all its many guises, is simply the Earth looking for us, asking where we went, just as Ceres searches everywhere for her lost child. We may never be able to return to our ancestral lands or even know where they were originally located on the Earth, but we should remember that we can always return to one another.
Big Foot and his relatives tell us over and over that evidence of their reality will never be obtained with our technology. In The Trickster and the Paranormal George Hansen discusses the traps that lie in wait for those searching for such evidence. Photographs will be blurred or reveal fakery, physical specimens will vanish from locked safes, phones and tape recorders will malfunction. The human mind will even be affected and groups of people who have cooperated willingly in the hunt for this evidence will suddenly quarrel and sabotage one another when they think they are close to obtaining it.
As for the thought that I might have been the victim of some kind of physical abuse as a child--that might be possible. I know for a fact that I had experienced mental abuse from an early age. But I've given up all desire to dig any deeper into the unhappiness of my past. I can't change the past but perhaps I can prevent it from poisoning the future.
I keep thinking of a sign an office manager used to keep on his desk:
"When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp."
I know that I will die with my swamp undrained, but that's okay. Right now I just want the alligators to leave me in peace for a while. I've been trying my best these past couple of years to do as Big Foot demands and LOOK around me. I've lost my lawn full of trees and wildlife but I now grow flowers in my tiny cement covered backyard in the city and, weather permitting, I hang up laundry instead of using the clothes dryer. I talk with my neighbors as they sit on their front steps--something I never had time to do in the suburbs. I write letters to my friends with pen and paper using snail mail instead of email which is becoming a quaint but fun new activity for us.
I still read about a wide variety of topics, but not obsessively. I've started a dream journal in the hope that strange messages will appear in my liminal space from that myusterious Otherworld.
When I looked back through my dream journal recently, I was surprised to note that I still ride the bus to and from Philadelphia in my sleep. My dreams often feature an eerily glowing city in which the historic hospital (the oldest in the United States) where I used to work has morphed into a looming glass walled tower that climbs far up into a night sky. Or sometimes I find myself in an unfamiliar Philadelphia full of trees and gardens with cushioned seats, populated by friendly people in old fashioned clothes. Other times I desperately run through dark streets chasing a bus I keep missing.
I always wake up before I catch it, but I'm sure I'll be able to board it eventually, and it will take me home.
Roberts, Jane. The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James. (Prentice-Hall) 1978
Harpur, Patrick. A Complete Guide to the Soul. (Rider) 2010
Hoffman, Michael, Twilight Language (Independent History and Research) 2021.
Horsley, Jasun. Prisoner of Infinity (Aeon Books) 2018
Peake, Anthony. The Daemon: A Guide To Your Extraordinary Secret Self (Arcturus) 2010
Hansen, George. The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris) 2001.
Cutchin, Joshua. Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon Vol. I Folklore (independently published) 2020
Cutchin, Joshua. Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon Vol. II Evidence (independently published) 2020
Mickoski, Howdie. Exposing the Expositions: 1851-1915 1970
Lecouteux, Claude. Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices. (Inner Traditions) 2015.